Neinsoul replied without moving, without a gesture.
“We consider circine,” he said, “the most important element so far released by us. The habit-forming drugs upon which we have heretofore depended are limited in their influence, and we have obtained from them only a fragmentary result. We have long sought something of universal appeal.”
“Well, you got it,” interrupted Arnbush; “the country’ll drink itself into hell on this stuff.”
In his satisfaction he overlooked the chemist’s plural pronoun.
The muscles about Neinsoul’s lips distended in a sort of weird smile.
“We shall hardly hope for that,” he said. “In fact, the effect of circine on the human body is not deleterious. Neither depression nor nausea follows its use; there are none of the unpleasant after-effects of alcohol, or the so-called habit-forming drugs. In truth, many persons of weak individuality will be physically advanced by circine.”
He continued to speak distinctly, in his thin, distant voice.
“It is the prime virtue in circine that it builds up and hardens the individuality of the user. It makes him, in the end, wholly self-sufficient. He will not go to another for any element of sensation. It is the influence of exterior organisms that the circine continually resists.
“All drugs released by us have had some psychic effect, as for example, the degenerative moral effect of opium. This psychic influence of circine is not degenerative in the individual, but it is eliminative of all influences psychic, exterior to the individual. I do not mean that it touches ordinary sensation which is of physical origin. But it removes all response to foreign psychic stimuli or physical stimuli moving from a psychic origin—as, for example, the love lure in its various psychic and psycho-physical expressions.
“Under the influence of circine, that basic element of the individual which he calls himself is built up to a completeness which will wholly reject any sensation depending upon another, whether that sensation be psychic, as in morals, or psycho-physical, as in the love lure.”