The First Scientific Psychonaut

Sir Humphry Davy

This is a slightly abridged version of a chapter from Dr

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

’s Modes of Sentience: Psychedelic, Metaphysics, Panpsychism.

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‘To fathom Hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic’¹ – penned in the mid twentieth century, this was the rhyme that coined the word ‘psychedelic’ and inaugurated its scene. The scene was soon suppressed, to the extent that no-one would have believed, in the last years of the twentieth century, that human affairs would later occupy themselves once more with mind-altering chemicals. Yet here we find ourselves, within the whirls of the so-named ‘psychedelic renaissance’. Top-selling author Michael Pollan expresses, and thereby assists, the revival thus:

‘Today, after several decades of suppression and neglect, psychedelics are having a renaissance. A new generation of scientists, many of them inspired by their own personal experience of the compounds, are testing their potential … hoping to unravel some of the mysteries of consciousness.’²

But there are more than several decades of neglect. Over two centuries ago, Penzance’s great scientist, ‘chemical philosopher’ Humphry Davy had pioneered experimentation with mind-altering compounds not merely in a quantitative, clinical fashion, but in ways, upon others and upon himself, philosophical: phenomenological and metaphysical.

We shall see how Davy, to be introduced, experimented with nitrous oxide, in increasingly large and frequent doses, till he attained experiences sublime. As well as being a published poet, Davy also pursued speculative metaphysics, as gleaned from his notebooks, letters, and especially his final, extraordinary book, Consolations in Travel; or, The Last Days of a Philosopher. Davy’s interest in idealism, catalysed especially through the interests of his friends Coleridge and Wordsworth, and their mutual interest specifically in Spinozism, will be analysed in respect to Davy’s phantastic ‘visions’, ‘spectra’, trips – experiences of the Absolute, of empyrean spacescapes, of alien beings forging communication. It is no exaggeration to say Davy – with all respect to Paracelsus, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke³ – was the first scientific psychonaut.⁴

Who was Humphry Davy? Born on the 17th December 1778, dead on the 29th May 1829, Davy was a quick burst of human light. In 1800 he publishes a book on the chemical and philosophical properties of nitrous oxide, the ‘laughing gas’ intake of which becomes a recreational activity soon thereafter in British aristocratic circles, before becoming an attraction in the US, where it is first used as an anaesthetic in 1844 (first produced commercially by the cousin of Edgar Allan Poe). In 1807 Davy discovers potassium, and in following years other elements such as calcium, barium, and magnesium. In 1812 he is knighted, only the second scientist to be thus awarded after Isaac Newton.

Three years later Davy invents the famous miners’ safety lamp, lovingly described simply as the ‘Davy Lamp’, a device that saved many lives by preventing explosion, and the one thing that the Davy statue holds, proudly. In fact, it is in relation to this lamp that he is predominantly known, his other subterranean visions of light remaining generally unknown.⁵ In 1820 Davy is elected President of the Royal Society, the world's oldest independent scientific academy. Davy dies in Geneva at the age of fifty, having suffered ill health for three years beginning with his first stroke in 1826 – with following pains appeased somewhat by opium.⁶

He had finished his book Consolations just before he died, and it was published via his brother John the following year in 1830. This book, Davy wrote in a letter, ‘contains the essence of my philosophical opinions’, which is a rather bold statement from a man of science, considering the book’s highly mystical and visionary tone, as will be seen.⁷

Davy was born in the harbour town of Penzance, within the Celtic land of Cornwall, culminating Britain to the south west. Not only does Cornwall bear the romanticized history of pirates and mermaids, tin miners and their hypogean goblin knockers – but Arthurian legends, and shadow talk of druids ritualizing at the stone circles, quoits, and fogous that lie strewn across the raw beauty of ancient-hedge-enclosed moors and meadows. Davy was infused and enthused by such surroundings, to which his early poetry attests. Both his parents were of Cornish stock, his ancestors described as yeomen and gentlemen on their Ludgvan tombstones – his paternal grandmother was reputed to have second sight.⁸

Davy was an average schoolboy, but, in his late teens, began a self-imposed self-education.⁹ Much of this involved metaphysics, including the study of figures such as Locke, Hartley, Berkeley, Hume, Helvetius, Condorcet, adding to his school study of the ancient Lucretius who, along with the rebellious streak weaving through his notes, may have inspired Davy’s early sympathies with materialism (which he came to reject).¹⁰ In later years he wrote, without apology, ‘What I am I have made myself’.¹¹ Davy’s quick metamorphosis was even a shock to his close friend Gregory Watt,¹² who, when visited by Davy in Birmingham, was, Mike Jay writes,

‘astonished to encounter not the previous winter’s wild Cornish lad but a confident and extrovert figure at the hub of a sophisticated philosophical circle’.¹³

In his teenage years Davy was apprenticed at Peasgood’s Pharmacy which stood atop Penzance’s main artery, Market Jew Street – a pharmacy that was later to find itself beside the statue of Sir Humphry Davy, erected in 1872. Back in 1798, at the age of twenty, Davy was invited to work in Bristol, two hundred miles from Penzance, at the newly-formed Pneumatic Institution – a centre created by a Dr Thomas Beddoes chiefly to research and apply gaseous methods to treat illnesses, primarily tuberculosis.

Davy’s chief preoccupation there was to see if nitrous oxide, discovered in 1772 by the English theologian, chemist, and liberal radical Joseph Priestley, was, as American physician Dr Samuel Latham Mitchell had claimed in 1795, highly toxic. Davy quickly showed through experiment that this was certainly not the case, in fact, the truth was quite the contrary.

To be sure, on 11th April 1799 Davy inhaled, for the first time, pure nitrous oxide, without any untoward effects – as opposed to the carbon monoxide he tried there which was apparently not at all pleasant: ‘I seemed sinking into annihilation … I do not think I shall die’.¹⁴ As a result of the successful nitrous oxide experiment, Davy decides to take a larger dose five days later, a dose of 3 quarts (6 pints, 3.4 litres) from a silk bag. He describes it as:

‘A fullness of the heart accompanied by loss of distinct sensation and of voluntary power, a feeling analogous to that produced in the first stage of intoxication.’¹⁵

The next day, 17th April 1799, he breathes a dose larger yet: 4 quarts (8 pints, 4.5 litres). He reports that it induces,

‘a highly pleasurable thrilling … the sense of muscular power became greater…’¹⁶

Davy continues to frequently take nitrous oxide between May and December 1799, sometimes five times a day (with no less than 6 to 9 quarts each time).¹⁷ On one of these days he discovers, whilst suffering from severe toothache, that when breathing nitrous oxide the, ‘uneasiness was for a few minutes, swallowed up in pleasure.’¹⁸ Davy writes of another anaesthetic occasion from nitrous oxide of the same period:

‘when I had head-ache from indigestion, it was immediately removed by the effects of a large dose of gas…’

But Davy’s concern is not for the anaesthetic effects of nitrous oxide, as can be understood through the fact that its first use as such occurred only four decades later. Davy’s concern was more metaphysical than medical:

‘Sometimes I had feelings of intense intoxication … at other times, sublime emotions connected with highly vivid ideas…’¹⁹

He also writes that large doses of nitrous oxide are, ‘superior in intensity to that occasioned by high intoxication from opium or alcohol’²⁰ revealing his use and familiarity with opium, a very common painkilling drug at the time – one to which Davy’s friend Coleridge became painfully addicted (he famously referred to it as the milk of paradise),²¹ and one that also had psychedelic-visionary properties, as conveyed so well by another of Davy’s acquaintances, Thomas de Quincey.²²

Davy is not content with the amounts of nitrous oxide he is taking. He wants more. On 26th December 1799 the intake of truly heroic doses of nitrous oxide begins. Davy’s accomplice, the engineer James Watt, had designed an air-tight breathing box – aptly resembling somewhat a realm-transporting Tardis. The breathing box was installed in the Pneumatic Institution. On Boxing Day Davy steps inside. Now 80 quarts (90 litres) of nitrous oxide are pumped in over 75 minutes. Davy reports that: ‘luminous points seemed frequently to pass before my eyes…’²³

As Davy steps out, he takes another 20 quarts from a silk bag. In his book of 1800, Researches Chemical and Philosophical, Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, Davy recounts what happened following the intake of these 100 quarts of nitrous oxide:

‘A thrilling extending to the chest to the extremities was almost immediately produced. … [My] visible impressions were dazzling and apparently magnified, I heard distinctly every sound in the room and was perfectly aware of my situation. By degrees as the pleasurable sensations increased I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorised … . My emotions were enthusiastic and sublime … . [W]ith the most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed to Dr. Kinglake, “Nothing exists but thoughts!—the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!”’²⁴

In Davy’s private notes of the same event, his account is less inhibited:

‘The sensations were superior to any I ever experienced. Inconceivably pleasurable … . I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals, I was indignant of what they said of me and stalked majestically out of the laboratory to inform Dr Kinglake that nothing existed but thoughts.’²⁵

Davy continued using nitrous oxide, in his everyday life, writing in his book of 1800:

‘I have often felt very great pleasure when breathing it alone, in darkness and silence, occupied only by ideal existence.’²⁶

Furthermore, in this unprecedented scientific and phenomenological book of 1800, Davy already writes of the indescribability of such psychedelic states, a notion of limitation that William James was to make common in his book a hundred years later, by the criterion of ‘ineffability’ for mystical states (that explicitly include those of nitrous oxide). Davy notes that:

‘I have sometimes experienced from nitrous oxide, sensations similar to no others, and they have consequently been indescribable.’²⁷

Were a congenitally blind man to experience colours in a dream, he would not know that they were colours, let alone would he be able to describe them in any way but negatively (not sound, not taste, etc.) or analogically. So it is with ineffable psychedelic experiences for us: the novelty of such mentality overflows our linguistic containers. Davy noted this in his first book, but he would return to it later, using an insectoid analogy in his last book, as will be shown.

But though certain experiences were purportedly indescribable, Davy was wise to employ for a chapter in this initial book a number of Britain’s finest writers so to gain as good a phenomenological description as was possible of the effects of the gas. These luminaries included Coleridge, Dr Roget (of later thesaurus fame), and poet-laureate-to-be, Robert Southey. In an enthusiastic letter to Davy, Southey described the gas in the following inspirational fashion:

‘your gaseous oxide, which according to my notions of celestial enjoyment, must certainly constitute the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens.’²⁸

— — —

“Nothing exists but thoughts!” – it seems that Davy was swept to idealism through chemical means. Or rather, it seems that Davy received an intuition of what he had already considered intellectually – not only through his earlier readings of the subjective idealist Bishop Berkeley, but also through the concurrent German Zeitgeist. His brothers-in-thought, Coleridge and Wordsworth were captivated by, though not as yet well versed in, the idealism and related pantheism steaming out of the Continent, and Davy would have undoubtedly been immersed in the atmosphere of this exciting new philosophy.

In fact, in one of Davy’s notebooks of the time is a page entitled, ‘System of Idealism’,²⁹ after which is immediately written ‘What philosophers call impressions, the world calls things’. After this, however, the meaning of his sentences become rather unintelligible, more convoluted than the densest of Hegelian passages. In fact, it would be quite reasonable to suppose that he was on nitrous oxide as he wrote it (or perhaps one should be on nitrous oxide as one reads it). In this context it is interesting to note that another prominent scientist-philosopher was also delivered to idealism of a Hegelian variety through the use of nitrous oxide. William James, almost a century after Davy’s insight, writes:

‘[The] effects of nitrous oxide gas-intoxication … have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and the weakness of Hegel's philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeat the experiment … an intense metaphysical illumination … . [Its] first result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the conviction that Hegelism was true after all…’³⁰

There are then a variety of types of idealism – including those of Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer – with Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ being the most influential. Though Davy and his poet friends endorsed idealism in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it would take another seventy years before British academic philosophers adopted it: the so-called ‘British Idealism’ of figures such as T. H. Green, B. Bosanquet, and F. H. Bradley. What is idealism? It is idea-ism: the view that mind is fundamental to all reality, rather than matter: “Nothing exists but thoughts!” One might say that for idealism, matter is a projection of the mind. Thus idealism is a viewpoint opposed to both materialism (that matter is fundamental, with mind being a product thereof), and dualism (that both matter and mind are fundamental).

Before Davy first met Coleridge, in Bristol, Coleridge had spent time in Germany absorbing the new philosophy. Here he had also immersed himself in the metaphysics of Spinoza, arguably a special type of idealism.³¹ In fact so involved was Coleridge in Spinoza that the government agent who was sent to spy on Coleridge and Wordsworth for possible traits of treason, concluded that the two were harmless but might have clocked on to him as they were constantly speaking of a ‘Spy Nozy’.³²

Now, in a notebook from the nitro days in Bristol, immediately after the poem ‘On Breathing the Nitrous Oxide’, Davy begins the poem ‘The Spinosist’.³³ Of all of Davy’s poems, this one appears to be the most important to him. As Sharon Ruston notes of it,

‘He revised one poem … at least four times, extending and developing it with each revision, and finally printing it anonymously twice within his lifetime. It is clear that this was a poem of which he was particularly proud and there is evidence that it was read aloud and circulated in manuscript among friends and acquaintances.’³⁴

What the continental philosophers had rationally theorized with regard to the mental depths of reality, the Cornish Davy had also, through the use of nitrous oxide, experimentally intuited. One can situate this within the general difference between Britain and the continent with regard to method, as Marcus Boon has thus situated it:

'The German Idealists themselves had little interest in this application of drugs. It was the British Romantics, empiricists at heart, who sought out experimental models for the study of the transcendental subject … . [T]hrough their philosophizing of their experiences with opium and nitrous oxide, [the Romantics] created “drugs” as we now know them.'³⁵

At that time, it was not stigma that dissuaded the German metaphysicians to avoid psychoactive chemical experimentation, it was rather the Enlightenment’s crowning of the intellect that left other forms of intuitive consciousness in the shadows of importance. But there was a stigma, or moreover, a danger, in adopting Spinozism. Spinoza’s bold, logical philosophy – one that rejected free will and the separation of body and soul, that advanced a moral relativism, and anticipated Nietzsche in seeing joy as a consequence of power, that saw sentience in all things (panpsychism), that dared to identify ‘God’ with Nature – was a worldview not compatible with the ideology of Judeo-Christian power structures in place at the time.

When F. H. Jacobi alleged that Enlightenment luminary G. E. Lessing was in later years secretly a Spinozist,³⁶ it triggered the Pantheismusstreit, the pantheism controversy of the late eighteenth century, that was to have hazardous occupational repercussion thence. Though Hegel said that one is ‘either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all’,³⁷ it would generally be unwise to declare oneself a Spinozist at that time, and Davy certainly did not. However, it is enlightening to explore Davy’s visions through the lens of Spinozism, a special case of examining psychedelic phenomenology through Spinozism that might provide new modes of thought for this psychedelic renaissance in which we find ourselves.

Let us then delve a little deeper into Spinoza and his system. Baruch (later Benedict de) Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 and, like Davy, died young, in 1677. Though Dutch he was of the Sephardim: the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula who had fled the Portuguese Inquisition in the previous century. However, at the age of twenty-three Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community for his already-controversial views, and later condemned by the Church, having his work banned in 1674. In his influential Dictionnaire Historique et Critique published first in 1697, Calvinist Pierre Bayle referred to Spinozism as a ‘most absurd and monstrous hypothesis’,³⁸ precipitating the later, aforementioned pantheism controversy. Though Spinoza was offered a faculty position at Heidelberg University, he declined realizing that it would limit the expression of his thought. Instead, whilst immersed in the intellectual circles of Amsterdam, Spinoza would for the most make his living grinding lenses.

Though ecclesiastico-politically repulsive, Spinozism was, and is, intellectually attractive. Echoing Davy’s sentiments, though more explicitly, another most prominent scientist paid homage to Spinoza. As well as writing an endearing poem about the man, Einstein wrote that:

‘I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists…’³⁹

and:

‘Spinoza is the greatest of modern philosophers, because he is the first philosopher who deals with the soul and the body as one, not as two separate things.’⁴⁰

So let us get to the substance of Spinoza’s metaphysics, as given in his posthumous magnum opus, Ethics. Rather than admitting the two fundamental substances of reality as those of mind and matter, à la Descartes, Spinoza, using an Euclidianesque method, posited one substance alone – monism. This one substance is all that exists, and he calls it both Nature and God. In this sense, Spinozism can also be considered pantheism. This substance/Nature/God has an infinite number of Attributes: expressions, aspects, or versions, of this same substance. Though infinite in number, we humans only have access to two such Attributes, viz. Extension and Thought – essentially matter and mind. We have access to our consciousness, and we have access to the matter that seemingly constitutes our bodies and the universe around us. But Extension and its correlative Thought are not then two separate substances, but rather two different ways – Attributes – of viewing the same thing (God/Nature). Thus there can be no mind-body mental causation, no free will, because there are not two things that exist in a two-way cause-effect relationship. Elisabeth II cannot cause the motions of the current queen of the United Kingdom because they/she are/is one and the same – an epistemic qualitative difference but an ontological numerical identity.

The neural correlates of consciousness express therefore a relationship of identity rather than one of causality. In relation to current neuroscience, especially with regard to understanding psychedelic phenomenology via brain activity, it is worth noting here that under Spinozism we would expect a perfect matter-mind correlation. This implies that even were the human neural correlates of consciousness completely mapped, the finding would not thereby evidence a materialist position. Mind-brain correlation merely indicates a part of the mind-matter relation. One does not explain consciousness through neuroscience. Moreover, for Spinoza, it is not merely the brain and body but all of matter that correlates to mentality. Even a molecule has an element of mind, a position known as panpsychism. This is an essentially logical position – as twentieth-century absolute idealist and panpsychist T. L. S. Sprigge has argued, 'the physical and the mental must be brought together everywhere or not at all'.⁴¹

Now, for Spinoza, each Attribute has an infinite number of Modes, or modifications – so for instance the Attribute Extension has a Mode of magnesium, and the Attribute Thought has a Mode of magnanimity. Thus we have three main divisions of Spinozism: Substance, Attributes, and Modes, as represented here:

Spinoza’s Ethics also includes two (of five) chapters on psychology which relates to his form of moral relativism which in this way can be seen as a precursor to Nietzsche. Spinoza’s conatus – the inherent drive within all life to preservation and power – is akin to Nietzsche’s will to power, and the emerging amoralism resultant therefrom is similar to Nietzsche’s active nihilism.⁴² In this conative-amoral connection, it is worth noting, with regard to the psychedelic renaissance vis-à-vis the law prohibiting psychedelic chemicals, that Spinoza advocated cognitive liberty:

'whatever... we judge to be good or to be profitable for the preservation of our being or the enjoyment of a rational life, we are permitted to take for our use and use in any way we may think proper; and absolutely, everyone is allowed by the highest right of nature to do that.'⁴³

But let us look more directly at Spinoza’s metaphysics in relation to the psychedelic experience. To help frame the exploration, we can generalize three common categories of psychedelic experiences (though in truth such a taxonomy is vast). Firstly we have the indescribable, or to use William James’ term for the mystical experience, ‘ineffable’ nature of the psychedelic experience. Before William James had used this word, Humphry Davy had claimed it for psychoactive experience, as quoted above and below. Secondly comes an experience that trades by many terms, one of which is ‘cosmic consciousness’, as used by R. M. Bucke⁴⁴ and William James.⁴⁵ It is a mystical experience of being One with the universe, of thereby losing one’s individuality – of losing principium individuationis – an experience often blissful, glorious, serene. By way of LSD especially, Alan Watts described the experience thus:

‘the individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with God, the Universe, with the Ground of Being, or whatever name he may use … . [To] those who have known it, it is as real and overwhelming as falling in love.’⁴⁶

More concisely William James writes:

‘In mystic states, we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness.’⁴⁷

The third category that I shall use to generalize psychedelic experiences is that of otherworldly entity encounters. N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or simply DMT – inhaled pure, or taken as part of the Amazonian brew ayahuasca – is especially known for inducing this third category. Dr David Luke writes that this,

‘psychedelic brew is taken because it gives rise to extraordinary mental phenomena … perhaps most commonly, encounters with discarnate entities. When described by seemingly naïve DMT participants the entities encountered tend to vary in detail but often belong to one of a very few similar types … [such as] mischievous shape-shifting elves, preying mantis alien brain surgeons and jewel-encrusted reptilian beings…’⁴⁸

Davy’s alien encounters were of entities yet stranger – but before we travel to that third category, let us first look at the second – ‘cosmic consciousness’ – with respect to Davy through Spinoza.

Spinoza argues that we humans have three kinds of knowledge:⁴⁹ firstly there is ‘opinion or imagination’ which is simply our common daily sense- and language-based, vague understanding of the world. Secondly there is the more cognitive ‘reason’ through which we come to devise our science, mathematics, logic. Thirdly, and far less commonly, there is ‘intuition’ by which is meant an immediate, non-inferred grasping of a core essence of a reality. It is beyond the second kind of scientific knowledge, being more akin (but not identical) to what Kant conjectured as ‘intellectual intuition’,⁵⁰ and to what Bergson also referred to as ‘intuition’ or ‘sympathy’ as opposed to the rational ‘intellect’.⁵¹ It is an immersive, essential knowledge of the real – the rare insight of a poet, ever disturbed by the inadequacy of his description, having to rest content by the mere attempt at evocation. It is as such immediate knowledge of the concrete rather than the second indirect knowledge of the abstract, an ‘adequate knowledge of the essence of things’.⁵²

At its highest instantiation, Spinoza calls it amor dei intellectualis, ‘the intellectual love of God’. To attain this state, Spinoza tells us, is to attain the ‘highest possible peace of mind, that is to say … the highest joy’.⁵³ It is to intuit the concrete, absolute nature of reality in its non-temporal, i.e. eternal, form – i.e. to intuit sub specie aeternitatis (temporality being the means through which the mere two Attributes of Extension and Thought are manifest). It is love, according to Spinoza, because it is joy with the knowledge of its cause. Through this state God/Nature, because it is not essentially separate from us, attains self-love: it is the means by which core reality comes to love itself through self-consciousness – in other words, a cosmic consciousness.  In Spinoza’s words:

‘The intellectual love of the mind towards God is the very love with which He loves Himself, not in so far as He is infinite, but in so far as He can be manifested through the essence of the human mind, considered under the form of eternity … . This love or blessedness is called glory in the sacred writings…’⁵⁴

Such a glorious state of Nature achieved through oneself was one sought by many Romantics, Davy being no exception. In a notebook entry dated to his nitrous years, he writes:

‘To day for the first time in my life I have had a distinct sympathy with nature … . Every[thing] seemed alive & myself part of the series of visible impressions. I should have felt pain in tearing a leaf from one of the trees – deeply & intimately connected are all our ideas of motion & life…’⁵⁵

In Davy’s final book, Consolations, he too writes of such unitive states, now more opium-induced and still poetically evocative of Spinoza’s amor dei:

‘I saw in all the powers of matter the instruments of the Deity; the sunbeams, the breath of the zephyr … . I saw love as the creative principle in the material world, and this love only as a Divine attribute … . Then, my own mind, I felt connected … a thirst for immortality.’⁵⁶

This was placed in the Fourth Dialogue of the Consolations. The First Dialogue, ‘The Vision’, is, it is fair to say, one of the earliest and one of the greatest ‘trip reports’ in the psychedelic canon, despite its being relatively unknown. The word ‘vision’ was often used in this period to refer to aesthetic opium experiences. In this chapter, Davy, as protagonist Philalethes, describes a vision he experiences as he falls into a trance state whilst resting in the Colosseum in Rome, flooded within moonshine. He comes to be guided by an alien spirit – the ‘Genius’ – through the history of Earth, seeing the progress of mankind from its beast-like beginnings through the epochs. That a few superior humans are pivotal to progress is often emphasized, such as King Alfred and Peter the Great (he does not explicitly name himself). The protagonist now finds himself in a dark cave. Then, in Platonic splendour, ‘a bright and rosy light broke into this cave … above all was bright and illuminated with glory’.⁵⁷ He rises now above the planet into space, past the planets, beyond the solar system. He is then introduced to different alien, spiritual civilizations and their subjects in a style supremely psychedelic. We here meet a passage that combines both the second and third categories of psychedelic experience, cosmic consciousness with otherworldly encounters, with seemingly Spinozist overtones. The Genius conveys the common highest state of certain ethereal minds or (using a term commonly employed by Bruno and Leibniz) monads:

‘There is one sentiment or passion which the monad or spiritual essence carries with it into all its stages of being, and which in these happy and elevated creatures [cometary fire-orb beings] is continually exalted: the love of knowledge or of intellectual power, which is, in fact, in its ultimate and most perfect development the love of infinite wisdom and unbounded power, or the love of God. … [At] the moment of death [it] is felt by the conscious being … . [We solar beings] feel the personal presence of that supreme Deity which only you imagine; to you belongs faith, to us knowledge; and our greatest delight results from the conviction that we are lights kindled by His light and that we belong to His substance.’⁵⁸

We now move from the second category of psychedelic experience to the third: otherworldly entity encounters. Though sounding somewhat mystical with his amor dei intellectualis, Spinoza was sceptical, at the least, of the existence of ghosts, as certain correspondence shows.⁵⁹ However, he accepted the reality of revelation,⁶⁰ and we can consider, through his metaphysics, the possibility of the veridicality of visions of otherworldly entities. As shown, we humans have access to only two Attributes of Substance/Nature/God: Extension and Thought, matter and mind. The number of the Attributes of reality, however, is infinite. Would it be possible, under the Spinozist system, for a human to access, enter, another Attribute? It is barely possible for a human to conceive another Attribute outside of matter and mind, as it is impossible for a beetle to conceive of the reality of the galaxy in which it exists. But Frederick Pollock writes that such inhuman access is not impossible for Spinozism:

‘Spinoza … thought it possible that new Attributes might become known to us by revelation; for in one place … he speaks of Thought and Extension as the only Attributes as yet known to us.’⁶¹

Such revelatory knowledge would be a new state of existence. Moreover, to follow Davy in the bold conjectures that emanated from his noetic visions, would it be possible for a sentient being to primarily exist through mind and through a non-spatial Attribute? Davy thought so: in a letter of 1804, during his time as celebrated professor of chemistry in London, Davy writes:

‘We are masters of the earth, but perhaps we are slaves of some great and unknown beings. The fly that we crush with our finger … has no knowledge of man, and no consciousness of his superiority. … There may be beings – thinking beings, near us, surrounding us, which we do not perceive, which we can never imagine. We know very little …’⁶²

Repeatedly throughout his life, Davy seems to have had such intuitions, the balance of their endogenous to exogenous causation unknown. Later in 1821, a year after he was elected President of the Royal Society, he writes of another vision:

‘It seemed as if I was entering a new state of existence … I seemed in communication with some intelligent being … I hoped to be, ultimately, in a world of intellectual light…’⁶³

Two years prior, Davy recounts another similar otherworldly encounter, one that was indubitably to inspire his later account in Consolations.⁶⁴ In his notebook, Davy writes:

'One moonlit night … I was walking in the Colosseum full of sublime thoughts … when of a sudden I saw a bright mist in one of the arcades, so luminous that I thought a person must be advancing with a light. … [A] voice, distinct, but like that of a flute, said, “I am one of the Roman deities! You disbelieve all the ancient opinions, as dreams and fables; nevertheless they are founded in truth. Before the existence of man, and some time after, a race of beings who are independent of respiration and air occasionally dwelt on the globe … In the early stage of society we condescended to instruct man …”’⁶⁵

Davy did not consider experiences such as these to be nothing but hallucination. If materialism were true, then both cosmic consciousness and otherworldly encounters would be nothing more than tricks of the material brain. But in Spinozism matter is not fundamental – it is not substance – but one of an infinity of equal Attributes. Davy himself rails against materialism, echoing Leibniz’s Mill⁶⁶ in Consolations that:

‘I can never believe that any division, or refinement, or subtilisation, or juxtaposition, or arrangement of the particles of matter, can give to them sensibility; or that [sentient] intelligence can result from combinations of insensate and brute atoms.’⁶⁷

This was written in 1829, and today materialism, now physicalism, still faces this hard problem of consciousness – a problem that can really be seen as falsification of materialism, unless hopes are placed in the faith that is ‘promissory materialism’, as Karl Popper snubs it.⁶⁸ So it would be presumptive to reduce the ethereal experiences Davy had to hallucinations produced by the brain when we do not understand how the brain produces consciousness at all, despite correlation. Davy himself considered the philosophical positions laid out in Consolations to be of utmost importance to his worldview, as mentioned – and with regard to the existence of the beings of his visions, he therein allows for their possibility:

‘[In] other systems beings of a superior nature, under the influence of a divine will, may act nobler parts. We know from sacred writings that there are intelligences of a higher nature than man … . [Such] seraphic intelligences may inhabit these [empyrean] systems and may be ministers of the eternal mind…’⁶⁹

Behind the dialogue of his visionary guide, Davy can be more candid:

‘Spiritual natures are eternal and indivisible, but their modes of being are as infinitely varied as the forms of matter. They have no relation to space, and, in their transitions, no dependence upon time, so that they can pass from one part of the universe to another by laws entirely independent of their motion … . [T]hey are, in fact, parts more or less inferior of the infinite mind…’⁷⁰

After this visionary speculation, Davy goes into detail describing a crystalloid alien cityscape, a description that two centuries on is not dated but entirely fitting of modern science fiction:

‘I saw below me a surface infinitely diversified, something like that of an immense glacier covered with large columnar masses, which appeared as if formed of glass, and from which were suspended rounded forms of various sizes, which, if they had not been transparent, I might have supposed to be fruit. … [M]asses of bright blue ice, streams of the richest tint of rose colour or purple … immense [living] masses … I saw with great surprise that they moved from place to place by six extremely thin membranes which they used as wings…’⁷¹

The first chapter of Consolations teem with such alien visions, with analysis thereof set in the next and last chapters. Though beautifully conveyed, Davy emphasized, as he had written of nitrous oxide experiences, that many if not most of these unworldly experiences were ultimately indescribable (as per the first category of psychedelic experience). In the book Davy now expresses this limitation of expressing the psychedelic state through insectoid analogy:

‘You are now in a state in which a fly would be whose microscopic eye was changed to one similar to that of man; and you are wholly unable to associate what you now see with your former knowledge.’⁷²

That is, what it is like to be a fly being a man is analogous to what it is like to be a man tripping psychedelic. In relation to the mysteries of understanding consciousness here, it should be noted that philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’⁷³ – with the intention of emphasizing the fact that a complete physical account of an animal’s body and brain will not yield a full understanding of the subjective experience which that organism may have. This is a point already made by Davy, as quoted above. Nagel later acknowledges⁷⁴ that even his use of the interrogative, ‘What is it like…’ is anticipated in the ‘semi-Spinozistic’⁷⁵ idealist T. L. S. Sprigge,⁷⁶ and before him used by the behaviourist B. A. Farrell.⁷⁷ Interestingly we come full circle here: Davy’s use of the insect analogy to convey the ineffability of what it is like to experience opium-induced visions, is mirrored in the phrase’s first use by Farrell. Farrell asked in his 1950 article ‘Experience’:

'1. "I wonder what it would be like to be an opium smoker."

2. "I wonder what it would be like to be, and hear like, a bat."'⁷⁸

What Davy understood was that the two questions could be almost equated: what it is like to be another creature can be what it is like to be an opium smoker. That is, Davy understood that by chemical means, other states of consciousness, nay, other states of existence, can be attained. Thus though reason yields theoretical metaphysics, psychedelics yield practical metaphysics – therefore to be a genuine mind researcher one must brave hell and soar angelic. Such flights were taken, and their value realized, by the western world’s very first scientific psychonaut: Penzance’s son of genius, Sir Humphry Davy.

This essay was first published in the Psychedelic Press journal, issue XXVI (2018),
pp. 7¬32 (attached), and later re-issued as Chapter IX in Modes of Sentience (2021). Find our more about Peter’s work at his website here.

1. In Humphry Osmond’s letter to Aldous Huxley, 1956.

2. See Pollan, M. (2018) How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics (London: Allen Lane)

3. Boyle and Hooke dallied with psychoactive drugs, notably cannabis, but were not as methodological, as scientific as Davy in this sense. Thanks to Chris Bennett for bringing to my attention the two Roberts in this respect. In his wish list of future human discoveries, Boyle includes (in the 1660s): ‘Potent Druggs to alter or Exalt Imagination, Waking, Memory, and other functions, and appease pain, procure innocent sleep, harmless dreams, etc.’

(Online: https://blogs.royalsociety.org/history-of-science/2010/08/27/robert-boyle-list/ [accessed 9^th July 2018].)

4. ‘Psychonaut’, coined by Ernst Jünger (1949), means a person who explores the mind via psychoactive chemicals.

5. Though the way is shown today by inspired writers such as Molly Lefebure, Richard Holmes, Sharon Ruston, and Mike Jay – the last two of whom I am grateful for guidance at the start of this trip, and to the last also for the end.

6. See for instance the letter to his wife dated 1827-10-02 (RI, HD/25/62). Available online at: http://davy-letters.org.uk. Note that the code in brackets in the first sentence is a reference to the Humphry Davy material held at the Royal Institution. I hereby thank the Royal Institution for providing me with certain copies of Davy’s notebooks.

7. Letter to Poole, February 1829. See Hartley, H. (1966/1972) Humphry Davy, 2^nd ed. (Wakefield: EP Publishing) p.147.

8. See Lefebure, M. (1990) ‘Humphry Davy: Philosophic Alchemist’, in: Gravil and Lefebure, eds. The Coleridge Connection: Essays for Thomas MacFarland (New York: Macmillan). p. 95.

9. As indicated in his notebook of 1795 – See Hartley, 1972, pp. 11-12.

10. See for instance his ‘Prospectus of my Theory of Mind’, in the notebook of 1796 (RI, HD/13/f, pp. 55–58).

11. 1802 letter to his mother, quoted in Hartley, 1972, p. 11.

12. Who was son to the engineer James Watt.

13. Jay, M. (2009) The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and His Sons of Genius (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) p. 162.

14. See Hartley, 1972, p. 28.

15. Ibid. 27

16. Ibid

17. Davy, H. (1800) Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and Its Respiration (London: Butterworths). p. 462.

18. Davy, 1800, p. 465.

19. Davy, 1800, p. 462.

20. Davy, 1800, p. 484.

21. Coleridge, Kubla Khan.

22. See de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

23. Davy, 1800, p. 487.

24. Davy, 1800, p. 488–9.

25. Quoted in Holmes, R. (2009) The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (London: Harper Press). p. 270.

26. Davy, 1800, p. 491.

27. Davy, 1800, p. 405.

28. 3 Aug 1799. Quoted from Green, A., ed. (2016) “Oh Excellent Air Bag”: Under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799–1920 (Cambridge: PDR Press). p. 54.

29. RI, HD/13/d, p. 18. With thanks once more to the Royal Institution.

30. Mind, 1882, Vol. 7.

31. See for example Murray, J. C. (1896) The Idealism of Spinoza, The Philosophical Review, 5:5 (September), pp. 473–488

32. Coleridge, S. T. (1817/2014) Biographia Literaria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). p. 133.

33. RI, HD/13/c, pp. 7–10. Note that above the title ‘The Spinosist’, above some crossed out initial lines, stands the alternative title ‘The Life of the Spinosist’.

34. Ruston, S. (2013) ‘From “The Life of the Spinosist’ to ‘Life’: Humphry Davy, Chemist and Poet’, in: M. Hagen and M. Vibe Skagen, eds. Literature and Chemistry: Elective Affinities (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press). pp. 77–78.

35. Boon, M. (2002) The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). p. 92.

36. For details, see for instance Gerrish, B. A. (1987) The Secret Religion of Germany: Christian Piety and the Pantheism Controversy, The Journal of Religion, 67:4 (October), pp. 437–455

37. Hegel, G. W. F. (1805–6/1892–6/1995) Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. III: Medieval and Modern Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). p. 283.

38. Ibid. p. 287.

39. 4^th April 1929, Einstein cable to Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein.

40. From an interview published in Viereck, G. S. (1930) Glimpses of the Great (New York: The Macauley Company)

41. 1977, p. 443.

42. Sjöstedt-H, P. (2009) Nietzsche and Nihilism, Ethical Record, 114:10 (November), pp. 6–10

43. Spinoza, B. (1677/2001) Ethics, trans. W. H. White and A. H. Stirling (Ware: Wordsworth Editions). p. 218.

44. From his 1901 book, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. One section of in this psychiatrist’s book is on Spinoza in relation to cosmic consciousness (Pt. V, ch. 9, pp. 151–153).

45. The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902/1985, p. 398.

46. ‘Psychedelics and Religious Experience’, California Law Review, 56:1, January 1968, p. 74. Also reprinted as Appendix to Watts, 2013.

47. James, W. (1902/1985) The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin). p. 419.

48. Luke, D. (2017) Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience (London: Muswell Hill Press). p. 85.

49. Ethics, 2P40s2, p. 80.

50. See Critique of Pure Reason, B145, p. 253.

51. See for instance ch. II of Bergson, H. (1907/1998) Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (New York: Dover)

52. Ethics, 5P25d, p. 245.

53. Ethics, 5P32d, p. 248.

54. Ethics, 5P36, p. 250.

55. RI, HD/13/d, 9–10 (11 July 1800 entry).

56. Dialogue Four, p. 78.

57. Davy, H. (1830/2005) Consolations in Travel; or, The Last Days of a Philosopher (Circencester: The Echo Library). p. 20.

58. Ibid. p. 25.

59. Pollock, F. (1880) Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co.) pp. 59–61.

60. Ibid. pp. 357–368.

61. Ibid. p. 355.

62. To William Clayfield (botanist, businessman), 21^st October 1804. Online at: http://davy-letters.org.uk.

63. Quoted in Lefebure, M. (1986) Consolations in Opium: The Expanding Universe of Coleridge, Humphrey [sic] Davy and "The Recluse", The Wordsworth Circle, 17:2, pp. 51–60. My italics.

64. Consolations was also the result of a planned joint epic with Coleridge to be called Moses (see Lefebure, 1990, p. 102); and, Mike Jay suggests in personal correspondence, based on The Ruins by C. F. Volney.

65. Notebook entry dated 9^th November 1819. See Lefebure, 1990, pp. 105–6.

66. Leibniz, 1989, p. 215 (in the Monadology [1714]): ‘perception … is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is through shapes and motions. If we imagine a machine whose structure makes it think … [and imagine] we could enter into it, as one enters a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will find parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception.’

67. Consolations, 4D, pp. 73–4.

68. Popper, K. R. and Eccles, J. C. (1977) The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer-Verlag). pp. 96–98.

69. Consolations, 6D, p. 98.

70. Consolations, 1D, p. 20.

71. Ibid., p. 21.

72. Ibid., p. 22.

73. Nagel, T. (1974) What is it like to be a bat?, The Philosophical Review, 83:4 (October), pp. 435–50

74. Nagel, T. (19.86) The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press) p. 15, fn. 2: ‘When I wrote I hadn’t read Sprigge and had forgotten Farrell.’

75. Sprigge, T. L. S. (1983) The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). p. 158.

76. Sprigge, T. L. S. and Montefiore, A. (1971) Final Causes, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 45. p. 167.

77. Farrell, B. A. (1950) Experience, Mind, 59:234 (April), pp. 170–198

78. Ibid., p. 183.