The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [20]
Although he found organized Christianity’s way of explaining the world to be antiquated and unconvincing, Wallace began to reconsider the possibility of a moral force at work in the universe. He worried that if science denied even the possibility of such a higher power, the result could be a widespread amorality that would rip the social fabric. Wallace began to think that he and his colleagues bore a responsibility that they had thus far shirked. He became compelled by the idea that it was the duty of scientists to study not only the “physical parts of our nature, but the moral ones.”
Uplifted by this new and growing sense of purpose, Wallace attended his first seance in 1865. As he would explain, Wallace thought of this as a scientific expedition into the dark jungles of spirit phenomena, worth the risk of giving ammunition to critics eager to discredit him. Pondering a dizzyingly radical new theory, he thought he might find the way to an integration of science with spirit.
Wallace’s new idea was that natural selection had its limits, at least with regard to human beings. It could account for the physical body, yes, for skin, hair, muscles, the thump of the heart, flex of the lungs, shape of the hands, curve of the spine. These, he continued to believe, all evolved according to Darwinian (or Wallacean) principles.
But the mind, he proposed, was different. Perhaps intelligence, morality, that ephemeral thing called the human soul, developed along other lines. Perhaps our better nature was crafted by direction, by a power yet to be discovered; perhaps the design of the universe was such as to encourage spiritual development. Perhaps, Wallace proposed, even “the material imperfections of our globe” were not random at all, but purposeful, planned by a higher power. Perhaps “the wintry blasts and summer heats, the volcano, the whirlwind and the flood, the barren desert and the gloomy forest, have each served as stimuli to develop and strengthen man’s intellectual nature; while the oppression and wrong, the ignorance and crime, the misery and pain, that always and everywhere pervade the world, have been the means of exercising and strengthening the higher sentiments of justice, mercy, charity, and love, which we all feel to be our best and noblest characteristics, and which it is hardly possible to conceive could have been developed by any other means.”
It occurred to Wallace that evidence for such an artful planner could only be found by investigating the supernatural realms. As he saw it, his first move should be a feasibility study, an exploration into whether evidence could be gathered at all. He needed to know, for instance, if one could reasonably expect to gather information about spiritual powers. In his first sittings with London mediums, Wallace saw nothing that approached the level of scientific proof. But the seances were just weird enough to be encouraging. If nothing else, he could argue that he’d seen inexplicable things happen, things that had not—and perhaps could not—be explained by the laws of science.
In his notes, Wallace said he was particularly impressed by one tabletilting demonstration in which “a curious vibratory motion of the table commenced, almost like the shivering of a living animal. I could feel it up to my elbows.” He was several times startled by the information provided by mediums. For example, a medium spelled out the names of a visitor’s deceased relatives, backward and forward, even though the visitor had arrived at the seance anonymously. The cleverness of the spelling seemed to Wallace to be evidence of survival of intelligence after death. And, like so many before him, he found a seance with Daniel Dunglas Home particularly unsettling. A few of the phenomena “give