HUXLEY, Aldous.

£800 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

The Doors of Perception. First UK edition. In 1952 Huxley contacted the psychiatric researcher Humphry Osmond requesting that he be allowed to take the psychedelic drug mescaline under observation. Huxley felt that the brain restricts consciousness, and was hoping that mescaline would increase awareness; The Doors of Perception was Huxley's account of the subsequent experiment, which took place in May 1953.The work takes its title from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793): "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern". Huxley's detailing of the aesthetic and psychological revelations he experienced while under the influence of mescaline prompted his publishers to say of the manuscript that: "You are the most articulate guinea pig that any scientist could hope to engage" (Murray, p. 399). The UK edition was preceded by the US edition by eight days.

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