BY JUNE 1876, even the indefatigable Wallace felt beaten down. The Dell had lost its magic. He told friends that he was sick of the climate, which destroyed the delicate plants in his garden, and frustrated by his isolation from London, which prevented him from attending evening scientific meetings and social gatherings with friends.1 But there were other concerns, both financial and personal. He was most alarmed by the health of five-year-old Will, who was wasting away from an unexplained illness, a frightening replay of Bertie’s fatal condition. And he had received a communication from his dead brother William—in the form of automatic writing by way of Agnes Guppy—warning him to leave Grays as soon as possible.2 The advance from Macmillan allowed him to hang on to his property just long enough to sell it at a reasonable price. He then moved his family to Dorking, forty miles to the west and only a short train ride to London. The immediate improvement in Will’s health convinced him of the astuteness of his decision.
Not long before the move, Wallace had been unanimously elected president of Section D, the Biology Section, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was scheduled to meet in Glasgow in early September. Michael Foster, a physiologist at Cambridge University and one of the general officers of the association, gave him the news in March. The president’s duties, he said, required that he also take charge of Section D’s Anthropology Department, while the two vice presidents headed the other two (Zoology and Botany). “This year it seemed right that the Department of Anthropology should have the honour of having the President—and the council felt it could not be in better hands,” Foster said.3 It was the highest honor the organization had awarded him since he began attending its meetings in 1862. Wallace assented. The next step was likely to be the presidency of the association itself. But the 1876 meeting would be his last. In that year, he reached both his apogee and his nadir.
The meeting opened auspiciously for Wallace. His address to the section, given on September 6, was eloquent and thought-provoking. After paying obligatory homage to Darwin’s greatness and reaffirming his belief in the general truths of the doctrine of natural selection, he reiterated his conviction that Darwin’s theory of sexual selection as the chief cause of coloration in birds and insects was insufficient to explain all the facts. He was currently studying the evolution of species on islands, he said, and had discovered striking examples of phenomena that could not be attributed to sexual selection. Large size and pale color characterized many unrelated species of butterflies endemic to islands, for example, while their allies on the mainland varied more in size and color. These were facts for which only natural selection could account. Because of the smaller number of predators and the less intense pressure from inter- and intraspecific competition, animals with traits that might be disadvantageous to mainland species flourished on islands.4
Wallace extended the theory of natural selection to insular floras. The peculiarity of these floras, he suggested, was due to the scarcity of flower-frequenting insects. On the most isolated oceanic islands, plants with showy flowers were rare. The unusually high proportion of ferns was due not to an equable climate and perennial moisture but to the relative absence of competing “phaenogamous” (flowering) plants, which, in turn, was a consequence of the scarcity of pollinating insects. On islands where flowering plants outnumbered ferns and “flower-haunting” insects were rare, the flowers were mainly small, green, and inconspicuous. Only those plants not requiring insect pollination won the struggle for existence and proliferated. Wallace felt that such facts were not appreciated because of the inadequacy of museums, which failed to group floras and faunas by location. If science hoped to make any progress in the understanding of geographic distribution, museum displays and collecting cabinets had to be arranged geographically.
Wallace then touched on the subject of humankind’s antiquity and origin. He was treading on dangerous ground and knew it, but since he was also chairman of the section’s Anthropology Department that year, he could not avoid the topic. Against his better judgment, he had given in to the secretary of the association, who had urged him to discuss recent discoveries in anthropology and ethnology.5 He reminded his audience that only twenty years earlier, scientists had scoffed at the idea that human beings had coexisted with now extinct animals. No one doubted any longer that the human species was derived from the lower animals, but some believed that the human mind “and even some of [humankind’s] physical characteristics” arose from the action of other forces. “We need hardly be surprised [at the] tendency among men of science to pass from one extreme to the other; from a profession (so few years ago) of total ignorance as to the mode of origin of all living things, to a claim to almost complete knowledge of the whole progress of the universe, from the speck of living protoplasm up to the highest development of the human intellect. Yet this is really what we have seen in the last sixteen years.” Wallace believed that opposition was the best incentive to progress; even good theories should not be allowed free rein.
One such theory was the linearity of human progress from a primitive to a civilized state. There was much evidence to the contrary. In Java, for example, the magnificent ruins of Borobodur and Prabanam loomed over the hovels of the current inhabitants, suggesting degeneration, not advancement: “The course of [our] development has been far less direct and simple than has hitherto been supposed; … instead of resembling a single tide with its advancing and receding ripples, it must rather be compared to the progress from neap to spring tides, both the rise and the depression being comparatively greater as the waters of true civilisation slowly advance towards the highest level they can reach.”
Wallace’s address, carefully constructed to skirt controversial issues, won praise, but his luck changed later that week. As chairman of the Anthropology Department, he presided over the reading of a paper that had aroused considerable debate among council members before its presentation. A single vote had prevented the paper’s rejection, an outcome that angered many at the Glasgow meeting.
The stirring days of the wars between Thomas Huxley and Richard Owen had passed. The press, which had been clamoring for years for something more newsworthy from the British Association, was calling the 1876 meeting one of the dullest on record. The Times reminded men of science of their duty to engage the interest of the public and spend less time on esoteric matters. But a paper on clairvoyance was not what anyone had in mind.6 Suddenly all eyes turned to the Anthropology Department and William Fletcher Barrett, a thirty-two-year-old physicist at the Royal College of Science in Dublin and a former student of John Tyndall. Barrett was also a hypnotist. His paper, “On Some Phenomena Associated with Abnormal Conditions of the Mind,” was the most exciting event of the week. More than a thousand people filled the lecture hall, with two hundred more filling the aisles.
Barrett’s paper addressed two subjects, mesmerism and spiritualism. He first described the case of a girl he had hypnotized whose most unusual aspect was “the degree of exaltation of [her] perceptive powers.” She displayed the usual responses to pressure on different parts of her skull, altering her behavior and expression depending on the place touched, as predicted by phrenologists. What was most remarkable, however, was her uncanny sensitivity to his voice. If he whispered her name, she responded at once. As he moved farther and farther away, even out of sight and earshot, she continued to respond, though more weakly as the distance increased. When he tasted or smelled something or touched something hot or cold, even while he was standing behind her and at some distance, she reacted as he did. No one else was able to produce these effects on her; the rapport between the two was extraordinary. Barrett disputed William Benjamin Carpenter’s interpretation of this uncanny affinity. Carpenter denied the existence of any special rapport between hypnotist and subject. According to Carpenter’s theory of “unconscious cerebration,” Barrett said, the sensitive girl already would have been convinced of the hypnotist’s ability to exert a special influence over her before entering the trance state, just as people follow the commands and actions of a charismatic leader. “I do not think that the whole mystery of this so-called ‘rapport’ can be disposed of quite so easily,” Barrett asserted.7
To demonstrate his point, Barrett described a few of his other experiments with this girl. After having induced the trance state in her, he picked a playing card at random from a drawer, glanced at it, and concealed it inside a book. Bringing the closed book to her, he asked her to describe what was inside. She said that she saw something with five red spots. The card was the five of diamonds. When he inserted a card in the book without having looked at it, she could not describe it. He next asked her to travel, by means of her imagination, to Regent Street in London and name the shops. Although she never had been to London, she described one shop that he was thinking of at that moment. Her astonishing ability convinced him of the existence of clairvoyance, or thought reading, which he likened to the conduction of electricity through a material across space. The nervous activity that constituted thought could be excited in the clairvoyant by corresponding nervous activity in another individual, which was transmitted across space by some sort of radiant energy unperceived by any of the senses. He believed that the facts he was presenting justified further inquiry: “All I wish to urge is, that it is not wise to push forward a natural feeling of incredulity on this matter, as a barrier to a possible extension of knowledge.”
Barrett then turned to the topic of spiritualist phenomena, which he divided into two classes. One class manifested itself in either subdued light or total darkness and was witnessed by only the “favored few.” The well-known case of Daniel Dunglas Home floating from one room to another or handling hot coals with impunity belonged to this class. Eminent men whose sincerity and honesty could not be doubted either saw or thought they saw these phenomena; in his opinion, the latter was closer to the truth. Relaxed by the serene ambience, their senses “enfeebled” by near-darkness, they would yield to the emphatic suggestions of the medium. To test this hypothesis, he once hypnotized a young man and drew his attention to a pair of shoes on a table. He told the young man that he was standing in the shoes and was now going to rise up and float around the room, and then he pointed to the successive stages of his imaginary flight. Upon awakening, the subject was convinced that Barrett had floated around the room.
The other class of phenomena occurred in broad daylight and was witnessed by the skeptical and credulous alike. The usual explanation was “clever conjuring,” which, though often true, could not explain all the facts. “I am well aware that I shall arouse feelings of incredulity, if not contempt, on the part of those who have never investigated the phenomena,” he predicted. He related the case of a young girl—the daughter of a gentleman of good social position—who was troubled by episodes of knocking. The knocking, which occurred when the child was in a “passive” condition, displayed some “intelligence”—say, by keeping time with a tune or spelling out words. Even in the full glare of the sun, when every precaution to prevent deception had been taken, the knocking was heard in different parts of the room, beyond the reach of the child, whose feet and hands he watched closely. The knocks were not limited to the house but occurred on the lawn as well. After dozens of tests, and with skeptical friends attesting to their reality, he was compelled to conclude that the sounds were real and not produced by any visible agency. “Is it not possible that there may be some foundation for the stories of occasional supernatural eruptions into the present visible universe?” Barrett asked. “I do not here refer to the great mysteries of religion, but to the numberless cases which float in families wherever you go; many, no doubt, are sheer hallucination, but still a formidable residue exists that cannot be explained.”
Barrett rejected Carpenter’s highly publicized opinion that these matters, which defied common sense, should be regarded as “a diluted insanity,” an opinion he found astounding. “Common sense,” Barrett protested, “is set up as the tribunal before which every fact must pass muster before it can be accepted.” He concluded by appealing to the true scientific spirit, which did not repudiate ideas on a priori grounds alone, and he recommended a patient, impartial, and systematic inquiry by a specially appointed scientific committee.
After Barrett had finished his presentation, Wallace addressed the audience: “Ladies and gentlemen, I think you must all agree with me that I have hardly heard in this room a paper which, whatever you may think of its subject matter, has been treated in a more careful, and a more truly scientific manner, than this paper of Professor Barrett’s.” Here he was interrupted by applause. “We may hardly wonder at this when we consider that he is a thoroughly trained man of science,” he continued. “As this subject is one which will naturally excite a considerable amount of discussion, and perhaps some feeling, I hope you will support me in my endeavours to restrict the discussion of it within certain limited bounds. I think it absolutely necessary, as this paper is a record of facts solely, that we should not allow persons to speak who know nothing whatever of the facts.” More applause. “I will call upon those gentlemen who, I believe, are prepared to add something to our knowledge on this interesting though mysterious subject.”
Sir William Crookes was the first to speak. Crookes said that he had come to the meeting to listen, not make comments, but Barrett’s paper, which he praised, brought several things to mind. He objected to Barrett’s characterization of the state of the scientific men who had witnessed phenomena at Home’s séances:
A physicist shows an experiment before an audience of physicists. Persons might say, “Your audience think they see it; you have very wonderful … mesmeric powers; you throw a kind of glamour over your audience; nothing takes place; but you make them think they see them.” That is exactly the kind of reasoning which I have heard and read applied to certain very extraordinary phenomena which I had been investigating for some years, and which I am glad to see Mr. Barrett is just nibbling at the edges of.
As a scientist, he said, he never had investigated phenomena except under his own test conditions: at his own house, among his own select friends and spectators, and with apparatuses he had designed. He always had let the device test the phenomena, avoiding the evidence of his senses as much as possible. “But when it is necessary to trust to my own senses, I must entirely dissent from Mr. Barrett, when he says a trained physical inquirer is no match for a professional conjuror. I maintain a physical inquirer is more than a match.”
The physicist John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh), who likewise expressed his original intention to remain on the sidelines, instead came forward to congratulate Barrett for his moral courage. Strutt was thirty-four years old at the time and would later discover the element argon, for which he would win the Nobel Prize. He had been attracted to the subject of spiritualism after reading Crookes’s articles on the subject in the Quarterly Journal of Science. “I have seen enough to convince me that those are wrong who wish to prevent investigation by casting ridicule on those who may feel inclined to engage in it,” he said. For most of his life, he was intrigued by psychic phenomena and would not hesitate to associate his weighty name with psychic research, but he was less convinced than Wallace and Crookes that such phenomena had a supernatural origin.
Charles Ottley Groom-Napier, author of The Book of Nature and the Book of Man, next gave a long-winded account of his own spiritualist powers, including examples of his clairvoyant talents, which provoked grumbles from the audience. Some grew impatient with him and laughed at his descriptions of his experiences. “Give us facts!” someone shouted. Undeterred, Groom-Napier continued to give personal testimony until he was interrupted by more laughter, shouting, and ridicule and then finally told to shut up. Humiliated, he returned to his seat.
A Reverend Thompson then rose to tell the audience that he had been waiting for thirty-five years for a good scientific demonstration of spiritualism and had yet to see one. Spiritualism, he said, was not a science like other sciences, and discussions of it did not belong at the British Association meetings. This time Wallace interrupted. “Please do not give us generalisations,” he said, “give us some fact or statement.” His request was seconded, but to no avail. After reading and hearing about these matters, Thompson continued, he had not found anyone among his circle of friends and acquaintances who was convinced of the truth of the phenomena. Wallace once again interrupted him, warning, “I must stop you if you go on in that way. I have told you we cannot have mere opinions and statements of disbelief. We must have facts, and if you cannot give us any, I shall rule that you must sit down.”
“I am a fact,” Thompson declared, evoking laughter from the audience. “Why should those gentlemen who hold opinions on the opposite side be afraid to have their opinions overhauled?” He tried to go on, but was derided. “Will the President kindly keep order for me?” he pleaded. Wallace asked for silence and allowed Thompson to sum up his argument. When Thompson had finished, Wallace said, “I think in order to limit this discussion within reasonable time, it ought to be made a rule that the speakers should reply to the paper, and not to the accidental remarks of other speakers. If they do so we shall have other gentlemen replying to them, and others to them, till we get miles away from the subject with which we commenced. I therefore beg, as chairman of this meeting, to rule that we will have no answers by one speaker to another unless the point refers directly to a matter brought forward by the reader of the paper.”
“Hear, hear!” someone cheered.
Thompson now raised further objections to the findings of séances. Why confine séances to a few friends, he wondered. Let them be tested publicly. To this suggestion, some members of the audience objected, and the room erupted in a cacophony of conversation, accompanied by the stamping of feet. “I am glad you approve of my sentiments,” Thompson shouted sarcastically. Wallace demanded that he sit down.
“You won’t hear my case because it is too strong,” Thompson complained, getting in one last word before taking his seat.
Carpenter, who had been uncharacteristically silent up to this point, asked Wallace for permission to speak. The audience quieted as he rose from his chair. He began by raising objections to Barrett’s quotations of his work, which, he said, had been taken out of context. “For instance, when I say of phenomena, that [they are] ‘impossible to believe,’ I do not mean at all to assert that we know everything. … I do not think anyone has a right to say I have ever been unwilling to receive new evidence on any fact.” He admitted that some individuals seemed to have the curious power of thought reading, which he had not yet investigated. “I believe it is one of the special gifts of a detective policeman [who] has a greater power of what is called ‘seeing through a millstone’ than other people.” The detective perceives certain signals—tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures—not consciously but intuitively. While not denying the possibility of direct communication between one nervous system and another, Carpenter held that body language was a more probable explanation. “[W]e are not at all unwilling to investigate, if only the things are presented to us in a way which enable us to investigate.” This was followed by applause.
Over the years, Carpenter continued, he had attended many séances and been told over and over again that his disbelief interfered with the manifestations. Lately, however, he had gone to séances held by Henry Slade, a celebrated American medium who was visiting London, and had witnessed astonishing things. He proposed that Slade come to his house and conduct a séance. “If Dr. Slade can do in my house, with my chairs, with my tables, with my slates, without any previous preparation, what he showed me in his own room, I will then honestly say this is a case for thorough investigation.” The audience enthusiastically applauded his challenge.
A Reverend Dr. McIlwaine, who spoke after Carpenter, impeached the credibility of Barrett’s witnesses, one of whom, he said, was a relative of his and not fit to give evidence. In his own experience, the majority of mediums were young girls, who were not proper persons to base great superstructures on, a remark that drew both laughter and hisses from the audience. But McIlwaine went further than Wallace could tolerate when he referred to what he called the great facts of the Bible. “I cannot allow theology to be introduced into this discussion,” Wallace interrupted. McIlwaine dropped the biblical references and began an account of a séance held in Belfast in 1856. Wallace asked whether he had been present. McIlwaine said that he had not been present but could give evidence from secondhand sources.
“We cannot have it,” Wallace declared.
“I will give you the name of the gentleman,” McIlwaine replied. “That won’t prove that he is trustworthy,” Wallace said. “You have accused one of your own [relatives] of being untrustworthy; how do we know that these people are trustworthy?”
McIlwaine backed off again and instead offered an American professor, whose name he could not remember, who had visited his town and produced a number of phenomena.
“You must not allude to people without giving the name,” Wallace said.
The professor was a charlatan, McIlwaine continued, ignoring Wallace’s objection. The man had caused all sorts of mischief before his true identity was discovered. McIlwaine concluded that spiritualist phenomena were due to three things: the excitability of women, the credulity of the observers, and imposture. But before Wallace could again intervene, Barrett defended himself by repudiating McIlwaine’s credibility. McIlwaine’s relative was not the person to whom he had alluded in his paper. That person was an Englishman not even remotely connected to McIlwaine and someone he could not have known. As for the mesmeric phenomena, they had occurred in the house of McIlwaine’s brother-in-law, a man with whom McIlwaine had not communicated for many years and whose credibility McIlwaine had impugned because of a difference of religious opinion.
Hyde Clark, the chairman of the Psychology Committee of the Anthropological Institute, interjected that he did not believe that Barrett’s paper contained any new facts. It was an old story, he said, told time and time again. The phenomena had to be presented in such a way that “men of sense” should be able to reproduce them themselves. Carpenter agreed, noting that scientists had accepted Crookes’s statements about his various apparatuses because they could be reproduced by anyone. If Crookes could reproduce spiritualist phenomena in the same manner, those phenomena would receive the same attention.
It was Wallace’s turn to speak. He had never seen a perfect case of clairvoyance himself, he said, but he believed in its probability:
There are certain phenomena you cannot bring before you. They must be sought for, and a case very much in point is that of the meteorolites [sic], the fall of which was for many centuries disbelieved by scientific men, and it was only after a considerable number had been actually recorded that they were accepted as a fact. According to the general system of unbelief, we ought to disbelieve [in them] even now, because all the scientific men cannot prognosticate when a meteorolite is going to fall, and we cannot go and see them fall.
Barrett rose once again. He congratulated the association for allowing the presentation and full discussion of phenomena previously shunned at such meetings and praised the audience for its polite reception of a controversial topic. Although he was not personally prepared to accept the spiritualist explanation of the phenomena, he lauded men like Wallace and Crookes, who had maintained objectivity in their investigations. He challenged Carpenter to account for every phenomenon as fraudulent, not just a great many. He called on all his fellow scientists who had witnessed these phenomena to have the courage to describe their experiences in public and accept criticism if it was due. He started to propose a resolution, but shouts from those opposing him blocked him, while others cried out for order. “I am out of order in asking the section to pass the resolution,” Barrett shouted, raising his voice for the first time, “but I think I am not out of order in asking that the resolution be referred to a committee of the section.” Barrett proposed that a committee of scientific men be appointed to inquire into the phenomena of mesmerism and spiritualism to remove any uncertainty that currently prevailed. Ignoring the suggestion, Carpenter returned to Barrett’s earlier objection that he had characterized the belief in spiritualism as “a diluted insanity.” He had used that phrase, Carpenter said, about beliefs that were on “extremely” inadequate grounds, not about every belief.
“I am only too glad to be corrected on this point by Dr. Carpenter,” Barrett said, “for it is further confirmation of the facts in my paper with regard to the gradual change of opinion.”
Carpenter asked Barrett what those facts of spiritualism were: “If, for instance, I visit Dr. Slade, and the chair jumps up and then falls back again, is that a fact of spiritualism? How do I know that it is a fact of spiritualism till I have carefully investigated that chair, till I have found whether there are concealed springs and mechanism to make that chair jump up?” In refutation of clairvoyance, he told a story about his friend Sir James Simpson, who placed a £500 note in a sealed box and offered it as a prize to any clairvoyant who could tell him the note’s serial number. No one had ever succeeded.
Carpenter’s remarks angered Wallace, who had himself visited Slade only a couple of weeks before the British Association meeting and had been convinced of his authenticity. Wallace wanted to make a “slight” correction to Carpenter’s clarification of his phrase “diluted insanity.” Carpenter had applied that phrase to Crookes, and everyone knew it, he said. It was not right to put a new slant on it. As for the monetary note, one negative was insufficient to disprove established facts. Why should anyone believe that there was a note in the box in the first place, he asked. “How do we know that this was not a piece of blank paper? We are asked to take these things on hearsay.” If Carpenter disbelieved Barrett’s facts, why should Wallace believe Carpenter’s?
“I will not stand here and allow the character of Sir James Simpson to be called in question,” Carpenter exclaimed.
“I call no man’s character in question,” Wallace retorted.
But his disparagement of Simpson offended others besides Carpenter. “You said, ‘How did you know that it was a genuine note?’” Carpenter replied heatedly, encouraged by cheers of support. Wallace protested that those were Carpenter’s recollections, not documentary evidence, at which point Barrett interrupted, fearing that the discussion threatened to degenerate into a shouting match or worse. His congratulations to the group for their gentlemanly behavior had been premature. People were leaving in disgust. “Don’t let us break up in anger,” Barrett pleaded. “There has at least been sufficient evidence given to show that full inquiry ought to be made.” But the discussion came to an abrupt end, and those in the audience who remained clamored for the next paper. Barrett’s recommendation to establish an ad-hoc committee to study the validity of psychic phenomena was tabled indefinitely and would never be brought up again at a meeting of the British Association.
The issue of spiritualism and science, simmering beneath the surface for five years, had finally arrived at its Armageddon. Sides were taken, and the battle commenced. The first sortie came from Edwin Ray Lankester, a twenty-nine-year-old fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, and a professor of zoology at University College, London. Lankester spoke for the scientific establishment when he wrote a scathing letter to the Times accusing Wallace of having degraded the British Association’s annual meeting.8 Wallace replied indignantly to Lankester and attempted to show that the charge was “wholly without foundation.” The secretary of Section D had brought Barrett’s paper before the subcommittee of the Anthropology Department, Wallace said, but after a full discussion the subcommittee had vetoed its presentation. The paper next passed to the section committee, which decided to let the paper be read, though the decision was not unanimous. “Professor Lankester is evidently ignorant of the fact that the reading of this paper was decided after a vote taken in two Committees. … As to [his] opinion as to what branches of inquiry are to be tabooed as ‘degrading,’ we have, on the other side, the practical evidence of such men as Lord Rayleigh, Mr. Crookes, Dr. Carpenter, and Colonel Lane-Fox—none of them inferior in scientific eminence to Professor Lankester, yet all taking part in the discussion, and all maintaining that discussion and inquiry were necessary.” Moreover, the paper received the attention of the president of the British Association, Thomas Andrews, and of a crowded audience that seemed eager to hear more on the subject.9
But a member of the Anthropology subcommittee, a man named J. Park Harrison, thought that Wallace had unfairly tried to place blame on the committee and subcommittee of Section D, when in fact it was Wallace’s own underhandedness that had been responsible. In a rebuttal to Wallace in the Times, Harrison wrote that the subcommittee had voted by a slim majority to refer the paper “in the usual way”—that is, to the committee of Section D itself. Wallace, however, had spoken against this proposal, urging that such a move would practically shelve the paper since the majority of the committee’s members undoubtedly would oppose any discussion of spiritualism at the association. Nevertheless, the subcommittee voted to pass along the paper. Despite a request to have the paper forwarded in time for a general meeting of the committee, the paper reached the secretary’s office after most of the members had left Glasgow. The scientific merit of the paper was therefore discussed before a much smaller meeting. Once again, Wallace had pleaded on the paper’s behalf, and by a majority of one—his own vote—he had won.10
Augustus Henry Lane-Fox (later General Pitt-Rivers), president of the Anthropological Institute of London and a member of the Anthropology subcommittee, came to Wallace’s defense. Contrary to his statement, Harrison had been in a minority “in wishing to taboo the subject.” Lane-Fox continued, “So far from meriting or receiving obloquy from men of science on this account, I believe that the Department of Anthropology as a practical science will only do itself honour by boldly grappling with the errors of our times.” How was science to play a leading role in preventing the public from “falling into the absurdities of past ages [with respect to] necromancy” if men professing to be anthropologists were afflicted with “a superstitious terror” of this subject and were “content to limit their investigations exclusively to old mounds, old scratches, or the relative position of people’s toes?” He agreed that science had a perfect right to veto the “intrusion of the empirics” on ground that it already had reclaimed and mapped out on its own, but who said that science had claims on the domain of the will and consciousness? “It is absurd,” he noted, “to speak of all previous experience in a field of inquiry where there is no experience.”11
Lane-Fox’s impassioned plea notwithstanding, Lankester and his supporters were bent on further mischief. He and a former Oxonian, Horatio Donkin, an assistant physician at the Westminster Hospital, plotted to expose Henry Slade as a fraud in order to humiliate Wallace, Crookes, and other scientists who had put their faith in what the Lankester camp considered nothing more than charlatanry and self-delusion. Slade, a spiritualist from Michigan, had stopped off in London in July 1876 while en route to Russia at the invitation of a committee from the Imperial University of Saint Petersburg that wanted to test his powers. During the previous fifteen years, Slade had impressed numerous skeptics in America by producing written messages on blank slates, which had been sealed and placed in full view of investigators. Slade charged a nominal fee for his séances, operated in broad daylight, and performed other feats, including having an accordion play a tune in the manner of Home. He dared the foremost scientific figures of the day to attend his séances and investigate him.
Lankester first visited Slade on September 11 at a house on Upper Bedford Place. Slade led him into a well-lighted room furnished with a four-legged table and invited him to take a seat at the table. Slade sat catty-corner to him, took his hand, and asked if he had ever attended a séance; Lankester replied that he had been to two of them. As he lapsed into a trance state, Slade suddenly began to shiver, as though exposed to cold, and told Lankester that the influence was very strong that morning. There were three taps, which shook the table, and Slade said that these phenomena had been occurring for twelve years, ever since the death of his wife, Allie. It was Allie’s spirit that wrote to him and produced the phenomena, he said. He showed Lankester a clean double-sided slate, free of writing, with a pencil resting on top of it. He then put the slate beneath the table and held it flat against the underside with the fingers of his right hand, his thumb braced on the table and the pencil “supposedly” between the table and the slate; his left hand was plainly in view. The slate was so firmly pressed against the table, Lankester noted, that no hand or finger could get at the piece of pencil. But he immediately heard a scribbling noise. The spirit, Slade said, was at work. The slate was removed, and Lankester saw a message that read: “I am here to help you … Allie.”
Slade repeated this process several times, sometimes leaving the slate on his knee for a few moments. Meanwhile, Lankester kept a cool eye on the medium’s every gesture, ignoring what he considered to be intentional distractions—raps, gentle kicks, and movements of the table—and detecting subtle movements of Slade’s right arm while his wrist and fingers were under the table supposedly holding the slate. Each time, the message was longer and better written, though not always in the same flowing hand. Sometimes Slade placed the slate on top of Lankester’s head, at which point the spirit-writing would allegedly ensue. Throughout the remainder of the séance, other messages appeared, including one from Lankester’s “Uncle John,” though he had no such uncle. Lankester feigned an “ardent belief” in the mysterious nature of what he saw. However, he was utterly convinced that Slade wrote the messages while the slate rested briefly on his knee. He arrived at this “hypothesis,” he said, by noting the delay that invariably occurred between his being shown the slate, with its two clean sides, and Slade’s placing it beneath the table or on top of Lankester’s head. During this delay, Slade made various excuses, bit the piece of pencil, or cleared his throat—all meant, Lankester believed, to keep him off guard. At one point, a hand touched his leg two or three times, startling him—no doubt a delay tactic, Lankester thought. “Did you feel anything?” Slade asked. “Yes, a spirit touched my leg,” Lankester replied. Finally, Slade said that there would be no more messages that day. He then joined his hands with Lankester’s and leaned forward, and his chair rose perpendicularly off the floor, hovered for a moment, and dropped back down. The table also suddenly levitated. Lankester expressed amazement at the feat. Slade promised that if he returned, he would see more remarkable things. Lankester thanked Slade for the séance and agreed to return in a few days. But it was his intention to put his hypothesis to the test by seizing the slate from Slade’s hand just before the spirit was about to begin writing on it.12
Lankester returned with his friend Donkin on Friday, September 16. As a witness to the event, Donkin would help him prove to the world that Slade was writing the messages himself. At the critical moment, he would grab the supposedly blank slate. If Lankester found writing already there, he said, he would conclude that only those who had not lost their reason would remain unconvinced.
During this second séance, Donkin observed the same to-and-fro movements of Slade’s arm, with some contraction of the flexor tendons of the forearm as though in the action of writing. The message that appeared was barely intelligible; Donkin believed that Slade had produced it by writing with a minute piece of pencil placed under the nail of his right middle finger. The next message, which came after “a considerable interval” while Slade was clearing his throat and making short remarks, was more legible and written in a “straightforward, undisguised hand.” After the slate was once again cleaned, Slade told Lankester that the spirit probably would write more distinctly for Lankester and he therefore would allow him to brace the slate against the underside of the table. Donkin watched Slade go through the same maneuvers, apparently writing while the slate was out of sight on his knee. And then the critical moment came. As Slade was about to give the slate, still supposedly free of its message, to Lankester, Lankester seized it and opened it in front of Donkin, revealing the writing. “You have already written on the slate.” Lankester said. “I have watched you doing it each time.”13
But the cool, scientific account of this “critical moment” that Lankester and Donkin gave to the readers of the Times was in reality less polite. Lankester later admitted that when he grabbed the slate and saw the writing, he smiled triumphantly and pronounced Slade a “scoundrel,” accusing him of having written the message himself. Slade said nothing but slumped back in his chair, apparently exhausted and bewildered as he emerged from his trance state. Lankester and Donkin rushed out of the room, slate in hand as evidence, creating a commotion in the waiting area, where they accosted Slade’s assistant, Geoffrey Simmonds, and called Slade a “damned liar.” Simmonds astonished the two scientists by reacting with delight: their accusation, he said, was the best advertisement that Slade could have hoped for, and would draw at least two hundred people to see whether they could detect a swindle. Lankester and Donkin threatened to go to the press, which only pleased Simmonds more. They then stormed out and wrote up an account of their experience, which they posted to the Times.14
Lankester and Donkin were not Slade’s only visitors from the British Association. Barrett wrote to the Times that he, too, had been suspicious of Slade’s methods at first and had witnessed the same movements of the tendons of the wrist, the coughing, and the fidgeting. But instead of forcibly interrupting Slade and discovering writing when none was supposed to be present, he performed a different experiment. He had taken the precaution of bringing his own blank slate, which he placed face down on the table and anchored with his elbow, the pencil underneath the slate but not touching the writing surface. He then grasped one of Slade’s hands, while the tips of the fingers of Slade’s other hand barely touched the slate. As he focused his attention on Slade’s hands, neither of which moved perceptibly, Barrett was astonished to hear scratching from the underside of the slate. When he turned the slate over, he found it covered with writing. A few days later, he reproduced these results during a second séance. The only time Slade failed to elicit writing occurred when the slate was sealed in a box—he had refused to make an attempt.15 In a letter to the Times on September 23, Slade defended his refusal to submit to Barrett’s last experiment. He had no objection to people bringing their own ordinary slates, single or folded, but he objected to locks, boxes, or seals: “I claim to be as honest and earnest in this matter as those who call upon me for the purpose of investigation. To my mind it would be as reasonable to sever the wire and then ask the operator to send your message as it is to violate the conditions which experience has taught me are essential in these experiments in order to obtain successful results.”16
Annoyed that Lankester and others had impugned his reputation and integrity in the popular press, Wallace sat again with Slade on October 7 and 16. On the first day, not much happened. The only message that appeared was “Can’t now,” written faintly in pencil, the pencil dust still present, indicating that the message had just been written. For the second session, he brought his own blank slate from home, a double slate that was folded shut and that only he had handled. Slade slipped into a trance and remained in a constant state of agitation, moving about uncontrollably. As he took the slate from Wallace’s hands, he accidentally struck Wallace in the face and apologized for his loss of control, but through it all Wallace never lost sight of the slate. Although Slade could have inserted a finger between the two faces, he could not have written anything. But when Wallace opened the slate, a message was there, written in a clear hand with the “i” dotted and the “t” crossed. The message read: “Is this proof, I hope so.”17
In the meantime, Lankester, now obsessed with rooting out spiritualism from the hallowed halls of modern science, had hired a lawyer and brought charges against Slade and his assistant for conspiracy and fraud under the Vagrant Act, which had been passed by Parliament early in the century to protect the “weak-minded” from the depredations of fortune-tellers. As his co-plaintiffs he named five other men, including William Carpenter, who objected that his name had been added without his permission and refused to sign a petition against Slade that had been circulated among the members of the British Association. Slade was represented by two attorneys; one of them, Charles Carlton Massey, had become a confirmed spiritualist after reading Wallace’s passionate “Defence of Modern Spiritualism” and had witnessed forty or fifty messages and other phenomena at Slade’s séances, in both England and America.
Slade and Simmonds were brought before a judge on October 2, 1876, in a courtroom packed with spectators.18 Throngs of people clamored to get inside. By the time the judge pounded the gavel to initiate the proceedings, they had managed to do so, with the street nearly empty except for broughams awaiting the departure of several aristocratic female observers. As everyone knew, the trial had nothing to do with Slade and everything to do with the powerful egos of London’s men of science. Lankester was the prosecution’s star witness and had the implicit support of the British Association. As the association’s unofficial representative, he understood that it was his duty to destroy spiritualism and its credulous advocates once and for all. The pressure on Lankester was intense, and his victory was far from certain. The proceedings were followed closely by the press, which reported every detail. Wallace stayed away at first, no doubt hoping that the affair would die a natural death.
The judge, a man named Flowers, was not an impartial observer. At the outset, he stated that he had no sympathy for the defendants. This nonprofessional attitude contributed to the circuslike atmosphere of his courtroom, with the trial spinning out of control on numerous occasions. He seemed one step behind everyone else, recognizing his mistakes only after he was no longer able to do anything about them. His first error was to allow John Nevil Maskelyne to appear as a witness for the prosecution. When Maskelyne stepped up to the witness stand, the spectators went wild. Maskelyne, one of the most famous magicians of his day, specialized in exposing the “tricks” of mediums. Every night he entertained crowds at the Egyptian Hall, a haven for antispiritualists. Once Maskelyne took the stand, the trial became a farce, according to one Times reporter. Flowers was completely helpless. The last thing he wanted, he said, was a magic show, but a magic show is what the audience was given. Maskelyne proceeded to describe or demonstrate every technique a medium might resort to in the art of slate-writing, though he had never attended any of Slade’s séances. Convincing or not, his performance was at least entertaining.
The trial dragged on for weeks. At first, the spectators had seemed to favor Lankester. But by the time one of Slade’s lawyers gave an impassioned speech about the freedom to promulgate new ideas without ridicule, the composition of the observers in the packed courtroom had shifted, with the antispiritualists making up a distinct minority and the women outnumbering the men. Many were distressed by the likely outcome. “From Galileo downwards the pioneers of every new movement which clashed with the prejudices of the day have been subject to persecution,” one of Slade’s lawyer thundered. “What is laughed at today might be very differently regarded tomorrow.” Wallace now sat among the defendants’ sympathizers and watched the proceedings for a while before taking the witness stand for the defense. When called, he boldly described his own investigations of the subject of spiritualism over the preceding eleven years. His account was terse and unemotional, in contrast to the virulence and fervor of his opponents. But his courage in risking his reputation on behalf of liberty and justice did nothing to sway the judge. On November 1, the “Great Spiritualist Case at Bow Street,” as the trial was called, came to an end, with Flowers upholding the prosecution. Although the Vagrancy Act antedated spiritualism, he believed that it was broad enough to cover the “subtle tricks and devices” used by Slade. While admitting that he had been influenced by his recollections of the mischief perpetrated by other professed mediums, he nevertheless inflicted the maximum penalty: three months’ imprisonment with hard labor.
A reporter for the Times concurred with the magistrate’s judgment. Men of science, he said, were not the proper investigators of “affairs of this kind,” as a professional magician had proved. He was pleased with spiritualism’s “comeuppance,” though he did not expect the trial to have much effect in putting down spiritualism. “As long as there are weak and silly people in the world,” he wrote, “so long will there be rogues ready to take advantage of them.”
Not everyone in the press shared this reporter’s view. The Spectator, whose literary editor and co-proprietor, Richard Holt Hutton, had an abiding interest in psychic phenomena, complained that the sentence imposed on Slade was a severe application of a law intended for something different. The defendant was a foreigner, with no prior criminal record, and had committed acts that were not illegal in his own country. The commentator (possibly Hutton himself) noted with uncommon sagacity:
The plain truth of the matter is that the belief in art-magic and the disposition to inquire into phenomena apparently ultra-natural revive periodically, whenever accepted faiths are shaking, or accepted physical knowledge is enormously and suddenly increased. A society suddenly amazed by a new learning, as Europe was in the Renaissance, or by a new set of religious and philosophic ideas … loses its old landmarks, thinks anything possible, and either believes marvels or, which is the much more frequent phenomenon, sees no reason why it should not investigate marvels. Its sense of the limitations of power is temporarily obscured.
Darwin, who had followed the proceedings closely from Down House, wrote to Lankester to congratulate him on his success and offered to contribute £10 to the costs incurred for the prosecution of the case.19 Emma Darwin seemed to be speaking for the whole family when she wrote to their son Leonard, who was stationed in Malta at the time, “I think that the sentence was too severe, at least as to hard labour, viz. three months’ imprisonment. If people are so credulous some allowance ought to be made for the rogues.”20
Slade appealed his conviction in late January 1877. Wallace appeared once again to lend his support for the spiritualist cause. The public, however, seemed to have lost interest in the case, and the courtroom was less crowded. This time, Slade and Simmonds (or their wealthy supporters) had hired a shrewder attorney. Drawing the attention of the presiding magistrates to the precise wording of the Vagrancy Act, this attorney pointed out that Judge Flowers had purposely omitted the words “by palmistry or otherwise,” as stated in the original act. After reading Flowers’s judgment verbatim to the appellate judges, the attorney said, “To my astonishment—and I think it would excite the astonishment of every member of this Bench—the conviction does not declare or charge the appellants with anything of the kind.” The actual material words, “by palmistry or otherwise,” under which Slade could be convicted by the Vagrancy Act were “by some sleight of hand” omitted from the conviction. Thus the charge against Slade could not be supported “for five minutes.” Speaking lawyer to lawyer, he said, what he pointed out had to be regarded as a fatal objection to the conviction. After deliberating in their chambers for an hour, the judges returned with their verdict. The words “by palmistry or otherwise,” they said, were of vital importance to the case. “The reasons for this omission and for framing the conviction in its present form are not far to seek. If the particular description ‘by palmistry’ were applicable to the case it was unnecessary to avoid it; and if the fact had been such as to bring the case within the meaning of the Act, preceded by the description, it would be sufficient to quote the language of the enactment.” They were therefore compelled to overturn Flowers’s decision.21 “The fault in this case may not be in the law,” the Times huffed. “We do not presume to decide; but that the case should have broken down on such grounds is certainly discreditable to the administration of the law.”22
Just as the eventual acquittal of Slade failed to vindicate spiritualism, the publication of Wallace’s masterwork on the geographic distribution of animals failed to rescue his tainted scientific reputation. His central role in the brouhaha at the British Association led to the adoption of more stringent rules about the type of papers that could be read at its scientific meetings.23 Wallace was never again asked to preside over a section. It may be that he never would have wanted to; in his memoir, he states that he had “pretty well exhausted” the interests of the association, preferring to take his autumn holiday with his wife and children elsewhere.24 Thirty years after the fact, he could afford to affect a nonchalant attitude, but in 1876 he may not have been so indifferent. With a single exception, he never attended another meeting of the association. In 1881 he made a brief appearance, but only because the meeting was held in York, near the home of his friend Richard Spruce, who lived fourteen miles northeast in Coneysthorpe, and provided a good excuse for visiting him.
The rank and file of the British Association were equally annoyed with Wallace. The Lancet, the voice of English medicine, which had praised The Geographical Distribution of Animals, expressed the general bewilderment of his scientific colleagues at what appeared to be Wallace’s bizarre attitude toward science and the supernatural, wondering how “the feebleness which begets folly may coexist in a mind with so much general strength and earnestness.”
Side by side with acumen we find obtusity [sic]; a vigorous and exacting judgment compounded with impressibility amounting to a credulous abnegation of intelligence; a tame submission to any mystery claiming to be supernatural, which dethrones the faculty of reason, and in its place sets up that tyrant and traitor puppet-sense, susceptibility, by some men called “faith,” by others “docility,” by a third-class “truth-seeking,” but which is either pretentious ignorance aping the worship of the unknown, or an over-strained and dazed mind ready to take refuge from the harass of doubt in any delusion—offered from without. On this wise, and this alone, can we explain the unquestioned fact that many intelligent and strong intellects exhibit the extraordinary spectacle of a belief in “spiritualism.”25
The immediate consequence of Wallace’s outspokenness was the forfeiture of the respect of a considerable number of people in the scientific community. One friendship that ended abruptly that fall was with Henry Bates. The relationship had been in its death throes anyway. For several years, the two men had been drifting apart, both personally and professionally, as Bates lost patience with Wallace’s heterodoxies. The split with Darwin over the question of the origin of the human mind had been almost intolerable, but the way in which Wallace had tried to ram spiritualism down the throats of his fellow scientists was the final straw for Bates. The two never talked to each other again. Wallace left no record documenting this final break. Although he had few serious and permanent disagreements with any man, he severed all relations when the boundaries of Victorian social intercourse were breached. Bates had crossed that line, but what he said or did is unknown. Only two months after the Glasgow meeting of the British Association, Wallace accepted an invitation to lecture before the Royal Geographical Society on zoogeography, but the formal tone of his letter to its secretary, addressed not to Bates but to “Dear Sir,” underscored the degree of disaffection between the two men.26 Fifteen years later, when he was asked to write Bates’s obituary notice for Nature, Wallace at first refused, stating that he knew absolutely nothing about Bates’s life during its last two decades, and only after some arm-twisting did he consent. What he produced lacked the affection and vividness of the obituary notice that he had written for Spruce, a man he had seen much less often but whom he always regarded as a brother.27
Wallace ceased proselytizing and maintained a dignified isolation from his scientific colleagues. When he wrote to Darwin in January 1877, following the acquittal of Slade, he seemed almost lighthearted: “I … am very idle and feel inclined to do nothing but stroll about this beautiful country and read all kinds of miscellaneous literature.”28 Darwin knew better. Wallace was too restless to be idle. Despite mounting financial woes, he had no prospects for future work.. The Great Depression of Trade, which began in 1874, led to the evaporation of most of his remaining investments. He was also saddled with another lawsuit. The contractor who had absconded with his money and defaulted on his obligations to his suppliers had the audacity to demand £800 or £900 in back pay for not having been allowed to complete the house. Wallace refused to reimburse him. The contractor sued, forcing Wallace to retain a lawyer. Depositions, affidavits, replies, and objections sailed back and forth between the opposing sides for two years. Ultimately the suit was dismissed as groundless, but the grief cost him £100 in legal fees. “That was my experience of English law,” Wallace complained years later, “which leaves the honest man in the power of the dishonest one, mulcts the former in heavy expenses, and is thus the very antithesis of justice.”29
In the meantime, his former friend Carpenter had positioned himself as spiritualism’s Antichrist. Carpenter’s opposition to spiritualists had reached fever pitch, and he was relentless in his persecution of Wallace, Crookes, and other eminent scientists who openly espoused spiritualist beliefs—this despite the fact that he himself dabbled in spiritualism well into the late 1870s. While the Slade case was in progress, Carpenter invited Tyndall and Huxley to a séance at his house. Tyndall and Huxley did not wish to get mixed up with Carpenter in an inquiry of this kind, but they reluctantly accepted. “I would not trust the Virgin Mary herself if she professed to see a medium,” Huxley wrote to Tyndall. “But we shall see what we shall see.”30 What they saw they did not say, yet the trio continued to attend séances. It may appear strange that all three men persisted in their investigation of spiritualist phenomena while simultaneously expressing contempt for the “deluded,” but séances were oddly compelling and grandly entertaining for believers and nonbelievers alike. Carpenter, Huxley, and Tyndall—though they had refused Wallace’s and Crookes’s invitations—surreptitiously went elsewhere, as though fearing that they might be forced to admit the reality of phenomena produced under rigid test conditions by two serious and reliable scientific men.
Despite his own indefatigable investigations, Carpenter pursued Wallace and Crookes as zealously as Javert hunted Jean Valjean, publishing articles and letters in a number of journals and provoking Wallace to note in a letter to the Athenaeum “the extreme inconvenience of Dr. Carpenter’s erratic mode of carrying on a discussion.”31 At the same time that he was arranging to attend a séance, Carpenter complained in the Spectator that “men like Mr. Crookes … and Professor Barrett seem to me to resemble Baron Reichenbach … and other Physicists, twenty-five years back, in their ignorance of the nature of their instruments of research; putting as much faith in tricky girls or women, as they do in their thermometers or electroscopes.”32 Barrett wryly observed Carpenter’s curious attitude toward spiritualism:
Here I yield to none in my admiration for the perseverance with which Dr. Carpenter has for a quarter of a century endeavoured to arrive at the bottom of this matter. Hardly any professional medium escapes him. At one time it is Mr. Foster, then Mr. Home, now Dr. Slade, and again … Mr. Kane. In fact, were it any one else but Dr. Carpenter, whose philosophy places him above the contagious influences of epidemic diseases, we should suspect such an ardent investigator to be wanting in that intellectual fortitude which comes from a steady reliance on “unconscious cerebration.”33
Crookes, for his part, wondered why, if all the phenomena ascribed to spiritualism were imposture, Carpenter was wasting his valuable time interviewing and sitting with mediums: “Does he regard the subject as his own special preserve, and may his demonstrations against other explorers in this domain of mystery be looked upon as the conduct of a gamekeeper towards a suspected poacher?”34
Such remarks enraged Carpenter. A prolific and eloquent writer, he often resorted to ungentlemanly tactics to humiliate anyone who dared to challenge or controvert him. Wallace was attacked after publishing a critical review in Fraser’s Magazine of Carpenter’s Mesmerism, Spiritualism, &c Historically & Scientifically Considered, a book illustrating Carpenter’s theory that these various “isms” could be explained by mental action, not mysterious external agencies and forces. Wallace had upheld him “as an example of what prepossession and blind scepticism can do for a man … how it makes a scientific man unscientific, a wise man foolish, and an honest man unjust.”35 Carpenter took Wallace’s review personally, accusing him of assailing his “honesty and good faith” and deprecating his scientific character by stating that he manufactured evidence to support his views. He threatened to seek the intervention of such mutual friends as Huxley and Joseph Hooker, though what these men would, or could, have done to Wallace is uncertain.36
Wallace referred Carpenter to the exact words he had written in his review, pointing out misunderstandings of the grammatical constructions. For example, he “never for a moment” intended to suggest that Carpenter had manufactured evidence in the case in question. “The words ‘his disposition to manufacture evidence’ plainly refer to and are supplementary of ‘the untrustworthiness of the authority,’” Wallace wrote privately to Carpenter. “On the previous page I have referred to this ‘authority’ as ‘not an unbiassed witness’ and have asked for independent proof that ‘the chemical was not applied to the flowers after the séance to keep them fresh.’ That is clearly the ‘manufacturing testimony’ to which I subsequently refer as possible, and which can by no possibility be taken to implicate you.” Wallace also had described Carpenter as an expounder of popular and educational science; but Carpenter sensed sarcasm, believing that Wallace had meant “mere” expounder. Wallace denied that he had ever “depreciated” Carpenter’s character in such a manner. However, he agreed to apologize if Carpenter could prove any genuine misstatements—noting that this was more than Carpenter had been willing to do when he made deliberate misstatements about Crookes.37
Unmoved by Wallace’s clarification of his position, Carpenter hit below the belt. Focusing on one of Wallace’s assertions, Carpenter cited the belief in a flat earth as “a parallel case,” equating Wallace’s tactics with those of the infamous John Hampden. In a letter to the editor of Nature, Carpenter wrote:
It must be perfectly obvious to any one who is capable of reasoning logically, that nothing which I said of Mr. Wallace … can be twisted into the implication that he is either “a fool or a knave.” John Hampden is continually saying this of Mr. Wallace and everybody who upholds the rotundity of the earth. And I mildly suggested whether … Mr. Wallace is not assuming an attitude in some degree similar, that is, setting himself up as the one wise and honest man that everybody else is either stupidly or wilfully blind to the evidence he presented.38
Carpenter called Crookes and Wallace a “tower of strength” to the various orders of tricksters in the world, contending that the two men followed methods that were “thoroughly un-scientific” and that they accepted on implicit faith statements that a good scientist would reject as untrustworthy. Forty years of theoretical studies had given him an “unusual power” to deal with the subject of spiritualism. It was his mission to prevent the spread of a “noxious mental epidemic” in England, and he had received many notes of thanks for curing those “bitten” by the malady. He was a martyr for the cause. Although not thick-skinned, he was content to “brave all” in his crusade against a dangerous disease imported from the United States.39
Comparing himself and Wallace with the small body of earnest students of alchemy who detected “germs of truth amidst the ravings and juggleries of the gold makers” and laid the foundations of modern chemistry, Crookes countered that the Carpenter of that period would have denounced those pioneering students as “scientific advocates of the system of alchemy,” feeling that it was his duty to humanity to undermine their reputations. Crookes added: “This is an act of disinterested kindness which recalls to me the exquisite truth of Dean Swift’s remark, ‘No enemy can match a friend.’”40 Undeterred, Carpenter carried his battle to the pages of the Athenaeum, in which he published a short article, “The Curiosities of Credulity,” in December 1877. Wallace, like Crookes, was growing weary. He could only hope, he replied in a subsequent issue, that a new audience might see through Carpenter’s obfuscations.41 To Barrett, he confided that he had advised friends not to waste their time on “Dr. C.” “Nothing would tend to lower Dr. C. in public estimation on this subject more than his being forced to acknowledge that what he has for more than thirty years declared to be purely subjective is after all an objective phenomenon.”42
The epistolary war eventually ended, and Wallace and Crookes moved underground, attending the meetings of the British National Association of Spiritualists, where they found peers who were more sympathetic. This association had been founded in 1874 in order to consolidate the British spiritualist movement and organize its expansion. It was also an outgrowth of the Psychological Society and sought to promote the study of a new field of science. Its membership included a large number of well-educated and respectable men and women, mainly from London and the surrounding principalities. At one of these meetings, the famous explorer Richard Burton read a paper on his mystical experiences in the Middle East. Burton had advanced the spiritualist cause by coming to the defense of a pair of mediums known as the Davenport brothers when they were “unjustly” attacked, but he kept a respectful distance and did not wholly embrace spiritualism. After the paper’s presentation, Wallace was asked to make some remarks. “It appears to me … that he believes everything we do,” Wallace said, “only he puts a different interpretation upon it.” He wished that Burton had elaborated on his own experiences, not those of the Eastern authorities he cited in his paper. Crookes agreed and asked Burton for an account of objective phenomena, not the subjective phenomena of peering into crystals or searching for meaning in a drop of ink. Burton demurred, but he praised the courage of men like Wallace and Crookes. “I [see] no stronger raison d’etre for a Spiritualist Society than that of giving greater boldness to men in expressing their belief,” Burton said, “whether true or false, especially when their beliefs are unpopular,” adding, “I very much doubt whether the ‘new truths’ are so valuable as the new fact of encouraging men to tell the truth about old things.”43
In their public defense of spiritualism, Wallace and Crookes obviously had touched a raw nerve, and everything they did afterward became suspect. By the late 1870s, Wallace occupied an anomalous, Janus-like position. In 1858 he had spearheaded a scientific revolution. Twenty years later, he was in the vanguard of a counterrevolution—a paradox to everyone but himself.