german idealism as laughing gas

just rummaging around in james's varieties of religious experience, as i prepare to teach a slice. in the chapter on mysticism, james famously connects intoxication to mystical experience, and reports his own experience with nitrous oxide. "I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the Hegelian philosophy means, if only one could lay hold of it more clearly." and on james's account, the effects of chloroform turn out to be even more like the effects of hegel's philosophy, an observation with which it would be frivolous to cavil.