An essay on hasheesh : including observations and experiments / by Victor Robinson.

  • Victor Robinson
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: An essay on hasheesh : including observations and experiments / by Victor Robinson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    7/92
    “What is left for us modern men? We can- not be Greek now. The cypress of knowledge springs, and withers when it comes in sight of Troy; the cypress of pleasure likewise, if it has not died already at the root of cankering Cal- vinism; the cypress of religion is tottering. What is left ? Science, for those who are scien- tific. Art for artists; and all literary men are artists in a way. But science falls not to the lot of all. Art is hardly worth pursuing now. What is left? Hasheesh, I think; Hasheesh of one form or another. We can dull the pangs of the present by living the past again in rever- ies or learned studies, by illusions of the fancy and a life of self-indulgent dreaming. Take down the perfumed scrolls; open, unroll, peruse, digest, intoxicate your spirit with the flavor. Behold, here is the Athens of Plato in your narcotic visions; Buddha and his anchorites ap- pear; the raptures of St. Francis and the fire- oblations of St. Dominic; the phantasms of myth- ologies ; the birth-throes of religion, the neurotism of chivalry, the passion of past poems; all pass before you in your Maya world of hasheesh, which is criticism.”—John Addington Symonds.
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image