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By causing the life to flow inward upon a more ideal centre, opium
deepens the consciousness, and compels it to give testimony to processes
and connections that in ordinary moments escape unrecorded. It is as if
new materials were found for a history of the individual
life,--materials which, like freshly discovered records, sound the
deepest meanings of the present and measure the abysses of the past.
Thus it is that the fugitive imagery of sense is interpreted as a scroll
which hides infinite truths under the most fleeting of symbols,--symbols
which are not sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even
syllables of words, since the most trivial hint or whisper of them has
hardly reached us ere they have perished. Thus it is that even the still
more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only images and
echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified and
enlarged.
There is, then, in the opium-eater a most marked, a polar antithesis
between his every-day life and the central manifestations of his genius.
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