ght be acceptable to
some readers to have it described more at length. _Fiat experimentum in
corpore vili_ is a just rule where there is any reasonable presumption of
benefit to arise on a large scale. What the benefit may be will admit of
a doubt, but there can be none as to the value of the body; for a more
worthless body than his own the author is free to confess cannot be. It
is his pride to believe that it is the very ideal of a base, crazy,
despicable human system, that hardly ever could have been meant to be
seaworthy for two days under the ordinary storms and wear and tear of
life; and indeed, if that were the creditable way of disposing of human
bodies, he must own that he should almost be ashamed to bequeath his
wretched structure to any respectable dog. But now to the case, which,
for the sake of avoiding the constant recurrence of a cumbersome
periphrasis, the author will take the liberty of giving in the first
person.

* * * * *

Those who have read the Confessions will have closed them with the
impression that I had wholly renounced the use of opium. This impression
I meant to convey, and that for two reasons: first, because the very act
of deliberately recording such a state of suffering necessarily presumes
in the recorder a power of surveying his own case as a cool spectator,
and a degree of spirits for adequately describing it which it would be
inconsistent to suppose in any person speaking from the station of an
actual sufferer; secondly, because I, who had descended from so large a
quantity as 8,000 drops to so small a one (comparatively speaking) as a
quantity ranging between 300 and 160 drops, might well suppose that the
victory was in effect achieved. In suffering my readers, therefore, to
think of me as of a reformed opium-eater, I left no impression but what I
shared myself; and, as may be seen, even this impression was left to be
collected from the general tone of the conclusion, and not from any
specific words, which are in no instance at variance with the literal
truth. In no long time after that paper was written I became sensible
that the effort which remained would cost me far more energy than I had
anticipated, and the necessity for making it was more apparent every
month. In particular I became aware of an increasing callousness or
defect of sensibility in the stomach, and this I imagined might imply a
scirrhous state of that organ, either formed or forming. An eminent
physici