Nor were the dreams thus
introduced mere fantasies, irregular and inconsistent. Throughout, they
were self-sustained and majestic.
The natural effects of opium were concurrent with preexisting tendencies
of De Quincey's mind. If, instead of having his restless intellect, he
had been indolent,--if, instead of loving the mysterious, because it
invited a Titanic energy to reduce its anarchy to order, he had loved it
as simply dark or obscure,--if his natural subtilty of reflection had
been less, or if he had been endowed with inferior powers in the sublime
architecture of impassioned expression,--then might he as well have
smoked a meerschaum, taken snuff or grog or any other stimulant, as to
have gone out of his way for the more refined pleasures of opium.
The reader will indulge us in a single philosophical distinction, at
this point, by which we mean to classify the effects of opium under two
heads: first, the _external_, and, secondly, the _internal_. Properly
speaking, all the _positive_ effects of opium must be internal; for all
its movements are inward in their direction, being refluent upon the
focal centres of life.
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