Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

5: Alfred Wallace: The Other Darwin

My contribution is made as a man of science, as a naturalist, as a man who studies his surroundings to see where he is. And the conclusion I reach is this: that everywhere, not here and there, but everywhere, and in the very smallest operations of nature to which human observation has penetrated, there is Purpose and a continual Guidance and Control.

Alfred Wallace

The Amazon and the Malay Archipelago

In age Alfred Russel Wallace could have been the younger brother of Charles Darwin, for Charles was born in 1809 and Alfred only fourteen years later, in 1823. In social status, however, the difference was considerable. Charles belonged to the rich upper class, was educated at top institutions in Britain, never had so much as a hint of financial problems and could, because of his standing, rely on the support of people who counted. Alfred, on the contrary, did not even finish grammar school, was all his life troubled for money, and belonged to the grey crowd of the unknown. “Degreeless, and without an important institute affiliation, Wallace nevertheless carved a path through life,” writes Michael Shermer.¹ Wallace himself encapsulated the inner drive which carried him through it all in one sentence: “I possessed a strong desire to know the causes of things.”²

One of the jobs which he took up in his youth, thanks to his intelligence and studious reading, was that of surveyor. It was the initial boom time for building railway lines. Stephenson’s steam locomotive, the Rocket, had been on the rails since 1830, and railway tracks began to crisscross through the landscape, of course first in Britain, but soon afterwards also in other countries. The railway fever caught on despite dire predictions that steam locomotives would start fires along the tracks, that the cows would become hysterical and no longer produce milk, and that the high speed (up to 40 km per hour!) would cause dangerous physical symptoms in the passengers. Surveying included map making and much time to spend in the open country. The skill needed for map making provided Wallace with a temporary job as a teacher, the time spent in the open gave him the occasion to indulge in his passion for beetles and all kinds of creepy crawlies.

He studied for some time in schools called “Mechanics’ Institute,” intended to give a basic education to youths of the working class. He also read everything he could dig up in the libraries to which he had access. The level of his interests can be deduced from some of the titles he would refer to in later years: Darwin’s just published account of his voyage on the Beagle, Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population, and Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, “the first book that gave me the desire to visit the tropics.” The two last works played an important role in Darwin’s life too, and there must have been many more books which contributed to the formation of their doctrines in both men.

Despite the differences in social standing, the general intellectual background of the age was obviously the same for both of them. Wallace too was influenced by the ever increasing secularization. The disappearance of the concept of the Christian God, and “the final removal of the Deity from nature in the nineteenth century” affected his worldview as well. He became an out-and-out freethinker. “By the time I came of age I was absolutely non-religious. I cared and thought nothing about it, and could be best described by the modern term ‘agnostic’” – the same term Darwin applied to himself. At the age of thirty-eight Wallace will write in a letter: “I remain an utter disbeliever in almost all you consider the most sacred truths. … I am thankful I can see much to admire in all religions … But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth, or believe that those will be better off in a future state who have lived in the belief of doctrines inculcated from childhood, and which are to them rather a matter of blind faith than intelligent conviction.”³

A book that influenced Wallace particularly was Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History, published anonymously in 1844. “Vestiges started harmlessly enough,” describing the solar system and the universe as it was conceived at the time. Then “Chambers worked through the geological record, noting the rise of fossils throughout history. The simple appeared first and then the complex. As time went by, higher and higher forms of life left their mark. And then Chambers made a scandalizing claim: if people could accept [since Newton] that God assembled the heavenly bodies by natural laws, ‘what is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also a result of natural laws, which are in like manner expressed by his will?’ That would make more sense than God stepping in to create every species of shrimp or skunk.” (Carl Zimmer⁴) Vestiges was one of the first texts openly advocating a naturalistic interpretation of the living world against the traditional and orthodox belief that each kind of species was created separately by God in the beginning.

Von Humboldt’s book having awakened the desire to visit the tropics, William Edward’s A Voyage Up the River Amazon suggested the destination, intensifying “an earnest desire to visit a tropical country, to behold the luxuriance of animal and vegetable life said to exist there, and to see with my own eyes all those wonders which I had so much delighted to read of in the narratives of travellers.”⁵ And so it happened that Alfred Wallace, accompanied by his friend, the entomologist Henry Bates, boarded HMS Mischief, and sailed to Brazil in 1848. Unlike Darwin, they were not the guest of the Royal Navy, but had to pay for their voyage from their own pocket. “Compared with their counterparts on naval survey ships, these two penurious, inexperienced young men faced almost unimaginable challenges.”⁶ Eventually Bates would continue on his way up the Amazon, while Wallace chose to branch off on the Rio Negro, a majestic river in its own right. Later Alfred’s brother Herbert joined him, but did not prove strong enough to stand the ordeals of the tough and dangerous explorer’s life. He caught yellow fever and died in a Brazilian harbour town, about to board a ship to his homeland.

After four years in the rain forest, Wallace returned to Great Britain in August 1852. As bad luck would have it, highly flammable natural lacquer called balsam of capivi in the ship’s cargo caught fire. “After its long stew in the tropical sun the old ship was as dry as a tinderbox.” Its crew and passenger had to abandon ship, and the naturalist watched from a life boat how the brig went down in flames, together with the greatest part of the specimens he had collected in four strenuous years, and most of his precious notes and sketches. After ten days at sea in the open boat they were rescued and taken to a home port.

“He had no qualifications, no money, no patrons, no clothes. Nor did he have any publications or specimens to show for his four years of backbreaking work. His ankles were so swollen that he could barely walk, and his thin tropical shirt failed to keep out the October wind.”⁷ Still he wrote six academic papers and two books, one of which was titled Travels on the Amazon and the Rio Negro. The specimens he had been able to send and his writings gave him some renown. He got into contact with the likes of the geologist Charles Lyell and, most importantly, Charles Darwin.

Wallace travelled in the Malay Archipelago, now Malaysia and Indonesia, from 1854 to 1862, which means that, adding the years in the Amazon, he was active as a naturalist in the field and an explorer for no less than twelve years. He was the first European to set foot on many islands, and “he collected more than 125,000 specimens in the Malay Archipelago (more than 80,000 beetles alone). More than a thousand of them represented species new to science.”⁸ He reported finding an average of forty-nine new species a day, “with a high of seventy-eight in one particularly good catch.” Several species are named after him.

The circumstances in which he lived there were appalling. He was often weak, sick – he had contracted malaria – and starving, not to mention poor, and on occasion barely survived. “The people here have some peculiar practices,” he wrote. “‘Amok’, as we say ‘running a muck’, is common here. There was one last week; a debt of a few dollars was claimed of a man who could not pay it so he murdered his creditor, and then knowing he could be found out and punished he ‘run a muck’, killed four people, wounded four more and died what the natives call a honourable death! A friend here seeing I had my mattress on the floor of a bamboo house which is open beneath, told me it was very dangerous as there were many bad people about who might come at night and push their spears up through me from below.”⁹

The days in March 1858 which Wallace passed on the island of Ternate are written in history.

A Theory of Evolution

Darwin was knowledgeable of several ideas on ‘transmutationism’ or ‘transformism’ (the opinion that species change over time), but had left on his voyage around the world without taking any of them seriously; he was still a convinced creationist at the time, and very impressed by the arguments of natural theology, more specifically those of William Paley. Wallace had severed his ties with creationism earlier in life and was already in the tropical forests of the Amazon searching for facts that would support one evolutionary theory or the other. He was also thoroughly familiar with Lyell’s writings on geology and Malthus’ sensational Essay on the Principle of Population.

About Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, which, as we just saw, played an important part in his thinking, he wrote to Henry Bates: “I do not consider it a hasty generalization, but rather an ingenious hypothesis strongly supported by some striking facts and analogies, but which remains to be proven by more facts and the additional light which more research may throw upon the problem. It furnishes a subject for every student of nature to attend to; every fact he observes will make either for or against it, and it thus serves both as an incitement to the collection of facts, and an object to which they can be applied when collected.”¹⁰ Each one of the countless facts Wallace observed during his explorations was examined with care and tentatively placed within a framework which would explain all of them together: a theory of transmutation or transformation. (The word ‘evolution’ would come in vogue around 1870.)

Alfred Wallace was the founder of ‘biogeography’, the distribution of plants and animals in the natural environments of the Earth. It had become clear to him that species had their specific habitat, generally separated by natural barriers – seas, mountains, large rivers. Islands demonstrated this fact quite convincingly, even when close to each other. In the Galapagos, Darwin had made a similar observation, which would eventually lead to his theory. Wallace found out that in the Malay Archipelago he could draw a line separating a group of western islands from the eastern ones: on the western side the animals were related to the Asian species, on the eastern to the Australian. (This line, slightly modified, is still called “the Wallace Line.”)

From 1852 to 1855, while in the field, Wallace’s reflections on a comprehending evolutionary framework became more coherent. We know that the idea of ‘transmutation’ of the species was not new to naturalists, and Wallace was doubtlessly acquainted with most of the proposed explanations. Yet the problem, “the mystery of mysteries,” was the mechanism: how did the change in the species, the formation of new species happen? In 1855, Wallace wrote an article which was a first approach to a solution: “On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species.” The article was published in a scientific periodical, Annals and Magazine of Natural History, and is now famous as “the Sarawak paper,” named after the island in which it was written. Its main statement was that “every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.”¹¹ Its direct inspiration was Lyell’s geological theory of gradualism and Wallace’s personal work in biogeography. The meaning at the core was no less than gradual evolution. Wallace declared that “closely allied species came into existence not only near one another in space, but from one another in time.”

The esteemed Charles Lyell read the article and was so impressed by it that he sent a warning to his friend Charles Darwin: somebody else seemed to be closing in on a theory of natural selection. It should be noted that at that time, after having pondered the subject for no less than twenty years, Darwin still kept his theory a secret even from his closest friends. Now he wrote to Wallace: “I can plainly see that we have thought much alike and to a certain extent have come to similar conclusions.” But he deemed himself quite superior to the practically unknown man in Sarawak, and wrote in the margin of his copy of the article “nothing very new.” – “Alfred Wallace was someone Darwin had never taken seriously, even in the face of warnings.”¹²

Wallace was suffering from malaria, which struck him with severe bouts of fever. It was on March 1858, during one such attack in the island of Ternate, that illumination hit and made him see all elements he had gathered over the years in one consistent picture. Once again, just like in Darwin’s case, it was Malthus who triggered the idea. “During one of these fits, while again considering the problem of the origin of species, something led me to think of Malthus’ Essay on Population … There suddenly flashed upon me the idea of the survival of the fittest – that the individuals removed by these [population] checks must be, on the whole, inferior to those that survived. Then, considering the variations continually occurring in every fresh generation of animals or plants, and the changes of climate, of food, of enemies always in progress, the whole method of specific modification [i.e. change of the species] became clear to me, and in the two hours of my fit I had thought the main points of the theory.”¹³ That very evening he “sketched the draft of a paper” and wrote his complete theory down in two nights.

Wallace sent “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” to Darwin. The essay took two months by ship to reach its destination – and shocked its recipient. “Darwin sent the manuscript to Charles Lyell with a letter saying ‘he could not have made a better short abstract! Even [Wallace’s] terms now stand as heads of my chapters.”¹⁴ He had confided to Lyell earlier: “I rather hate the idea of writing for priority, yet I certainly should be vexed if anyone were to publish my doctrine before me.”¹⁵ Ever the recluse, and distraught by the illness of one of his children, he entrusted the problem to his friends Lyell and Hooker. Now Darwin’s theory had to be brought into the open; if not, he would loose the priority of its formulation, for it would be conferred on Wallace.

On 1 July 1858 extracts from Darwin’s writings and Wallace’s essay were read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London, in this way ascertaining that the original idea had been Darwin’s. Recently several historians of science have claimed that the manoeuvre of Darwin’s influential friends was a conspiracy, in which he was involved, to make him come victorious out of the contest. Robert Wright, for instance, writes: “Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker were part of Darwin’s coalition, and manoeuvred to elevate his status at the expense of Alfred Russel Wallace … Wallace had been taken to the cleaners. His name, though given equal billing with Darwin’s, was now sure to be eclipsed by it. After all, it wasn’t news that some young upstart had declared himself an evolutionist and proposed an evolutionary mechanism; it was news that the well-known and respected Charles Darwin had done so. …Today Darwin is Darwin, and Wallace is an asterisk.”¹⁶

How did far-away Wallace react to that historical meeting of the Linnean Society? “He accepted the arrangement after the fact, happy that he had been included at all. Darwin’s social and scientific status was far greater than Wallace’s, and it was unlikely that, without Darwin, Wallace’s views on evolution would have been taken seriously. Lyell and Hooker’s arrangement relegated Wallace to the position of co-discoverer, and he was not the social equal of Darwin or the other prominent British natural scientists. … This, combined with Darwin’s (as well as Hooker’s and Lyell’s advocacy) on his behalf, would give Wallace greater access to the highest levels of the scientific community.”¹⁷

In fact Wallace, “the man on the outside,” has always remained respectful of Darwin and grateful to him. After having received a copy of The Origin of Species, he said to a friend: “Mr. Darwin has created a new science and a new philosophy; and I believe that never has such a complete illustration of a new branch of human knowledge been due to the labours and researches of a single man. Never have such vast masses of widely scattered and hitherto quite unconnected facts been combined into a system and brought to bear upon the establishment of such a grand and new and simple philosophy.”¹⁸ He dedicated The Malay Archipelago, one of the most popular books of scientific exploration, to Darwin, and called him late in life still “my honoured friend and teacher.”

Shermer writes: “Wallace did not feel the loser, because he was not. An essay written in two nights, sent to the right place at the right time, put him in the scientific inner circle and into the historical record – his name next to Darwin’s – forever.”¹⁹ One might beg to differ with the words “written in two nights”, for Wallace’s illumination and the feverish penning of his essay were the eruptive result of at least ten years of constant observation and reflection.

Wallace Breaks with Darwin

It would have been a wonder if two theories, composed by two natural scientists isolated from each other, had been similar in every detail. They certainly were the same in outline – which is what caused Darwin’s stupefaction – but on some topics the accents differed. For example, “Darwin emphasized competition between individuals of the same species to survive and reproduce, whereas Wallace emphasized environmental pressure on varieties and species forcing them to become adapted to their local environment.”²⁰ Another point of disagreement was Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which Wallace would never accept. (If natural selection is the one and only mechanism, as is still vociferously asserted, how can it ever be replaced or supplemented by another mechanism?) And a third point, mostly kept under wraps by Darwinians, was Lamarckism. For Darwin had bit by bit integrated more Lamarckian elements in his revised editions of the Origin, while Wallace remained squarely opposed to the “acquired characteristics” of the Frenchman.

The break with Darwin happened in 1869, ten years after the publication of the Origin. According to Wallace “certain of our physical characteristics” were not explicable by the theory of variation and survival of the fittest, the backbone of Darwinism. “These [characteristics] include the human brain, the organs of speech and articulation, the human hand, and the external human form, with its upright posture and bipedal gait.”²¹ What Darwin could not explain, in short, was the evolution of the human mind and its physical instrumentation. “How then was an organ [the brain] developed far beyond the needs of its possessor?” Wallace asked. “Natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape [according to the gradualism of Darwinian evolution], whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.”²²

“As Wallace observed: raised in England instead of the Ecuadorian Amazon [well-known to him], a native child of the head-hunting Jivaro, destined otherwise for a life spent loping through the jungle, would learn to speak perfect English, and would upon graduation from Oxford or Cambridge have the double advantage of a modern intellectual worldview and a commercially valuable ethnic heritage … From this it follows, Wallace argued, that characteristic human abilities must be latent in primitive man, existing somehow as an unopened gift, the entryway to a world that primitive man does not possess and would not recognize.”²³ The problem of the evolution of the human brain and its capacities has recently become trendy because of the much publicized theory of “evolutionary psychology.” According to this view of our species, for ninety-nine percent of human existence people have lived as foragers in small nomadic bands, which resulted in our brains being adapted to that long-vanished way of life. Consequently, the modern mind is fit for the Stone Age, not the computer age.

As an evolutionary scientist, Wallace raised another pertinent question in connection with the mind-body problem: “How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness? The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable.” Consciousness, Wallace argued, is a qualitative phenomenon, not a quantitative one. It cannot be spontaneously generated by adding more molecules, as if there were some critical mass that, when reached, produces consciousness. “If a material element, or a combination of a thousand material elements in a molecule, are alike unconscious, it is impossible for us to believe that the mere addition of one, two, or a thousand other material elements to form a more complex molecule could in any way tend to produce a self-conscious existence.”²⁴ Since then libraries have been written about the mind-body problem, but materialistic science is still unable to solve it.

In Wallace’s writings one began now to find passages mentioning a “purpose” in nature, which was anathema to scientific materialism. “There is purpose, then, in what is, and in what happens in Nature.” He also mentioned an “Overruling Intelligence.” But he kept repeating that his conclusions were made exclusively on the basis and in the spirit of science. Even today one hardly ever reads a page about living organisms without hitting on a teleological metaphor, but that there should be a trend in the evolution is always curtly if not sarcastically denied. Matter is matter and cannot have a purpose, and neither can a mechanism consisting of matter. In science the metaphor of the machine is a persistent one, however refined it has become in our micro-technological age; it seems for the time being the only one to enable humankind to reduce, understand, and construct.

Darwin’s reaction to Wallace’s apostasy from scientific orthodoxy was bitter, perhaps more so because Charles Lyell, at last accepting evolution after many years of friendship with Darwin, seemed to lean over to Wallace. “These views greatly disturbed Darwin, who argued that spiritual appeals were not necessary and that sexual selection could easily explain apparently non-adaptive phenomena.” (Darwin’s reaction reminds of Sigmund Freud’s when Carl Jung tore himself loose from him. Maybe it is typical for all founders of a faith when the beloved disciple turns his back on them.) Many other members of the scientific elite joined Darwin is his rejection of Wallace’s deviation, “for his views were at odds with two major tenets of the Darwinian philosophy, which were that evolution was not teleological and that it was not anthropocentric.”

Wallace would be the most cited naturalist, though often in strong disagreement, in Darwin’s Descent of Man (1872). Wallace himself, more broad-minded, continued respecting “his master and friend” and his work. In 1889 he even published a much cited book, called Darwinism, in response to criticism among scientists of natural selection. In those years the fact of evolution was already widely accepted in scientific circles and among the educated public – although Wallace and August Weismann (to be met with later) “were nearly alone among the prominent biologists in believing that natural selection was the major driving force behind it.”²⁵ For rough times awaited Darwin’s Darwinism.

‘Intelligent Design’

Readers informed about the present controversy concerning ‘intelligent design’ will have noticed that Alfred Wallace was stepping on the same path. He did so openly, sincere and outspoken as always, and made his viewpoint perfectly clear. He reminded his readers of the terms he had used for the Overruling Intelligence – “some other power”, “some intelligent power”, “a superior intelligence”, “a controlling intelligence” – and the way he had, on the basis of observation and well-informed, rational thought, come to such a conclusion.

He had already written in 1856: “Many animals are provided with organs and appendages which serve no material or physical purpose. The extraordinary excrescences of many insects, the fantastic and many-coloured plumes which adorn certain birds, the excessively developed horns in some of the antelopes, the colours and infinitely modified form of many flower-petals, are all cases for an explanation of which we must look to some general principle far more recondite than a simple relation to the necessities of the individual.” No one, layman or scientist, can admire the creatures of nature and wonder at them without occasionally having the same impression. But “naturalists are too apt to imagine, when they cannot discover, a use for everything in nature,” remarked Wallace.²⁶ Observers today are of the same opinion, e.g. Michael Behe: “Some evolutionary biologists … have fertile imaginations. Given a starting point, they almost always can spin a story to get to any biological structure you wish.”²⁷

Still, by 1867 Wallace was “an uncompromising adaptationist, a hyper-selectionist.” And he will write many years later: “Although I maintain, and even enforce my differences from some of Darwin’s views, my whole work tends forcibly to illustrate the overwhelming importance of Natural Selection over all other agencies in the production of new species … Even in rejecting [Darwin’s] phase of sexual selection depending on female choice, I insist on the greater efficacy of natural selection. This is pre-eminently the Darwinian doctrine, and I therefore claim for my book [Darwinism, 1889] the position of being the advocate of pure Darwinism.”²⁸

“Pure Darwinism” meant scientific materialism. Then how could Wallace write “an Overruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws [of nature], so directing and so determining their accumulation as finally to produce an organization sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature”? The conclusion seems to be that he, less prejudiced than doctrinaire scientific materialists, saw everything as Nature, as a form of manifested matter in action. Matter was the fact, matter was the mystery. His rational mind would not accept anything he could not explain, and held that in Nature everything had to be mechanism in one way or other. The Chain of Being – matter, life-force, mind – was no longer taken into consideration in the second half of the nineteenth century. Therefore Wallace had to consider, even when denying it, a materia mystica with the power to perform the wonders of nature.

This is shown by his enumeration of three stages in the Earth’s past that cannot be accounted for by natural selection: 1. “the change from inorganic to organic, when the earliest vegetable cell, or the living protoplasm out of which it arose, first appeared”; 2. “the introduction of sensation or consciousness”; 3. “the existence in man of a number of his most characteristic and noblest faculties,” namely those of the mind.²⁹ Earth is a planet whose basis is matter; therein the life forces manifested; then therein consciousness has gradually lit up. At these three points in the evolution on our Earth “the unseen universe of the Spirit” has interceded, averred Wallace.³⁰ The two axis points in between the three phases of the evolution are precisely the points of insertion where a higher level of the hierarchical Chain of Being became active in the existence of our planet.

Spiritism

At the time of Wallace’s break with Darwin an important change must have taken place in his mind. And indeed it had: Wallace had accepted spiritism as genuine. “When I returned from [the Malay Archipelago] I had read a good deal about spiritualism, and, like most people, believed it to be a fraud and a delusion. This was in 1862. At that time I met Mrs. Marshall, who was a celebrated medium in London, and after attending a number of their meetings, and examining the whole question with an open mind and with all the scientific application I could bring to bear upon it, I came to the conclusion that spiritualism was genuine. However, I did not allow myself to be carried away, but I waited for three years and undertook a most rigorous examination of the whole subject, and was then convinced of the evidence and genuineness of spiritualism.” (Wallace, in the Anglo-Saxon fashion, uses the word ‘spiritualism’ for the phenomena connected with the evocation or apparition of beings from another world; as this may cause confusion with spirituality, in the present essay the word ‘spiritism’ is used, except in direct quotations which have ‘spiritualism’.)

Nonetheless, Wallace consistently and persistently considered himself a scientist in the unadulterated sense of the word. Shermer writes: “Wallace’s belief in spiritualism was based on a rational, scientific analysis of the phenomena, not on blind faith, typically associated with religious devotion.” And Wallace himself affirms that in the years before his discovery of spiritism, “I was so thorough and confirmed a materialist that I could not at that time find a place in my mind for the conception of spiritual existence, or for any other agencies in the universe than matter and force. Facts, however, are stubborn things. … My desire for knowledge and love of truth forced me to continue the inquiry. The facts became more and more assured, more and more varied, more and more removed from anything that modern science taught, or modern philosophy speculated on. The facts beat me.”³¹

In Wallace’s view “there is no supernatural. There is only the natural and unexplained phenomenon yet to be incorporated into the natural. It was one of Wallace’s career goals to be the scientist who brings more of the apparent supernatural into the natural.” (Shermer³²) It is interesting to see how Wallace, while trying to encompass all of Existence in his perception of Reality, rediscovers the existence of the gradations of being, which he calls “the law of continuity.” “The incapacity of the modern cultivated mind to realize the existence of any higher intelligence between itself and Deity, angels and archangels, spirits and demons, have been so long banished from our belief as to have become actually unthinkable as actual existences, and nothing in modern philosophy takes their place. Yet the grand law of ‘continuity’, the last outcome of modern science, which seems absolute throughout the realms of matter, force, and mind, so far as we can explore them, cannot surely fail to be true beyond the narrow sphere of our vision, and leave an infinite chasm between man and the Great Mind of the universe.”³³

Wallace did not adhere to any traditional religion and he did not believe in a personal God. He considered his exploration of spiritism and the supernatural as purely and exclusively scientific, on scientific principles and in the spirit of experimental science as practiced since Galileo Galilei. But what was fancy and superstition to other scientists, Wallace found to be factually true according to his experience as a scientist, but as yet insufficiently known or understood. “A century ago,” he wrote in support of his view, “a telegram from 3000 miles distance, or a photograph taken in five seconds [sic], would not have been believed possible, and would not have been credited on testimony, except by the ignorant and superstitious who believed in miracles.”³⁴

A Revival of Occultism

The nineteenth century is generally characterized as the age of dry positivism, bourgeois commercialism and science. But its second half was also the time of an astounding revival of occultism in its various aspects. Spiritism was one of the most important. The publication in 1857 of the Livre des Esprits (book of the spirits) by Allan Kardec, ere long called “the pope of spiritism,” resulted in the emergence of a real Church with millions of followers, and of which the ministers were mostly women, the mediums. The movement spread like wildfire in the West.³⁵ At its core was something quite different from the hysterical sensationalism as it is so often caricatured. Spiritism was the expression of an existential need in the human being, of an activation of its various levels of being, immensely richer than the sole material level to which scientific thought reduced the world.

About this occult revival the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes: “Occult science tended to stress man’s intimate and meaningful relationship with the cosmos in terms of ‘revealed’ correspondences between the microcosm and macrocosm, and strove to counter materialist science, with its emphasis upon tangible and measurable phenomena and its neglect of invisible qualities respecting the spirit and emotions. These new ‘metaphysical’ sciences gave individuals a holistic view of themselves and the world in which they lived. This view conferred both a sense of participation in a total meaningful order and, through divination, a means of planning one’s affairs in accordance with this order.”³⁶

Spiritism was considered no less than a new religion by its adherents. “The question of the continuation of life and the hope that death at the end is actually not the end are too deeply anchored in the human being not to try to respond to them. … It is for the most part people thirsting for instruction and enlightenment who gather in what one might call a ‘circle’. The official way of the Christian Churches and their regular sermon on Sunday, which the mass of those present lets passively go over their heads without actually listening to it, does not satisfy them any longer. Their living spirit demands more nourishment than that.”³⁷

During the same period, and often closely connected with spiritism, there was “the rebirth of magic,”³⁸ with authors like Éliphas Lévi and Papus who are still being reprinted; there was an expansion of the masonic movement, which is a form of structured and hierarchized occultism; a spreading of Rosicrucianism, closely related to freemasonry; and the foundation of the rapidly proliferating theosophical movement in 1875 – not to mention alchemy, mesmerism (i.e. hypnotism), the illuminati, and dark satanic sects … A glance at the literature of that time will meet with Honoré de Balzac (a disciple of Swedenborg), Victor Hugo, a practicing spiritist, Joris-Karl Huysmans and his novels about black magic, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle and his idiosyncratic Sherlock Holmes, Marcel Proust, chronicler of his time, and the superlative French poets Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. And there were of course the Impressionists, scandalizing but revolutionizing the world of the arts, not to forget the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, loosing his mind in the whirlpool of the age, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud.

This cascade of names reminds us that the age of Jules Verne (1828-1905), contemporary of Alfred Wallace, was much more than a time of rigidity and strictness à la Queen Victoria and the French messieurs in their cylindrical top hats and mesdames in their crinolines. This was an explosive age, the more so for the pressure exerted by the formal restrictions on its surface. It was in fact the end of the centuries’ long transition from the Middle Ages to an age yet to come, announced and prepared by the wars and global upheavals of the twentieth century – an age of which our Earth as a whole is in labour.

Spiritism and Science

In the context of our examination of the importance of Alfred Wallace, however, the most important side of spiritism was that it saw itself as scientific. Wallace wrote: “The speculations [of spiritism] are usually held to be far beyond the bounds of science; but they appear to me to be more legitimate deductions from the facts of science than those which consist in reducing the whole universe to matter conceived and defined so as to be philosophically inconceivable.” Camille Flammarion, astronomer and spiritist, wrote: “Spiritism is not a religion, it is a science of which we hardly know the ABC. Physical science teaches us that we live in the middle of a world which is invisible to us, and that it is not impossible that there are beings (equally invisible to us) who also live on the Earth in an order of perception totally different from ours.”³⁹

After all, this was the time of William Crookes’ cathode rays, Wilhelm Röntgen’s X-rays and the mysterious radiation discovered by Henri Becquerel. After the revolution introduced by the steam engine, electricity was working its wonders. People could now communicate over long distances by telegraph and telephone. And were the invisible rays, of which so many variants were being discovered, any less occult than the visitors from beyond death and the strange matter in which they appeared?

“The magic came out of the laboratories,” not only out of the occult séances. In those days “the scientists were still incapable to explain how waves with mysterious capacities could cross oceans and continents, and how they could be received”⁴⁰ – as they were incapable of explaining the occult phenomena, or explaining them away. They could only accept or refuse them because they liked or disliked them. Several of the greatest names in science showed active interest in spiritism, among them Crookes and Flammarion, already mentioned, Pierre and Marie Curie (Nobel Prize winners), Charles Richet (Nobel Prize winner), the mathematician Augustus de Morgan, Cesare Lombroso, the physicist Lord Rayleigh, and others.

But what about Charles Darwin, how did he react to the spiritist wave carrying Alfred Wallace away from him? It so happened that the Recluse of Down let himself be prompted to attend a séance, but “I found it so hot and tiring that I went away before all these astounding miracles, or jugglery, took place. … The more I thought of all that I had heard happened at Queen Anne St., the more convinced I was it was all imposture.”⁴¹ This was nothing but sheer prejudice of a mind who had decided beforehand that all that was nothing but “astounding miracles,” “jugglery” and “imposture,” without having the patience to witness it at least once. Which is neither in accordance with the scientific method, nor with Bacon’s inductive method, nor with the hypothetico-deductive method.

In this, as in so many other matters, Darwin set the tone for his future disciples, who quote him not only as a naturalist but as a source of ultimate wisdom, which he certainly was not. In a case about spiritism brought to justice, Wallace testified for the defense, Darwin for the prosecution. Shermer even writes that Darwin waged “a secret war on spiritualism,” hiding his weighty involvement. He said of himself: “I fear I am a wretched bigot on the subject.”⁴² (That Darwin was capable of this kind of attitude strengthens the suspicion that, indeed, in 1858, when the priority of the theory of evolution by natural selection was settled in his favour, Wallace may have been the victim of a conspiracy with Darwin’s knowledge.) Darwin will be joined by the scientific establishment, in his time and in the eyes of the future, to condemn Alfred Wallace as scientifically spurious, and thereby eclipse him to the present day. As Joseph Hooker wrote to his friend Charles: “Wallace has lost caste terribly,”⁴³ and he has not yet regained it, although he amply deserves regaining it.

“Occultism is in its essence man’s effort to arrive at knowledge of secret truths and potentialities of Nature which will lift him out of slavery to his physical limits of being,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, the Indian philosopher and yogi. “This human aspiration takes its stand on the belief, intuition and intimation that we are not mere creatures of the mud, but souls, minds, wills that can know all the mysteries of this and every world, and become not only Nature’s pupils but her adepts and masters.” However, “occultism in the West could be thus easily pushed aside because it never reached its majority, never acquired ripeness and a philosophic or sound systematic foundation. It indulged too freely in the romance of the supernatural or made the mistake of concentrating its major effort on the discovery of formulas and effective modes for using supernatural powers. It deviated into magic white and black or into romantic or thaumaturgic paraphernalia of occult mysticism and the exaggeration of what was after all a limited and scanty knowledge. These tendencies and this insecurity of mental foundation made it difficult to defend and easy to discredit, a target facile and vulnerable.”⁴⁴

But Sri Aurobindo, with his cultural roots in the West as well as in the East, writes also about the same subject: “To know of these [occult] things and to bring their truth and forces into the life of humanity is a necessary part of its evolution. Science itself is in its own way an occultism; for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organize and place at the service of man her occult power and processes, a vast system of physical magic – for there is and can be no other magic than the utilization of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.”⁴⁵ Alfred Wallace seems to have had an intuition of a kindred idea.

The loss of the knowledge and practice of true spirituality in the West has gradually led to the negation of anything non-material, to gross materialism. And rightly so! The civilization of the European Middle Ages was, like all other civilizations, based on imagination, myth and superstition, covering a modicum of real spirituality. The long and painful process of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, industrial revolution and materialism, resulting in the explosion of the twentieth century wars and globalization, has led humanity to more reality, to a nearer approach of truth. The present, postmodernist time, when even the possibility of any knowledge of reality or truth is negated, may be the moment when humanity discovers that the Truth is other than supposed until now.

“To refuse to enquire upon any general ground preconceived and a priori is an obscurantism as prejudicial to the extension of knowledge as the religious obscurantism which opposed in Europe the extension of scientific discovery. The greatest inner discoveries … cannot be brought before the tribunal of the common mentality which has no experience of these things and takes its own absence or incapacity of experience as a proof of their incapacity or their non-existence. Physical truth of formulas, generalizations, discoveries founded upon physical observation can be so referred, but even there a training of capacity is needed before one can truly understand and judge; it is not every untrained mind that can follow the mathematics of relativity or other difficult scientific truths or judge the validity either of their result or their process.” (Sri Aurobindo⁴⁶)

In conclusion, Pierre Lagrange and Patrizia d’Andréa see the historical importance of the relation between occultism and science as follows: “The occult, presumed to be opposed to the sciences, is in fact profoundly defined by its confrontation with science. The occult is not a form of the irrational, but an active participation in the definition of the borderline between the rational and the irrational. The people involved do not stand on one side or the other of the Great Divide [between occultism and science], but establish this divide by the social position they take up and the definitions they formulate. Far from being a pseudo-science, occultism has without any doubt made one of the most important contributions to the historical creation of a rationalist discourse on the sciences.”⁴⁷ The British Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882, the American Society for Psychical Research in 1885; a “Spiritist and Spiritualist Congress” took place at Paris in 1889.

Humanist – Socialist

If Darwin thought that bringing his theory of evolution in the open was “like confessing a murder,” it was because he realized that it would be understood as a degradation of the human being from a creature made in the image of God to just an animal among animals. His disciples who are our contemporaries do not miss any occasion to remind their readers, with obvious gusto, of what is according to Darwinism the real, scientific position of the human species.

Burton Guttman, for example, writes: “Homo sapiens is a mammal and a primate, a member of the Class Mammalia and the order Primates that includes the monkeys, apes, and their kin. … The forces of evolution that operate on other kinds of organisms have shaped humanity just as inexorably, and they continue to do so today, however slowly.”⁴⁸ John Gribbin’s evaluates the human as follows: “There is no reason to single out the human line as special, except for our chauvinistic interest in it. … There is no way in which we can claim to be ‘better’ than Aegyptopithecus, or the Miocene apes, only different. They were well adapted to the world in which they lived, and we are well suited to the world in which we live.”⁴⁹ One could fill a volume with similar and even more denigrating statements, like Scott Atran’s: “Human beings are accidental and incidental products of the material development of the universe, almost wholly irrelevant and readily ignored in any general description of its functioning.”⁵⁰

On the contrary Alfred Wallace, the other Darwin, saw quite valid reasons to single out the human species as special. One reason, fundamental, was that a theory of natural selection could not explain the phenomena and capabilities of the human brain, which was why Wallace distanced himself from Darwin, as we have seen earlier. Wallace argued that man is not just a physical being, not just an animal, but “a duality, consisting of an organized spiritual form … with glorious qualities which raise us so immeasurably above our fellow animals.”⁵¹ His view was “that there is a difference in kind, intellectually and morally, between man and other animals,” and he dedicated a whole book to the subject: Man’s Place in the Universe.

Wallace saw the human being as a duality: an immortal spirit in a mortal body. Death effects no change in the spirit, and it was with such spirits that a contact could be established from our material world of mortals. The reason that he refused to believe in reincarnation may have been that he understood it as metempsychosis, an aimless transmigration of the soul in bodies of animals as well as humans. The misunderstandings in connection with this topic are endless, and seeing Peter O’Toole, when in India for the filming of Kim, dart around on the set shouting: “I want to come back as a snake!” did not reduce the confusion. Sri Aurobindo gives this rationale for reincarnation: “All the secret of the circumstances of rebirth [i.e. reincarnation, not metempsychosis] centres around the one capital need of the soul, the need of growth [in life after life], the need of experience; that governs the line of its evolution and all the rest is accessory.”⁵²

This is a view which Wallace might have accepted, for he held that life on Earth “is the school for the development of the spirit.”⁵³ Behind the constantly proclaimed “progress” by which the nineteenth century was supposed to be driven superficially, he perceived an inner urge which would make humanity evolve thanks to “the inherent perfectibility of man.” This was miles away from Darwin, whose brooding view of life looms over every page of his Origin, except for one upbeat note in the very last paragraph of the book: “There is grandeur in this view of life …” The way this single phrase is used time and again by Darwin’s hardcore disciples, when singing the praises of science in general and biology in particular, is grotesque – especially when considering the sadomasochistic pleasure with which they declare evolution to be meaningless and humans to be complete animals. (All the same, in the writings which label the human being as nothing but an animal, it is sometimes difficult to dispel the impression that the learned author means the whole of humanity, except himself.)

Bright-minded Wallace, a genius if Darwin was one, never tried to overcome his humble working-class attitude, even when much honoured later in life. Darwin remained smugly embedded in his upper-class security and let the world take care of itself, dedicating himself exclusively to his doctrine and his family. Wallace, from his early youth influenced by the progressive humanitarian socialism of Robert Owen, wanted to collaborate towards a better world. One should keep in mind the grey, miserable masses of the “proletariat” in the shanty towns of the industrial revolution, especially in Great Britain but not only there. Wallace was concerned about the Earth and humanity as a whole, this special species with qualities far superseding those of its nearest relatives in the evolutionary tree of life. He even envisioned a world inhabited by “a single homogeneous race,” and, indefatigable as always, founded a utopian community – one of many at the time – called Freeland.

Alfred Wallace has been called “the grand synthesizer” and “the last great Victorian,” among other appreciative formulas and epithets. “In courage of opinion Wallace was without peer,” writes Michael Shermer. “He was ashamed of nothing and prejudiced only against those he perceived to be dogmatically close-minded to what he believed to be unambiguous factual proof of a remarkable phenomenon.”⁵⁴ His death in 1913, at 90 years of age, was widely reported in the press. The New York Times called him “the last of the giants belonging to that wonderful group of intellectuals that included, among others, Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Lyell and Owen, whose daring investigations revolutionized and evolutionized the thought of the century.”

“Despite this, his fame faded quickly after his death. For a long time he was treated as a relatively obscure figure in the history of science. A number of reasons have been suggested for this lack of attention, including his modesty, his willingness to champion unpopular causes without regard for his own reputation, and the discomfort of much of the scientific community with some of his unconventional ideas. Recently, he has become a less obscure figure with the publication of several biographies about him and anthologies of his writings.”⁵⁵ May his exemplary presence increase.