Alfred Russel Wallace 



has more opponents than anti-vaccination. No one can 

 overlook the fact that Spiritualism has many scientific 

 exponents — Myers, Crookes, Lodge, Barrett and others. 

 Prejudices against Spiritualism are as unscientific as the 

 credulity which swallows the mutter ings of every medium. 

 Podmore's two ponderous volumes on the History of 

 Spritualism are marred by an obvious anxiety to make 

 the very least, if not the very worst, of every phenomenon 

 alleged to be spiritualistic. That kind of deliberate and 

 obstinate blindness which prided itself on being the clear 

 cold light of science Wallace scorned and denounced. He 

 did not insist upon spiritualistic manifestations shaping 

 themselves according to his own predesigned moulds in 

 order to be investigated. He watched for facts whatever 

 form they assumed. He fully recognised that the phenomena 

 he saw and heard could be easily ridiculed, but behind them 

 he as fully believed that he came into contact with spiritual 

 realities which remain, and which led him to other explana- 

 tions of the higher faculties of man and the origin of life 

 and consciousness than were acceptable to the materialistic 

 followers of Haeckel, Btichner and Huxley. And who dares 

 dogmatically to assert in the name of science and in the 

 second decade of the twentieth century, when the deeper 

 meanings of evolution are being revealed, and the philosophy 

 of Bergson is spoken about on the housetops, that he was 

 wrong ? In these views may he not become the peer of 

 Darwin ? 



At first blush it may seem to be a bad example of special 

 pleading to attempt to discover the reason for his opposition 

 to vaccination in his idealism. But it is not far from the 

 truth. He believed in a Ministry of Public Health, that 

 doctors should be servants of the State, and that they 

 should be paid according as they kept people well and not 

 ill. Health is the natural condition of the human body 



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