The Equinox (Volume I, Number IV)

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 263