Science Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

Wallace’s gratitude is doing quiet combat work. Coming from a 19th-century scientist - and not just any scientist, but Darwin’s co-discoverer of natural selection - the line reads like a refusal to let “science” be drafted into a blunt, culture-war trench. He doesn’t say religions are true, or even good. He says he can “see much to admire,” a careful concession that keeps empirical standards intact while granting moral and aesthetic credit where it’s due.

The verb choice matters: “see” makes admiration a kind of observation, not a conversion. It’s a scientist’s posture - attentive, comparative, wary of absolutism. And “all religions” is deliberately expansive in an era when empire, missionary zeal, and Victorian confidence encouraged ranking cultures like specimens. Wallace flips that instinct. Instead of using difference as proof of superiority, he uses it as an invitation to discern value across traditions.

The subtext is also autobiographical. Wallace’s heterodox interests (including spiritualism) made him a magnet for both fascination and dismissal among his contemporaries. This sentence feels like preemptive defense: you can be rigorous without being contemptuous; you can critique doctrine while respecting what religions build - communities, ethical vocabularies, art, consolation, discipline.

In a century addicted to grand narratives of progress, Wallace offers a smaller, sharper ethic: intellectual humility. The gratitude is strategic. It positions tolerance not as indulgence, but as a learned capacity - a way of seeing that resists the era’s easy binaries of enlightened versus superstitious.