Colin Wilson - The Philospher's Stone

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The Philosopher’s Stone

Colin Wilson

PANTHER,

GRANADA PUBLISHING

London Toronto Sydney New York

Published by Granada Publishing Limited in Panther Books 1974 Reprinted 1978

ISBN 0 586 03943 0

Granada Publishing Limited

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Set in Linotype Pilgrim

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

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this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Scanned : Mr Blue Sky

Proofed : It’s Not Raining

Date : 09 February 2002

PREFATORY NOTE

Bernard Shaw concluded his preface to Back to Methuselah with the hope that ‘a hundred apter and

more elegant parables by younger hands will soon leave mine... far behind’. Perhaps the thought of trying

to leave Shaw far behind has scared off would-be competitors. Or perhaps - what is altogether more

probable - the younger hands are simply not interested in writing parables of longevity, or any other kind

of parable. Most of my contemporaries seem to feel pretty strongly that the activities of thinking and

novel-writing are incompatible, and that to be interested in ideas reveals a deficiency in the creative

faculties. And since the critics also like to foster this idea - perhaps out of a kind of defensive

trade-unionism - it seems to have achieved the status of a law of contemporary literature.

Now no one has a profounder respect for the critics than I, or strives more constantly to sound like a

paid-up member of the literary establishment. But I enjoy ideas. And this seems to give me a rather odd

perspective on modern literature. I suspect that H. G. Wells is probably the greatest novelist of the

twentieth century, and that his most interesting novels - if not necessarily the best - are the later ones. I

am completely unable to be objective about Shaw; he seems to me simply to be the greatest European

writer since Dante. And I completely lack sympathy for the emotional and personal problems that seem

to be the necessary subject of a contemporary play or novel. Mr Osborne once said his aim was to make

people feel. I think they feel too much. I’d like to make them stop feeling and start thinking.

Fortunately for me, I am neither original nor creative, so I can afford to ignore the contemporary rules.

And there is another factor in my favour. Since Shaw wrote Back to Methuselah, science fiction has

become an established genre, and it has even become quite respectable. And in recent years, I have

stumbled accidentally into the writing of a few modest works of science fiction.

I must explain how this came about. In 1961, I wrote a book called The Strength to Dream, a study of

the creative imagination, particularly in writers of fantasy and horror stories. A large part of the book was

inevitably devoted to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, the recluse of Providence, Rhode Island, Who died of

malnutrition and a cancer of the intestine in 1937. I pointed out that although Lovecraft possesses a

gloomy imaginative power that compares with Poe, he is basically an atrocious writer - most of his work

was written for Weird Tales, a pulp magazine - and his work is finally interesting as case history rather

than as literature.

In due course, a copy of my book fell into the hands of Lovecraft’s old friend - and publisher - August

Derleth. And Derleth wrote to me, protesting that my judgement on Lovecraft was too harsh, and asking

me why, if I was all that good, I didn’t try writing a ‘Lovecraft’ novel myself. And the answer to this

question is that I never write purely for the fun of it. I write as a mathematician uses a sheet of paper for

doing calculations: because I think better that way. And Lovecraft’s novels are not about ideas, but about

an emotion - an emotion of violent and total rejection of our civilisation, which I, being rather cheerful by

temperament, do not happen to share.

But a couple of years later, an analogy thrown out in my Introduction to the New Existentialism

became the seed of a science fiction parable about ‘original sin’ - man’s strange inability to get the best

out of his consciousness. I cast it in the Lovecraft tradition, and it became The Mind Parasites, which

was published in due course by August Derleth. Its reception by English critics was unexpectedly good; I

suspect this is because I didn’t sound as if I was serious.

And so when, two years ago, I became interested in questions of brain physiology - as a by-product of a

novel about sensory deprivation - it seemed natural to develop some of these ideas in another ‘Lovecraft’

novel. Besides, ever since, reading Wells’s Time Machine at the age of eleven, it has always been a

daydream of mine to write the definitive novel about time travel. Time travel is a perpetually alluring idea,

but it always sounds so preposterous. Even when my friend Van Vogt - the contemporary SF writer I

enjoy most - uses it, he makes it sound a joke. The question of how to make it sound plausible is quite a

challenge.

It sounds a vertiginous mixture - Shaw, Lovecraft and Wells - but it’s the kind of thing I enjoy doing. In

fact, I got quite carried away until this novel became twice as long as originally intended. Even so, I had

to write part of it as a separate short novel, which August Derleth has published.

A final word. It is part of the game in a Lovecraft novel to stick as far as possible to actual sources, and

never to invent a fact when you can dig one out of some obscure work of scholarship. I would modestly

claim to have surpassed Lovecraft in this particular department. Nearly all the ‘sources’ quoted are

genuine, the major exception being the Vatican Codex; even so, there is a fair amount of archaeological

authority for the hypothetical contents of this codex. The Voynich manuscript does, of course, exist, and

is still untranslated.

Seattle-Cornwall November 1968

PART ONE

THE QUEST OF THE ABSOLUTE

I was reading a book on music by Ralph Vaughan Williams the other day, while listening to a

gramophone record of his remarkable Fifth Symphony, when I came across the following remark: ‘I have

struggled all my life to conquer amateurish technique, and now that perhaps I have mastered it, it seems

too late to make any use of it.’ I found myself moved almost to tears by the poignancy of those words of

a great musician. Admittedly, he was eighty-six when he died, but for practical purposes - the value of

the music he wrote in his last years - it might well have been twenty years earlier. And I found myself

thinking: Supposing by some fluke, Vaughan Williams had lived another twenty-five years... or supposing

he had been born a quarter of a century later. Could I have passed on to him what I now know, so that

he might still be alive and writing great music? The case of Shaw is even more to the point, for he came

close to the great discovery in Back to Methusakh, and in his early nineties, he remarked jokingly that he

was a proof of his own theory that men could live to be three hundred. Yet this is the man who said two

years later, as he lay in a hospital bed with a broken leg: ‘I want to die, and I can’t, I can’t,’ He came so

close, but he was alone; and a man standing alone lacks that final ounce of conviction. Would Columbus

have had the courage to reach San Salvador Island if he had been alone on the Santa Maria?

It was this train of thought that decided me to tell the story of my discovery exactly as it happened. In

doing so, I break my own vow of secrecy; but I shall see that the account is withheld from those whom it

might harm - that is to say, from most of the human race. It should exist, even if it never leaves a bank

vault. The carbon copy of memory grows thinner year by year.

I was born in the Nottinghamshire village of Hucknall Torkard in 1942. My father was a maintenance

engineer in the colliery of Birkin Brothers. Those who have read D. H. Lawrence will recognise the

name; in fact, Lawrence was born fairly close by, at Eastwood. Byron is buried in the family vault at

Hucknall, and in my day, Newstead Abbey - his home - was still approached through a typical coal

mining village of grimy cottages. The setting sounds romantic; but dirt and boredom are not romantic; and

most of the memories of the first ten years of my life are of dirt and boredom. I think of falling rain, and

the smell of fish and chips on autumn nights, and queues outside the local cinema on Saturday evenings. I

was back there a few weeks ago, and found the place unrecognisable. It is now a suburb of Nottingham,

with an airport, an underground railway for commuters, and helicopter stations on the top of most blocks

of flats. Yet I cannot say I regret the change; I only have to read a few pages of The Rainbow to

remember how much I hated the place.

The great conflict of my childhood was between my love of science and my love of music. I was always a

good mathematician. My father gave me my first slide rule for Christmas when I was six. And, like most

mathematicians, I was almost dangerously susceptible to music. I can remember pausing outside the

church one evening, ‘clutching an armful of library books, and listening to the sound of the choir. They

were obviously rehearsing - probably some abomination by Wesley or Stainer - for they repeated the

same passage of half a dozen notes over and over again. The effect was almost incantatory, and in the

cold night air the voices sounded distant and mysterious, as if mourning for man’s loneliness. Suddenly I

found myself crying, and before I could stop it, the feeling rushed over me like a burst dam. I hurried into

the churchyard and flung myself on the grass, where I could stifle my sobs, and allowed the feeling to

convulse me until I felt as though I were being shaken by the shoulders. It was a disturbing experience.

When I walked home - feeling relaxed and light-headed - I found it impossible to understand what had

happened to me.

Because I loved mathematics, and could do complicated sums in my head, my father decided that I

should be an engineer. The idea struck me as reasonable enough, although I found something oddly

boring about machinery. I felt the same when my father took me to visit the colliery, and showed me the

mechanisms that it was his duty to maintain. It struck me as futile to spend one’s life keeping a mass, of

dead metal up to a certain level of efficiency. What did it matter? But I could think of no good reason to

object to my father’s plans. I spent most of my spare time playing the airs of Dowland and Campion on a

recorder, and learning to pick out tunes from The Messiah on the electric organ that belonged to a

neighbour. Certainly, there was nothing in music that seemed to offer a real alterative to engineering; I

would never be more than a mediocre executant.

I can remember clearly the time when the problem of death first struck me. I had borrowed a book on

early music from the library. That cold, modal music of the Middle Ages continued to exert its strange

attraction over me. In the chapter on ancient Greek music, I discovered the Skolion of Seikilos, with its

words:

May life’s sun upon thee smile

Far from pain and sorrow.

Life is far too short, alas.

Death the kraken waits to drown you

In the sea of earth.

I knew about the kraken, the legendary giant octopus; so, apparently, did Homer. (I presume Scylla is

supposed to be an octopus.) The lines made me feel cold. All the same, I went up to our attic and tried

out the skolion on our old piano, picking out the Phrygian scale, then playing it through until I understood

the shape of the melody. Again, the coldness settled on me, and I murmured the words aloud as I played,

feeling the same immense sadness, the sensation of infinite distances, that I had experienced in the

churchyard. Suddenly, my mind said: What are you doing, you fool? This is real, not a literary metaphor.

There is not a person alive in the world today who will still be alive in a hundred years from now... And I

grasped the reality, the truth of my own death. The horror almost choked me. I felt too weak to keep my

hands on the keyboard, too weak to sit on the piano stool without support. Then, for the first time, I

understood why the idea of engineering struck me as pointless. It was wasting time. Time. It was

disconnected from reality. Like opening and closing your mouth without speaking. Irrelevant. The watch

on my wrist ticked like a time bomb, presenting life’s ultimatum. And what was I doing? I was learning to

maintain the machinery at Birkin’s colliery. I knew that I could never be an engineer. But what could I be

instead? What would not be irrelevant?

The strange thing is that the experience was not all horror. Somewhere deep inside me there was a spark

of happiness. To see the emptiness of things brings its own exultancy. Perhaps because to grasp futility is

to recognise that its opposite is implied. I had no idea of the meaning of this ‘opposite’. I only knew that

the skolion of Seikilos was somehow preferable to mathematics, because it recognised a problem that

could not be formulated mathematically. The effect was to weaken my interest in science and to deepen

my love of music and poetry. But the conflict remained hidden, and within a day or so, I had forgotten it.

I owe the profoundest debt of my life to Sir Alastair Lyell - of whom I have written at length elsewhere

(Introduction to Sir Alastair Lyell, A Life in Science by Leslie M Banyon, Lord & Fisher, London

1972). I met him in the December of 1955, when I was thirteen; from that time, until his death twelve

years later, he was closer to me than any other human being, including my father and mother.

In the autumn of 1955, I became a temporary member of the St Thomas’s church choir. It was a Church

of England choir, and my family, insofar as they possessed any religion at all were Methodists; but I had

been asked to sing by the choirmaster, McEwan Franklin, who was well known in Nottingham musical

circles. At this time I possessed a clear soprano voice (that remained unbroken until I was sixteen), and I

belonged to a group of half a dozen boys who often sang in the school chapel. Franklin heard us at an

end of term concert in July of that year, and we were all asked whether we would be willing to join the St

Thomas’s choir for its winter concert season. Franklin had scheduled an ambitious season that included

Judas Maccabaeus, motets of Lassus, madrigals by Gesualdo, and some Britten pieces. The motets and

madrigals were to be performed in a concert that would be broadcast by the BBC Third Programme.

Four of the boys were not interested but two of us joined. I sang a leading part in Lassus’s Missa vinum

bonum. and in Britten’s A Boy Is Born. After the concert, in the changing room, I was introduced to a

tall, clean shaven man with a face that reminded me of a picture of Thomas Carlyle that hung in our

school classroom. I was too excited to pay much attention to him or even to catch his name; but at

Franklin’s house afterwards - where we had coffee and cakes - he came and sat beside me on the

settee, and began to question me about my interest in music. We soon discovered important common

ground; he thought Handel the greatest composer in the world, and so did I. Then the talk shifted, I

forget how, to the mathematics of infinite sets, and I was delighted to discover that he understood the

problems that Bertrand Russell discusses in the Principles of Mathematics. (I could never understand

how there could be any problem about the foundations of mathematics.)

It was one of those occasions that happen once in a lifetime: two minds with immediate and total

sympathy. He was forty-five, I was thirteen; but it was as if there was no age difference between us, as if

we had been close friends for twenty years. This is perhaps not as strange as it sounds. In my small-town

environment I had never met anyone who shared both my loves: science and music. Lyell already knew

about me; Franklin had talked about me at dinner a week before. Franklin was always intrigued by the

various books that I took to rehearsals - on mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. Lyell was intrigued

by Franklin’s description, so he came to the concert that night with the intention of talking to me.

Lyell left early, after inviting me to call and see him at Sneinton - a nearby village. When he had gone, I

asked Franklin: ‘What did you say his name was?’ He told me it was Sir Alaistair Lyell, a descendent of

the Sir Charles Lyell whose Principles of Geology I had been reading only a week ago. I must admit

that I felt startled and shaken. I had never, in my whole life, actually talked to anyone with a title; in fact, I

don’t think I’d ever seen anyone with a title. I knew Sneinton; I’d assumed Lyell lived in one of the

houses in the main street. When I learned that he lived in a sort of ‘manor’ surrounded by a park, I was

overawed. It was lucky that I had not caught the name when Franklin introduced him; I would have

stammered and blushed, or simply been tongue-tied. As it was, I lay awake half the night, trying to grasp

the fact that I had been talking to a ‘Sir’, with no more respect or embarrassment than if he had been the

greengrocer.

Two days later, tense and shy, I cycled over to Sneinton. I found the place easily enough, a mile outside

the village, and it increased my misgivings: the high stone wall, the man in the gate lodge who rang the

house and then told me to go ahead up the drive. The house itself was less grand than I had expected,

but still too grand for me. And then Lyell himself came to answer the door, and the shyness vanished. The

curious sympathy, that remained unchanged to the end, was immediately there between us. I was

introduced to his wife - his first wife, Lady Sarah, who even at this time looked pale and ill - and then we

went immediately to his ‘museum’ on the top floor.

The Lyell museum - now transferred into Nottingham - is too well known to need a description. At the

time I first saw it, it was less than half the size it later became; even so, it was enormous. Its chief exhibit,

then as now, was the skeleton of the Elasmotherium sibericum, the extinct ancestor of the rhinoceros,

whose horn grew in the middle of his forehead - undoubtedly the seed of the racial memory that became

the legendary unicorn. There was the mammoth tusk, and the skull of the sabre toothed tiger, and the

fragments of the plesiosaurus skeleton, which Lyell introduced to me as the Loch Ness monster. Sir

Charles Lyell’s rock collection was complete - and this was what fascinated me most on that first

afternoon. Lyell was, of course, the man who caused the first great intellectual revolution of the Victorian

era, before Darwin and Wallace and Tyndall and Huxley. Before Lyell, the old Biblical theory of creation

had held the field, qualified by Cuvier’s theory of violent catastrophes - periodic upheavals that destroyed

all life and made it necessary for God to re-populate the world with living creatures. According to Cuvier,

there were no less than four creations - which enabled him to explain the fossils of extinct creatures

without contradicting the Bible and Archbishop Usher. It was Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) who took

the incredible step of contradicting the Bible, and showing that living forms are continuous, and that the

time needed for their development amounts to millions of years. The uproar was enormous - to be

exceeded later only by the Darwinian controversy itself. I had read the story with excitement only a week

or so before I now saw the Lyell collection - the very fossils that had led him to his conclusions. Looking

around at this enormous room, with its skeletons and bones and rock specimens, I grasped for the first

time the reality of history. I can clearly remember this moment, as if it had happened ten minutes ago.

There was a touch of the feeling I had experienced playing the skolion: recognition that human life is small

and self-centred and totally divorced from reality, and that death is our final reckoning, the universe’s

dismissal of our trivialities. And again, there was that curious core of happiness, the mind’s delight in truth

at all costs, even if the truth is destructive. And I somehow grasped instinctively that there is no

contradiction between these two feelings, that the exultation is not some paradoxical acceptance of our

own destruction; that reality is synonymous with power.

That afternoon, I understood why Lyell and myself spoke as equals. I understood that our human time is

an illusion, and that the mind is capable of seeing through it. In that museum there was a ‘point of

intersection of the timeless with time’, a moment outside time. And as I look back on it, I can see that I

possessed a total intuitive certainty that afternoon - a certainty that my life had reached a new phase, a

turning point.

In my dissatisfaction at the prospect of becoming an engineer, I had often daydreamed of the kind of life I

would prefer. I had no definite ideas, no clear alternatives; I only knew that I wanted to be allowed to

think and study as I liked. My favourite book was Peacock’s Gryll Grange because I was fascinated by

the character of Mr Falconer, who is rich enough to live in a tower, surrounded by servant girls, and to

devote his life to browsing through a vast collection of books. (I was also charmed by the whole way of

life in Gryll Grange - leisurely conversations about ideas over enormous meals or during country walks.)

But even in my most epicurean daydreams I could not have anticipated a life as perfect as the one that I

led for the next five years. Lyell ate, drank and lived ideas. As I came to know him better, I understood

why I was as important to him as he was to me. He had never met anyone so totally committed to ideas

as he was. Even his fellow members of the Royal Society struck him as too blasé, too worldly, too

comfortable in the futilities of everyday existence. They had allowed the world to dilute the intensity, the

original purity. His own teens had been lonely, for his father’s chief interest had been in hunting and

fishing, while a younger brother had a practical turn that later led to his becoming a millionaire property

dealer. Now he imagined the satisfaction of meeting someone like his own younger self, someone through

whom he could rediscover the excitement of science and music, who had not outgrown his hunger for

ideas. So he was as happy to discover me as I to discover him; happier, perhaps, since he had formed a

mental picture of what he wanted, while I only experienced a formless dissatisfaction. He had never had

children - his first wife was sterile. All this meant that I came to a place that had been prepared for me.

Although there was no formal adoption, I became, for practical purposes, his adopted son. My parents

had no objection; from a very early stage - long before the thought entered my head - they entertained

the idea that he might make me his heir. This was, of course - pure wishful thinking and inexperience, not

shrewdness or intuition; still, they proved to be right, in the main.

At first, I spent part of the weekends there. During Easter, 1956, I travelled to America with him to

examine the Arizona meteor crater, near Winslow, and to collect specimens. (Five years later we were to

visit the scene of the Podkamennaya Tunguska explosion in Siberia, which, we established to our own

satisfaction, was an atomic explosion, probably of some space craft from another galaxy.) When we

returned from America, I transferred most of my books and other belongings from Hucknall to Sneinton

Hall, and thereafter spent more time there than at home. I continued at school to GCE level, after which

he offered to pay for my university training. He made no attempt to influence me, but I knew his own

views - that a university education is a waste of time, and that few of the first rate minds of the past

hundred years have owed anything to the university. (He was a (Cambridge man, but had left, at his own

request, in his second year, to pursue his own studies at home.) So I refused his offer. Besides, I knew

that he could teach me more than a dozen tutors. I never regretted this.

Perhaps it is not entirely relevant to my story, but I cannot resist trying to give a picture of my life at

Sneinton in those early years. It was a warm, comfortable house, and the servants’ quarters were so

enormous that I often lost my way in them during the first months. I particularly liked the windows of the

two front rooms, which stretched from floor to ceiling. There was a hill opposite, with trees along the

skyline; its sunsets could be magnificent. Lady Sarah loved to sit in the writing room in the afternoons,

and make toast at an open fireplace - I think she liked the smell - and drink as many as ten cups of tea.

Lyell and I usually came down from the laboratory to join her. (I refer to him here as Lyell although, like

his wife, I always called him Alec; to the rest of his family he was Alastair. An amusing touch - the

gardener-chauffeur called him Jamie. He was one ‘of the most naturally democratic persons I have ever

known.) After dinner, we usually moved into the music room to play gramophone records, or sometimes,

to make music for ourselves. (He played the clarinet and oboe, as well as the piano; I was also a

passable clarinettist.) His collection of records - mostly 78’s - was enormous, and occupied a whole

wall, stretching from floor to ceiling. Sir Compton Mackenzie, who once spent a weekend in the house

when I was there, said that Lyell probably owned the largest record library in the country after The

Gramophone. I should mention here one of Lyell’s amusing idiosyncrasies; he seemed to enjoy very long

works for their own sake. I think he simply enjoyed the intellectual discipline of concentrating for hours at

a time. If a work was long, it automatically recommended itself to him. So we have spent whole evenings

listening to the complete Contest Between Harmony and Invention of Vivaldi, the complete Well

Tempered Clavier, whole operas of Wagner, the last five quartets of Beethoven, symphonies of

Bruckner and Mahler, the first fourteen Haydn symphonies... He even had a strange preference for a

sprawling, meandering symphony by Furtwangler, simply because it ran on for two hours or so.

My own enthusiasm and interest was obviously important to him. If I became tired or indifferent, I could

immediately sense his disappointment. When his wife once protested at the number of hours he kept me

working or listening to music, he said: ‘Nonsense. Man is naturally a creature of the mind. The idea that

brain-work tires people is an old wives’ tale. Man should no more get tired of using his brain - if he is

using it properly - than a fish should get tired of water.’

Lyell was, of course, an eclectic. He loved to quote a sentence that Yeats attributes to Pater - when

Pater was explaining the presence of volumes of political economy on his bookshelves: ‘Everything that

has occupied man for any length of time is worthy of our study.’ He was passionately opposed to the

idea of the specialist in any field - certainly in science or mathematics. When I first knew him, his chief

reputation was as a micro-biologist. He was the first man to cultivate rickettsiae — intracellular parasites

of microscopic size - apart from a living host. His essay on mastigophora - a unicellular animal - is a

classic that has been reprinted in many anthologies of scientific literature, and his paper on yeast

infections, although less deliberately ‘literary’, is also a classic of its kind. But he refused to be ‘typed’ as

a scientist, and I once heard Sir Julian Huxley refer jokingly to Sneinton Hall as ‘the laboratory of a

mediaeval alchemist’. After 1952 he was fascinated - one might almost say obsessed - by the problem of

the expansion of the universe and quasi-stellar radio sources, and his observatory was one of the

best-equipped private observatories in the country, perhaps in Europe. (Its 80-inch reflecting telescope is

now in my own observatory near Mentone.) In 1957, his interest moved decisively to the field of

molecular biology and problems of genetics. He also experienced a revival of an early interest in number

theory - this was a matter in which I exerted an influence -and in the question of how far electronic

calculating machines could solve previously insoluble problems.

It may seem incredible to most readers that a man with such a variety of interests should also have time

for music - as well as for literature, painting and philosophy. Such a view misses the point. Lyell felt that

most men - even brilliant men - waste their intellectual resources. He liked to point out that Sir William

Rowan Hamilton could speak a dozen languages - including Persian - at the age of nine, and that John

Stuart Mill had read all the Dialogues of Plato - in Greek - when he was seven. ‘Both these men were

intellectual failures if we judge their mature achievement by their earlier standards,’ he wrote in a letter to

me. He believed that our limitations are due mainly to laziness, ignorance and timidity.

Only one aspect of my new life saddened me - the alienation from my family. From the first, my two

brothers were openly envious. I was sad about this. I had never liked my elder brother, Arnold, much,

but I was fond of Tom, who was a year my junior. Both of them began to treat me as a stranger

whenever I returned home, and made sneering comments about the ‘life of luxury’ they must be missing.

After a while, their attitude seemed to affect my father, who also became distant and definitely hostile.

Only my mother was always pleased to see me. She understood that it was not for the ‘life of luxury’ that

I preferred Sneinton to my own home. Even so, I took care not to say too much to her about my doings

there. She would have thought so much mental activity abnormal and unhealthy - as, in fact, have several

friends to whom I have described life at Sneinton. The truth is that the life was ideal for me. At thirteen,

my mind was hungry; I could feel myself changing almost daily. Without Lyell, it would have been a

period of frustration - of increasing desire to live a life of ‘sensations and ideas’, and hatred of the

everyday world that prevented this. The conflict had already started before I met Lyell; I was already

beginning to see my life at home and school as completely futile. What Lyell offered me was not

abnormal intellectual activity, but a life of discovery and purpose. Thirteen is the age of what Shaw calls

‘the birth of the moral passion’ - that is, the period when ideas are not abstractions but realities, when

they are food and drink. The changes of puberty have altered one’s old conception of oneself. Identity

vanishes; one’s inner being becomes formless, chaos waiting for the act of creation. There is a brooding

feeling of anticipation; the clouds lie there, fragmentary, slate grey, waiting for the wind. And a book, a

symphony, a poem, is not merely another ‘experience’ but a mystery, a wind blowing from the future.

The problem of death is still far away; but the problem of life seems quite as tremendous. The mind

contemplates vistas of time, the emptiness of space, and knows that the ‘ordinariness’ of everyday life is

an illusion. And as the everyday becomes less real, so ideas are seen to be the only reality, and the mind

that shapes them the only true power in this world of blind natural forces.

Lyell made no attempt to influence the direction of my studies, except to recommend books to me. He

wanted me to make my own discoveries. When I first went to Sneinton, I read Irvine’s fine book on the

Darwinian controversy, and became fascinated by the period. I read everything I could find about

Huxley, Darwin, Lyell, Tyndal and Herbert Spencer, and spent my days in the laboratory, dissecting

specimens and examining them under the microscope. I came completely under the influence of Sir Julian

Huxley, to whom Lyell introduced me in London. Huxley’s belief that man has become the managing

director of evolution in the universe seemed to me self-evident. I was fascinated by Wendell Stanley’s

experiments in which he transformed a virus into a non-living crystal, and showed that it could still cause

disease, for they obviously opened up the question of the dividing line between living and non-living

matter. Lyell kept me up to date on the researches of Watson and Crick into DNA. And both of us

became excited about Stanley L. Miller’s demonstration that organic compounds can form spontaneously

under conditions that parallel those of the earth of eighteen thousand million years ago. For they raised

the supreme question: Is ‘life’ something that permeates the universe like some kind of electric current,

but has to wait for ‘conductors’ to form before it can enter matter? Or can it play some part in forming

the conductor? Neither of us could entertain for a moment Oparin’s hypothesis that life arose

‘spontaneously’ through the accidental build-up of organic compounds.

It was during this period that I stumbled on the trail of the ‘great secret’ that later became my life work. I

was reading an article by Lyell on enzymes - those strange catalysts that act within living cells, and upon

which all life depends - when I came across his reference to the autolytic enzymes. I asked him what

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ThePhilosopher’sStonebyColinWilsonPANTHER,GRANADAPUBLISHINGLondonTorontoSydneyNewYorkPublishedbyGranadaPublishingLimitedinPantherBooks1974Reprinted1978ISBN0586039430FirstpublishedinGreatBritainbyArthurBarkerLimited1969Copyright©ColinWilson1969GranadaPublishingLimitedFrogmore,StAlbans,Herts,AL22NFand...

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Colin Wilson - The Philospher's Stone

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