It would be too long a story to tell you how, like poor
Coleridge, I was first decoyed, then enticed from one stage to
another; the desire to escape from pain is a natural instinct; and
that, and the necessity also for escaping my past self, especially
in its relations to certain others, have brought me by degrees into
far too great a dependence on the use of drugs. And now that, from
certain symptoms, I have ground to fear a change of some kind not so
far off--I do not of course mean to-morrow, or next year, but
somewhere nearer than it was this time, I won't say last year, but
say ten years ago--why, then, one begins to think about things one
has been too ready to forget. I suppose, however, if the will be a
natural possession of the human being, and if a man should, through
actions on the tissue of his brain, have ceased to be conscious of
any will, it must return to him the moment he is free from the body,
that is from the dilapidated brain!"
"My lord, I would not have you count too much upon that. We know
very little about these things; but what if the brain give the
opportunity for the action which is to result in freedom? What if
there should, without the brain, be no means of working our liberty?
What if we are here like birds in a cage, with wings, able to fly
but not flying about the cage; and what if, when we are dead, we
shall indeed be out of the cage, but without wings, having never
made use of such as we had while we had them? Think for a moment
what we should be without the senses!"
"We shall be able at least to see and hear, else where were the use
of believing in another world?"
"I suspect, my lord, the other world does not need our believing in
it to make a fact of it.
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