...In 1942, in his classic Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, Julian encouraged his readers to own their own role in determining the “purpose of the future of man” and to cease putting human responsibilities “on to the shoulders of mythical gods or metaphysical absolutes.” In short, in a stunning example of Authorization, he suggested that we must now evolve ourselves. More radically still, well within the mytheme of Mutation this time, he wrote openly about how “there are other faculties, the bare existence of which is as yet scarcely established: and these too might be developed until they were as commonly distributed as, say musical or mathematical gifts are today. I refer to telepathy and other extrasensory activities of mind.”
Closer still was the great French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Bergson held a prestigious chair at the Ecole Normale Superieure, worked with President Woodrow Wilson to help found the League of Nations, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928. During his prime, Bergson was as famous as Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. He was also the president of the London Society for Psychical Research in 1913. Mystics, for the philosopher, were forerunners of human evolution, and psychical powers were hints of what we might all still someday become in the future. Thus, in Creative Evolution(1907), he wrote beautifully of what he called the élan vital, a cosmic evolutionary force that reveals the universe to be, as he put it in 1932 in the very last lines of his very last book, “a machine for the making of gods.”
Well before Bergson, the Canadian doctor Richard Maurice Bucke (1837-1901) wrote an eccentric and rather erratic tome about evolution as a mystical force creating spiritual, cultural, and literary geniuses just before he died - his 1901 classic, Cosmic Consciousness. Despite its obvious flaws and historical naiveté, the book is just as obviously inspired. Accordingly, it would have a significant impact on later readers, including both of our case studies in chapter 6, fantasy artist Barry Windsor-Smith and sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick. Given this, and Bucke’s obvious dissent from the essential randomness of accepted Darwinian biology, it seems wise to spend a bit more time on the author.
By birth, Bucke was a farm boy, by training an accomplished medical doctor and psychologist. The original inspiration for his mysticism was literary and, to be more precise, poetic. In 1867, a visitor read some Walt Whitman to him. He was stunned. Five years later, in the spring of 1872, this poetic inspiration resulted in a dramatic mystical opening in London...