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

The Psychology of Biography /9
which includes independence of thought, separatist tendencies, and especially
an exceptionally high openness to experience that led him to make a number
of revolutionary scientific discoveries, but with a concomitant level of gullibility
that made Wallace more susceptible to many non-empirical and nonscientific
assertions, most notably his uncritical endorsement of the spiritualism
movement.
The five external forces in decreasing order of influence on the upper horizontal
axis represent the cultural variables that affected Wallace’s thinking
throughout his intellectual life and include: (a) Spiritualism and phrenology,
and other such quasi- and nonscientific phenomena popular in Victorian England
throughout much of the nineteenth century; (b) Teleological purposefulness,
the belief that all life is directed toward a goal by a higher force,
pervasive throughout many fields of thought, but especially prevalent in both
natural theology and natural history; (c) Scientific communal support in both
the rejection of natural selection to the human mind, as well as for spiritualism
and other nonscientific claims; (d) Anthropological experiences in Amazonia
and the Malay Archipelago that directly influenced Wallace’s hyperselectionism
in the controversy over the evolution of the human mind, as well
as his social theories, attitudes, and activist causes; and (e) Working-class
associations tethered to the populism of the Mechanics’ Institutes through
which Wallace gained his education, the socialism of Robert Owen in Wallace’s
younger years, and the worldview of Herbert Spencer in his later life,
all of which directed his social activism in a distinct direction.
The Historical Matrix Model is used as a heuristic in the middle chapters
of this biography, dealing with the historical variables in the matrix, their
interaction, and how they interface with social and cultural events and the
intellectual climate in which Wallace lived. The primary focus of the model
is the problem of the evolution of the human mind, over which Wallace and
Darwin broke their intellectual bonds and that so came to dominate Wallace’s
thoughts and actions. I have placed this problem in the upper left corner of
the HMM in order to adjoin closely the two most significant internal and
external causal variables—Hyper-selectionism and Spiritualism respectively.
Broken-lined arrows represent force-vectors, or direct linkages from an influencing
force, so that the farther each is from the problem, the weaker the
link. The decision of relative position is based on textual analysis and cultural–historical
interpretation.
It follows from this factorial design that the HMM could be used to examine
the effects of the various forces on each other, since they do sometimes
interact, and this is occasionally done in the biography. But the overriding
flow of the force-vectors is from thought or culture to the thesis question,
arguably a primary focal point in Wallace’s life and career. Designing the