THE HASHEESH EATER
the time of their first presence considered trivial acts—as
small as the cutting of a willow wand, all fled by his sense in
arrow-flight; yet he remembered them as real incidents, and
recognised their order in his existence.
This phenomenon is one of the most striking exhibitions
of the state in which the higher hasheesh exaltation really
exists. It is a partial sundering, for the time, of those ties
which unite soul and body. That spirit should ever lose the
traces of a single impression is impossible.
In the morning he awoke at the usual time; but, his
temperament being perhaps more sensitive than mine, the
hasheesh delight, without its hallucination, continued for
several days.
And now a new fact flashed before me. This agony was
not new; I had felt it ages ago, in the same room, among the
same people, and hearing the same conversation. To most
men, such a sensation has happened at some time, but it is
seldom more than vague and momentary. With me it was
sufficiently definite and lasting to be examined and located as
an actual memory. I saw it in an instant, preceded and
followed by the successions of a distinctly recalled past life.
What is the philosophy of this fact? If we find no ground
for believing that we have ever lived self-consciously in any
other state, and cannot thus explain it, may not this be the solu-
tion of the enigma? At the moment of the soul’s reception ofa
new impression, she first accepts it as a thing entirely of the
sense ; she tells us how large it is, and of what quality. To
this definition of its boundaries and likeness succeeds, at times
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