Page:A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.djvu/11

 success in all your pursuits, and, God knows, if admirable zeal and energy deserve success, most amply do you deserve it;" and in 1876 he wrote to him, "You have paid me the highest conceivable compliment by what you say of your work in relation to my chapters on distribution in the 'Origin,' and I heartily thank you for it."

In one important point Mr. Wallace early found himself in divergence from Mr. Darwin. 'This was as to the limits of natural selection as applied to man. Mr. Darwin saw no reason to imagine a break or a new force or kind of action in regard to the development of man, and especially of his brain and mind; while Mr. Wallace, from the belief that savage man possesses a brain too large for his actual requirements, from the absence of a general hairy covering in lower men, from the difficulty of conceiving the origin of some of man's physical and mental faculties by natural selection, and from the nature of the moral sense, came to the conclusion that a superior intelligence, acting nevertheless through natural and universal laws, has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose.

This divergence of view from that of Darwinism pure and simple may be interestingly illustrated from an autobiographical passage in Mr. Wallace's Essays "On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism," 1881. He says: "From the age of fourteen I lived with an elder brother, of advanced liberal and philosophical opinions, and I soon lost (and have never since regained) all capacity of being affected in my judgments, either by clerical influence or religious prejudice. Up to the time when I first became acquainted with the facts of spiritualism, I was a confirmed philosophical sceptic, rejoicing in the works of Voltaire, Strauss, and Carl Vogt, and an ardent admirer (as I am still) of Herbert Spencer. I was so thorough and confirmed a materialist that I could not at that time find a place in my mind for the conception of spiritual existence, or for any other agencies in the universe than matter and force. Facts, however, are stubborn things. My curiosity was at first excited by some Slight but inexplicable phenomena occurring in a friend's family, and my desire for knowledge and love of truth forced me to continue the inquiry. The facts became more and more assured, more and more varied, more and more removed from anything that modern science taught, or modern philo-