Hippies Part 2 - William James and Mind-Altering Substances - Nitrous Oxide
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First, I felt a WARNING would be justified for this essay.
Here it is. WARNING: Use of nitrous oxide damages your neurological system, including your brain and spinal cord, by destroying the protective sheath of neurons through vitamin B12 deactivation.
Nitrous oxide has some pretty terrifying effects that I have seen firsthand. So if you want a psychedelic experience, please do not choose this substance. There are much better alternatives.
Now back to the essay. We've already talked about William James' experiment with peyote. But he had another, long standing mind-altering practice, and that is his use of nitrous oxide...
William James' experimentation with mind-altering substances began in 1870. He was then 28 and trying to decide whether or not he believed in free will. He had recently returned from Europe, where illness, depression, and a sense of intellectual paralysis had left him uncertain whether he would ever become a serious thinker. William felt stalled. He later wrote in his diary in April 1870 that his “first act of free will” would be to believe in free will itself.
A decade later, he would try to test the boundaries of that decision by inhaling a gas.
Nitrous oxide had been circulating in medical and intellectual circles for nearly eighty years. In 1800, Humphry Davy had described inhaling it in Bristol and experiencing the conviction that he had grasped ultimate truth. Davy wrote that under its influence, he believed “nothing exists but thoughts.” The insight evaporated when he returned to ordinary consciousness.
James knew this history. By the late 1870s, as he was drafting what would become The Principles of Psychology, he was already obsessed with the mechanics of consciousness—attention, habit, association. But nitrous oxide offered something different. It did not explain consciousness; it shattered it.
In the early 1880s, James obtained nitrous oxide and began inhaling it deliberately. These were not party demonstrations. They were solitary trials. He would sit, breathe deeply from the apparatus, and wait for the onset. The initial effects were physiological: warmth, pressure in the head, a sense of expansion. Then, abruptly, something shifted.
In an 1882 paper, James described the moment when “the mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent flash.” He insisted that the gas produced “a sense of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” The experience was not vague pleasure. It was structured. It felt conclusive.
He kept paper nearby.
Under the gas, James would scribble sentences as quickly as he could, trying to capture the revelation before it dissolved. Later, reviewing these notes, he found that many of them were banal or incoherent. One famous fragment read simply: “There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.” In the moment, it had seemed like metaphysical breakthrough. In daylight, it resembled verbal collapse.
He did not treat this as evidence of fraud or delusion. Instead, he treated it as data.
In letters to friends, including Benjamin Paul Blood, who had undergone his own nitrous oxide revelation decades earlier, James returned to the same problem: why did the experience feel absolutely true while lasting, and why did it become inaccessible afterward? Blood had published a pamphlet in 1874 titled The Anaesthetic Revelation, describing a sudden, overwhelming certainty about the nature of reality while under the gas. James read it closely.
James was trying to understand whether chemically induced states had philosophical legitimacy.
By 1890, when The Principles of Psychology appeared, James had woven his nitrous oxide experiences into his larger argument. He proposed that “our normal waking consciousness… is but one special type of consciousness,” and that other forms lay “all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens.” The gas, he argued, did not create hallucination out of nothing. It revealed a spectrum. The mind was not a single stable entity; it was a field.
In 1902, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James returned to the issue. There, he compared nitrous oxide to religious ecstasy. He wrote that the gas could produce “a mystical consciousness” in which opposites were reconciled and intellectual conflict dissolved. He admitted that he could not prove the metaphysical claims suggested by the experience. But he insisted that the authority of the experience itself could not be dismissed merely because it was chemically induced.
This position placed him in tension with the scientific establishment. Scientific psychology in the late nineteenth century was striving to become rigorous, laboratory-based, and respectable. Figures like Wilhelm Wundt were building experimental apparatuses in Leipzig. In the United States, James’s former student Hugo Münsterberg was developing applied psychology at Harvard. The discipline was moving toward measurement.
James, by contrast, was inhaling gas and writing down metaphysical fragments.
He did not advocate widespread use or call for social transformation through chemicals. But he refused to deny what he had felt. In correspondence and published essays, he maintained that altered states—including those induced by nitrous oxide—expanded the range of what must be considered real in any serious account of human consciousness.
James had once decided, in 1870, that he would believe in free will as an act of will. With nitrous oxide, he encountered something different: a state in which belief felt unnecessary because certainty seemed total. But it could not be held.
What remained was not a conclusion, but a question. If a simple gas could produce the absolute conviction of truth, then the feeling of truth itself could not be the final measure. And if consciousness could shift so radically under chemical influence, then the stable, rational self that nineteenth-century science was trying to secure was thinner than anyone had assumed.
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