November 1874

Review of "The Anaesthetic

Revelation and the Gist of
Philosophy"
by William James
What we are, we are! Fear not, gentle reader, we are only
thus beginning to give you a brief account of The
Anaesthetic Revelation, a privately printed pamphlet
which its author has sent us. What we are, we are, whether
we be aware of it or not! The stuff of which we and our
universe are made cannot be helped by knowledge. Her
use is to forestall contingencies; but in Being nothing is
contingent. It shall be what is always was; whether for
weal or woe its inmost equality or meaning IS already, nor
can all our complacent recognition confirm or clinch it, "or
all our tears wash out a word of it." This utterance of
practical sense has helped to bring the metaphysical
craving into disrepute, as being a morbid overgrowth of
intellectual activity; whilst more subtle reasons still are
making some minds condemn it as an essentially hopeless
passion. Among these latter stands Mr. Blood, who,
however, frees himself from philosophy only as many
others have done, by wading deeply through, and thereby
exposing himself to the scornful eyes of the sound-minded
and practical crew as one of the other visionary sort. More
indeed than visionary,--crack-brained, will be the verdict
of most readers, when they hear that he has found a
mystical substitute for the answer which philosophy seeks;
and that this substitute is the sort of ontological intuition,
beyond the power of words to tell of, which one
experiences while taking nitrous oxide gas and other
anaesthetics. "After experiments ranging over nearly
fourteen years, I affirm what any man may prove at will,
that there is an invariable and reliable condition (or
uncondition) ensuing about the instant of recall from
anaesthetic stupor to sensible observation, or 'coming to,'
IN WHICH THE GENIUS OF BEING IS REVEALED;
but because it cannot be remembered in the normal
condition, it is lost altogether through the infrequency of
anaesthetic treatment in any individual's case ordinarily,
and buried amid the hum of returning common-sense,
under that epitaph of all illumination, This is a queer
world!...To minds of sanguine imagination, there will be a
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sadness in the tenor of the mystery, as if the key-note of
the universe were low,--for no poetry, no emotion known
to the normal sanity of man, can furnish a hint of its
primeval prestige and its all but appalling solemnity; but for
such as have felt sadly the instability of temporal things,
there is a comfort of serenity and ancient peace; while for
the resolved and imperious spirit there are majesty and
supremacy unspeakable." So glorious does this solution of
the world's mystery seem to him, that he rises to this flight
of rhetoric, which will seem grand or funny according to
the disposition of the reader: "My worldly tribulation
reclines on its divine composure; and though not in haste to
die, I care not to be dead, but look into the future with
serene and changeless cheer. This world is no more that
alien terror which was taught me. Spurning the cloud-
grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately
Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing
against the night-fall and takes the dim leagues with a
fearless eye."
Now, although we are more than skeptical of the
importance of Mr. Blood's so-called discovery, we shall not
howl with the wolves or join the multitude in jeering at it.
Nirwana, whether called by that name or not, has been
conceived and represented as the consummation of life too
often not to have some meaning; and the state without
discrimination, the "informal consciousness," the "being in
a meaning prior to and deeper than manifestation in form"
of our author seems to be the same as nirwana. Every one
has felt the proverb, "In vino veritas," to have a deeper
meaning than the common interpretation, that the mask
falls from the drinker's character. Ontological emotion,
however stumbled on, has something authoritative for the
individual who feels it. But the worst of all mystical or
simply personal knowledge is incommunicability. To the
mere affirmation, "I KNOW that this is truth, therefore
believe it!" the still more simple reply, "I won't!" is
legitimate and conclusive for the time. The intellect, with
its classifications and roundabout substitutions, must after
all be clung to as the only organ of agreement between
men. But when a man comes forward with a mystical
experience of his own, the duty of the intellect towards it is
not suppression but interpretation. Interpretation of the
phenomenon Mr. Blood describes is yet deficient. But we
may be sure of one thing now: that even on the hypothesis
of its containing all the "revelation" he asserts,
laughing-gas intoxication would not be the final way of
getting at that revelation. What blunts the mind and
weakens the will is no full channel for truth, even if it assist
us to a view of a certain aspect of it; and mysticism versus
mysticism, the faith that comes of willing, the intoxication
of moral volition, has a million times better credentials.
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The greater part of the pamphlet, in which he
ratiocinatively explains the gist of all philosophy to be its
own insufficiency to comprehend or in any way state the
All, is marked by acuteness of thought and often great
felicity of style; though it sins by obscurity through a
quaint density of expression, and by such verbal monsters
as spacical instead of spatial. We can enter into it no
further than to say that the common run of believers in the
"relativity" of knowledge, who feel as if the imbecility of
the latter were due to its bounds and not to its essence
(which is to duplicate Being in an Other, namely, Thought),
will find here the view argued interestingly that the trouble
all comes of a gratuitous guest; that the mystery we feel
challenged to resolve, and baffled at not resolving, is not
mystery if we decline the challenge; in other words, that
fullness of life (unreflected on) forestalls the need of
philosophy by being in itself "what we must confess as
practical somewhere, namely, an apodal sufficiency; to
which sufficiency a wonder or fear of why it is sufficient
cannot pertain, and could be attributed to it only as an
impossible disease or lack." The secret of Being, in short, is
not the dark immensity beyond knowledge, but at home,
this side, beneath the feet, and overlooked by knowledge.
We sincerely advise real students of philosophy to write for
the pamphlet to its author. It is by no means as important
as he probably believes it, but still thoroughly original and
very suggestive.
The Atlantic Monthly; November 1874; Review of "The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist
of Philosophy"; Volume 33, No. 205; pages 627-628.
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