Science Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

Wallace is trying to wedge a heresy into the machinery of respectable science: the idea that “mind” doesn’t merely ride on matter like foam on a wave, but stands upstream as a causal force - without abandoning the observable fact that brains, bodies, and environments shape individual consciousness. The sentence is engineered as a peace treaty. “No contradiction” is doing heavy political work, anticipating the Victorian reader’s raised eyebrow: if mind causes matter, haven’t you just smuggled God back into the lab?

Context matters. Wallace co-discovered natural selection with Darwin, then scandalized many allies by defending spiritualism and arguing that human consciousness and moral faculties might exceed what selection alone could explain. This line is an attempt to keep evolutionary development intact (“through the agency of matter”) while insisting on a larger metaphysical frame in which matter is not ultimate. He’s offering a kind of top-down causation: mind originates the physical order, then uses that order as an instrument to individuate minds in time. That’s why “agency” is the key word. Matter isn’t the author; it’s the medium.

The subtext is also reputational: Wallace wants permission to sound empirical and metaphysical in the same breath. He rejects the era’s hardening materialism without reverting to crude dualism. Instead he proposes a layered causality - mind as the source, matter as the workshop, human minds as the crafted outcomes. It’s a scientist’s bid for cosmic meaning, written in the cautious syntax of someone who knows exactly how dangerous it sounds.