Mr. Belloc still objects to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"
Date: 2023-12-05T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Wells; H. G. (Herbert George); 1866-1946. Outline of history; 1866-1946. Mr. Belloc objects to "The outline of history"

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Title: Mr. Belloc still objects to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Release date: December 5, 2023 [eBook #72334]

Language: English

Original publication: San Francisco: Ecclesiastical Supply Association, 1927

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. BELLOC STILL OBJECTS TO MR. WELLS'S "OUTLINE OF HISTORY" ***

MR. BELLOC STILL OBJECTS

MR. BELLOC
STILL OBJECTS
TO MR. WELLS’S “OUTLINE OF HISTORY”

BY
HILAIRE BELLOC

ECCLESIASTICAL * SUPPLY * ASSOCIATION
E * S * A
PUBLISHERS     AND     IMPORTERS

328–330 STOCKTON ST.       SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.
1927

Made and Printed in Great Britain at
The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.

CONTENTS

| | PAGE
| Introduction | vii
I. | Mr. Wells’s General Grievances | 1
II. | Mr. Wells as Biologist | 12
III. | Mr. Wells’s Ignorance of the Catholic Church | 22
IV. | My Errors | 28
V. | Mr. Wells Shirks | 36
VI. | The Great Rosy Dawn | 40

INTRODUCTION

Mr. H. G. Wells brought out some time ago an Outline of History, the object of which was to deny the Christian religion.

I examined this production for the benefit of my co-religionists in the columns of certain Catholic papers. I did full justice to Mr. Wells’s talents as a writer, but I exposed his ill acquaintance with modern work on Biology, with early Christian writing and tradition, with Christian doctrine itself: and, in general, his incompetence.

Stung by this exposure, Mr. Wells has just brought out against me a small pamphlet, under the title of Mr. Belloc Objects to the “Outline of History.” It is an excited, popular, crude attack, full of personal insult and brawling, and ample proof that he is hit. But it is singularly weak in argument, confused in reply, and, as I shall show in a moment, shirks nine-tenths of the very damaging criticism which I directed against his book.

That book denies a creative God. There is no God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. The Incarnation is a myth; the Resurrection a falsehood; the Eucharist a mummery.

Probably Mr. Wells is thus infuriated, not only at being exposed, but also because he cannot understand how such an assault upon religious truth should possibly provoke resentment; yet I think I can explain the thing to him by a parable.

Supposing (it is mere hypothesis) that a man were to attack the Royal Family, and His Majesty in particular, jeering at the functions which monarchy performs for the State and holding up the King of England to contempt.

Mr. Wells would be the first to admit that a man so misbehaving himself would receive very hard knocks indeed. He would be called severely to account on all sides. It would be said that his spite arose from some personal grievance against the Great; that he thus relieved his soreness at feeling himself socially neglected, and so on. He might justify himself as a martyr in the cause of political duty, but he would be a fool if he did not look out for squalls.

Now the great and fundamental truths of the Christian religion are still sacred to quite a number of Mr. Wells’s fellow-citizens, including myself. Our attachment to them is at least as strong as the loyalty of the average Englishman to the Royal Family; and if he attacks them by way of History—making out that History disproves the Christian religion—then it is not, as he seems to imagine, an outrage; but, on the contrary, a natural and inevitable consequence that he should be taken to task, and his competence for writing history severely examined.

I propose to reply in this pamphlet, not because I have any intention of being drawn into a slanging match with a writer who is my superior in this form of art, but because no challenge to Truth must be allowed to pass unheeded. So far from imitating Mr. Wells, I shall take care when I publish—as I do in a few weeks—my whole book, entitled A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline of History,” to go carefully over my text and to cut out anything which could be construed into mere personal attack; though I shall preserve, of course, and even add to, the due and often severe criticism which Mr. Wells deserves for pretending to teach others on the basis of his own most insufficient instruction.

I should, no doubt, greatly increase the circulation of this little pamphlet of mine were I to season it with those offensive references to personal habits and appearance which are now fashionable between contemporaries. But I do not aim at any large circulation, beyond that reasonable amount which will secure my being heard by the people whose attention is worth having.

Invective such as Mr. Wells substitutes for argument is wholly irrelevant. When you are discussing the competence of a man to write history, it is utterly meaningless to throw about the jeers of the gutter on his dress, accent or any other private detail concerning him. If you discover a man pretending to write about Roman antiquity and yet wholly blind to the effect of Latin literature, you rightly point out his ignorance. But it is not to the purpose to accuse him of having a round face or a thin voice. Indeed, were invective my object (which it most certainly is not), I should rather have answered in verse as being the more incisive and enduring form.

If it be a test of literary victory over an opponent to make him foam at the mouth, then I have won hands down; but I do not regard Mr. Wells as my opponent, nor am I seeking any victory. I am simply taking a book which proposes to destroy the Faith of Christian men by the recital of pretended history, and showing that the history is bad. While praising many qualities in the book, I point out with chapter and verse that the history is uninformed. That is my point and my only point.

Now that I have made it, I hope, quite clear that I am neither interested in Mr. Wells’s personalities nor intend to go one better upon them, but to deal strictly with things capable of argument and intelligent examination, let us cut the cackle and come to the horses.

* * * * *

Mr. Wells’s pamphlet against me, to which I am here replying, is a web of six elements. These are not put in any regular order, and the author himself would probably not be capable of analysing them; but a competent critic has no difficulty in separating them one from the other.

They are:—

First: A number of shrill grievances on general grounds. For instance, that though I have praised him highly I have not praised him highly enough; that where I had to blame him I have used adjectives upon his work such as “confused,” “ignorant,” which were not warranted; that in general he is an ill-used fellow, and is moved to complain most bitterly.

Secondly: He violently (and this is the main gist of all his pamphlet) assaults me for pointing out that his statement of Darwinian Natural Selection as the chief agent of evolution is antiquated stuff, exploded, and proves him quite unacquainted with modern work. Here he jeers at me as putting on a pose of special learning, and challenges me to quote any modern authorities substantiating my criticism. He calls my argument fantastic, a thing made up out of my own head, without any authority from competent biologists. He denies the existence of any such group of modern men of science opposed to Darwinian Natural Selection. It is an amazing thing that his ignorance should reach such a level as that, but it does. And it is there I am going to hammer him.

Thirdly: There runs all through the little pamphlet, and still more through the book itself, a startling ignorance upon the Catholic Church, and in particular the idea that the Church is opposed to scientific work, even such elementary science as Mr. Wells attempts to expound.

Fourthly: He complains that I have in certain specific points misread his meaning, misstated his conclusions or affirmations, and made errors myself in attempting to correct his. He brings, it is true, no more than three specific allegations; three out of a total of I know not how many score, in a body of work which catches him up and exposes him over and over again. Nevertheless, such as they are, being specific allegations, however few, they must in justice be met; and I will here meet them.

Fifthly: (and most significant): There is the embarrassed silence of Mr. Wells’s pamphlet: his inability to meet nine-tenths of the points I have brought against him, and his discreet shirking all mention of them.

Sixthly: The book ends with Mr. Wells’s usual glorious vision of a glorious Millennium contrasted with the sad blindness of Catholics in general, and myself in particular, to this approaching Seventh Monarchy.

I will deal with these six matters which build up Mr. Wells’s pamphlet, taking them in the order I have given.

I
MR. WELLS’S GENERAL GRIEVANCES

I cannot pretend in so short a pamphlet as this to deal with all the separate lamentations with which Mr. Wells has filled the air. But I can state the principal of them, and try to make him understand how wrong-headed he is in his objections.

Of these general points, the first and, perhaps, most important is that he was refused a right of reply. On page v of his pamphlet he distinctly insinuates that I was afraid of hearing his reply, and had it suppressed. For he says that the Editor of the paper in which my articles appeared would not give him his opportunity, and that he so refused “after various consultations with Mr. Belloc.”

As to the space which was offered, and the exceptional facilities which, I understand, were granted to this angry man, the Editor must, of course, speak for himself, and has, I believe, done so. But as to the part which I took, it can be stated very simply. I was told by the Editor (who had asked to see me on the matter) that Mr. Wells desired to reply in the same columns in which he had been criticised. I was asked what my attitude was in the matter, and I affirmed in the strongest fashion (to which the Editor will bear witness) my belief that the fullest right of reply should always be given to anyone criticised on matters of fact or judgment. The interview did not last ten minutes, but, to give a record of my attitude, I wrote a strong and clear letter to the same effect. So far as I am concerned I asked for nothing better than a reply, and I believe the Editor offered it.

Of two things, one, either Mr. Wells knew my attitude, in which case his insinuation is inexcusable, or he did not, in which case it was only rash; but at any rate he is, in this first grievance of his, quite wrong. I particularly wanted him to have every opportunity for reply. Nothing could suit me better.

Next he complains that I have not given him sufficient praise, or, at any rate, not praised him as continuously, highly and enthusiastically as I ought to have done. He complains that I only give him “slow” and “formal compliments” (page 2) and “patronising praise” (page 5).

He is wounded because I accuse him of violent antagonism to the Catholic Church (page 1) (an accusation which he denies very earnestly).

He indignantly repudiates any bias against the gentry in history—which social class I ask him to revere.

Lastly, he accuses me of using such terms about many passages in the History as “ignorant,” “childish,” “confused.”

I am afraid it is necessary before touching on these grievances to explain to Mr. Wells what criticism is, for it is clear that he has never considered the nature of that literary function.

When you criticise the writing of a man who deals with definite facts and the conclusions to be drawn from them, it is your business to praise what is praiseworthy in his effort, and to condemn what is insufficient, false or bad.

You do not praise (if you are a serious critic) simply as a sort of sop or counterbalance to blame; you praise because you find things worthy of praise—and you blame where you find things worthy of blame.

There was nothing oily or patronising, nor even adventitious and artificial in the praise which I saw fit to offer. It was not vague, it was very definite, and, I think, just. Moreover, it was very strong praise, of which any writer might be proud at the hands of a colleague. I praised Mr. Wells’s lucidity and economy of manner, his sense of proportion, and, above all, his most remarkable talent for presenting a vivid picture to the reader. In this my words were, “None of our contemporaries possesses it” (the gift of lucid and vivid description) “in anything like the same degree.” In other words, I said that he possessed a talent of the most important literary kind, which any writer would envy, and that he possessed it in a degree which made him superior to any contemporary.

I also said that he was conspicuously sincere, that he wrote very clearly, with an “excellent economy in the use of words,” and was unreserved in my hearty appreciation of his accuracy in details of reference, such as dates, spelling of names, etc.

I went on to say how strongly he felt the importance of history to mankind, though it is true that I qualified this by saying that by mankind he meant the only sort of mankind he knew. I said of his honesty of purpose, “that it was a quality apparent in every line of the work.”

Really, if that sort of thing is “oiliness,” Mr. Wells must be very difficult to please! It may be “slow”; it is not a torrent of undiscriminating adulation; it is mixed with justified blame. But it is such a catalogue of remarkable literary powers as I would not make for another writer.

I did much more than this. I specifically praised whole portions of the book as being quite excellent, notably his handling of the story of language, and the précis on many sections of history. I have no space here to give a list of the passages in which I compliment him; but they are numerous, as any one of my readers will see when my book (A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline”) shall appear.

But he is not satisfied; and I am afraid the truth must be that these recent large, popular circulations of his have gone to his head, and now make him think himself much more talented than he is.

Next he has a grievance which I have no doubt is quite sincere in his own mind, but which any impartial observer, I think, would smile at. I have said that he acts with violent antagonism to the Catholic Church, and I have called that his motive. That it is his motive Mr. Wells “earnestly denies.”

Well, the whole book is written quite clearly round the object of convincing the reader, by so-called evidence, rather than reasoned argument, that there is no design in nature, and therefore no all-powerful creative God as the Author of nature; therefore, again, no revelation of such a God to men, therefore, naturally, no question of the Incarnation in Jesus Christ. The Atonement is man-made nonsense: The Fall of Man never happened, the Resurrection is a foolish story, and the Eucharist a make-believe.

Now what Body is it which maintains in their entirety the doctrines thus attacked? Can anyone deny that it is the Catholic Church? Many of them have been held by other Bodies schismatical or heretical to it, and therefore the doctrines are often alluded to as those not of the Catholic Church, but of a vague entity, impossible to define, called “Christianity.” Nevertheless, we all know that the denial to-day of those doctrines does not provoke determined resistance in any large organised Body outside the Catholic Church.

Apart from this, there are expressions of contempt which quite clearly show the rabidness of the author’s reaction against the Creed. There is no doubt at all that the Church makes him “see red”—as she does so many others.

He says he is not conscious of any such motive in attacking all the prime dogmas of the Christian Faith.

Well, I will give him a parallel. Suppose a foreigner were to write an Outline of Nineteenth Century History, and to say in it that Islanders were always rascals, that the love of sport and games was degrading—and particularly vicious that of football and cricket—that the English language was an offensive vehicle of thought and had produced nothing worthy; that sea-power was a myth, and that Nelson in particular was a bungler at handling ships; that the administration of India was a failure and a crime; and that the creation of large Overseas Colonies from the Mother Country was a fatuous experiment.

Should we not say that the gentleman had some bias against England?

Were he to tell us that he was not conscious of such a motive, we should answer, “Very well, then, you aren’t—since you say so. But the motive is certainly there, and your case is the most extraordinary case of the subconscious ever presented to a bewildered onlooker.”

Next, Mr. Wells objects most emphatically that I have done him the grievous wrong of calling him a patriot.

I am quite willing to withdraw the words, to admit my blunder, and to apologise to Mr. Wells for having made it. Every man is the judge of his own thoughts, and if he assures me that he hates his country, or is even indifferent to its fate, I will readily accept the statement. I will substitute in my book for the word “patriot” the word “national,” my only point being that Mr. Wells is highly local in his outlook. I was careful to say that the patriotic (or national) motive was, in my opinion, an advantage to the historian; but that its great danger was limitation, and that in the particular case of Mr. Wells the limitation was so narrow as to be disastrous to a general view of Europe: making him unable to understand anything that was not of his own particular suburban world.

He is wounded because I pointed out his odd reaction against the idea of a gentleman, and his dislike of the gentry, and says that I bid him “revere” them. I never asked him to do anything so silly as to revere the gentry. I am sure I do not revere them myself. What I did say was that it weakened an historian and pretty well put him out of court when he wrote, not with balanced judgment, but negatively, out of hatred; and that piece of criticism I must maintain.

As for his attitude towards the type called “a gentleman” in history, and in contemporary life, it would be easy to give examples out of other books from the same pen. But I am rigidly confining myself to this book—the Outline of History—and I submit that right through this work you see this strong dislike appearing. It appears in his treatment of the type, Roman, French or English, ancient, mediæval or modern. To take one instance out of a hundred, his sneer at the late Lord Salisbury in the pamphlet against me is characteristic. He suggests that this great man and considerable scientist was incompetent to discuss a simple question in biology, and had to be coached for the purpose, and badly coached. All our generation is a witness to the great talent of Lord Salisbury and to the range of his learning, and since he was no man’s enemy, and certainly never can have done any harm, direct or indirect, to Mr. Wells, I can only suggest that the word “Lord” was sufficient to throw Mr. Wells off his balance.

Now for the condemnatory words to which he objects,—presumably on account of their force—words which I have, indeed, used in connection with his work, and shall certainly use again: such words as “ignorance,” “blunders,” “childish,” “unscientific,” etc. I see I must again explain to Mr. Wells an obvious principle in criticism which he fails to grasp. A word is not out of place in criticism unless it is either irrelevant or false in statement or in degree. The mere strength of a word does not put it out of court. On the contrary, if the strength of the word is exactly consonant to the degree of error noted the criticism is more just than if a milder word had been used. To say that a man who poisons his mother in order to obtain her fortune is “reprehensible” is bad criticism. To call him an “inhuman criminal” is sound criticism.

Irrelevant condemnatory words are very properly objected to by their victims. But relevant condemnatory words are not only admissible, but just and even necessary.

I must not fill the whole of this little reply of mine with a mass of quotation illustrating the justice of the words I have used, but I can give a few examples which are conclusive, and which the reader has only to hear to be convinced.

As to “ignorance.” This is a word exactly applicable to point after point in the Outline which I have thoroughly exposed. For instance, it is ignorance not to appreciate the overwhelming effect of Latin literature upon all our civilisation. It is not mere omission which has left out this capital factor from Mr. Wells’s strange idea of Rome; it is, and could only be, an insufficient knowledge of what that factor was. If a schoolboy, writing an outline of the Battle of Waterloo, leave out all mention of Blücher, that is not a mere omission, it is ignorance.

There is an example of ignorance on a very wide general point. Next let me give an example of a highly particular point. It is really startling in its effect.

Mr. Wells nourishes the idea that the technical name for the Incarnation is the Immaculate Conception!

It is perfectly legitimate to say that the man of average education is not bound to be familiar with technical terms in a special department, such as that of religious terminology; but when he sets out to discuss that particular department, he must at least have the alphabet of it. Had he never mentioned the Immaculate Conception at all, the accusation would not lie: as he has foolishly blundered into mentioning it, the accusation does lie. A Frenchman who has never been to England cannot be called ignorant because he is unfamiliar with the streets of London. But what of a Frenchman who writes a guide to London and mixes up Victoria Station with Buckingham Palace?

But by far the most striking example of ignorance in his work, an example upon so astonishing a scale that one could hardly believe it even of popular “scientific” stuff, is to be found in Mr. Wells’s complete ignorance of the modern destructive criticism of Darwinian Natural Selection. He not only (as we shall see in a moment) has never heard of this European, English and American work—he actually denies its existence and imagines I have made it up!

Again, I have used the word “childish” of his attitude on more than one occasion.

Is the word “childish” too strong? I will give examples. In his fury against me he suggests that I cannot “count beyond zero,” and he admits, with a sneer, that I perhaps understand the meaning of the word “strata.”

He tries to make capital of my giving the name of the very eminent anthropologist, E. Boule, without putting “Monsieur” before it, and says that I “elevate Monsieur Boule to the eminence of ‘Boule.’” That is childish. All the world cites eminent men by their unsupported name. It is a sign of honour. For instance, that great authority, Sir Arthur Keith (whom Mr. Wells sets up to have read and followed), says “Boule.” Didn’t Mr. Wells know that?

He says that he uses the term “Roman” Catholic because it is the only one he knows with which to distinguish between the many kinds of Catholics. Whereas (and everybody knows it, including Mr. Wells in his more sober moments) the term is only used either because it is the legal and traditional word of English Protestantism, or, much more legitimately, to distinguish between us of the world-wide Roman Communion and those sincere men (many of whom I am proud to count my friends) who emphasise Catholic doctrine in the English Church and call themselves “Anglo-Catholics.” This wild protest, that there are any number of other Catholics—Scotto-Catholics, Americano-Catholics, Morisco-Catholics, Indo-Catholics, Mongolo-Catholics—is frankly ridiculous, and ridiculous after a fashion which it is legitimate to call “childish”: the mere explosion of a man in a passion.

Yet another example. Finding me to have overlooked a tiny misprint (“ai” for “ia”) in the printing of a proper name, he writes a whole page about it.

The proper adjective for absurdities of that kind is the adjective “childish.” I could give any number of other examples, but I think these are quite enough.

In point of fact, I only use the word “childish” rarely—I do not know how often in my whole book, but at a guess I should say not more than three times. But each time I am sure that it is well deserved. However, if he prefer a more dignified adjective, such as “immature” or “unstable” or “puerile,” or any other, I am quite willing to meet him, so long as he allows me to say that he only too often in his violence does write things which make him ridiculous from their lack of poise.

And what of the adjective “confused” or (for I am afraid I allowed myself that licence) “muddle-headed”? Well, I can give examples of that innumerable. For instance, he cannot conceive that I should call him unscientific, seeing that he was one of Huxley’s students. What on earth has that got to do with my accusation? If a man should call me a very poor Latin scholar (which I am—but then I do not write popular manuals on Latin poetry), would it be any reply to tell him that I had been as a boy at a school of which Cardinal Newman was the head, or as a young man that I had been at Balliol; or that among my intimate acquaintances whom I listen to fascinated upon classical themes were some of the greatest scholars of my time? Whether Mr. Wells is a scientific man or not must be decided, not by his having attended classes under Huxley, but by the use he has made of his reading; and it is easy to prove that that use has been deplorable.

Mr. Wells is unscientific because he does not survey the whole of evidence upon a point, and weigh it, and especially because he is perpetually putting forward hypothesis as fact—which may be called the very criterion of an unscientific temper; because he introduces mere fiction as an illustration of supposed fact (e.g. the nonsense about human sacrifice at Stonehenge) and the material for a magazine shocker as though it were history.

It is quite unscientific to tell people that a point highly debated and not yet concluded ranks as ascertained scientific fact.

It is quite unscientific, in talking of early Christian doctrine, to leave out tradition; still more is it unscientific to work on it without any knowledge of the sub-Apostolic period. It is unscientific in the highest degree to leave out an elementary mathematical argument as though it were mere juggling with figures, and to play to the gallery by saying that your critic has got some wonderful system of figures or other which nobody can follow.

The words “science” and “scientific” do not imply a smattering of biology or geology; still less do they imply mere popular materialism. They imply real knowledge, finally accepted after full enquiry upon complete evidence; and that is why there is nothing less scientific in the world than this so-called popular “science,” which is perpetually putting forward exploded guesses of the last century as ascertained facts.

As for muddle-headedness, what can be more muddle-headed than mixing up the general theory of evolution with the particular (and now moribund) materialist theory of Natural Selection? And yet that is what Mr. Wells is perpetually doing!

It is true that a great many other people do it too, but that is no excuse. The whole of his argument on pages 18, 19 and 20 is precisely of that kind. It would be incredible to me that any man could get confused between two such completely separate ideas had I not most wearisome and repeated experience of it—and here is Mr. Wells repeating it again!

The general theory of transformism (which itself is now subjected to a very heavy and increasing modern attack) may be compared to saying that a man travelled from London to Birmingham. But the theory of Natural Selection may be compared to saying that he travelled by motor-car and not by railway.

Now suppose a man on trial for his life for a murder which had taken place not on the railway, but by the roadside between the two towns. The whole issue turns upon whether the prisoner had travelled by motor-car or by railway. What should we say of Counsel for the Defence who confused these two issues and thought that the prosecution was concerned merely with the man’s going from one town to the other, and not with the road he travelled? I do not know whether the judge would stop him or no, but I know that Counsel for the Crown would walk round him. He would say, “The issue is not whether the man went from London to Birmingham; we grant that. The point is whether he went by motor-car or by railway.” The only issue in the controversy, which Mr. Wells has both misunderstood and rashly engaged in, is upon the agency of Evolution, not upon Evolution itself. Yet he has confused the two!

Another example of bad muddle-headedness is his mixing up the Catholic use of relics and the Catholic use of sacred images with the unwarranted illustration of the unknown prehistoric past, and the unwarranted basing of a detailed conclusion upon the insufficient evidence of a few bones.

I say in my criticism of Mr. Wells, and I say quite rightly, that to put forward a picture of an imaginary being called “Eoanthropus,” giving him a particular weapon and gait and gesture, and an expression (which, as I have said, made him very like one of my acquaintance), was utterly unwarranted upon the exceedingly doubtful evidence of the fragments called “The Piltdown skull.” Sacred images in Catholic use are not—and surely everybody ought to know that—attempts at reconstruction, still less are they fakes to try and get people to believe that, for instance, an Archangel has goose wings and curly hair. They are symbols; are powerful and useful aids to devotion, not reconstructions.

Nor are relics in any way parallel to fossil evidences. We venerate a relic of St. Agnes (such as I am glad to say I have in my house), both because it is a striking memorial of that very holy witness to the Faith, who gave up her life for it, and because (what I will not debate here) we believe that the sanctity of the person can upon occasion give virtue and power to such things. But we do not say, “In case you do not believe St. Agnes ever existed, here is a fragment of her bone.” To mix up two things so entirely different is muddle-headedness turned glorious.

I could add not only further examples justifying the terms I have used, but a great many other terms equally justified. I must leave it to the ampler space of my book, The Companion to his work, which Mr. Wells will have the pleasure of seeing before him in a very few weeks.

II
MR. WELLS AS BIOLOGIST

I come now to what is the pith of Mr. Wells’s whole pamphlet. It is evidently the matter upon which he is most pained; it is also the matter on which he has most woefully exposed his lack of modern reading.

Through page after page—thirteen whole pages—he slangs and bangs away at me—because I have exposed his ignorance of modern work upon Darwinism.

There are in this furious attack two quite distinct points: first, his accusation that I pose as being a man having special learning, with European reputation in such affairs (very silly nonsense!); secondly, his treatment of the arguments which I have put before my readers against the old and exploded theory of Darwinian Natural Selection, upon which theory, remember, all these popular materialists still desperately rely in their denial of a Creative God and of Design in the universe.

As to the first point: there can be no question of my having put on airs of special knowledge in any of these affairs. Not only have I not pretended to any special knowledge on geology or pre-history, or biology: I have not even pretended to special knowledge on matters where I have a good deal of reading in modern and mediæval history. When I took up the atheist challenge presented by Mr. Wells’s book, I did so as a man of quite ordinary education, because it was amply evident on a first summary reading of it that the writer was not a man of even average education. I pretend to no more than that working acquaintance with contemporary thought which is common to thousands of my kind, and I think it the more shame to Mr. Wells that with no expert training I can make hay of his pretensions. Any man of average education, reading and travel could have done the same.

Suppose somebody were to write a little popular manual on chemistry with the object of showing that there is no God, and were to say of the Atom that it had existed from all eternity, because it had no lesser parts, but was eternally simple and indivisible. The man of ordinary education would at once reply: “Have you never heard of the Electron?” He would be justified in putting it much more strongly, and in saying, “Is it conceivable that you are so hopelessly out of date that you have never heard of the Electron and of the modern theory of the Atom?”

This does not mean that the person asking this most legitimate and astonished question would be posing as an expert in chemistry; it would simply mean that in ordinary conversation with his fellows he was abreast of his time. Any of us whatsoever, even if he read no more than newspaper articles, would have a right to say, “My good fellow, you are out of court with your absurd old-fashioned simple Atom.”

Now suppose the person whom he had thus most justly criticised were to lose his temper and say, “You are making up all this about electrons out of your own head! You do not quote a single modern authority by name in favour of this new-fangled theory of yours about electrons! The reason you do not quote any name or authority is that you can’t! There are no such names!” Would he not have delivered himself into the hands of his opponent?

That is precisely what Mr. Wells has done. He has shown himself utterly ignorant of all modern work in his own department, and he must not cry out too loud at the consequences of his rashness.

Why on earth Mr. Wells challenged me to give names opposed to the old Darwinian position I cannot conceive. It was a tactical blunder, so enormous that I can make nothing of it, save on the supposition that he, being a sincere man, does honestly believe no modern destructive criticism of Natural Selection—let alone of Transformism—to be in existence.

So much for my pose of great learning. I pose to about as much learning in the matter as anyone among thousands of my own sort who by current reading keep abreast of the mere elements of modern thought.

Now let us turn to the main point.

So there has been no destructive criticism of the old Darwinian hypothesis? So there are no names to be quoted against the particular distinctively Darwinian invention of Natural Selection? Indeed!

Let us see.

There is a certain Professor Bateson, who has left on record the following judgment:—

“We” (biologists in general) “have come to the conviction that the principle of Natural Selection cannot have been the chief factor in determining species....”

And who is this Professor Bateson, Mr. Wells will ask (perhaps with some contempt)?

Well, he was the President of the British Association when it met in Melbourne in 1914, and the sentence I have just quoted dates from that year.

Now let us turn to something totally different. I give it, not in German, which I cannot read, but in what I believe to be an adequate translation:—

“Natural Selection never explains at all the specifications of the animal and vegetable forms that are actually found....”

And who is the unknown fellow I have got hold of here? Driesch: and his conclusion is much older than that which we have from Professor Bateson. Here, again, from the same insignificant little fellow, we have this—thirty whole years ago:—

“For men of clear intellect Darwinism has long been dead....”

“Oh!” I can hear Mr. Wells saying, “but who is this Driesch?” Well, he stands among the greatest of the German biologists to all educated men. But Mr. Wells has never heard of him.

There is yet another German who put it more strongly still, for he actually gave a title to his book which is, being interpreted, The Death-bed of Darwinism. And who was he? He was only a person called Dennert.

Here Mr. Wells will, I am sure, protest and say, “Oh, this Dennert you tell me about is surely extreme.” I am rather inclined to agree. But that is not the point. He wanted modern authorities, and I am giving him a few. Mr. Wells had never heard of Dennert.

Let us turn to Dwight:—

“We have now the remarkable spectacle that just when many scientific men are all agreed that there is no part (my italics) of the Darwinian system that is of any great influence, and that as a whole the theory is not only unproved, but impossible, the ignorant, half-educated masses have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted as a fundamental fact....”

Who is this fellow Dwight? cries Mr. Wells. Whoever heard of him? I do not know whether Mr. Wells has ever heard of him, but he wrote in the year 1918. And he happened to hold the position of Professor of Anatomy at Harvard University.

At it again! In the year 1919 there was published by a certain Professor Morgan (who, very rightly, is a great admirer of Darwin as the founder of popular modern interest in evolution):—

“Selection does not (my italics) bring about transgressive variation in a general population.”

Indeed, Professor Morgan’s whole book, and one might say his whole work, is a moderate but sufficient destruction of the old orthodox Darwinian stuff. Mr. Wells is now becoming restive. “Who’s this chap Morgan? I haven’t heard of him. He’s a nobody?” Well, I am no student. I am only a general reader—but I should imagine that Professor Morgan was somebody, for he is the Professor of Experimental Zoology in the University of Columbia.

Shall I go on among these authorities whom Mr. Wells assures us don’t exist? We have Le Dantec, with his whole crushing book of 1909. Le Dantec is only a Frenchman, it is true, but, after all, he was at the time the newly-appointed Professor of General Biology at the University of Paris giving his lectures at the Sorbonne.

I might go right back to Nägeli, of whom certainly Mr. Wells has heard, for his work dates from some years before 1893—the date when Mr. Wells seems to have stopped making notes in class. But perhaps Mr. Wells would like the actual words of that authority—which again I quote (from a translation, because I cannot read German):—

“Animals and plants would have developed much as they did even had no struggle for existence taken place....”

Would Mr. Wells like to hear Korchinsky? It will be news for him:—

“Selection is in no way favourable to the origin of new forms.”

And again, from the same authority:—

“The struggle for existence, and the selection that goes with it, restricts the appearance of new forms, and is in no way favourable to the production of these forms. It is an inimical factor in evolution.”

Korchinsky may sound in Mr. Wells’s ears an outlandish name, but I do assure him the authority is not to be denied.

Or would he like Cope, as long ago as 1894? He at least, I believe (I am only quoting from the books of others), was pretty definite upon the impossibility of the rudimentary forms having survival values. Or, shall we have Delage—yet another Continental name, and a Professor in these subjects?—

“On the question of knowing whether Natural Selection can engender new specific forms, it seems clear to-day that it cannot.”

That is straightforward; that is not of yesterday; that is as old as 1903.

Do let me fire one more shot at Mr. Wells—it is such fun!

I take hotch-potch from a page printed a whole nineteen years ago, this further set of names out of a much larger number there given:—

“Von Baer, Hartmann, Packard, Jeckel, Haberlandt, Goette, von Sachs, Kassowitz, Eimer.”

I quote not my own list (for I am quite incompetent here), but the words of a first-class authority who draws up this list, including many other names, and ends:—

“Perhaps these names mean little to the general reader” (Mr. Wells being here the general reader). “Let me translate them into the Professors of Zoology, of Botany, of Paleontology, and of Pathology, in the Universities of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Strasbourg, Tubingen, Amsterdam, etc. etc.”

“And who writes thus?” Asks Mr. Wells (getting a little nervous)—why, only one of the principal and most serious critics in Biology of nineteen years ago, and with a chair in Stanford University.

I should have no difficulty in adding to the list. I have quoted here more or less haphazard and hastily from my very general and superficial reading. But surely when a man tells you that you have no authorities behind you, and that you are making things up out of your own head, even such a list as this must sound pretty startling to him. Mr. Wells had no idea of its existence. If he had he would not have questioned it.

I have no quarrel with ignorance of this kind, as such. There is no particular reason why any general writer, myself or Mr. Wells, or Jones or Brown or Robinson, should have even this amount of knowledge on a special department of modern science. But then, if he hasn’t, he shouldn’t write about it; still less should he say that the authorities alluded to don’t exist—that their names cannot be quoted, because there are none, and that the arguments advanced by me were made up by an ignorant man who had no expert work from which to quote.

Now that last sentence leads me to yet another thrust of the battering ram which I am bringing against poor Mr. Wells. He says that the arguments I have advanced against Natural Selection are of my own imagining.

So the arguments I have put forward (only a few main arguments out of many) were made up out of my own head, and have no support from authority? I have no acquaintance with the names or general conclusions of any experts in these affairs? It would be, indeed, astonishing if I had acted thus, seeing that nothing was easier than for me to write to any friend engaged in biological study and get the amplest information. I did not do so, because there was no necessity to do so. That liberal education—which Mr. Wells derides—was sufficient.

Really, Mr. Wells here flatters me too much! He does not know that the arguments were not mine but the main arguments which have been set forward by a host of competent authorities, and which have proved so damaging that even the remaining defenders of Darwinism have had to modify their position.

Thus my first argument is the well-known one of accident being quite unable to explain the co-ordination of variations necessary to adaptation.

The point is this, that not only one accidental advantageous variation which might give an animal a better chance of survival has to be considered, but the general adaptation of all the organism to new conditions; not only that, but the marvellous adaptation of thousands upon thousands of special relations within complex organisms such as are the higher animals. Left to chance, such co-ordination would be impossible. The chance of a vast number of favourable variations all arriving together by accident approximates to zero. It is a mere matter of arithmetic.

That argument in Mr. Wells’s judgment is “burlesque,” “beautifully absurd,” and so forth. But the judgment is not passed on him by me (who make no pretence to anything but the most general reading on these affairs). It is passed by such an authority, for instance, as Wolff. It is clear that Mr. Wells has never heard of Wolff; yet it is, I believe, now nearly eighteen years since Wolff brought out this argument, and for all I know many another clear-headed man had preceded him; certainly a great many have followed.

I do not pretend to have read Wolff; I have not. But I have read the significant quotations from him, and even if I had not done so I should, as a man of general education, have known at least what his position was. Shall I quote a single (translated) sentence? (Mr. Wells with his wide command of languages may look it up in the original, called, I believe, Beitrage zur Kritik der Darwinischen Lehre):—

“One could possibly imagine a gradual development of the adaptation between one muscle-cell and one nerve-ending, through selection among an infinity of chance-made variations; but that such shall take place coincidently in time and character in hundreds or thousands of cases in one organism is inconceivable.”

My second argument is equally a commonplace with educated men, and in saying that I am the author of it Mr. Wells is again flattering me a great deal too much, and again betraying his own astonishing lack of acquaintance with the subject he professes to teach.

I pointed out, as hundreds have pointed out before me, that Darwinism obviously breaks down from the fact that it demands each step in evolution to be an advance in survival value over the last. There again it is a plain matter of arithmetic that the chance of this happening accidentally is impossible. Mr. Wells is so confused in mind that he quotes as a bad example what I said about the reptile and the bird. He seems to think that the argument is upset by the fact that there are intermediate forms and that in these intermediate forms the fore legs lose their function before they become wings. If one could prove such a transformation—which one cannot, it is mere hypothesis—it would have nothing to do with Natural Selection; it would be simply an example of transformism. What I say (and what is obviously true in a myriad instances) is that between the foot of the land animal and the flapper of the whale, between the powerfully defensive and aggressive great ape and the weak, more intelligent man, there must be stages (if the transition ever took place) where the organism was at a positive disadvantage, and that consideration blows Darwinian Natural Selection to pieces.

When Korchinsky calls selection through the struggle for existence a factor inimical to evolution, he is saying exactly that; and, I repeat, hosts of men great and small, of high authority like these Professors or of no authority like myself, have been repeating that obvious bit of common sense for something like a lifetime, though it would seem that for some extraordinary reason Mr. Wells has never heard of it.

He makes the same sort of mistake about my third argument, which was that rare variations would, under the action of pure chance, necessarily be soon reabsorbed in the mass, and disappear. He thinks I invented this argument in 1926.

Great Heavens! It is perhaps the most widely known of all Nägeli’s famous seven objections to Natural Selection which were formulated before Mr. Wells left off reading on these subjects. He ought to have been acquainted with them even in the elementary class work of his youth, however little he might later read of more modern work.

Has Mr. Wells never heard that this was the very argument which compelled the first serious modification of the Darwinian theory, and began its breakdown? I suppose not—Any more than he has heard that what he foolishly calls “my” first argument seriously shook Weissmann’s position—that most formidable of the Darwinian remnant—and that as long ago as 1896 Weissmann did, if I am not mistaken, in the preface to his book virtually admit that it could not be got over.

And so on. I could write a whole book upon that rather dreary and negative subject, the abysmal lack of acquaintance Mr. Wells shows with the thought of his time. I could expose him here in the matter of Couenot, or of Vialleton’s book, as I exposed him in the Manchester Guardian, or print in detail quotations from Carazzi, which I leave for another occasion.

But I think I have said enough to expose Mr. Wells’s pretence of reading in modern biology.

The bubble is pricked and has burst.

III
MR. WELLS’S IGNORANCE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Third mark of Mr. Wells’s outburst against me I have called his amazing ignorance upon the Catholic Church. That ignorance is, of course, still more apparent in his book. But I am concerned here only with the way in which it appears in his pamphlet. He inherits the old prejudice—flourishing strongly in the best No-Popery days—that for some unexplained reason a Catholic is opposed to that most interesting intellectual activity, the pursuit of physical knowledge. He envisages the Catholic Church as teaching an inchoate heap of unconnected doctrines, each of them highly concrete, each of them flagrantly impossible, and the chief of them an historical statement that in a particular place and at a particular time, to wit, in the neighbourhood of Baghdad 5930 years ago, there took place the Fall of Man. He has no conception that we object to a book like his and to methods such as he uses because we use the human reason, and are all brought up to know that the human reason is absolute in its own sphere.

Exactly the same habit of clear thinking which makes us know the limitations of reason and makes us accept a mystery, gives us our admiration for that divine gift of reason in man and our contempt for people who, like Mr. Wells, have never been trained to use it, and flounder the moment they try to think hard.

For instance, nowhere is Mr. Wells’s intellectual weakness more apparent than in his inability to understand what is meant by a fixed type, or general form. He meets it with the dear old fallacy which has been known for more than two thousand years under the name of Sorites—I may inform Mr. Wells that this is not the name of a disease of the body but of the intelligence. It consists in always asking, “where do you draw the line?” and on that pretence trying to avoid definition.

A fixed type does not mean that there is no difference between one individual or another, nor exact identity of form between one time and another. It means that there is a general idea which can be recognised and on which one can predicate: as, that cats mew and dogs bark, that ducks swim and hens don’t.

Mr. Wells has innumerable readers, and among them let me suppose a reader who has stolen a horse. He is asked in Court what he has to say in his own defence. Taught by Mr. Wells, I suppose he would say: “M’lud, my defence is that there is no such thing as a horse. You cannot draw the line between Eohippus, Hippus Alogos vel Hodiernus, and that glorious thing with wings and a halo which the horse will no doubt become here on earth if we give it time.” I am afraid he would not be allowed to get on very far with his defence. The judge and jury would still ignorantly go on believing that there was such a thing as a horse, an animal which behaved in a certain way and is very easy to recognise, and the humble pupil of Mr. Wells would go to gaol.

So also there is such a thing as man, though Mr. Wells seems to doubt it. Man has a particular nature, and that nature is subject to questions which it is of enormous importance to him to decide. His individuality, his soul, is, for instance, either immortal or mortal. It is of first-rate importance to decide on that—infinitely more important than it is to decide on exactly how and by what stages his body came to be; just as it is infinitely more important for a man to decide between right and wrong action in manhood than to make a selection of his photographs as a baby.

We Catholics are interested in this Animal Man, because we think (making clear use of our reason) that it is more important for man to know what happens to man and what man really is than for man to know any other subject. We believe that he has been created by an omnipotent God, to whom he is responsible for good or evil action committed by his own free will—for in man’s free will we also believe; we believe his soul to be immortal, and to be tested for eternal beatitude or eternal loss thereof.

Anyone is free to say “These doctrines are particular, you admit yourself that you hold them on Faith and not on positive evidence. I for my part do not accept them.” There is no lack of reason in making that negative statement.

But a mind that can imagine that there is no such thing as man and indeed no such thing as a thing; a mind (to put it in the old language) which is nominalist in that degree, is in great peril of ceasing to be a mind at all.

The particular point on which Mr. Wells comes his worst cropper in connection with the Catholic Church is a blunder to which he devotes a whole chapter of his pamphlet, and over ten pages of print furiously reviling me.

He has got hold of the idea that the discovery of Neanderthal skulls and skeletons destroys Catholic theology. He imagines that we wake up in the middle of the night in an agony of imperilled faith because a long time ago there was a being which was as human as we are apparently in his brain capacity, in his power to make instruments, to light fires, and in his reverent burial of the dead, but who probably, perhaps certainly, bent a little at the knee, carried his head forward, was sloping in the chin. He thinks that unless a private individual like myself, with hardly any more reading on anthropology than Mr. Wells himself, can give a definite theological definition on whether the owners of these skeletons were true men or not, all the theological statements about man as we know him are worthless.

I can understand many a blunder about the Catholic position on the part of people living in a world where they do not meet Catholics and who know next to nothing of the past of Europe or of the way in which our civilisation is a product of the Catholic Faith. I often come across even well-educated men who have surprisingly little knowledge of the Church; but what I cannot understand is that a man thus ignorant should also be ignorant of the ordinary rules of thought.

A man’s Faith may possibly be shaken by some philosophical argument—though my own experience is that when it is shaken, still more when it is lost, the cause at work is not intellectual but always moral—the Faith is lost through wrong doing. But that the Faith could conceivably be lost through not being able to define at what exact moment true man appeared, is to me quite inconceivable. I confess I cannot understand the mental processes of a writer who puts a test of that kind.

We are arguing as to whether Wordsworth is a good poet or no. One man says he is, quoting from his best; another man says he isn’t, quoting from his worst. There barges in a third party who says cheerfully, “The whole discussion is futile. There was no such person as Wordsworth as a writer at all. And to prove that, here is a record of what he was like and what he did at the age of six, and another when he was inarticulate upon his death-bed. Where do you draw the line?”

We are discussing whether an individual is responsible for a particular action; for instance, writing a confused book. One man says, “It was not his fault; it was due to bad training.” The other says, “It was his fault, for any rational being ought to write more clearly than that.” A third party barges in, and says, “The whole discussion is futile, for there was no such writer. I can prove it by a photograph of him as a baby, in which it is quite clear that he couldn’t write books at all.”

But Mr. Wells’s manifold lack of acquaintance with his most serious opponent is seen in plenty of other lights.

For instance, there is his idea that scale destroys the Faith. “Only let me convince you,” he pathetically urges, “that the material universe existed long before man, and that the scheme of redemption only applies to the comparatively brief human period in geology. Only let me convince you, and you will see how foolish all this Christian talk is.” But we have all of us known all about that, not only since first the Church began, but since first man began to trouble himself about divine things at all. Is not the sky at night sufficient evidence of scale? Is not the brevity of human life? Is not the magnitude of the world upon which we live—of even a part of which no man could have comprehensive knowledge in a thousand years?

There is I think in all of this an honest desire upon Mr. Wells’s part—I may say a burning missionary zeal—to convert us to Atheism, something on the same level as that of those from whom he derives. They were convinced, you will remember, not so long ago, that to turn the inhabitants of Wugga-Mugga into honest folk like themselves attending chapel, meeting at tea-fights, and even keeping one or two servants, all that was wanted was a translation of the Old Testament in Wugga-Mugganese—which translation they then did order in prodigious quantities and export to Wugga-Mugga by the ton, to the huge profit of a great number of salaried officials in the W.M. Bible Society, and to honest rum-drinking sea captains as well; but to no appreciable effect upon Wugga-Muggaland, its monarch, aristocracy and common folk.

So I fear it will be with this effort at conversion of the Catholic to Atheism by an exceedingly insufficient rehash of text-books thirty years old. Mr. Wells sometimes pleads that all this doesn’t matter, because the Catholic Church no longer counts. Well, that plea itself is a very good example of ignorance. If he had a general acquaintance with Europe he would know, not only that the Catholic Church counts, but that it is beginning to count more and more. That is no proof of its right to the claim it advances of a divine authority; but it is proof that there is a great social phenomenon present to the eye of every educated and travelled man to-day—the resurrection of the Catholic Nations, the new attitude of the academic youth on the Continent, and particularly in Paris; the new wave in literature; the breakdown of the nineteenth-century materialism in philosophy—which is not present in the experience of Mr. Wells.

He tells us rather pathetically that he must know all about the Catholic Church, because he now winters on the Riviera. I answer that the experience is insufficient. If every rich Englishman who wintered on the Riviera acquired thereby a general grasp on the modern spirit of Europe, we should have among them a public to be envied; but from what I have seen of those who thus escape the English winter, the Monte Carlo Express and the Cosmopolitan hotels do not make for common culture, let alone for an understanding of divine things.

I have no space to enlarge on the point. Mr. Wells knows as much about the Catholic Church as he does of the classical spirit, of great verse, of the architecture inherited from the ancients, or indeed of any other noble tradition. Yet it should be a commonplace with anyone who attempts to write upon European history that some general knowledge of what the Faith may be is a first essential in his affair.

That knowledge is rare and fragmentary in many considerable anti-Catholic historians; in Mr. Wells it is absent.

IV
MY ERRORS

I owe it to Mr. Wells that any error or misstatement I may have committed in the great bulk of work which I did showing up the paucity of his knowledge and the confusion of his mind, should be corrected.

I now, therefore, deal with the specific, particular points, in which he says that I have misrepresented him or misunderstood him; and these I will take in their order, as they appear in his somewhat hysterical protest.

Of these alleged misstatements Mr. Wells manages to scrape up exactly six, out of I know not how many in the detailed and destructive criticism which I directed against his work.

But even six alleged misstatements (out of perhaps some hundreds of critical remarks) should in justice be dealt with, and I will deal with them here.

I will take his complaints in their order as they appear in his angry little pamphlet.

(1) I recommend him occasionally to a translation of foreign work, though he is, as a fact, better equipped than I am in the reading of Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese; while French comes to him much the same as his native tongue.

I accept his statement unreservedly, and beg leave to tell him that in German, Italian, Spanish, and even Portuguese, I am no use at all; and that I am altogether his inferior in French. For I have perpetually to consult better scholars than myself on the meaning of French words which I come across; I write the language painfully, and, on the few occasions when I have to speak it in public, I spend a vast amount of effort and am a burden to my friends before I can get my paper ready for delivery.

But it is only fair to myself to give him the reasons for my deplorable blunder. I honestly took it for granted that he was ignorant of Continental languages. I had no idea of his quite remarkable linguistic achievements, which are excelled only by two men out of my wide circle of acquaintance. And the reason that I fell into this error was that his Outline of History betrayed no acquaintance with general European culture. My own acquaintance with that culture is no more than the general familiarity with it possessed by all men of average education, and average experience in travel, and average meeting with their fellows. Why Mr. Wells should have concealed far greater advantages I do not know; but, at any rate, he has certainly done so most successfully. No one reading his Outline of History could imagine for a moment that he had an urbane and comprehensive view of Christendom based on the reading of French, German, Italian, Spanish—and Portuguese.

However, I was wrong, and I duly apologise.

(2) He accuses me of having put into his mouth the words “climbing up the family tree,” as applied to the embryo; which words, as a fact, he never used. Here, again, I am to blame—not, indeed, for having said that Mr. Wells used words which he never used, but for not having written with that clarity which the occasion demanded. I had no intention of saying that Mr. Wells had used this particular phrase himself. I quoted it between inverted commas, not because I ascribed it to himself, but because it was a sort of current slang phrase familiar enough when Mr. Wells and I were young and were both being taught the nonsense which he still so loyally defends.

The idea was that the embryo reproduced in various stages of its development the various stages of its ancestry in the evolutionary process. The proper scientific term for this conception or theory is “Recapitulation.” To this theory of Recapitulation Mr. Wells amply commits himself in his book. He brings it out specifically in connection with man. How his allusions to Recapitulation look in the light of modern scientific work we shall see in a moment. The particular point here is that he did not use the particular phrase “climbing up the family tree.” He did not, and I never intended to say that he did. I readily apologise for any misconception that may have arisen on that head. But I confess I cannot for the life of me see how the matter can be of the least importance!

Supposing Mr. Wells were to write a criticism of my book, Europe and the Faith, and were to say, “Mr. Belloc is for ever referring the main institutions of Europe to the Roman Empire,” and then were to add, out of his wide acquaintance with French literature, that fine expression from Verlaine, “O Rome! O Mère!”

I don’t think I should rush into print and protest that I had been abominably maligned. I should say that I was not the author of the expression (if anybody bothered to ask me), but that it put my opinion more tersely than I could have put it myself.

However, if Mr. Wells cannot bear the misunderstanding, he will be relieved to know that in my book I have got rid of it by the simple process of adding the words “as it was called in Mr. Wells’s youth and mine” before the offending phrase (and a very good epigrammatic one it is) “climbing up the family tree.”

(3) Mr. Wells complains that I accuse him of not having read Vialleton, and brings forward, in triumphant proof of my own ignorance of that great scientist, the fact that I passed an error in proof, allowing “Vailleton” to stand for “Vialleton.”

Here it is I that must defend myself.

I bought Vialleton’s great book (which is a destructive criticism of Darwinism of a 17-inch calibre) the week in which it came out, and have consulted it ever since. If Mr. Wells is reduced for ammunition to the picking out of one misprint in some hundred thousand words of matter, he must be in a terrible way.

But on the attached point, that I accuse him of never having read Vialleton, and that (as Mr. Wells himself roundly affirms) Vialleton does not knock Recapitulation sideways, I can only repeat that I have made no error at all; but that, on the contrary, it is clear Mr. Wells has never read the book, and probably never heard of it until he saw the name quoted in my criticism. Had he really read Vialleton he could not have had the face to pretend that this great authority did not oppose the old-fashioned views Mr. Wells was putting forward.

Mr. Wells is foolish enough—and ignorant enough—to say that this leading European authority, one of the greatest living authorities on his subject, “may have seen fit in one of his works” (my italics) to set right some “French student” (why French?) who had imagined that the embryo reproduced in detail all its ancestral life.

I might as well say that Darwin “may” in some one of his works have seen fit to set right some English student who imagined all animals to have been created out of mud in a week.

Why! the whole of that great book is nothing but one continuous bombardment of everything—let alone Recapitulation—which Mr. Wells was taught in his youth.

He will hear all about it in my book, and I am sure that he will wish, when he reads what modern science really says, that he had never talked about things of which he knows so little.

(4) He complains that I have abused him for stating as dogma (with large diagrams) Croll’s astronomical theory of glaciation as propounded—thirty-three years ago!—by Sir Robert Ball. But I did right to expose anything so monstrous. Not that astronomical factors may not, or rather must not, have been at work; but that the particular theory which he puts forward for his innocent readers as admitted scientific fact, has been dead and done for since 1894. Surely one has a right in 1926 to point out that the popular teacher laying down in that year as fact an hypothesis which was exploded over thirty years ago should be exposed.

(5) He says that I have attacked him for not accepting the theory that times of high glaciation were also times of high sea-level, and vice versa. He says that he has followed in this authorities later than the authorities of twenty years ago which I quoted.

He is perfectly right. I owe him an apology for this, and when my book comes out the passage shall be wholly modified in consonance with recent work. I over-emphasised the certitude of Boule and others; I admit that the point is in doubt and ought not to be treated as certain. Mr. Wells was obviously wrong in treating it as certain upon his side, for the whole debate still remains doubtful (as, for instance, in the latest work of all, Professor Coleman), but that does not excuse me for having been too positive on my own side.

(6) The last accusation Mr. Wells brings against me is that I misrepresent him in similar fashion upon two points, the Neanderthal quality of the Tasmanians (now extinct) and the use of the bow by Paleolithic Man.

As both these accusations turn on the same point (to wit, whether I was justified in reading confused writing as I did), they are essentially one accusation, and I will treat them as such.

In the matter of the bow being used by late Paleolithic Man the position is this.

Mr. Wells gives a long description of later Paleolithic Man (pages 51–56). In the course of this description he tells us (on page 54) that later Paleolithic Man disappeared and that a new culture took his place, possessing (what Paleolithic Man had not) domesticated animals, a knowledge of husbandry, bows and arrows, and the rest of it.

This, of course, is the orthodox doctrine of the famous Gap between Paleolithic Man and Neolithic Man on which our generation were all brought up. It is true that there are now guesses at the discovery of a link between them; still the gap is very marked.

He ends up with a summary of the whole affair on page 55, carried over to page 56, where the section ends.

Now, in the middle of this description of later Paleolithic Man (who, remember, had no bows and arrows), he has a set of paragraphs (on page 53) describing the well-known fact that these men executed drawings on rock surfaces. On the same page is given a specimen of these drawings, and above it, by way of title, the caption, “Mural Painting by Paleolithic Man.” This mural painting is nothing else but bows and arrows! It is a picture of four men hunting with large bows, three of them actually shooting arrows, and the unfortunate animals stuck full of arrows so that there may be no doubt.

Yet in the course of this very same description he says that it is “doubtful if they knew of the bow!” And that phrase comes on page 55, two whole pages after the description of Mural drawings and pictures of bows and arrows.

The division about later Paleolithic Man—who, he has told us, was supplanted by Neolithic Man—comes to an end and a new division begins.

In this new division Mr. Wells suddenly starts to describe a type of Paleolithic Man upon whom the guess has been made that he came at the very end of the process and had a more advanced culture, including bows and arrows.

What is any man to make of such a confusion?

First, Paleolithic Man as an artist, illustrated by a picture of him shooting away like the devil. Then, the casual remark that he was too degraded to shoot at all. Then the end of Paleolithic Man and his replacement by Neolithic Man. Then Paleolithic Man reappearing, pages after, with bows and arrows all complete?

It looks uncommonly as though Mr. Wells had written his first section, putting an end to Paleolithic Man and introducing Neolithic Man, before he had been told of the supposed later Paleolithic men who had bows and arrows: that he put in these latest Paleolithic men as an afterthought.

But that is only an inference from reading his confused order, and if he tells me that what he had meant to say was that there were two kinds of late Paleolithic men, one of whom had bows and arrows and the others had not, of course I accept what he says. Only, he should have written it plainly, and he should not have illustrated the part describing the men who had no bow and arrows with a large picture in which bows and arrows are the main thing.

The other case of the Tasmanian is a similar example of confused writing. Let the reader judge.

We have on page 43 and what follows a description of Neanderthal Man.

It is, as is usual with Mr. Wells, a mass of vague guess work, on very little evidence, put forward as certain facts. We have also the judgment of the author that those who regard Neanderthal Man as no ancestor of ours, but a side-line of development, have his approval; though he admits that the other view is held. This on page 49.

Then Mr. Wells steps sideways again. “No doubt” our own breed, “which includes the Tasmanians, was a very similar and parallel creature.” There is, of course, no ground for that “no doubt,” but that is by the way. He next goes on to say that some imaginary ancestor of ours and of the Tasmanians (whom he generously admits to be men), is not so far from us as to have allowed contemporary types to have eliminated, not indeed Neanderthal but the Neanderthaloid types. Then, on page 52, there is a smart return to the original position that Neanderthal Man was not an early type of our own breed, and that true men did not intermix with him.

Mr. Wells may protest against my calling all this sort of thing a rigmarole, but I think that is the right word for it. It is certainly not history, and, above all, it is not clear.

The confused impression left upon the reader’s mind by the confused writing is that Neanderthal Man was not true man, and yet that true man must have passed through a Neanderthal stage, having been both Neanderthal and not Neanderthal: as it were, so to speak, and somehow.

However, a critic’s misreading, though caused by the confusion of the author’s style and the lack of orderly arrangement in his mind, is none the less a misreading, and Mr. Wells may rest assured that when my book appears it shall be corrected. My perplexed guess at what Mr. Wells really meant shall be replaced by his own statement of what he meant, and I will, in these two cases of the Bow and the Tasmanian, emphasise the muddlement of his method while apologising for the error into which it led me as to his intention.

With this I conclude my review of Mr. Wells’s specific grievances of misstatement.

They are, as I have pointed out, only six in number. Out of a prolonged examination—covering nearly a hundred thousand words—he could find no others.

Of these six, only one (the fifth, that on the connection of sea level with glaciation) is a definite error of over-emphasis upon my part.

The first, my ignorance of his remarkable proficiency in modern language (including Portuguese), is more than natural, because he had made no use of such knowledge: nevertheless, I shall correct it in my book.

The second is wholly insignificant, and turns merely upon Mr. Wells’s misunderstanding of my use of inverted commas in a particular case.

In the third, about Vialleton, he is simply wrong, and, what is worse, pretends acquaintance with a book of which he clearly knows nothing.

So is he wrong about the fourth. Mr. Wells’s definite affirmation for popular consumption of a theory exploded more than thirty years ago was disgraceful.

On the sixth point, misreading due to Mr. Wells’s own confused order, I have promised him the small necessary redress, which he will receive.

Now, let me ask my reader, in conclusion, is it not remarkable that a man setting out to inform a large audience that God, and our Lord’s Divinity, and our own immortal destiny are all nonsense, doing so by a pretended “science” and favouring me as an insufficient critic of his book, can only find in some scores of my exposures of him six points, half of which tell heavily against himself, while two of the remainder are due to his own confusion and only one—my over-emphasis on glacial sea level—has any substance in it?

V
MR. WELLS SHIRKS

The most violent positive part of Mr. Wells’s attack upon me is, as I have said, his challenge upon the matter of Natural Selection, his jeer that my arguments are wholly my own, ridiculous and unsupported; and his amazing assertion, which he makes, quite naïvely and sincerely, that there has been nobody in modern criticism opposing the Darwinian theory. I think I have sufficiently exposed Mr. Wells in these particulars.

But quite as important as this huge positive error on his part is the negative factor in his pamphlet which I here emphasise for the reader.

In my articles, which are about to appear in book form, I took his Outline of History section by section, examined, turned over, analysed, and exposed failure after failure in historical judgment and information.

One challenge after another—I know not how many in all, but certainly dozens on dozens—was put down by me clearly and, I hope, methodically throughout a series of articles originally twenty-eight in number, and of such volume that they still will form when rearranged a book not less than 70,000 or 80,000 words.

Of all this great mass of destructive criticism which leaves his Outline limp and deflated, Mr. Wells knows nothing. He leaves it unanswered, and he leaves it unanswered because he cannot answer it. All he can do is to fill a pamphlet with loud personal abuse.

I do not think it difficult to discover his motive or the calculation upon which he worked. He said to himself: “I have a vast reading public which will buy pretty well anything I write, and very few of whom have seen or will see Belloc’s work. For to begin with he has no such huge popular sales as mine; and on the top of that his work is only written for his co-religionists, who are an insignificant body. Also it only appeared in a few of their Catholic papers, which nobody reads.

“Therefore, if I write a pamphlet against Belloc holding him up to ridicule in every possible fashion, slanging him with the violence so dear to the populace, making him out to be a grotesque fellow—and yet shirking nine-tenths of his criticism—I am in no danger of exposure. The pamphlet attacking Belloc will be very widely read, people will believe anything I say in it about his articles, because they will not have read these articles and because, in their simplicity, they think me a great scientist.”

This calculation is partially justified.

I suppose that for ten men who may read Mr. Wells’s pamphlet against me, there will not perhaps be more than one who will read this, my reply.

But I would like to point out to Mr. Wells that success of this kind is short-lived. No one can read what I have said in the second section of this pamphlet, no one can read that list of authorities of whom Mr. Wells has not even heard, and whom he loudly proclaimed not even to exist, without discovering that the author of the Outline of History was incompetent for his task. Very few people, I think, faced with chapter and verse of that sort, can refrain from passing on the good news.

If you take the history of opinion upon matters of positive fact, you will generally discover that the discovery of the truth affects at first but a small circle, and that a popular error may cover a whole society. But it is the truth that wins in the long run, because the truth is not soluble: it is hard and resistant. The number of people who continue to believe that there has been no modern destructive criticism of Darwinism by the greatest of modern biologists, anthropologists, and scientific men, bearing the highest names in our civilisation, will necessarily be progressively lessened as time goes on. The half educated of any period are always cocksure of things which the real science of that period has long ago abandoned; but their situation is not a stable nor a permanent one. Sooner or later they learn. So undoubtedly will it be with Darwinian Natural Selection.

Mr. Wells’s incompetence in that one department of his history has been exposed. I have exposed it. But note that he was here on his own chosen ground. He boasted special instruction in these affairs of physical science, and particularly in biology; he contrasted his education with my own, which had been so deplorably limited to the Humanities, and in his attack upon me he was fighting wholly upon a position chosen by himself.

What then would it have been had he attempted to meet the rest of my criticism, filling up as it does much the greater part of my book?

How will he meet my objection that the man who tries to talk about the Roman Empire, and our civilisation which is its product, without any mention or conception of Latin literature and its effect, is incompetent?

How would he deal with the simple and obvious but conclusive fact that physical discovery was not the cause of religious disruption, as may be proved by the simple fact that it came after and not before that disruption?

How will he handle my pointing out that he knows nothing of the history of the early Church and has no conception of what the Christian traditions and sub-Apostolic writings were?

What will he make of my showing him to be ignorant of Catholic philosophy and Catholic definition, and yet absurdly confident in his attack on what he supposes them to be?

Anyone can see how he deals with my criticism of him in all these things. He is silent. He does not rebut it, because he cannot rebut it. If he could have done so even in the briefest and most elementary fashion, there would have been at least a few sentences to that effect in his pamphlet. There were none except one vague phrase on the contemporary doctrine of the Incarnation.

In plain English Mr. Wells shirks. He shirks the great mass of my attack. He submits in silence to the bombardment—because he has no power to reply.

Yet surely these proved absurdities on recorded history, and not his backwardness in biological science, are the main thing he has to meet.

It is principally through recorded human history and not through guess work upon the unknown past, that he should rely, in order to upset the Christian Faith of his readers.

The history of our race becomes a definable and concrete thing only after the establishment of record, and if he fail there manifestly—as he has failed—he fails altogether.

Mr. Wells must, I think, have heard the famous dictum of the late Master of Balliol upon his Outline—a judgment which has already been quoted by more than one critic, and which I am afraid he will hear repeated pretty often before he has done with it. That very learned historian remarked: “Wells’s Outline was excellent until it came to Man”; and upon the whole it is about the truest epigram that could have been written. Save perhaps this. Mr. Wells’s Outline is excellent until he begins to deal with living things—somewhere about page ten.

VI
THE GREAT ROSY DAWN

The last factor in Mr. Wells’s pamphlet is one that we must always expect from your Bible Christian who has lost his God. He becomes a materialist troubled with Pantheism, and very eager to get away from the Puritan disease of his youth—yet a vision remains. He comes forward as the “Seventh Monarchy man,” which is, indeed, the natural term of your Bible Christian—even after he has lost his God.

“I see knowledge,” says Mr. Wells at the end of his diatribe, “increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limit set to it at all. Existence impresses me as perpetual dawn. Our lives as I apprehend them, swim in expectation.”

We have had this before over and over again, not only from the enthusiasts of the seventeenth century, but from the enthusiasts of the early heresies. There was a glorious time coming. Reality—that is the Faith—is a delusion. Now that you know it to be a delusion you are naturally down in the mouth. But cheer up, I have a consolation for you. All will yet be well; nay, much better. All is going forward. My donkey will soon grow wings.

I need not waste my reader’s time on that sort of thing. It is sheer stupid enthusiasm, indulged in to fill the void left by the loss of reason: by a man losing himself in a fog of cheap print and becoming fantastically unaware of things as they are.

When, in that connection Mr. Wells tells me that we of the Faith are backward people, who “because it is necessary for their comfort believe in Heaven and Hell” (a comfortable place Hell!) I answer that he appreciates the Faith as a man born blind might appreciate colour. When he tells me that this Catholic sort (to which I belong) are besotted to stand by accepted morals, beget children honestly, love one wife and live decently, I answer him that he is becoming disgusting. When he says that we believe in immortality “because we should be sorry to grow old and die,” I answer that he is talking nonsense on such a scale that it is difficult to deal with it.

When he goes on to say that we think we live on a “flat World” it becomes worse still, and one can’t deal with it; it is no longer nonsense, it is raving.

When he tells us that the Catholic has about him “a curious defensive note,” I am afraid he must be thinking of the Church Congress. There was certainly no “curious defensive note” in my demolition of his own ignorance, vanity and lack of balance.

When he tells us that I, as a Christian, “must be puzzled not a little by that vast parade of evolution through the immeasurable ages,” he clearly has not the least grasp of the very simple principle that eternity is outside time, and that relative values are not to be obtained by mere measurement in days or inches. When he says that “my” phantasy of a Creator....

Really, my dear Mr. Wells, I must here interrupt. Why “my” phantasy? Not that he uses the word “phantasy,” but he implies that I invented God (another enormous compliment to me). Does he not know that the human race as a whole, or at any rate the leading part of it, including his own immediate honourable ancestry, pay some reverence to Almighty God, and humbly admits His creative power and Sustained Omnipotence? But I must resume.

... that my phantasy of a Creator has worked within disproportionate margins both of space and time; when he tells me if I reach beatitude I shall feel like a fish out of water; when he speaks like this, I recognise the unmistakable touch of the Bible Christian who has lost his God.

Mr. Wells has never met anybody, I suppose, of sufficient breadth of culture to instruct him in these things. He does not know that the truths of the Faith cannot be visualised; he does not know that the Faith is a philosophy; he does not know that our limitations are no disproof of an infinite Creator.

He boasts that his education was a modern one, and taught him things that were unknown a hundred years ago. So was mine. I also was taught that the Earth was a globe, that geological time was prolonged, and the rest of it, but I was also taught how to think, and I was also taught a little—not very much—history.

For instance, I was taught enough to know that the doctrine of immortality did not arise in the Middle Ages, as Mr. Wells thinks it did, nor even the doctrine of eternal beatitude. But I was taught enough to regard these great mysteries with reverence and not to talk about them as preposterous. In other words, I was taught not to measure the infinite things of God, nor even the great things of Christendom, by the standards of the Yellow Press.

When Mr. Wells concludes this passage by saying, “I strut to no such personal beatitude,” and then goes on to say, “the life to which I belong uses me and will pass on beyond me, and I am content,” he does two unintelligent things. First of all, he mixes up the real with the imaginary (for whether he will attain beatitude or its opposite has nothing whatever to do with his opinions upon the subject), and next he falls into the very common error of confused intellects—the personification of abstract ideas. “The life to which we belong uses us” is a meaningless phrase. God may use us or we may use ourselves, or some other third Will, not God’s or our own, may use us: but “the life to which we belong” does not use us. Talking like that is harmless when it is mere metaphor, it is asinine when it sets up to be definition.

He accuses the Christian of being anthropomorphic: it is just the other way. It is we who are perpetually compelled to drag back inferior minds to a confession of their own apparently ineradicable tendency to talk in terms of their own petty experience; to imagine that the whole world has “progressed” because they have daily hot baths and bad cooking, while in their childhood they had only occasional hot baths, but better cooking; that more people voting is “progressive” as compared with people not voting at all; that a lot of rich people going from England to the Riviera every year is “progressive” compared with staying at home in the hideous surroundings of poor old England.

This leads Mr. Wells, as it always does all his kind, to prophecy. We are all of us approaching what I may call The Great Rosy Dawn: a goldmine: a terrestrial Paradise.

This sort of exaltation is the inevitable first phase of Bible-mania in decay. But it is a very short phase. It is the shoddy remnant of the Christian hope, and when it is gone there will return on us, not the simple paganism of a sad world, but sheer darkness: and strange things in the dark.

A COMPANION
TO MR. WELLS’S
“OUTLINE OF HISTORY”

BY
HILAIRE BELLOC

CONTENTS

CHAPTER |
I. | Introduction
II. | Mr. Wells and the Creation of the World
III. | Mr. Wells and the Fall of Man
IV. | Mr. Wells and God
V. | Whence came Religion to Man?
VI. | We come to Real History
VII. | Mr. Wells on Priesthood
VIII. | Buddhism as a Stick with which to beat the Christians
IX. | Mr. Wells and the Incarnation
X. | The Origins of the Church
XI. | Islam
XII. | The Christian Dark Ages
XIII. | The Middle Ages
XIV. | The Reformation
XV. | The Fruit of Disruption
XVI. | Mr. Wells’s Strange Obsession that the Catholic Church has been Killed Stone Dead by Mr. Darwin
| Summary

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. BELLOC STILL OBJECTS TO MR. WELLS'S "OUTLINE OF HISTORY" ***

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Table of Contents

- MR. BELLOC STILL OBJECTS
- CONTENTS
- INTRODUCTION
- I MR. WELLS’S GENERAL GRIEVANCES
- II MR. WELLS AS BIOLOGIST

- III MR. WELLS’S IGNORANCE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

- IV MY ERRORS
- V MR. WELLS SHIRKS
- VI THE GREAT ROSY DAWN
- Transcriber’s Notes
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE