In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace ...

Heretical Culture / 231
indefinite life and perfectibility. To us, the whole purpose, the only raison d’etre
of the world—with all its complexities of physical structure, with its grand
geological progress, the slow evolution of the vegetable and animal kingdoms,
and the ultimate appearance of man—was the development of the human spirit
in association with the human body. 16
This, then, was Wallace’s raison d’être: a belief in a purposeful cosmos
that under the direction of a higher intelligence inexorably led to the appearance
of humans who were capable of perfectibility and would, in time, achieve
immortality of the spirit. It was a consilient worldview that tied together his
many and diverse interests and commitments, ideologies and philosophies,
and was ultimately grounded in a unique form of Wallacean scientism. Its
origin dates back to the night lectures he attended as a young man at the
Mechanics’ Institutes, but whose ultimate congealing was the result of countless
experiences and ideas he encountered throughout his varied and adventurous
life voyage. Despite Wallace’s obvious intelligence and creativity that
led him to see the anomalies of the accepted scientific paradigm as evidence
for a new theoretical model of nature with regards to the origin of species,
Wallace was unable to extricate himself from the general nineteenth-century
progressivism of most intellectuals, or to look beyond the positivistic vision
of humanity culturally advancing toward a more elevated intellectual and
moral level. 17 Twenty years earlier, in the paper that caused Darwin so much
grief over man, Wallace was “forced to conclude that it is due to the inherent
progressive power of those glorious qualities which raise us so immeasurably
above our fellow animals, and at the same time afford us the surest proof that
there are other and higher existences than ourselves, from whom these qualities
may have been derived, and towards whom we may be ever tending.” 18
Two decades later, in a Fortnightly Review article “Evolution and Character,”
Wallace minced no words: “My view...was,andis,that there is a difference
in kind, intellectually and morally, between man and other animals.” 19
Wallace’s teleology also led him to argue for the uniqueness of humans not
only on earth, but in the entire cosmos as well, a subject on which he characteristically
wrote an entire book. In Man’s Place in the Universe Wallace
notes the extreme improbability that every contingent step of evolutionary
change from basic bacteria to big brains could possibly have been repeated
somewhere else: “The ultimate development of man has, therefore roughly
speaking, depended on something like a million distinct modifications, each
of a special type and dependent on some precedent changes in the organic
and inorganic environments, or in both. The chances against such an enormously
long series of definite modifications having occurred twice over...
are almost infinite.” 20