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 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.
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