Alfred Russel Wallace by Peter Raby

Author:Peter Raby
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446498170
Publisher: Random House

10 Wallace Transformed

AT ABOUT THE same time that Annie Mitten came into his life, Wallace plunged into another transforming experience. His sustained interest in spiritualism in the years to come is a major factor, affecting not only his inner happiness and his personal relationships, but his public and professional standing, even, arguably, the course of his scientific thinking. After his intense burst of writing in the first six months of 1864, with its focus on man, the emotional turmoil of his engagement and subsequent rejection left him so flat that he produced, for him, very little scientific or literary work in 1865: a list of land-shells, and a description of twenty-one new Malayan birds for the Zoological Society; ‘Pigeons of the Malay Archipelago’ for the Ibis, in October; ‘Progress of Civilisation in Northern Celebes’ for the Ethnological; and, in June, ‘How to Civilise Savages’ at Spencer’s request for the Reader – all spun out of existing material – although he strengthened his language on the subject of the civilised and the savage: ‘The white men in our colonies are too frequently the true savages, and require to be taught and Christianised quite as much as the natives.’1 That summer, however, he embarked on a new voyage into unknown territory, as he began to attend seances.

His enthusiasm had all the intensity of a conversion. He moved, apparently, from a position of general interest – and Wallace was always open to new ideas, and beliefs – to fervent advocacy in a matter of months. Undoubtedly, he was prepared by his earlier contact with Mesmerism and phrenology. His successful experiments with his pupils at Leicester, and with the Indians of the Amazon, and his faith in phrenological ‘readings’ of his own personality, predisposed him to think that there was a spiritual dimension to existence that could be scientifically analysed, even measured. An initial session on 22 July 1865 in a friend’s house – ‘with none but members of his own family present’ – produced the standard menu of rappings and table shifting.2 He was confident that these signs had not been produced by the physical action of anyone present, and similar happenings were subsequently reproduced in his own home, ‘scores of times’. He moved on to seances with well-known mediums such as Mrs Marshall. What it all might mean was for a future stage of enquiry. But once he had experienced for himself the physical manifestations of tappings and rappings, table tiltings and levitations, names written on blank bits of paper, musical instruments spontaneously producing sounds, and, most wonderful of all, the production of fruit and bunches of flowers, he was convinced that there must be an unseen cause, a force that could not be explained away in conventional physical terms. He was aware that some mediums might be fraudulent; he understood the need for careful, systematic checks. Characteristically, he was inclined to give great credence to events that happened in his own home. In November 1866, Fanny discovered that Miss Nichol, who was lodging with the Sims, seemed to have special gifts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.