ad us to postulate as irreducible the
contingencies of the world.

10. Elements mutually contingent are not in conflict so long as they
partake of the continua of time, space, etc.,--partaking being the
exact opposite of strife. They conflict only when, as mutually
exclusive possibilities, they strive to possess themselves of the same
parts of time, space, and ego.

11. That there are such real conflicts, irreducible to any
intelligence, and giving rise to an excess of possibility over
actuality, is an hypothesis, but a credible one. No philosophy should
pretend to be anything more.

NOTE.--Since the preceding article was written, some observations on
the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to
make by reading the pamphlet called The Anaesthetic Revelation and the
Gist of Philosophy, by Benjamin Paul Blood, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874,
have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and
the weakness of Hegel's philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeat
the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough. The
effects will of course vary with the individual. Just as they vary in
the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the
former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain. With
me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the
experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense
metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth
beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the
logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity
to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety
returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly
at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a
cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled,
or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.

{295}

The immense emotional sense of _reconciliation_ which characterizes the
'maudlin' stage of alcoholic drunkenness,--a stage which seems silly to
lookers-on, but the subjective rapture of which probably constitutes a
chief part of the temptation to the vice,--is well known. The centre
and periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its
objects, the _meum_ and the _tuum_, are one. Now this, only a
thousandfold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first
result