Part 3

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 “V_ai_lleton” to stand for “V_ia_lleton.”

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.