...--Yours very truly,
ALFRED R. WALLACE.
II.--Spiritualism
"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.
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