Like that of many other children, Wallace’s early childhood was spent in an orthodox religious atmosphere, which, whilst awakening within him vague emotions of religious fervour, derived chiefly from the more picturesque and impassioned of the hymns which he occasionally heard sung at a Nonconformist chapel, left no enduring impression.  Moreover, at the age of 14 he was brought suddenly into close contact with Socialism as expounded by Robert Owen, which dispelled whatever glimmerings of the Christian faith there may have been latent in his mind, leaving him for many years a confirmed materialist.

This fact, together with his early-aroused sense of the social injustice and privations imposed upon the poorer classes both in town and country, which he carefully observed during his experience as a land-surveyor, might easily have had an undesirable effect upon his general character had not his intense love and reverence for nature provided a stimulus to his moral and spiritual development.  But the “directive Mind and Purpose” was preparing him silently and unconsciously until his “fabric of thought” was ready to receive spiritual impressions.  For, according to his own theory, as “the laws of nature bring about continuous development, on the whole progressive, one of the subsidiary results of this mode of development is that no organ, no sensation, no faculty arises before it is needed, or in greater degree than it is needed."[56] From this point of view we may make a brief outline of the manner in which this particular “faculty” arose and was developed in him.

When at Leicester, in 1844, his curiosity was greatly excited by some lectures on mesmerism given by Mr. Spencer Hall, and he soon discovered that he himself had considerable power in this direction, which he exercised on some of his pupils.

Later, when his brother Herbert joined him in South America, he found that he also possessed this gift, and on several occasions they mesmerised some of the natives for mere amusement.  But the subject was put aside, and Wallace paid no further attention to such phenomena until after his return to England in 1862.

It was not until the summer of 1865 that he witnessed any phenomena of a spiritualistic nature; of these a full account is given in “Miracles and Modern Spiritualism” (p. 132).  “I came,” he says, “to the inquiry utterly unbiased by hopes or fears, because I knew that my belief could not affect the reality, and with an ingrained prejudice even against such a word as ‘spirit,’ which I have hardly yet overcome.”

From that time until 1895, when the second edition of that book appeared, he did much, together with other scientists, to establish these facts, as he believed them to be, on a rational and scientific foundation.  It will also be noticed, both before and after this period, that in addition to the notable book which he published dealing exclusively with these matters, the gradual trend of his convictions, advancing steadily towards the end which he ultimately reached, had become so thoroughly woven into his “fabric of thought” that it appears under many phases in his writings, and occupies a considerable part of his correspondence, of which we have only room for some specimens.