In 1882, after reading a pamphlet by a philosopher named Benjamin Paul Blood titled The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, William James decided to inhale the gas himself. [1]

He famously wrote about the experience:

"Some observations of the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to make... have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and the weakness of Hegel's philosophy." [1]

Why did he connect it to Hegel?

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy is famous for its dense, dialectical unity—the idea that all contradictory things eventually merge into a single, massive, harmonious "Absolute Reality". [1, 2]

James found that inhaling nitrous oxide triggered a profound, mystical feeling of "intense metaphysical illumination" where all worldly contradictions suddenly dissolved into one grand truth. Essentially, the gas gave him a shortcut to experiencing what Hegel described in hundreds of pages of dense, mind-bending text. [1, 2, 3, 4]

However, once the gas wore off, James realized that while it gave him a taste of "Hegelian unity," it also made him deeply distrust it. He ultimately rejected Hegel's rigid worldview in favor of pluralism—the belief that the universe is actually messy, fragmented, and constantly changing. [1]

If you are interested, I can provide more details on what James wrote while high on the gas, or explain why Hegel's actual philosophy is notoriously hard to understand without drugs. [1]