Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater [June 1836]

This chapter provides an autobiographical sketch of an English opium-eater. The philosophy of Kant – so famous, so commanding in Germany, from about the period of the French Revolution – already, in 1805, was found to be a philosophy of destruction, and scarcely, so much as tending to a philosophy of reconstruction. It destroys by wholesale, and it substitutes nothing. This is no trifling matter, and therefore no trifling advantage on the side of Kant and his philosophy, to all who are acquainted with the disagreeable controversies of late years among French geometricians of the first rank, and sometimes among British ones, on the question of mathematical evidence. De Quincey describes a spiritual pilgrimage, which many Romantics actually made to the sources of great rivers in a symbolic gesture of return to nature as the source of poetic inspiration.