WCP5412

[1]

Parkstone, Dorsetshire

June 12th 1890

Frances E Abboth Esq

My dear Sir

Many thanks for sending me your book on "The Way out of Agnosticism". I have read it with much interest, and feel disposed to accept most of its conclusions. I cannot however think that it will really have any influence with agnostics. In the first place such a very long and elaborate course of reasoning, founded largely on analogy and hypotheses, is open to dispute at almost every step, and is too ponderously difficult of comprehension [2] to influence any but metaphysical thinkers — a very limited body.

In the next place the results you reach — an absolute scientific pantheism — leaves the great fundamental difficulties & inconceivabilities as great as ever. If the universe is infinite, personal, organic, machine, the agnostic will still ask — Whence cause it? How did it begin? Has it been ever evolving, & if so what did it evolve from? Evolution, progress, change — all necessarily imply a beginning, but this could have had no beginning. The agnostic will [3] say, & reasonably say — "I cannot understand it, — I do not know it — your conception seems no easier or more likely to be true than a hundred others. I prefer to say — "I do not know" rather than pretend to know what to use is utterly incomprehensible.

Nevertheless your book is, for this such a subject, most clearly and forcibly written, and accords sufficiently with my own vague ideas to be acceptable to me, without being conclusive. I will lend it to a metaphysical friend of [4] mine to see what he l says of it.

Believe me | Yours very faithfully | Alfred R Wallace [signature]