Alfred Russel Wallace, who, with Darwin, was jointly responsible for the theory of evolution by natural selection, has been long been renowned for the divergence between his scientific and nonscientific views. As Michael Flannery notes in Nature's Prophet, George Romanes observed in 1890 that there were “two Wallaces,” one of them “the Wallace of incapacity and absurdity” (88). Wallace had become a spiritualist and announced in 1869, ten years after On the Origin of Species had appeared, that natural selection alone was insufficient to account for many features of our species. For Wallace, human evolution must have been overseen by what he called an “Overruling Intelligence.” Flannery argues rightly that we should not see the two Wallaces—scientist-materialist, spiritualist-mystic—as Romanes did, as two distinct individuals. Rather, Flannery follows biographer Martin Fichman (An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace [2010]) in challenging readers to see Wallace as an integrated whole, his apparent internal contradictions reconciled.

For the most part, it is not too difficult to reconcile Wallace-the-scientist with Wallace-the-mystic in the area highlighted by Flannery—Wallace's embrace of teleology in nature—because the shift from one perspective to the other occurred over time. Wallace began as a doctrinaire methodological materialist, then ditched this perspective in favor of that Overruling Intelligence in the context of human evolution before eventually extending the influence of Overruling Intelligence(s) to the whole natural world. What is difficult to understand is the middle phase of this transition, when Wallace was simultaneously doing standard science and fervently preaching the gospel of spirit-mediated teleology.

On 2 July 1866, Wallace wrote to Darwin to condemn the teleological import of the term natural selection, which, Wallace complained, “requires the constant watching of an intelligent ‘chooser’ like man's selection to which you so often compare it.” In short, natural selection, by analogy to artificial selection, implies a selector. Wallace preferred Herbert Spencer's term survival of the fittest and went through his copy of The Origin carefully crossing out natural selection and replacing it with survival of the fittest. Wallace was at this stage apparently more anti-teleological in his thinking than was Darwin. Then came the disagreement with Darwin on human beings, but he emphasized then that human beings alone merited special treatment, telling a fellow spiritualist that “Darwin's laws of natural selection and variation are true laws, which will account for much—perhaps for all—the material organizations of plants and animals. He admits an influx of life from the Creator at first. I think an influx of a higher life occurred when man appeared. He [Darwin] does not think this necessary” (85). By the end of his long life, however, Wallace had expanded the scope of the influence of Overruling Intelligence(s)—of teleology—to all of life. The title of his 1910 book is The World of Life: A Manifestation of Creative Power, Directive Mind and Ultimate Purpose. This teleology even pops up in Wallace's 1905 autobiography, in which he notes “that my books have served to instruct and to give pleasure to a good many readers, and that it is therefore just possible that my life may have been prolonged, and conditions modified so as to afford the required impulse and the amount of time for me to write them” (My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, 2:381).

Flannery provides an engaging and readable account of Wallace's intellectual journey. It is generally well researched but nevertheless error-strewn: I counted three errors of fact in the book's first three pages, including, for example, the wrong publication date for one of Wallace's major works. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, Wallace's embrace of spiritualism (he attended his first séance in 1865) seems particularly misguided. Flannery, however, criticizes the presentism implicit to such judgments, pointing out that spiritualism was broadly popular among Victorian scientists. Regardless, it remains difficult to see how Wallace was able to reconcile jarringly discordant perspectives. Wallace published arguably his most influential (and scientifically doctrinaire) work, The Geographical Distribution of Animals, in 1876, the same year in which he appeared in court for the defense of Henry Slade, a medium who had been unmasked as a fraud by E. Ray Lankester, a student of T. H. Huxley (on the witness stand, Wallace called Slade an “earnest inquirer after truth”).

Flannery's conclusion that Wallace ended up a natural theologian is reasonable, except in one regard. In the literature on the history of evolutionary thought, the term is most closely associated with William Paley's explicitly Christian championing of the idea of exploring the Works of God in order to understand the Mind of God. There is nothing remotely Christian about Wallace's teleology. In fact, he carefully disavows Christianity, insisting in his conclusion to The World of Life that postulating “the Infinite and Eternal Being as the one and only direct agent in every detail of the universe seems, to me, absurd; his is the spiritualist's universe, entailing “infinite grades of influence of higher beings upon lower” (400). Flannery, however, does not want to lose sight of Paleyan natural theology, pointing out, for example, that Wallace established “a human-centered cosmology that resonates with much of scripture” (118). What is the relevance of this? That Flannery's previous book on Wallace, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life (2011), was published by the anti-evolution Discovery Institute, is telling. Wallace's particular appeal to proponents of intelligent design creationism is that very strand of teleological thinking that Romanes condemned for its “incapacity and absurdity” (88).