"The completely materialistic mind of my youth and early manhood has been slowly moulded into the socialistic, spiritualistic, and theistic mind I now exhibit—a mind which is, as my scientific friends think, so weak and credulous in its declining years, as to believe that fruit and flowers, domestic animals, glorious birds and insects, wool, cotton, sugar and rubber, metals and gems, were all foreseen and foreordained for the education and enjoyment of man. The whole cumulative argument of my 'World of Life' is that in its every detail it calls for the agency of a mind ... enormously above and beyond any human mind ... Whether this Unknown Reality is a single Being and acts everywhere in the universe as direct creator, organiser, and director of every minutest motion ... or through 'infinite grades of beings,' as I suggest, comes to much the same thing. Mine seems a more clear and intelligible supposition ... and it is the teaching of the Bible, of Swedenborg, and of Milton."—Letter from A.R. Wallace to JAMES MARCHANT, written in 1913.
The letters on Spiritualism which Wallace wrote cast further light on the personal attitude of mind which he maintained towards that subject. He was an unbiased scientific investigator, commencing on the "lower level" of spirit phenomena, such as raps and similar physical manifestations of "force by unseen intelligences," and passing on to a clearer understanding of the phenomena of mesmerism and telepathy; to the materialisation of, and conversation with, the spirits of those who had been known in the body, until the conviction of life after death, as the inevitable crowning conclusion to the long process of evolution, was reached in the remarkable chapter with which he concludes "The World of Life"—an impressive prose poem.
Like that of many other children, Wallace's early childhood was spent in an orthodox religious atmosphere, which, whilst awakening within him vague emotions of religious [pg 182] fervour, derived chiefly from the more picturesque and impassioned of the hymns which he occasionally heard sung at a Nonconformist chapel, left no enduring impression. Moreover, at the age of 14 he was brought suddenly into close contact with Socialism as expounded by Robert Owen, which dispelled whatever glimmerings of the Christian faith there may have been latent in his mind, leaving him for many years a confirmed materialist.
This fact, together with his early-aroused sense of the social injustice and privations imposed upon the poorer classes both in town and country, which he carefully observed during his experience as a land-surveyor, might easily have had an undesirable effect upon his general character had not his intense love and reverence for nature provided a stimulus to his moral and spiritual development. But the "directive Mind and Purpose" was preparing him silently and unconsciously until his "fabric of thought" was ready to receive spiritual impressions. For, according to his own theory, as "the laws of nature bring about continuous development, on the whole progressive, one of the subsidiary results of this mode of development is that no organ, no sensation, no faculty arises before it is needed, or in greater degree than it is needed."[57] From this point of view we may make a brief outline of the manner in which this particular "faculty" arose and was developed in him.
When at Leicester, in 1844, his curiosity was greatly excited by some lectures on mesmerism given by Mr. Spencer Hall, and he soon discovered that he himself had considerable power in this direction, which he exercised on some of his pupils.
Later, when his brother Herbert joined him in South America, he found that he also possessed this gift, and on [pg 183] several occasions they mesmerised some of the natives for mere amusement. But the subject was put aside, and Wallace paid no further attention to such phenomena until after his return to England in 1862.
It was not until the summer of 1865 that he witnessed any phenomena of a spiritualistic nature; of these a full account is given in "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism" (p. 132). "I came," he says, "to the inquiry utterly unbiased by hopes or fears, because I knew that my belief could not affect the reality, and with an ingrained prejudice even against such a word as 'spirit,' which I have hardly yet overcome."
From that time until 1895, when the second edition of that book appeared, he did much, together with other scientists, to establish these facts, as he believed them to be, on a rational and scientific foundation. It will also be noticed, both before and after this period, that in addition to the notable book which he published dealing exclusively with these matters, the gradual trend of his convictions, advancing steadily towards the end which he ultimately reached, had become so thoroughly woven into his "fabric of thought" that it appears under many phases in his writings, and occupies a considerable part of his correspondence, of which we have only room for some specimens.
The first definite statement of his belief in "this something" other than material in the evolution of Man appeared in his essay on "The Development of Human Faces under the Law of Natural Selection" (1864). In this he suggested that, Man having reached a state of physical perfection through the progressive law of Natural Selection, thenceforth Mind became the dominating factor, endowing Man with an ever-increasing power of intelligence which, whilst the physical had remained stationary, had [pg 184] continued to develop according to his needs. This "in-breathing" of a divine Spirit, or the controlling force of a supreme directive Mind and Purpose, which was one of the points of divergence between his theory and that held by Darwin, is too well known to need repetition.
This disagreement has a twofold interest from the fact that Darwin, in his youth, studied theology with the full intention of taking holy orders, and for some years retained his faith in the more or less orthodox beliefs arising out of the Bible. But as time went by, an ever-extending knowledge of the mystery of the natural laws governing the development of man and nature led him to make the characteristically frank avowal that he "found it more and more difficult ... to invent evidence which would suffice to convince"; adding, "This disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress."[58] With Wallace, however, his early disbelief ended in a deep conviction that "as nothing in nature actually 'dies,' but renews its life in another and higher form, so Man, the highest product of natural laws here, must by the power of mind and intellect continue to develop hereafter."