The Franklin Merrell-Wolff Fellowship

This file contains the correspondence between Franklin F. Wolff and J. William Lloyd, to whom Wolff sent a manuscript copy of the book that was to become Pathways Through to Space. The following sketch of Lloyd’s life and achievements is based an autobiographical essay that Lloyd penned in 1940, as well as a number of other sources that illuminate the life of this fascinating individual.[1]

John William Lloyd was born on June 4, 1857 in Westfield, New Jersey. His mother was a woman of a broad, gentle nature, quite spiritual, poetic, and a great reader; his father was an intense abolitionist. As a child, Lloyd did not receive much schooling, and he preferred the company of books and the trees in a local forest over that of other children. He tried his hand at farming and carpentry, and then at the age of eighteen attended the Hygiene Therapeutic College of drugless medication. After the college failed, Lloyd became a pioneer on the Kansas frontier, first as a worker on a cattle ranch, cow-punching and prairie-breaking, and then on his own homestead, having married a woman in 1879 whom he had met in college. He served as the local doctor, but had “almost no patients in that hardy and destitute population.”[2] Falling on hard times, Lloyd accepted an assistant physician job in Iowa, followed by similar positions in Tennessee and at a spiritualist commune in Florida. After the death of his wife, he returned to New Jersey so that his sister could look after his two children. He found work as a nurse in New York City, specializing in the care of the insane.

When in Kansas he had written for the local newspaper and some medical journals, and in Florida he had written for radical journals and reform papers (for a time he was a regular contributor to Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty); and, he had faithfully produced poetry since his days in college. In New York, Lloyd began a more serious literary career and would go on to produce a large corpus of articles, books and poems; he also briefly published a monthly journal, The Free Comrade, the motto of which was “The clear eye, the free brain, the red heart, the warm hand—Manhood in Comradeship.”

His first published book, Wind-Harp Songs (1895), was a compilation of his poetry; Dawn Thought on the Reconciliation: A Volume of Pantheistic Impressions and Glimpses of Larger Religion was published in 1900 and its sequel, Life’s Beautiful Battle: or, The Human Soul Before Pain, in 1910. Lloyd had visited the Pima Indians of Arizona in 1903, and he weaved a number of their legends into Aw-Aw-Tam Indian Nights: Being the Myths and Legends of the Pimas of Arizona (1911); he had recounted some of his experiences living with the tribe in The Songs of the Desert (1905). Other works of many include two utopian novels, The Natural Man: A Romance of the Golden Age (1902) and The Dwellers in Vale Sunrise: How They Got Together and Lived Happy Ever After. A Sequel to “The Natural Man,” Being an Account of the Tribes of Him (1904).

Lloyd promoted a type of social philosophy that he dubbed “Social-Anarchism,” and in which he envisioned a “larger socialism” that controls the industrial processes but also gives the individual “the right to secede” from social organization and to lead one’s own life apart from it. He considered this way of life to embody humanism, by which he meant “love of the human”:

It is really the underlying and often unconscious motive of one half the world’s activities. It is of the heart. It is an instinct made conscious and elevated into a cult and a practical religion. It is not ethics, but the spirit of ethics. It is the old clannish loyalty and communism of the tribe enlarged until it includes the whole human race, without distinction of race, sex, merit. It is gregariousness. It is the true patriotism of man. It is the tie of the human family. It is the deepest and best well-spring of good in our nature—the passion, sympathy, enthusiasm of the human for the human.[3]

Lloyd’s philosophy of sex and marriage may strike some as radical, given his claim that monogamous relationships can no longer satisfy our expanding humanity. In line with thinkers such as Moses Harman and Edward Carpenter, Lloyd held that the tendency of sexual evolution is to include and reconcile all forms of sexual life, so as to set the individual free to rely on one’s own intelligence and conscience in sexual faith and practice. In general, Lloyd would reconcile marriage and free love by allowing a “central love” and “side lovers,” which he dubbed “the Larger Love.”[4]

Lloyd died on October 23, 1940 at the age of eighty-three years. The December 21, 1940 issue of the Los Angeles Times reported on the filing of Lloyd’s will with the headline, “Poet’s Will Sets Out Opposition to Tears.” The story states that Lloyd’s will recorded that he was of the belief “that death should be regarded as a happy journey to a new land and should not provide the occasion for bleak despair and unrestrained lamenting. Such mourning he considered barbaric, antisocial and immoral.”[5]

Richard Maurice Bucke recognized Lloyd as an individual who had attained “cosmic consciousness” as defined in his book of the same name—a book with which Wolff was quite conversant. Bucke had asked Lloyd to write a brief account of his life and spiritual evolution, and this account makes up the bulk of the chapter on Lloyd in this book.[6] As Bucke notes,

what proves J. William Lloyd to be a case of Cosmic Consciousness is not so much the above account of himself (although that could hardly have been written without some such an experience as illumination) as the volume [Dawn-Thought] which he produced after the occurrence in question. This volume, which contains overwhelming evidence of the fact, is easily accessible and will doubtless be read by every person who feels an interest in the subject.[7]

It is likely that Wolff learned of Lloyd when reading Bucke’s book and that this prompted Wolff to procure a copy of the 1904 edition of Dawn-Thought for his library. Wolff also gifted Lillian Reid a copy of Life’s Beautiful Battle for Christmas in 1936, inscribing these words in the volume:

To Lillian,

Though the battle of life may oft seem slow, The task that comes very simple and plain, Yet never forget, but remember this well, He who is faithful in the little, striving the best, Doth build noble Mansion, there later to dwell.

Yogi

Since these were the only writings by Lloyd found in Wolff’s library, it is doubtful that Wolff was familiar with the totality of Lloyd’s philosophy.

Here is an excerpt of Lloyd’s account of his own illumination as found in Bucke’s volume:

As to my illumination: I was going to New York City one morning in January, 1897, on a train, to do some hospital work. I was reading Carpenter. It was a beautiful winter morning. I think I was near the Bay Bridge, or on it, when the Thought came. There was no particular sensation, except that something beautiful and great seemed to have happened [to] me, which I could only describe in terms of light. Yet it was purely mental. But everything looked different to me. I went about the city that day calm, but glad and uplifted. The thing I remember most was a wonder how soon the sensation, or impression, would leave me. I was latently sceptical, and thought it a temporary inspiration, like that of a poem. But days, weeks, months, passed, and I found the shoot which had broken ground that winter morning was ever growing, strengthening and changing all the scenery of my life. I continually questioned and tested, and at last, after a year’s trial, began to write.[8]

Lloyd’s writing culminated in his self-proclaimed most important work, Dawn Thought on the Reconciliation: A Volume of Pantheistic Impressions and Glimpses of Larger Religion, which he first published in 1900. The central theme of this work is that there is but One, whether we call it the Universe, God or anything else. We imagine that we are separate beings, but this is only a “working fiction” of the universe, because in the ultimate sense we are inseparable. This idea can best be understood by comparing the universe to a shattered sphere. Every piece is imperfect, being less than the sphere, and of another shape. Only when all fits together again in the order of their breaking is harmony restored, and this not for each, as a separate one, but for all together as One.[9]

In the explication of his metaphysics, Lloyd does not pretend to have solved the riddle of life; rather, he simply offers his view as a working hypothesis:

Lloyd finds in his hypothesis a reason for living (“life is growth, and growth is toward the light”); that he offers a reconciliation of the bewildering dualities that beset every attempt to construct a rational life-philosophy, by pointing out that all forces, evil and good alike, tend toward one end and ideal; that he anticipates a future religion that shall be truly synthetic because including the best features of every religion hitherto existing; and that he looks, above all, to an increasing freedom of spirit and of life. “Inevitably,” he says, “this philosophy leads to freedom in its widest. It liberates from all laws, rules, codes, dogmas, formulas. These are indeed seen to be useful, but only as guides, working-plans, advices, tools. They are not finalities or masters.”[10]

Wolff’s and Lloyd’s letters make it quite clear that these men held each other in high regard; those in the Wolff Archive include:

(26 pages)

[1] (1) J. William Lloyd, “A Brief Sketch of the Life of J. William Lloyd,” n.p., 1940; (2) Leonard D. Abbott, “J. William Lloyd and his Message,” Mother Earth 1908, 360-8; and (3) “J. William Lloyd, Philosopher of the Paradox,” The International 1912, 121-2. The first of these articles may be retrieved from the first link below; the second link below is to a folder containing the second and third articles.

1. http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.1875
2. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0ByQby38wboyCYW1hRjN3WS1zc3c

See also Lloyd’s autobiographical account in Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D., Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (Philadelphia: Innes & Sons, 1901), 342-3.

[2] Lloyd, “A Brief Sketch of the Life of J. William Lloyd.”

[3] Quoted from Abbott, “J. William Lloyd and his Message,” 367.

[4] Lloyd also advocated sexual intercourse without seminal emission, noting that “In the highest form and best expression of the art neither man nor woman has or desires to have the orgasm . . .” J. William Lloyd, The Karezza Method or Magnetation: The Art of Connubial Love (Roscoe, Calif.: n.p., 1931), 7.

[5] Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1940, 29.

[6] Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness, Chp. 32.

[7] Ibid. 344. The volume to which Bucke refers is J. William Lloyd, Dawn Thought on the Reconciliation: A Volume of Pantheistic Impressions and Glimpses of Larger Religion (Wellesley, Mass.: Maugus Press, 1900).

[8] Ibid, 343.

[9] This summary is from Abbott, “J. William Lloyd and his Message,” 362.

[10] Ibid, 362-3.