Alfred Russel Wallace, the "co-discover" with Charles Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, was a confirmed spiritist—in fact, Wallace was one of the leaders of the revival of "spiritualism" in England that was taking place at the time. He wrote articles and books defending the ancient pagan belief that people could actually communicate with spirit beings (the Bible calls them demons).
In fact, he "discovered" natural selection in a very strange way. Wallace related this experience as follows:
The whole method of species modification became clear to me, and in the two hours of my fit I had thought out the main points of the theory.3
That is, Wallace, with no scientific education and little contact with scientists at all, invented in two hours the whole evolutionary scenario that Charles Darwin, in the midst of England's most distinguished scientific community, had been working on for twenty years. The noted science historian, Loren Eisely, said concerning this experience:
A man pursuing birds of paradise in a remote jungle did not yet know that he had forced the world's most reluctant author [that is, Darwin] to disgorge his hoarded volume, or that the whole of western thought was about to be swung into a new channel because a man in a fever had felt a moment of strange radiance.4 - Loren Eiseley, Historian of science at the University of Pennsylvania
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