Yet James's experiments with nitrous oxide, when they have been noticed at all, have been variously derided. Even in the nineteenth century, skeptical scientists found his interest in exotic mental phenomena misguided, if not reckless. Religious believers tend to resent the comparison of intoxication to religious inspiration. Veterans of the counterculture, who have all had similar if not more-intense drug revelations, tend to think of James as a dabbler. These criticisms are shortsighted, and slight the fact that James was America's first philosophical genius. Perhaps more than any philosopher before him, he succeeded in combining the skepticism of the empirical scientist, the form of consciousness that "diminishes, discriminates, and says no," with the hyperbole of the mystical visionary, the form of consciousness that "expands, unites, and says yes." If drugs helped him to open the doors of consciousness in this welcoming way, perhaps we should rethink some of our assumptions about drug use and its possible role in human life. For example, can drugs play a role in authentic religious experience? And if so, what should be the legal and moral status of religious drug use?

These questions lead into a fascinating tangle of history and philosophy, much of which has surprising relevance to contemporary policy. Indeed, for more than thirty years courts, legislatures, and philosophers have been debating James's questions, reaching a bewildering variety of incompatible conclusions. Some courts have held that religious drug use is legitimate and even deserves constitutional protection; others--including the Supreme Court--have rejected these arguments. In 1993 Congress passed a law allowing for the sacramental use of peyote, a powerful hallucinogen; yet politicians continue to excoriate "drug use," as if "drugs" were a single sort of unequivocally bad thing. (One wonders how many of the congressional representatives who passed the peyote law would be willing to acknowledge publicly their support for hallucinogenic drug use.) William James thought more clearly about these issues than we are able to think today, and we may want to look to James as we consider the place of drugs in contemporary life.

JAMES'S interest in nitrous oxide was prompted by a man named Benjamin Paul Blood. Born in 1832, Blood --a farmer, philosopher, athletic strongman, prodigious calculator, debunker, inventor, mystic, and forgotten visionary, and the author of the pamphlet The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy --is a classic figure of nineteenth-century America. By his own confession an idler, a "fraud," haphazardly educated and with little gift for sustained argument, Blood spent his eighty-six years in Amsterdam, a town in upstate New York. But despite his limitations, or perhaps because of them, he devoted his life to philosophy. The bulk of his writing consists of letters to the editors of local papers: the Amsterdam Gazette and Recorder , the Utica Herald , the Albany Times . (Some of these letters were amalgamated for the Journal of Speculative Philosophy .) He published a few poems in Scribner's Magazine . Eventually he wrote a book, Pluriverse: An Essay in the Philosophy of Pluralism .