Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Confessions of an English Opium Eater 19
sharpened weapon, no reasonable man could find anything to say
against it. Were I to assimilate it with sorcery, with magic, whose
qualities, operating on matter, and by occult and efficacious Arcanas,
might conquer a domination interdicted to man or permitted solely
to those who are judged worthy of it, no philosophic soul could blame
this comparison. If the Catholic Church were to condemn magic
and sorcery, it would be because these fight against God’s intentions,
and because they suppress the travail of the times and because they
desire to make superfluous the conditions of purity and morality;
and because the church, not considering these as being both real and
legitimate, would simply set them down to good or bad intentions. I
call by the name of a thief the gambler who has found the means of
winning almost every game—perhaps by cheating; how shall I name
the man who wants to buy, with a little money, genius? It is certainly
the inflexibility of the means that constitutes Immorality, as the
supposed infallibility of magic inflicts on it its infernal stigmata. Shall
I add that Haschisch, like other solitary joys, makes the individual
useless to men and makes society superfluous for the individual,
driving him forward to a singular kind of self-admiration and, day by
day, precipitating him toward the luminous gulf wherein he admires
in his own face the face of Narcissus?
If still, at the price of his dignity, of his honesty and of his freewill,
a man can derive spiritual benefits from Haschisch, can he make
from it a kind of thinking machine—en faire une espèce de machine
à penser? That’s a question I have often heard said before me, and
I can answer it. For, as I have explained at length, Haschisch never
reveals to the Individual more than the Individual himself. It is true
that this individual is, as it were, driven to the utmost extremity, and
as it is equally certain that the memory of impressions and of sensations
survive debauches, so the hope of these Utilitarians does not
appear at first sight unreasonable. But I must ask them to observe that
thoughts—which have to all of us such immense importance—are
not really as fine as when they appeared under their momentary travesties
covered with magic and faded fineries. They have more hold
on the earth than on the sky, and owe a great part of their beauty to
nervous agitation, to the avidity with which the spirit casts itself on
them. It follows on this, that all vain hope is a vicious circle; admit,
for an instant, that Haschisch gives, or at least augments, genius; they
forget that it is of the nature of Haschisch to diminish will power, and