In
short, to sum up all in one word, a man who is inebriated, or tending to
inebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a condition which calls up into
supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal part of his nature; but
the opium-eater (I speak of him who is not suffering from any disease or
other remote effects of opium) feels that the divines part of his nature
is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless
serenity, and over all is the great light of the majestic intellect.
This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium: of which
church I acknowledge myself to be the only member--the alpha and the
omega: but then it is to be recollected that I speak from the ground of a
large and profound personal experience: whereas most of the unscientific
{13} authors who have at all treated of opium, and even of those who have
written expressly on the materia medica, make it evident, from the horror
they express of it, that their experimental knowledge of its action is
none at all. I will, however, candidly acknowledge that I have met with
one person who bore evidence to its intoxicating power, such as staggered
my own incredulity; for he was a surgeon, and had himself taken opium
largely. I happened to say to him that his enemies (as I had heard)
charged him with talking nonsense on politics, and that his friends
apologized for him by suggesting that he was constantly in a state of
intoxication from opium.
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