Faith & Spirit Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

A Victorian scientist calling religion a "necessity" is doing something more strategic than pious. Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of natural selection and a lifelong spiritualist, isn’t conceding theology to the clergy; he’s diagnosing a social technology. The phrasing matters: not truth, not revelation, but necessity - a pragmatic claim about human needs and civic stability. "The mass of mankind" draws a sharp line between the educated few and everyone else, smuggling in a paternalism typical of 19th-century reformers who feared what a disenchanted public might do with its freedom.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side, Wallace is arguing that moral order can’t be left to reason alone, because reason is unevenly distributed and easily weaponized. Religion, in this view, supplies a ready-made scaffolding: community, ritual, restraint, consolation. On the other side, the sentence quietly absolves elites from the same requirement. It implies that sophisticated minds can run on science and ethics, while ordinary people require a metaphysical governor. That’s less an endorsement of faith than a vote for social management.

Context sharpens the stakes. Wallace lived through Darwin’s cultural earthquake, when evolutionary theory threatened traditional authority and created a new kind of anxiety: if humans are animals, what keeps the crowd from acting like it? His answer is tellingly conservative and oddly modern. Even in a scientific age, he suggests, meaning isn’t a luxury item; it’s infrastructure.