Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Wallace was led to this conclusion by a growing interest in spiritualism,
sparked by observations of the religious practices of peoples he had visited in
his travels in South America and Malaya. He was also most impressed by the
results of some experiments he carried out with hypnosis. He concluded that
there were powers of the mind that could not be explained by the ordinary
processes of evolution. Human evolution must, he felt strongly, have some
kind of a supernatural dimension.
Wallace's views were in their essence similar to those of the Catholic
Church, which since the time of Pope Pius XII has been clear in its statements
that humans are distinguishable from other animals by the possession of a soul
and of the ability to believe in and accept a higher power. More recently the
Church (or at least the Vatican) has specifi cally accepted the scientifi c mecha-
nisms of evolution, but always with the caveat that the creation of humans
constitutes a special case because of our relationship to a higher power.
The Church is of course confi dent that the higher power involved is God,
while Wallace was far less certain of the nature of the spiritual dimension of
our species. Wallace seems to have believed in some kind of supernatural
evolutionary continuity of lesser deities that lie between God and man. He
suggested that some of these lesser deities have assisted us on our evolution-
ary way:
An eminent French critic, M. Claparède, [suggests that I] continually call in the aid of “une
Force supérieure,” the capital F, meaning I imagine that this “higher Force” is the Deity. I can
only explain this misconception by the incapacity of the modern cultivated mind to realise 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, [not leaving] an infi nite chasm between man and the Great
Mind of the universe. Such a supposition seems to me in the highest degree improbable.
Darwin took Wallace to task for these and similarly vague and goofy
ideas about human evolution. Indeed, Wallace's scientifi cally unorthodox
views hindered his own scientifi c career and help to explain why he has
always played second fi ddle to Darwin.
