Science Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

Wallace doesn’t just tweak a definition of matter here; he pulls a trapdoor under the reader’s everyday common sense. The opening - “foregoing considerations” - is the Victorian scientist’s way of saying: this isn’t a vibe, it’s a deduction. He frames the claim as the inevitable endpoint of disciplined reasoning, then detonates the folk picture of the world: solid stuff, little lumps of “something” moving around in space. Calling matter “philosophically inconceivable” isn’t an idle provocation. It’s a power move aimed at an audience still tempted by blunt materialism as the default scientific posture.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, Wallace is aligning with a 19th-century trend in physics that increasingly described nature in terms of interactions, fields, and forces rather than billiard-ball substance. But the subtext is larger: if matter dissolves into force, then “material” explanations stop looking like the final word on reality. That was a live cultural fight. Wallace, unlike many of his scientific peers, was willing to let science destabilize the metaphysical confidence of his era, not shore it up. The sentence quietly invites a second conclusion he doesn’t state outright: if the bedrock of “matter” vanishes under analysis, there may be room again for mind, spirit, or at least a reality not exhausted by mechanism.

The rhetoric works because it’s austere and uncompromising. No ornament, no hedging - just a cold, formal march to an explosive endpoint. It reads like a lab report that ends by questioning the existence of the lab bench.