– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-creator of the evolutionary thesis with Darwin, attended the first official meeting of the Society for Psychical Research on February 20, 1882. He also attended multiple séances, witnessed the full-blown materializations of various physical mediums, and accepted for publication William Barrett’s 1876 paper on thought-transference as chairman for the anthropological section of the British Association (the paper was later suppressed and then finally published in the journal of the S.P.R.). He thus wrote of how an “overruling intelligence” may have something to do with the evolution of mind and morality. He explained to T. H. Huxley his dream of a “new branch of Anthropology” that might be crafted out of a study of Spiritualist phenomena. And he asked his scientific colleagues to pursue “those grand mysterious phenomena of the mind, the investigation of which can alone conduct us to a knowledge of what we really are.” In other words, Wallace realized that science leads, inexorably, to ontological questions. Much like Myers, Wallace saw the phenomena of Spiritualism as evidence for a separate, nonphysical line of moral or spiritual evolution. In Myers’s own words, Wallace entertained the idea “that some influence, resembling that of man on the domestic animals, may have been brought to bear upon primitive man…and that some power of spiritual communion, differentiating man from the lower races, may have been thus originated.” We’ll return to that idea too: the earth as a farm.
P. 70
Ср.: селекция неоантропов палеоантропами в “О начале человеческой истории (проблемы палеопсихологии)” Б.Ф. Поршнева