INTR OD UCTION. v ii 



success in all your pursuits, and, God knows, if admirable 

 zeal and energy deserve success, most amply do you deserve 

 it;" and in 1876 he wrote to him, "You have paid me the 

 highest conceivable compliment by what you say of your 

 work in relation to my chapters on distribution in the ' Origin,' 

 and I heartily thank you for it." 



In one important point Mr. Wallace early found himself 

 in divergence from Mr. Darwin. This was as to the limits 

 of natural selection as applied to man. Mr. Darwin saw no 

 reason to imagine a break or a new force or kind of action in 

 regard to the development of man, and especially of his brain 

 and mind ; while Mr. Wallace, from the belief that savage man 

 possesses a brain too large for his actual requirements, from the 

 absence of a general hairy covering in lower men, from the 

 difficulty of conceiving the origin of some of man's physical 

 and mental faculties by natural selection, and from the nature 

 of the moral sense, came to the conclusion that a superior 

 intelligence, acting nevertheless through natural and universal 

 laws, has guided the development of man in a definite direction 

 and for a special purpose. 



This divergence of view from that of Darwinism pure and 

 simple may be interestingly illustrated from an autobiographi- 

 cal passage in Mr. Wallace's Essays " On Miracles and Modern 

 Spiritualism," 1881. He says : "From the age of fourteen I 

 lived with an elder brother, of advanced liberal and philosophi- 

 cal opinions, and I soon lost (and have never since regained) 

 all capacity of being affected in my judgments, either by clerical 

 influence or religious prejudice. Up to the time when I first 

 became acquainted with the facts of spiritualism, I was a con- 

 firmed philosophical sceptic, rejoicing in the works of Voltaire, 

 Strauss, and Carl Vogt, and an ardent admirer (as I am still) 

 of Herbert Spencer. I was so thorough and confirmed a 

 materialist that I could not at that time find a place in my 

 mind for the conception of spiritual existence, or for any other 

 agencies in the universe than matter and force. Facts, how- 

 ever, are stubborn things. My curiosity was at first excited by 

 some slight but inexplicable phenomena occurring in a friend's 

 family, and my desire for knowledge and love of truth forced 

 me to continue the inquiry. The facts became more and 

 more assured, more and more varied, more and more removed 

 from anything that modern science taught, or modern philo- 



