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THE ANÆSTHETIC RELEVATION.
To the Editor of The Tribune.

SIR: For fourteen years I carried in lonesome silence the secret of the world, until in 1874 I published "The Anæsthetic Revelation." As journalist you will recall that brochure as eliciting from Alfred Tennyson an account of a kind of trance ("this is for lack of a better name," as he said) which had been usual with him quite up from his boyhood, and in which he had an intuition of the genius of being. His letter is even yet within the last month circulating in English papers, attended with discussion of various abnormal experience. My publication, which was circulated gratuitously - for I felt that no one should make money out of it - brought me many letters from patients of anæsthesia who expressed themselves as reminded of that unutterable appreciation of existence which seems common to all active intelligence after the exhilaration. Some who had not chanced upon anæsthesia in a therapeutic course, experimented expressly. Dr. William James, the metaphysician of Harvard University, reviewed my pamphlet in a wondering way in The Atlantic Monthly, and afterward experimented on himself and made some resolute attempts to utter the secret in Mind, an English magazine; but his exclamations are hardly intelligible to one not versed in Hegelism. A considerable circle in London make a familiar topic of the revelation. The Therapeutic Gazette, of Philadelphia, in the August number, contains a guarded and conscientious narrative of the experience of Dr. Shoemaker, of that city, in which he relates the anæsthetic insight with the same wonder and difficulty which all patients encounter, and, strangely enough, he fancies that he is now first signalizing the mystery to the public.

It seems to me, sir, to be legitimate news, matter of good journalism, that there is now a rapidly spreading apprehension that the primordial secret, the goal of philosophy and man's most curious aspiration, is a homologous experience within certain conditions. The topic does not force itself strongly into business circles, but for all who find interest in destiny, sentiment and emotion of the higher order, it has an absorbing attraction, and so far it is news. But the reader who learns this much about the anæsthetic revelation, and who then presses the natural inquiry, what the revelation is, or reveals, can be answered only in his own realization of it; for its matter is unutterable in the philosophical art of the past, and obviously so on account of philosophical obscurity. For it should be known that this insight is not generically or necessarily anæsthetic. Long experience has familiarized my way to this wonder in the normal condition; and there is a philosophy possible in which the truth of it can be told so far as to rekindle the memory of it. Lying still on my back in the night I can at any time go as near to the awful mystery as my nerve will allow; but to express it in rational terms was impossible ere philosophy had read the true character of the opposition between being and not-being. The common notion of intelligence is that of a kind of light; as we see by light, so we know by intelligence. But this is a mistake: we do not see by the light any more than we see by the darkness. We usually think, as to intelligence and distinction, that if the light were to go out the show would be ended (and so it would), but we foreget that if the darkness were to go out, that would be equally calamitious; for the features and outlines of things appear only by shades and contrasts. Light alone were wholly unintelligible and useless -quite as much so as darkness alone. And being, as we ordinarily use that though, would similarly come short of the expression of this mystery, if disconnected in through from not-being. Immediate life and death are the two equal wings of true being to which both are necessary. This is the combination which exhausts all reality; for it is total or universal, having no opposite, and is therefore inevitable, and neither can cease nor have become.

Much of this sort of talk would repel the readers whom I desire to attract, and whom I earnestly advise to test the revelation for themselves; it is brief, a mere glimpse, and however astounding yet utterly harmless, tending rather to laughter than to tears. My special impulse in renewing this topic now is to enable more people to read by its inner light those Philosophical Reveries which were incited by this familiar, and which are now [[obscured]] philosophical thought of the world. With [[obscured]]

BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD

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