Alfred Russel Wallace

by Peter Raby

  Wallace was moving on to the subject of man – as indeed was Darwin, now deep into the writing of The Descent of Man. The closing paragraphs of The Malay Archipelago had sounded the trumpet call, echoing the perfectionist notes of the 1864 paper on ‘The Development of Human Races under the Law of Natural Selection’:

  We most of us believe that we, the higher races, have progressed and are progressing. If so, there must be some state of perfection, some ultimate goal, which we may never reach, but to which all true progress must bring us nearer. What is this ideally perfect social state toward which mankind ever has been, and still is tending?

  Wallace answered the question by reference to what the ‘best thinkers’ maintain: ‘a state of individual freedom and self-government, rendered possible by the equal development and just balance of the intellectual, moral, and physical, parts of our nature …’; and then he went on more radically to testify that he had himself experienced an approach to such a perfect social state ‘among people in a vety low stage of civilisation’, both in South America and the East. In contrast, the mental and moral status of European people had regressed. ‘Compared with our wondrous progress in physical science and its practical applications, our system of government, of administering justice, of national education, and our whole social and moral organisation, remains in a state of barbarism.’ (The word ‘barbarism’ is asterisked, and receives a whole page of justification.) European civilisation, in short, was a failure, and would always be so, mainly from ‘our neglect to train and develop more thoroughly the sympathetic feelings and moral faculties of our nature’. This, concluded Wallace, ‘is the lesson I have been taught by my observations of uncivilised man. I now bid my readers – Farewell!’3

  This resounding conclusion might be read as starry-eyed Utopianism, or incipient socialism. But it stemmed from two major thrusts of Wallace’s observations and instincts: firstly, the surprisingly advanced nature of so-called ‘savage’ man and ‘savage’ societies; secondly, his separation of the intellectual and, especially, the moral attributes of man from the physical. He is careful not to use the word ‘spiritual’ at this stage, although his language indicates unease about the results of the ‘struggle for life’ as practised by the colonialists:

  If the tide of colonisation should be turned to New Guinea, there can be little doubt of the early extinction of the Papuan race. A warlike and energetic people, who will not submit to national slavery or to domestic servitude, must disappear before the white man as surely as do the wolf and the tiger.4

  Having rejected orthodox Christian doctrines and values, he needed a substitute to defend his shift of position: needed, at least, a logical grounding to challenge or modify the scientific determinism that he had embraced with such enthusiasm.

  Wallace’s first extensive account of his new theory was published in the Quarterly Review, at the close of an evaluation of new editions of Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Elements of Geology. He argued that, first, neither natural selection nor the more general theory of evolution could explain the origin of sensational or conscious life:

  They may teach us how, by chemical, electrical, or higher natural laws, the organised body can be built up, can grow, can reproduce its like; but those laws and that growth cannot even be conceived as endowing the newly arranged atoms with consciousness. But the moral and higher intellectual nature of man is as unique a phenomenon as was conscious life on its first appearance in the world, and the one is almost as difficult to conceive as originating by any law of evolution as the other. 5

  He went even further, and suggested that there were certain physical characteristics of the human race that were not explicable by the theory of variation and the survival of the fittest: the brain, the organs of speech, the hand, and the external form of man. The brain, particularly, exercised Wallace: a ‘savage’ possessed a brain apparently far too highly developed for his immediate needs, but essential for advanced civilisation; immediate utility was thereby called into question. Then, in his closing paragraphs, came the crunch: the same great laws that had developed all other organised beings were indeed active in the development of man, but there seemed to be evidence of ‘a Power which has guided the action of those laws in definite directions and for special ends’. Just as man had intervened to develop the Guernsey milch-cow or the London dray-horse, so there must be a possibility that ‘in the development of the human race, a Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws for nobler ends’. This was the direction to pursue, wrote Wallace, in order to find the true reconciliation of science with theology.

  Let us fearlessly admit that the mind of man (itself the living proof of a supreme mind) is able to trace, and to a considerable extent has traced, the laws by means of which the organic no less than the inorganic world has been developed. But let us not shut our eyes to the evidence that an Overruling Intelligence has watched over the action of those laws, so directing their variations and so determining their accumulation, as finally to produce an organisation sufficiently perfect to admit of, and even to aid in, the indefinite advancement of our mental and moral nature.6

  It was out: Wallace’s apostasy from his own doctrine of natural selection, a variation so radical that he later described it to Darwin as his ‘little heresy’. Darwin wrote ‘No’ against the offending passage on his copy of the Quarterly, and underlined it three times. ‘I differ grievously from you,’ he wrote to Wallace, ‘and I am very sorry for it.’ If he had not known better, he would have sworn that the brain passages had been inserted by some other hand. ‘I can see no necessity for calling in an additional and proximate cause in regard to Man.’7 He wrote, too, to Lyell, bewailing Wallace’s apparent volte-face; but Lyell, though not convinced by Wallace’s reasoning, was sympathetic to the concept; ‘I rather hail Wallace’s suggestion,’ he replied to Darwin, ‘that there may be a Supreme Will and Power which may not abdicate its function of interference but may guide the forces and laws of Nature.’8 Wallace was careful not to use the word ‘God’ in his argument, either in this first exposition or in his later refinements and extensions, but talked rather of powers, intelligences, forces, influences – a distinction totally lost on most of his critics. For Darwin, it must have seemed as if Wallace had reverted to orthodox, eighteenth-century theology, in an adaptation of the argument from design. For Wallace, the theory was corroborated by his experience of the spiritual world. Those phenomena demonstrated, to his satisfaction, the existence of forces and influences ‘not yet recognised by science’ – evidence that a higher order of intelligences was at work in the world. As for himself, he scarcely budged from this new position, except to refine it in a long essay published in 1870, and he defended himself vigorously against criticism. With this one massive exception, he had not relinquished his basic adherence to the mechanism of natural selection, and he continued to argue, write and lecture on all other aspects of Darwinian theory.

  Now that The Malay Archipelago was in the bookshops, and selling steadily, Wallace was free to enjoy the summer. First, a walking tour with his father-in-law, and Geach, his Archipelago friend, in Wales: climbing Snowdon, and botanising furiously – Mitten called out ‘I’ve got another species’ so often that Wallace thought the little valley below Beddgelert was inexhaustible.9 Next, the meeting of the British Association at Exeter, where Wallace’s shift of position was reported. Wallace, versatile as ever, presented a paper on ‘The Measurement of Geological Time’ in Section C, Geology, then turned up in Section D, Biology, to contribute to the discussions, for example following Lubbock’s paper ‘On the Primitive Condition of Man’. He was invited to join the fraternity of the Red Lions, the dining club he attended at the Cambridge meeting of 1862, was entertained at a country house with ‘a large party of scientific men’, and thoroughly relished the genial, slightly irreverent atmosphere: there seemed to be no signs that he had damaged his reputation by his heretical amendment.10 He relished, too, the magazine that appeared in parody of the British Association
, ‘Exeter Change for The British Lion’, edited by Snug the Joiner. After twitting Darwin, the author of ‘The Development Hypothesis’, ‘General Fitz-Muddler’, went on to tease Wallace:

  After every so-called discovery, some second claimant for the honour is sure to arise, announcing that he had arrived at precisely the same conclusions from widely different evidence; and in this case a Mr Wallace appears on the scene as Mr Darwin’s alter ego. Like all the rest of them he has travelled everywhere – restlessness of body, as of mind, being a characteristic of the school. We leave his arguments about birds of paradise and butterflies and ‘simulation’ for those who can follow them, alluding only to one of his statements. He says that, somewhere or other in the Eastern Archipelago, there are islands only a few miles apart in which the animals are quite different. Here is a discovery worth going half round the globe for! What would be thought of a gamekeeper that wanted three miles to keep the partridges out of the pheasant preserves. In Regent’s Park he would find a very different fauna on either side of a six-foot paling.11

  The writer then moves on to fresh targets, first, Huxley, and finally Hooker, who as Director of the Royal Gardens, a public officer, ‘has so far forgotten what is due to his position’ as to have become associated with ‘the great heresy’ of the nineteenth century. ‘Are the conservatories at Kew to be made hot beds of insidious doctrine? and have the Commissioners of Woods and Forests no power in their own borders? Under a more enlightened Ministry these things would see an early doom.’ Of the four named natural selectionists in this good-humoured lampoon, Darwin had no need of a salary, and Hooker and Huxley were already secure. The jobless Wallace ran a double risk. He remained distinctly suspect to anyone belonging to the traditional school of Owen, but also, because of his theory of Higher Intelligences, he might no longer be regarded as ‘safe’ by the champions of the new orthodoxy.

  After Exeter, Wallace took the opportunity of travelling further west, to stay with his publisher, Macmillan, at Torquay, where he enjoyed meeting the geologist William Pengelly, before returning to London for the next intellectual season. Pengelly, largely self-educated like Wallace, was particularly interested in the antiquity of man, and carried out systematic excavations at Bovey Tracey, Brixham Cave, and Kent’s Hole at Torquay: this was all fascinating and thought-provoking material for Wallace, who was editing a collection of his own essays and articles for Macmillan, including the Sarawak and Ternate papers, a revised version of ‘The Development of Human Races under the Law of Selection’, and a fresh assault on the problems of consciousness and moral development, ‘The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man’. He sent the proofs to Darwin in January. Darwin was horrified: the Lyell review was not an isolated aberration; Wallace was extending and solidifying his line of argument. Much of the book he could assent to – ‘But I groan over Man – you write like a metamorphosed (in retrograde direction) naturalist, and you the author of the best paper that ever appeared in the Anthropological Review! Eheu! Eheu! Eheu!’12 He signed himself ‘your miserable friend’, and followed this up by a further letter; he had just re-read the Anthropological paper (slightly amended by Wallace, incidentally, for its republication) ‘and I defy you to upset your own doctrine’.13 Wallace was unmoved. In fact, he seems to have been able to continue his friendships and social life quite untouched, at least from his own perspective, by controversies and differences of opinion: his brush with Huxley over seances did not interrupt their social meetings, and with other scientists, such as Lyell or Mivart, his new position aroused interest rather than lamentation. It was a busy winter: there were meetings of the Entomological Society – he was elected President in 1870 – and the Linnean; and he was also now appearing regularly in Nature, for which he was an active reviewer and correspondent from its foundation in November 1869.

  Domestically, he wanted to find a home outside London. Bertie, especially, did not seem to thrive in the city, and was often taken down to Hurstpierpoint to be ‘put to rights’ by his grandmother; and the addition of Violet made a more rural setting increasingly important. Yet London might provide the job he increasingly needed. While the outcome of the desirable museum post at Bethnal Green remained unclear, the Wallaces took a cottage temporarily at Barking, east of London: a ‘miserable village’, surrounded by marshes and factories, but with pleasant walks beside the Thames, and a convenient railway service that brought both Bethnal Green, and the evening meetings of the societies, within range. They moved there on 25 March 1870, just as Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection came out.

  This was the first time Wallace had brought together his theoretical papers, allowing his readers to trace the development of his thought from the Sarawak statement on the introduction of new species, through to his concept of man. The essays represent him at his most impressive, moving from the lucidity of his early theory to the grand philosophical vision of his latest doctrine. But during the first months of 1870 he demonstrated a surprising lack of judgement by becoming embroiled in a ridiculous wager, something that he lived to regret. In the journal Scientific Opinion, which Wallace wrote for occasionally, John Hampden issued a challenge to ‘scientific men’ to prove the convexity of the surface of any inland water, and staked £500 on the outcome, stating that he would acknowledge that he had forfeited the deposit ‘if his opponent can exhibit, to the satisfaction of any intelligent referee, a convex railway, river, canal, or lake’. Wallace rose to the bait, having first asked Lyell’s opinion. According to Wallace, Lyell actively encouraged him to accept: ‘It may stop these foolish people to have it plainly shown them.’14 Perhaps the £500 was too tempting; perhaps Wallace saw himself undertaking a task of public education for the common good. A six-mile stretch of the old Bedford River was chosen, between Welney and the old Bedford bridge; referees were selected, and the editor of the Field, J. H. Walsh, was appointed umpire. It was rather like a duel, fought with poles and discs and calico flags, with spirit-levels and telescopes. Walsh decided unequivocally in Wallace’s favour, publishing the diagrams in the Field. Hampden refused to accept the verdict, and demanded his money back. Bitter dispute followed: two lawsuits, and three prosecutions of Hampden by Wallace for libel, and one by Walsh; two prison sentences for Hampden; tracts and pamphlets, accusations and defences, were fired off in every direction during the next twenty years. Hampden wrote to every learned society Wallace belonged to, and later distributed a thousand leaflets to most of the residents and tradesmen of Godalming, including ‘the professors and tutors of the Charter House’, calling him cheat, coward, swindler and impostor, and accusing him of falsehood, embezzlement and theft. What particularly stirred Wallace was a letter to his wife:

  Madam – If your infernal thief of a husband is brought home some day on a hurdle, with every bone in his head smashed to pulp, you will know the reason. Do you tell him from me he is a lying infernal thief, and as sure as his name is Wallace he never dies in his bed.

  You must be a miserable wretch to be obliged to live with a convicted felon. Do not think or let him think I have done with him.15

  Wallace should have realised that Hampden was seriously unbalanced, and quietly let the matter drop. Although the courts usually found in his favour, the legal costs mounted, and he ended up as the financial loser. But the rather ludicrous set of proceedings did his reputation no good, besides the harassment and personal abuse he suffered – ‘a tolerably severe punishment for what I did not at the time recognize as an ethical lapse’, as he comments with characteristic honesty.

  At Holly House, Barking, Wallace decided on the subject of his next book: the geographical distribution of animals. This was something he had been intrigued by ever since his collecting in the Amazon, and which became one of his keys to understanding the principles of natural selection as he sifted through the distribution patterns of insects, birds and animals in the Archipelago. ‘I have thought of such a book this two years,’ he confessed to Newton, but stopped when he found it would be the
work of years to do it all thoroughly. ‘I had just thought of a comparatively short manual such as you suggest, but Darwin was horrified at my thinking of writing a small book on such a vast subject, – & that put me off.’16 However, he promised to think of it again. Sclater, too, was urging him in the same direction. It took Wallace the best part of five years, and in the end it was sufficiently substantial to satisfy even Darwin’s appetite for thoroughness.

  Anchored again by a major project, Wallace threw himself into his usual, and slightly frenetic, range of pursuits, while he waited to hear what might happen about the Bethnal Green Museum. He wrote letters replying to the notices of Natural Selection, and pieces for Nature – reviews of Francis Galton’s influential study Hereditary Genius and Edward Tylor’s Early History of Mankind. The British Association meeting in September drew him to Liverpool – Sclater was talking about the principles to be observed in establishing a National Museum of Natural History, a topic close to his heart. The Entomological Society’s meetings were not to be missed lightly, now that he was President, in succession to Bates. Spiritualism continued to absorb a great deal of his intellectual energy, and his time. He wrote a substantial paper for a spiritualist soirée, ‘An Answer to the Arguments of Hume, Lecky, and Others, against Miracles’.

  To take on John Hume as a prelude to establishing the credentials of modern spiritualism was an act of some courage, if not folly, but Wallace had boundless confidence in his own power of reasoning, and believed he showed Hume’s arguments to be full of ‘unwarranted assumptions, fallacies, and contradictions’. His confidence was bolstered by fresh and first-hand experience. William Crookes was actively and ‘scientifically’ investigating Daniel Home’s powers as a medium, and Wallace eagerly became one of the circle. Home was one of the most convincing contemporary practitioners, and Wallace was satisfied that the table lifted without any interference, and that an accordion played several bars of ‘Home Sweet Home’ – at his own mischievous request – apparently by itself, or by means of a ‘shadowy yet defined hand’ at the bottom end (one of Home’s hands was resting on top of the accordion, the other in full view on the table).17 Wallace was also an early believer in the ‘materialisations’ that some mediums, including Mrs Guppy – the former Miss Nichol – seemed able to call into view: confining themselves to a small cabinet, in order to concentrate the energy, shadowy figures would emerge, to touch or to communicate with the observers. The sceptical claimed fraud, or commercial conjuring; the sympathetic, including Wallace, were inclined to accept the validity of at least some of these figures.