Source, in full
Claimed to be written by James while intoxicated by nitrous oxide. Does not appear in his essay Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide. First attributed, not necessarily seriously, by Robert Anton Wilson in his Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy (1979). Possibly Wilson's version is his humorous descendant of a statement in an 1870 address by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., about his own experience with chloroform: "A strong smell of turpentine pervades the whole." In 1945 Bertrand Russell claimed that James reported a similar statement from an unnamed man. Quote Investigator