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, Buechner 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.
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