In addition to believing in spirits, Wallace also believed that anatomically modern humans were of considerable antiquity. For example, he accepted the discoveries of J. D. Whitney, which, by modern geological reckoning, place humans in California up to 50 million years ago (Cremo and Thompson 1993, pp. 368–394, 439–458). Wallace noted that such evidence tended to be “attacked with all the weapons of doubt, accusation, and ridicule” (Wallace 1887, p. 667). Wallace suggested that “the proper way to treat evidence as to man’s antiquity is to place it on record, and admit it provisionally wherever it would be held adequate in the case of other animals; not, as is too often now the case, to ignore it as unworthy of acceptance or subject its discoverers to indiscriminate accusations of being impostors or the victims of impostors” (Wallace 1887, p. 667).
Wallace encountered the same kind of opposition when he communicated to scientists the results of his spiritualistic research. Describing the reactions of the public and his scientific colleagues, Wallace wrote in his autobiography: “The majority of people today have been brought up in the belief that miracles, ghosts, and the whole series of strange phenomena here described cannot exist; that they are contrary to the laws of nature; that they are the superstitions of a bygone age; and that therefore they are necessarily either impostures or delusions. There is no place in the fabric of their thought into which such facts can be fitted. When I first began this inquiry it was the same with myself. The facts did not fit into my then existing fabric of thought. All my preconceptions, all my knowledge, all my belief in the supremacy of science and of natural law were against the possibility of such phenomena. And even when, one by one, the facts were forced upon me without possibility of escape from them, still, as Sir David Brewster declared after being at first astonished by the phenomena he saw with Mr. Home, ‘spirit was the last thing I could give in to.’ Every other possible solution was tried and rejected. Unknown laws of nature were found to be of no avail when there was always an unknown intelligence behind the phenomena—an intelligence that showed a human character and individuality, and an individuality which almost invariably claimed to be that of some person who had lived on earth, and who, in many cases, was able to prove his or her identity. Thus, little by little, a place was made in my fabric of thought, first for all such well-attested facts, and then, but more slowly, for the spiritualistic interpretation of them. . . . Many people think that when I and others publish accounts of such phenomena, we wish or require our readers to believe them on our testimony. But that is not the case. Neither I nor any other well-instructed spiritualist expects anything of the kind. We write not to convince, but to excite inquiry. We ask our readers not for belief, but for doubt of their own infallibility on this question; we ask for inquiry and patient experiment before hastily concluding that we are, all of us, mere dupes and idiots as regards a subject to which we have devoted our best mental faculties and powers of observation for many years” (Wallace 1905, v. 2, pp.
349–350).
Early experiences with mesmerism
Wallace first became interested in paranormal phenomena in 1843. Some English surgeons, including Dr. Elliotson, were then using mesmerism, an early form of hypnotism, to perform painless operations on patients. The reality of this anesthesia, although today accepted, was then a matter of extreme controversy. Wallace noted: “The greatest surgical and physiological authorities of the day declared that the patients were either impostors or persons naturally insensible to pain; the operating surgeons were accused of bribing their patients; and Dr. Elliotson was described as ‘polluting the temple of science.’ The Medical-Chirurgical Society opposed the reading of a paper describing an amputation during the magnetic trance, while Dr. Elliotson himself was ejected from his professorship at the University of London” (Wallace 1896, pp. ix–x).
At the time, Wallace was teaching school in one of the Midland counties of England. In 1844, Mr. Spencer Hall, a touring mesmerist, stopped there and gave a public demonstration. Wallace and some of his students, greatly interested, attended. Having heard from Hall that almost anyone could induce the mesmeric trance, Wallace later decided to make his own experiments. Using some of his students as subjects, he soon succeeded in mesmerizing them and produced a variety of phenomena. Some were within the range of modern medical applications of hypnotism, while some extended to the paranormal (Wallace 1896, p. x, pp. 126–128; 1905 v. 1, pp. 232–236).
One thing witnessed by Wallace was community of sensation. “The sympathy of sensation between my patient and myself was to me the most mysterious phenomenon I had ever witnessed,” he later wrote. “I found that when I laid hold of his hand he felt, tasted, or smelt exactly the same as I did. . . . I formed a chain of several persons, at one end of which was the patient, at the other myself. And when, in perfect silence, I was pinched or pricked, he would immediately put his hand to the corresponding part of his own body, and complain of being pinched or pricked too. If I put a lump of sugar or salt in my mouth, he immediately went through the action of sucking, and soon showed by gestures and words of the most expressive nature what it was I was tasting” (Wallace 1896, pp.
127–128). During such experiments, Wallace took care to “guard against deception” (Wallace 1896, p. 126). From reports of the mesmeric experiments of other researchers, Wallace concluded that “the more remarkable phenomena, including clairvoyance both as to facts known and those unknown to the mesmeriser, have been established as absolute realities” (Wallace 1896, p. xi).
Despite the well-documented observations of numerous competent researchers, the scientific establishment remained hostile to mesmeric phenomena. Eventually, the production of insensibility, behavior modification, and mild delusions would be accepted under the name of hypnotism. But the more extraordinary mesmeric manifestations—such as clairvoyance and community of sensation—were never accepted. In any case, Wallace found his own experiments of lasting value: “I thus learned my first great lesson in the inquiry into these obscure fields of knowledge, never to accept the disbelief of great men, or their accusations of imposture or of imbecility, as of any great weight when opposed to the repeated observation of facts by other men admittedly sane and honest” (Wallace 1896, p. x).
Travels in the tropics
From 1848 to 1862, Wallace traveled widely in the tropics, collecting wildlife specimens and filling notebooks with biological observations. While on an expedition in the Amazon region of Brazil, he saw his brother Herbert mesmerize a young Indian man in a hut. At Herbert’s command, the young man’s arm became rigid. Herbert restored movement to the young man’s arm and then asked him to remain lying down in the hut until the brothers returned from a collecting excursion. When two hours later they came back, they found the young man still lying down, as if paralyzed, unable to rise although he had attempted it (Wallace 1905, v. 2, pp. 275–276).
When Wallace returned to England from Brazil, he did so alone, Herbert having died of a tropical disease. After a short time, Wallace set off on another expedition, this time to the East Indies. While in that region, Wallace learned of paranormal phenomena that went far beyond anything he had witnessed in his experiments with mesmerism. “During my eight years’ travels in the East,” he later recalled, “I heard occasionally, through the newspapers, of the strange doings of the spiritualists in America and England, some of which seemed to me too wild and outrageous to be anything but the ravings of madmen. Others, however, appeared to be so well authenticated that I could not at all understand them, but concluded, as most people do at first that such things must be either imposture or delusion” (Wallace 1905, v. 2, p. 276).