their hearts expanding, when they are smitten by the arrows of the
vine.” The true Greek, one scarcely needs add, put his final emphasis,
as befitted a child of Apollo, not on intoxication but on the law of
measure and sobriety--on preserving the integrity of his mind, to
render literally the Greek word for the virtue that he perhaps prized
the most.[111] One must indeed remember that alongside the Apollonian
element in Greek life is the orgiastic or Dyonisiac element. But when
Euripides sides imaginatively with the frenzy of Dionysus, as he does
in his “Bacchae,” though ostensibly preaching moderation, we may affirm
that he is falling away from what is best in the spirit of Hellas and
revealing a kinship with the votaries of the god Whirl. The cult of
intoxication has as a matter of fact appeared in all times and places
where men have sought to get the equivalent of religious vision and the
sense of oneness that it brings without rising above the naturalistic
level. True religious vision is a process of concentration, the result
of the imposition of the veto power upon the expansive desires of the
ordinary self. The various naturalistic simulations of this vision
are, on the contrary, expansive, the result of a more or less complete
escape from the veto power, whether won with the aid of intoxicants or
not. The emotional romanticists from Rousseau down have left no doubt
as to the type of vision they represented. Rousseau dilates with a sort
of fellow feeling on the deep potations that went on in the taverns
of patriarchal Geneva.[112] Renan looks with disfavor on those who
are trying to diminish drunkenness among the common people. He merely
asks that this drunkenness “be gentle, amiable, accompanied by moral
sentiments.” Perhaps this side of the movement is best summed up in the
following passage of William James: “The sway of alcohol over mankind
is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties
of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry
criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and
says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is, in fact, the
great exciter of the _Yes_ function in man. It brings its votary from
the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the
moment one with truth.”[113]
The American distiller who named one of his brands “Golden Dream
Whiskey” was evidently too modest. If an adept in the new psychology he
might have set up as a pure idealist, as the opener up of an especially
radiant pathway to the “truth.”