Romanes laments over me because he says I wilfully misunderstand his theory. The fact is, poor fellow, that I do not think he understands it himself. If his life had been destined to be prolonged I should have done all in my power to have induced him to occupy himself more with observation and less with mere logomachy.
I cannot get him to face the fact that natural hybrids are being found to be more and more common amongst plants. At the beginning of the century it was supposed that there were some sixty recognisable species of willows in the British Isles: now they are cut down to about sixteen, and all the rest are resolved into hybrids.—Ever sincerely,
W.T. THISELTON-DYER.
Wallace was a seeker after Truth who was never shy of his august mistress, whatever robes she wore. "I feel within me," wrote Darwin to Henslow, "an instinct for truth, or knowledge, or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue." This was equally true of Wallace. He had a fine reverence for truth, beauty and love, and he feared not to expose error. He paid no respect to time-honoured practices and opinions if he believed them to be false. Vaccination came under his searching criticism, and in the face of nearly the whole medical faculty he denounced it as quackery condemned by the very evidence used to defend it. He very carefully examined the claims of phrenology, which had been laughed out of court by scientific men, and he came to the conclusion that "in the present (twentieth) century phrenology will assuredly attain general acceptance. It will prove itself to be the true science of the mind. Its practical uses in education, in self-discipline, in the reformatory treatment of criminals, and in the remedial [pg 238] treatment of the insane, will gain it one of the highest places in the hierarchy of the sciences; and its persistent neglect and obloquy during the last sixty years of the nineteenth century will be referred to as an example of the almost incredible narrowness and prejudice which prevailed among men of science at the very time they were making such splendid advances in other fields of thought and discovery."[68]
Wallace was not even scared out of his wits by ghosts, for, unlike Coleridge, he believed in them although he thought he had seen many. Whether truth came from the scaffold or the throne, the séance or the sky, it did not alter the truth, and did not prejudice or overbear his judgment. He shed his early materialism (which temporarily took possession of him as it did of many others as a result of the shock following the overwhelming discoveries of that period) when he was brought face to face with the phenomena of the spiritual kingdom which withstood the searching test of his keen observation and reasoning powers. Prejudices, preconceived notions, respect for his scientific position or the opinions of his eminent friends or the reputation of the learned societies to which he belonged—all were quietly and firmly put aside when he saw what he recognised to be the truth. If his fellow-workers did not accept it, so much the worse for them. He stood four-square against the onslaught of quasi-scientific rationalism, which once threatened to obliterate all the ancient landmarks of morality and religion alike. He made mistakes, and he admitted and corrected them, because he verily loved Truth for her own sake. And to the very end of his long life he kept the windows of his soul wide open to what he believed to be the light of this and other worlds.
He was, then, a man of lofty ideals, and his idealism [pg 239] was at the base of his opposition to the materialism which boasted that Natural Selection explained all adaptation, and that Physics could give the solution of Huxley's poser to Spencer: "Given the molecular forces in a mutton chop, deduce Hamlet and Faust therefrom," and which regarded mind as a quality of matter as brightness is a quality of steel, and life as the result of the organisation of matter and not its cause.
"We have ourselves," wrote Prof. H.F. Osborn in an account of Wallace's scientific work which Wallace praised, "experienced a loss of confidence with advancing years, an increasing humility in the face of transformations which become more and more mysterious the more we study them, although we may not join with this master in his appeal to an organising and directing principle." But profound contemplation of nature and of the mind of man led Wallace to belief in God, to accept the Divine origin of life and consciousness, and to proclaim a hierarchy of spiritual beings presiding over nature and the affairs of nations. "Whatever," writes Dr. H.O. Forbes, "may be the last words on the deep and mysterious problems to which Wallace addressed himself in his later works, the unquestioned consensus of the highest scientific opinion throughout the world is that his work has been for more than half a century, and will continue to be, a living stimulus to interpretation and investigation, a fertilising and vivifying force in every sphere of thought."
It is perhaps unprofitable to go further than in previous chapters into his so-called heresies—political, scientific or religious. Yet we may imitate his boldness and ask whether he was not, perhaps, in advance of his age and whether his heresies were not shrewd anticipations of some truth at present but partially revealed. Take the example of Spiritualism, which, I suppose, [pg 240] has more opponents than anti-vaccination. No one can overlook the fact that Spiritualism has many scientific exponents—Myers, Crookes, Lodge, Barrett and others. Prejudices against Spiritualism are as unscientific as the credulity which swallows the mutterings of every medium. Podmore's two ponderous volumes on the History of Spritualism are marred by an obvious anxiety to make the very least, if not the very worst, of every phenomenon alleged to be spiritualistic. That kind of deliberate and obstinate blindness which prided itself on being the clear cold light of science Wallace scorned and denounced. He did not insist upon spiritualistic manifestations shaping themselves according to his own predesigned moulds in order to be investigated. He watched for facts whatever form they assumed. He fully recognised that the phenomena he saw and heard could be easily ridiculed, but behind them he as fully believed that he came into contact with spiritual realities which remain, and which led him to other explanations of the higher faculties of man and the origin of life and consciousness than were acceptable to the materialistic followers of Haeckel, Büchner and Huxley. And who dares dogmatically to assert in the name of science and in the second decade of the twentieth century, when the deeper meanings of evolution are being revealed, and the philosophy of Bergson is spoken about on the housetops, that he was wrong? In these views may he not become the peer of Darwin?
At first blush it may seem to be a bad example of special pleading to attempt to discover the reason for his opposition to vaccination in his idealism. But it is not far from the truth. He believed in a Ministry of Public Health, that doctors should be servants of the State, and that they should be paid according as they kept people well and not ill. Health is the natural condition of the human body [pg 241] when it is properly sustained and used. And chemicals, even in sickness, are of less importance than fresh air, light and proper food. He ridiculed, too, the notion of unhealthy places. "It is like," he wrote to Mr. Birch, "the old idea that every child must have measles, and the sooner the better." To the same correspondent, who was contemplating going into virgin forests and who expressed his fear of malaria, he replied: "There is no special danger of malaria or other diseases in a dense forest region. I am sure this is a delusion, and the dense virgin forests, even when swampy, are, in a state of nature, perfectly healthy to live in. It is man's tampering with them, and man's own bad habits of living, that render them unhealthy. Having now gone over all Spruce's journals and letters during his twelve years' life in and about the Amazonian forests, I am sure this is so. And even where a place is said to be notoriously 'malarious,' it is mostly due not to infection only but to predisposition due to malnutrition or some bad mode of living. A person living healthily may, for the most part, laugh at such terrors. Neither I nor Spruce ever got fevers when we lived in the forests and were able to get wholesome food." "Health," he said to the present writer, "is the best resistant to disease, and not the artificial giving of a mild form of a disease in order to render the body immune to it for a season. Vaccination is not only condemned upon the statistics which are used to uphold it, but it is a false principle—unscientific, and therefore doomed to fail in the end." Besides which, he believed in mental healing, and had recorded definite and certain benefit from spiritual "healers." And he reminded himself that amongst doctors (witness the blind opposition encountered by Lister's discoveries) were found from time to time not a few enemies of the true healing art, and obstinate defenders of many forms of quackery. [pg 242]
Wallace made no claim to be an original investigator. He knew his limitations, and said again and again that he could not have conducted the slow and minute researches or have accumulated the vast amount of detailed evidence to which Darwin, with infinite patience, devoted his life. He was genuinely glad that it had not fallen to his lot to write "The Origin of Species." He felt that his chief faculty was to reason from facts which others discovered. Yet he had that original insight and creative faculty which enabled him to see, often as by flashlight, the explanation which had remained hidden from the eyes of the man who was most familiar with the particular facts, and he elaborated it with quickening pulse, anxious to put down the whole conception which filled his mind lest some portion of it should escape him. Therein lay one secret of his great genius. He often said that he was an idler, but we know that he was a patient and industrious worker. His idleness was his way of describing his long musings, waiting the bidding of her whom God inspires—Truth, who often hides her face from the clouded eyes of man. For hours, days, weeks, he was disinclined to work. He felt no constraining impulse, his attention was relaxed or engaged upon a novel, or his seeds, or the plan of a new house, which always excited his interest. Then, apparently suddenly, whilst in one of his day-dreams, or in a fever (as at Ternate, to recall the historical episode when the theory of Natural Selection struck him), an explanation, a theory, a discovery,[69] the plan of a new book, came to him like a flash of light, and with the plan the material, the arguments, [pg 243] the illustrations; the words came tumbling one over the other in his brain, and as suddenly his idleness vanished, and work, eager, prolonged, unwearying, filled his days and months and years until the message was written down and the task fully accomplished. Whilst writing he referred to few books, but wrote straight on, adding paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter, without recasting or revision.[70] And the result was fresh, striking, original. It was a creation. The work being done, he relapsed into his busy idleness. The truth, as he saw it, seemed to come to him. Some people called him a prophet, but he was not conscious of that high calling. I do not remember him saying that he was only a messenger. Perhaps later, when he was reviewing his life, he connected his sudden inspirations with a higher source, but for their realisation he relied upon a foundation of veritable facts, facts patiently accumulated, a foundation laid broad and deep. He had the vision of the prophet allied with the wisdom of the philosopher and the calm mental detachment of the man of science. Perhaps another explanation of his genius may be found in his open-mindedness. Truth found ready access to his conscience, and always a warm welcome, and he saw with open eyes where others were stone-blind.