This Old Book: 'The Philosopher's Stone'

This science fiction novel by Colin Wilson is really a novel of ideas, and my teen-age self found it quite compelling, so much so that when I lost my paperback copy I ordered this out of print hardcover first edition. There's an element of fantasy to the book, as it describes the adventures of two scientists trying to find rational explanations for what seem to be nearly mythological forces dating back to the ancient Mayans. The scientists are in pursuit of heightened or cosmic consciousness -- brain operations give them the power to read minds and travel back in time to Shakespeare's era -- and, well, then a bunch of other crazy stuff happens. Wilson said that after he read H.G. Wells at age 11 he wanted to write "the definitive novel about time travel. Time travel is a perpetually alluring idea, but it always sounds so preposterous... The question of how to make it sound plausible is quite a challenge." He pulls it off. 

    This Old Book is a series of posts about books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades. It used to be a Tumblr, now archived here.

This Old Book: 'Cosmic Consciousness'

This 1901 book by Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D., formerly medical superintendent of the asylum for the insane in London, Canada, was reissued as a paperback in 1969, and apparently thousands of copies were sent to the used bookstores of Ithaca, N.Y., where I ran into so many copies of it that I finally broke down and bought one. "A classic investigation of the development of man's mystic relation to the infinite," the book describes something that might sound similar to zen enlightment, or a born-again Christian experience, or various other mystical states. There are charts and footnotes. The best part is the second half that lists a number of people -- some well-known historical figures, others individuals listed only by their initials -- who the doctor believed had attained this state of consciousness. They include: Gautama the Buddha, Jesus the Christ, Paul (the saint), Mohammed, Bartolome le Casas, Francis Bacon, Honore de Balzac, Walt Whitman, Spinoza, Pushkin, Tennyson, and Thoreau. Among the anonymous adepts is H.B., who wrote of a realization that came upon him while reading the only copy of Darwin's "Origin of Species" available in his town:

The first real mental illumination I remember to have experienced was when I saw that the universe exists in each of its individual atoms -- that is, the universe is the result of a few simple processes infinitely repeated. When a drop of water has been mathematically measured, every principle will have been used which would be called for in the measurement of hte heavens. All life on the globe is sustaned by digestion and assimilation; when by voluntary and traumatic action these stop death follows. The history of an individual mind is the history of the race. Know one thing in its properties and relations and you will know all things. 

     This Old Book is a series of posts about books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades. It used to be a Tumblr, now archived here.