The central figure was an unutterably lean and woebegone looking man, who, on a rush-bottomed chair, the only one in the room, sat mending his sole pair of unmentionables by the aid of a small needle-book which I was informed his mother had given him on leaving home.
“Mr. Jonah, Mr. Fitz-Gerald,” said my friend, sententiously. “Very happy to know Mr. Fitz-Gerald,” returned the seer; though, as I took his lank and ghostly fingers in mine, he looked the very antipodes of happy. Decayed gentleman as he was, he shuffled around to do the honors of his mansion, and offered us the chair in which he had been sitting. We refused to dispossess him, and took our seats upon the shaky pine table, which, with one battered brazen candlestick, holding an inch of semi-luminous tallow, and a dog’s-eared copy of Watt’s Hymns, also a gift from his mother, completed his inventory of furniture.
“How do you like your situation?” asked my friend.
“Leaky,” replied Jonah; “find the climate don’t agree with me. I often wish I hadn’t come.”
“Can’t you leave here when you want to? I should think you would clear out if you find it uncomfortable,” said I to our entertainer.
“I have repeatedly asked my landlord to make out his bill and let me go,” replied the gentleman; “but he isn’t used to casting up his prophets, and I don’t know when I shall get off.”
Just then Leviathan, from the top of the stairs, by a strange introversion looked down into his own interiors, and in a hoarse voice called out to know whether we were going to stay all night, as he wanted to put down the shutters.
“Be happy to give you a bed, gentlemen, but I sleep on the floor myself,” woefully murmured the poor seer. “You mustn’t neglect to call on me if you ever pass through Joppa, and—and—I ever get back myself.” We wrung Jonah’s hand convulsively, rattled up the crazy stairs, and ran out upon the sand just as Leviathan was about shoving off into deep water.
It may, perhaps, be hard to conceive how this incongruous element of the hashish visions should comport with all I have said upon the subject of those delicious raptures of beauty and sublime revealings of truth which break upon the mind under the influence of the drug.
How, it will be asked, as oftentimes it has been asked me already, can you put any confidence in discoveries of unsupposed significancy in outer things, and wonderful laws of mental being, attained during the hashish state, when you have also beheld vagaries of fancy which Reason instantly pronounced absurd? You do not believe that you really saw Jonah; how, then, can you believe that you saw truth?
I would answer thus: The domains of intuition and those of a wild fancy were always, in my visions, separated from each other by a clearly-defined and recognized boundary. The congruous and the incongruous might alternate, but they never blended. The light which illustrated the one was as different from that shed upon the other as a zenith sun is from lamplight. Moreover, at the time of each specific envisionment, I beheld which faculty of mind was working as distinctly as in the simplest tests of his laboratory the chemist knows whether cobalt or litmus is producing a certain change of color. The conviction of truth in the one case was like that of an axiom; in the other, such only as is drawn inferentially from mere sense.
We very little realize in our daily life that there are two species of conviction felt at various times by every man, yet a moment’s reflection will show that it is so. I look, for example, at a piece of silk, and pronounce it black; if I were now to turn away without any further inspection, I should not be at all astonished to hear afterward, from someone who had examined the fabric more closely and in a better light, that it was not black, as I had pronounced it, but a dark shade of blue. I would be very willing to abjure my previous conviction, and, in this willingness, would show that I ascribed no absolute infallibility to the proofs of sense. Yet if the same man should assure me that the silk was both wholly black and wholly blue at the same time, I should instantly reject his assertion as absurd, for the reason that it was a violation of the very law of possibility. There would be no need of going back to test his truth, for it is denied by an entirely different conviction from that of sense—the conviction arising from an insight into necessary and universal law.
Between the convictions of reality in the different hashish states, the boundary-lines are drawn even more distinctly than in the natural; and not only so, but the hashish-eater beholds those lines and acknowledges them, as the ordinary observer never does, from the fact that the practical wants of life make it convenient, nay, even imperative, that the data of sense should be treated as valid for the basis of action. We have neither time nor power in our present day-labor to secure the same unerring verdict upon objects of sense which the axiom gives us upon objects of intuition.
Nor is it necessary that in this life such a power
