Confessions of an Opium-Eater - Softcover

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1907. Excerpt: ... Confessions of an Opium-Eater 21 not fail to render the confessions themselves more interesting. If a man, "whose talk is of oxen," should become an opium-eater, the probability is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all)--he will dream about oxen: whereas, in the case before him, the reader will find that the opium-eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher; and accordingly, that the phantasmagoria of his dreams (waking or sleeping, day-dreams or nightdreams) is suitable to one who in that character, Humani nihil a se alienum putat. For amongst the conditions which he deems indispensable to the sustaining of any claim to the title of philosopher, is not merely the possession of a superb intellect in its analytic function^--in which part of the pretension, however, England can for some generations show but few claimants; at least, he is not aware of any known candidate for this honour, who can be styled emphatically a subtle thinker, with the exception of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in a narrower department of thought, with the recent illustrious exception of David Ricardo--but also such a constitution of the moral faculties as shall give him an inner eye and power of intuition for the vision and the mysteries of our human nature: that constitution of faculties, in short, which, amongst all the generations of men that from the beginning of time have deployed into life, as it were, upon this planet, our English poets have possessed in the highest degree, and Scottish professors in the lowest. I have often been asked how I came to be a regular opium-eater; and have sjuJejed,_very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintance, from being reputed to have brought upon myself all the sufferings which I shall have to record, by a long course of indulgence in this practice purely for th...