Two major figures in the history (in the West) of altered states of consciousness and psychedelic research, pioneers in “the modalities of consciousness”, to use Allen’s succinct, accurate phrasing, William James and Albert Hofmann, were both born on this day.
Hofmann, we’ve already noted at length, see here
William James deserves, and continues to deserve, repeated attention.
Allen, from his testimony at the Senate Subcommittee Hearing in 1964, on LSD:
“I am 40 years old now, a poet, this year with the status of Guggenheim Foundation fellow.
I graduated from Columbia College, curiously enough, and had a practical career in market research before I went to writing full time. When I was 22 I had a crucial experience-what is called a visionary experience, or “esthetic” experience – without drugs -that deepened my life. William James’ classic American book Varieties of Religious Experience describes similar happenings to people’s consciousness. What happened to me amazed me – the whole universe seemed to wake up alive and full of intelligence and feeling. It was like a definite break in ordinary consciousness, lasted intermittently a week; then disappeared and left me vowing one thing -never to forget what I’d seen.”
From Mike Jay‘s comprehensive study, Psychonauts – Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (2023):
“In the Varieties of Religion Experience, William James had proposed a distinction between two character types that led to “two different conception of the universe of our experience”. One type he called the “once-born” – those who accept their lives as given and attempt to make the best of them. For the other class, the ‘twice-born”, the task was different – “peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life”. The twice-born needed to begin afresh; they were those, in James’ scheme, who experienced sudden religious conversion or transformative existential insights… Although James referred to the once-born as “healthy-minded” and the twice-born as “sick souls” the thrust of his distinction was to undercut moral judgment – one mindset, as he insisted, cannot be criticized from the standpoint of the other. He also suggested that the once-born mind, healthy as it may be, is inclined to smug and dull conservatism, while the twice-born seeks adventure and transformation. Psychedelics were agents of radical change for the twice-born, and of peak experience for all.”
James, had written as early as 1874, in an unsigned review in The Atlantic, open-mindedly, about “metaphysical craving”, and “anesthetic revelation” and the need for a non-judgmental view – “when a man comes forward with a mystical experience of his own, the duty of the intellect towards it is not suppression but interpretation”
That short review stands up well these many years later – see here
Likewise, his later notes, eight years later, on “The Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide”
– see here
In 1896, James was sufficiently impressed (as were many others) by Silas Weir Mitchell, the leading neurologist in the USA at that time, who wrote a lengthy and vivid report that year, published in the British Medical Journal, on the “brilliant visions” that he’d experienced under the influence of peyote (obtained by him from the Native American (Comanche) medicine man, Quanah Parker). Mitchell sent some of Quanah’s buttons to James, with the enthusiastic promise of “an afternoon and evening in fairyland,” but it didn’t work out quite as Mitchell had hoped. James, unfortunately, experienced nothing more remarkable than 24 hours of acute gastric distress! – Notwithstanding, his ethical stance remained unfaltering,
his curiosity and belief in scientific experimentation (as against scientific rejection) remained undimmed.
Varieties of Religion Experience, his ground-breaking volume appeared in 1902.
James’ drug research is of course only one small part of his considerable intellectual achievement. For further reading here’s his entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Robert D Richardson‘s William James – In The Maelstrom of American Modernism is probably the definitive biography
and check out Wesley Cecil‘s lively lecture on his life and his philosophy – see here