By Alfred Russel Wallace
The nineteenth-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used to be a tremendous impression on Darwin's thought of common choice. He was once later moved through numerous own stories to check the idea that of spirituality, yet his exploration into the opportunity of compatibility among spiritualism and ordinary choice alienated him from the clinical neighborhood. the 3 debatable essays during this 1875 booklet try to make stronger his ideals and validate his claims. the 1st, written in 1871 and browse earlier than The Dialectic Society, reconsiders the credibility or incredibility of miracles. the second one, 'The medical point of the Supernatural', have been released in a secularist periodical a number of years prior, and 'A Defence of recent Spiritualism' seemed within the Fortnightly evaluation almost immediately sooner than this e-book used to be released. Wallace's ebook takes the fashionable reader to the center of the raging debates engendered via Darwin, lots of which proceed over a century later.
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Additional resources for On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism: Three Essays
Sample text
BURTON—Military Man. NASSAU E. SENIOR—Political Economist. W. M. THACKERAY—Author. T. A. TROLLOPE—Author. R D. OWEN—Author and Diplomatist. W. HoWITT—Author. S. C. HALL—Author. MIRACLES AND MODERN SCIENCE. 35 II. MIEACLES AND MODEEN SCIENCE. A MIRACLE is generally defined to be a violation or suspension of a law of nature, and as the laws of nature are the most complete expression of the accumulated experiences of the human race, Hume was of opinion that no amount of human testimony could prove a miracle.
We behold electricity in the form of lightning riving the solid oak, throwing down lofty towers and steeples, or destroying man and beast, sometimes without a wound. And these manifestations of force are produced by a form of matter so impalpable, that only by its effects does it become known to us. With such phenomena everywhere around us, we must admit that if intelligences of what we may call an ethereal nature do exist, we have no reason to deny them the use of those ethereal forces which are the everflowing fountain from which all force, all motion, all life upon the eaith originate.
When Castellet informed Eeaumur that he had reared perfect silkworms from the eggs laid by a virgin moth, the answer was Ex nihilo niMlfit, and the fact was disbelieved. It was contrary to one of the widest and best established laws of nature; yet it i% now universally admitted to be true, and the supposed law ceases to be universal. These few illustrations will enable us to understand how some reputed miracles may have been due to yet unknown laws of nature. We know so little of what nerve or life-force really is, how it acts or can act, and in what degree it is capable of transmission from one human being to another, that it would be indeed rash to affirm that under no exceptional conditions could phenomena, such as the apparently miraculous cure of many diseases, or per- MIRACLES AND MODERN SCIENCE.