^* William James has interesting things to say about nitrous oxide in The Will to Believe (“On Some Hegelisms”): “It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience,” he writes (677). Noting that the propensity of gaseous intoxication was indubitably Hegelian, he offers as an example of the “most coherent and articulate sentence” he produced under the influence : “There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference” (678).