PART VI {Continued) 

 II. — Spiritualism 



" The completely materialistic mind of my youth and early manhood has 

 been slowly moulded into the socialistic, spiritualistic, and theistic mind I 

 now exhibit — a mind which Is, as my scientific friends think, so weak and 

 credulous in its declining years, as to believe that fniit and flowers, domestic 

 animals, glorious birds and insects, wool, cotton, sugar and rubber, metals 

 and gems, were all foreseen and foreordained for the education and enjoyment 

 of man. The whole cumulative argument of my ' World of Life ' Is that in its 

 every detail it calls for the agency of a mind . . . enormously above and beyond 

 any human mind . . . Whether this Unknown Reality is a single Being and 

 acts everywhere in the universe as direct creator, organiser, and director of 

 every minutest motion ... or through ' infinite grades of beings,' as I suggest, 

 comes to much the same thing. Mine seems a more clear and intelligible sup- 

 position . . and it is the teaching of the Bible, of Swedenborg, and of Milton." 

 — Letter from A. R. Wallace to James Marchant, written in 1913. 



THE letters on Spiritualism which Wallace wrote cast 

 further light on the personal attitude of mind which*" 

 he maintained towards that subject. He was an un- 

 biased scientific investigator, commencing on the *' lower 

 level " of spirit phenomena, such as raps and similar 

 physical manifestations of " force by unseen intelligences,'* 

 and passing on to a clearer understanding of the pheno- 

 mena of mesmerism and telepathy; to the materialisation 

 of, and conversation with, the spirits of those who had 

 been known in the body, until the conviction of life after 

 death, as the inevitable crowning conclusion to the long 

 process of evolution, was reached in the remarkable chap- 

 ter with which he concludes " The World of Life " — an 

 impressive prose poem. 



Like that of many other children, Wallace's early child- 

 hood was spent in an orthodox religious atmosphere, which, 

 whilst awakening within him vague emotions of religious 



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