Richard Maurice Bucke often called Maurice Bucke, was an important Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 progressive psychiatrist

Psychiatry

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

 in the late nineteenth century. An adventurer in his youth, he went on to study medicine

Medicine

Medicine is the science and art of healing. It encompasses a variety of health care practices evolved to maintain and restore health by the prevention and treatment of illness....

, practice psychiatry in Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

, and befriend a number of noted men of letters in Canada, the U.S., and England. In addition to writing and delivering professional papers, Bucke wrote three book-length studies: Man's Moral Nature, Walt Whitman, and – his best known work – Cosmic Consciousness

Cosmic consciousness

Cosmic consciousness is the idea that the universe exists as an interconnected network of consciousness, with each conscious being linked to every other...

, a classic in the modern study of mystical experience.
Richard Maurice Bucke was born in 1837, in Methwold

Methwold

' is a civil parish in the English county of Norfolk, on the edge of the Norfolk Fens and BrecklandsIt covers an area of and had a population of 1,476 in 591 households as of the 2001 census...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 the son of Rev. Horatio Walpole Bucke (a parish curate) and his wife Clarissa Andrews.