A companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

by Hilaire Belloc

CONTENTS

CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	Introduction	[1]
II.	Mr. Wells and the Creation of the World	[9]
III.	Mr. Wells and the Fall of Man	[28]
IV.	Mr. Wells and God	[34]
V.	Whence came Religion to Man?	[40]
VI.	We Come to Real History	[47]
VII.	Mr. Wells on Priesthood	[51]
VIII.	Buddhism as a Stick with which to Beat the Christian	[59]
IX.	Mr. Wells and the Incarnation	[64]
X.	The Origins of the Church	[72]
XI.	Islam	[77]
XII.	The Christian Dark Ages	[84]
XIII.	The Middle Ages	[89]
XIV.	The Reformation	[93]
XV.	The Fruit of Disruption	[103]
XVI.	Summary	[110]
	Appendix	[115]
	Index	[119]

A COMPANION TO MR. WELLS’S

“OUTLINE OF HISTORY”

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

My object in these pages is to follow, for Catholic readers, Mr. Wells’s Outline of History; to point out the principal popular errors, most of them now out of date, which its author has repeated, and to state the opposing truths with their supporting evidence and reasoning.

If it be asked why I should devote such labour to a book which is but a passing fashion, and that not in the classes or districts which count most, I answer that, though ephemeral, the work has had a wide circulation, and is therefore of some momentary effect worth checking, while it is also representative of its type: writing of wide circulation which repeats as facts for general acceptation theories once respectable and now exploded. Now to check erroneous statement is always worth while.

If it be asked why I envisage a Catholic audience in particular, I answer that the issue in such matters lies between the Catholic Church and its modern opponents. The hosts of modern writers in all countries, of whom Mr. Wells is a local example, act more or less consciously in reaction against the Catholic Church. It is her doctrines they are concerned to attack; and soon, with the increasing effect of the Church upon the one hand, the increasing abandonment (outside her boundaries) of all transcendental belief on the other, there will be but two opposed camps: the Faith and its enemies.

Already the denial of a Personal God, of Immortality, of the Redemption, of the Fall, of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, is no longer directed against some vague “Christianity”—a word with twenty meanings or none—but against that defined and existing corporation which alone defends in its entirety that body of dogma upon which our civilization has been founded and with the loss of which it will perish.

Further, I have the legitimate motive of sustaining others. There are Catholics into whose hands a work of this kind falls, and it is possible that here and there a Catholic may be disturbed in his faith by popular literature of this kind. For the sake of this very small number of chance Catholics, who may suffer from a popular (though ephemeral) work of this kind, I desire to examine the book and distinguish its merits from its absurdities. One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more important than a host of the average reading public of England and America, drowsily accepting stuff they have heard all their lives, and reading it because they have always believed it to be true.

A Catholic disturbed in his faith is like a man troubled with his sight. A Catholic losing his faith is like a man going blind. One should take a great deal of trouble to prevent a man from going blind.

I am aware that to aver such a motive reads presumptuous and a little ridiculous. For faith is strongest in the humble. But the motive is there, and at any rate the important thing is that Mr. Wells’s widely read, though necessarily short-lived, survey of human affairs, with its violently anti-Catholic motive, should not be of effect on any Catholic mind so far as a Catholic critic can provide the antidote.

Every man, even the idlest, occupies his time with something or other. The vast majority of men have their energies absorbed by their daily tasks. So when a man comes forward with a mass of historical facts, drawn from Encyclopædias (which not one man in a thousand has had the leisure to look up in those books of reference), and tacks on to these historical facts all manner of false conclusions (destructive of the only truth worth having, destructive of the one grasp on reality which is of any value to men), the reader may well be misled.

He may easily say to himself, “Since all these historical facts are presumably true, the conclusions tacked on to them are also probably true.” And in this way a false philosophy is insinuated.

Mr. Wells’s main motive—the honestly held conviction which drives him to writing matter of this kind—is reaction against the Catholic Church. But as this motive is not stated—(and, indeed, I fancy, not fully conscious in the mind of the writer)—the reader may take his work to be neutral matter. In doing so, false history, and, therefore, false philosophy (for history is but the illustration of philosophy) may, without his knowledge, pass into his mind. It is this which it is important to prevent.

At the outset of my task it behoves me to set forth the great talents with which Mr. Wells has been endowed by Almighty God, and especially the talents suitable to the writer of general history. For, indeed, he seemed from his earlier works admirably fitted for writing a general outline of history, and would, by the consent of all, have been thought apt for the task—had he not undertaken it.

First, he writes very clearly; he practises an excellent economy in the use of words. This, for popular exposition, is essential; and he never fails in it. He never lapses into verbosity. He is direct, simple, clear.

Next, he possesses a sense of time. Now in history nothing is more valuable. Within his lights, within the measure of his limited instruction, he does see time in right scale; and that is so rare in any historian that one cannot welcome it too warmly.

Next, we should remark that Mr. Wells has (as his works of fiction amply show) a strong power of making the image he has framed in his own mind arise in the mind of his reader. This is, indeed, his chief talent.

It is a talent extremely rare: the very essential of good imaginative writing, but of particular importance in historical writing. For History, as the great Michelet finely put it, should be a resurrection of the flesh. Were I engaged upon a critique of Mr. Wells’s more permanent literary claims I would dilate on this: for such a gift is of quite exceptional power in him. None of our contemporaries possesses it in anything like the same degree. But I am not concerned here with his style, and must reluctantly leave it.

Next, it is worth noting that Mr. Wells is exceedingly accurate in his use of reference books and proof-readers. The dates are always right, and the names and all the mechanical details of the book are similarly exact. I have a particular right to praise such a quality because in my own case (as in the case of the great Michelet, whom I have just quoted) I despair of accuracy. My own writings on History are full of misprints: “right” for “left” in descriptions of battles, “north” for “south,” “east” for “west,” transposed letters and the rest of it. Mr. Wells’s writing is quite remarkable for its freedom from such irritating verbal blemishes.

But much more important than these advantages which he possesses for a writing of an Outline of History is his sincerity. He feels the importance of History to mankind, and especially, I think, to that part of mankind which he knows best—the mankind of the English Home Counties and London Suburbs. He feels instinctively that he and his must now obtain a general view. It is due to Mr. Wells to say that hardly anyone else in our restricted society feels this as strongly as he does. Our newspapers, our politicians, and even our financiers, cosmopolitan though they are, do not feel the need of trying to understand the past of Europe and of the world. They are still soaked in what is left of the old self-sufficiency. But Mr. Wells has woken up, and it is to his credit.

I put his sincerity thus last in this category of his advantages for writing History, because it is the chief. He is conspicuously and naively sincere. This good quality is apparent in every line of the work as it first appeared. It is equally apparent in the first part of the new revised edition. He does really believe from the bottom of his heart all that he read in the textbooks of his youth. He does really and from the bottom of his heart believe that the little world he knows is the whole world; and that his doctrines of goodwill, vague thinking, loose loving, and the rest—all soaked in the local atmosphere of his life—may be the salvation of mankind. It is not vanity or pride (though, of course, it is ignorance); it is a perfectly honest conviction. He cannot imagine how things could possibly be otherwise; and that, by the way, is the root of his recently acquired hatred of the Catholic Church, which has now become, directly and indirectly, the universally present savour in his writing.

He is sincerely bewildered and exasperated at the power of Something so different from the only world he knows. He hopes vaguely that the Church may be dying: he suspects it is not—the doubt worries him. It moves him to hatred; but that hatred is sincere. This sincerity of his, even where it is misguided and untaught, is respectable. He does sincerely desire to do good to his fellow-men within the narrow circle of his experience and understanding.

If the reader will add up all these advantages for the writing of History, he will find them amount, I think, to a very notable sum.

There are few men who could have produced a general history better than Mr. Wells—had he not suffered from certain graver disadvantages to which I shall presently allude. To be sincere is essential. To have the motive of History is both singular and decisive. To have clarity, economy and a sense of time is rare and of high value. To be accurate in detail of dates, etc., is a most excellent minor virtue in any historian.

Mr. Wells has called me an inveterate antagonist. He is wrong. From the first moment that the Time Machine appeared, so many years ago, I have consistently praised his talents in private conversation and in public writing, and I shall praise them still.

Before I leave this point of his advantages in the writing of History, let me deal very briefly with certain false accusations that have been made against him.

The first and, I think, the stupidest, is that of brevity. I have heard people say, “Here is a man pretending to write a history of the world in a few months and in a few pages,” and they have laughed at him on that ground. The accusation is unintelligent. You can give the outline of the history of anything in a sentence, or a paragraph, or a pamphlet, or a book, or an encyclopædia. If Napier, the great historian of the Peninsular War—perhaps the greatest English writer of History—had been asked to state in one sentence the outline of that struggle, he might have replied, “The Spanish national feeling engaged with French usurpation was supported by a small English regular army possessed of the command of the sea. These two forces combined achieved, after Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, the driving out of the French from the Peninsula.” If he had been given a page in which to write the thing he could have added phrases upon the talent of Wellington as a defensive General, the misconception of the French upon the Spanish national feeling, the skill with which the lines of Torres Vedras were drawn, etc. Had he been given fifty pages, he could have added more details still—and so on, up to a shelf full of books. But the outline from such a pen would have been good History had it covered ten lines or ten thousand. It is thoughtless to say that a man has no right to give an outline of any movement, however great, in any space, however small. The Catechism puts the whole vast business of man through time and eternity into one short phrase, “That we were made to know, love, and serve God, and to be happy with Him for ever.” You could add to that all the rest of true philosophy in as much detail as you like, and still expand; but the original brief outline of less than a score of words remains true. Mr. Wells has a perfect right to produce an outline of general History in one volume, or half a volume, or a page, and, so far as the manner of it goes, he has done it excellently: the drawing is firm, the intention honest; it is the shape of the Outline that is wrong.

Again, he is wrongly accused of superficiality. That is an accusation made by people who see—what, indeed, is obvious—that the book has no lasting value, and that therefore they can call it hard names with impunity, secure against the judgment of posterity. The book is ephemeral, certainly; but no honest critic can call it superficial. The book is not superficial at all. On the contrary, it goes to the roots of things, and considers what is really important to mankind. One may indeed call the writer superficial in so far as he knows nothing of beauty or tradition—that is due to his unavoidable limitations; but superficial his effort is not. It is as searching in the matter of cause and effect as its writer can make it. That is not saying very much, for its writer has never had the opportunity for digging deep into cause and effect; but the book does not suffer from that prime mark of superficiality—indifference. Mr. Wells means to say all that is in him, and if there is not very much in him, that is not his fault.

He has a neutral quality, neither an advantage nor a disadvantage in the writing of History; or, perhaps, rather an advantage than a disadvantage, and that is, an intense nationalism. An English scientist is supreme. An English book changes the world. An English mode of thought is self-evidently the best. The Catholic Church itself is hateful mainly because it is foreign. Such nationalism is often the unconscious accompaniment of limitation, but, upon the whole, it serves the historical sense. After all, any worker must be himself. He cannot create unless there is a flame within him. Such flames arise from intense conviction, and the historian steeped in his own country does better, in my judgment, despite his inevitable leanings, than one who pretends attachment to nothing: for attachment to nothing is sterility. The three great historians whom good judges most admire were all intense lovers of their country—an Athenian, a Frenchman and a Scotsman.

Now for the disadvantages.

The first and most glaring of these is Provincialism.

But here I must warn my readers that they will not discover in this criticism any of those personal descriptions or offensive allusions to private life by which our vulgarians aim at extending their large circulations. I am concerned only with this one book of Mr. Wells’s, and with History and Religion in it; not with domestic details in the Author’s life or the caricatures of them. The mental formation and social motive of an author must indeed be alluded to in any judgment of his work, as must his defects of instruction or judgment. The rest is irrelevant. I have even, in revising the text, cut out anything which might be mistaken for a personal allusion, and leave it, I believe, confined wholly to the criticism of historical statement, method and motive.

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I have said, then, that with so many qualifications for writing a popular general History, Mr. Wells suffers from defects which ruin it; and the first of these is that his book is Provincial.

The word “Provincial” is a hard one; but it exactly applies to Mr. Wells’s History; therefore it must be used.

I find it the more difficult to use this necessary and precise word here because I know Mr. Wells, from an acquaintance of many years, to be abnormally sensitive to any printed judgment of his work.

Such extreme sensitiveness is not rare in men of vivid imagination, especially if they cultivate its literary expression. But in this case it is quite exceptionally developed; and I naturally hesitate to offend it.

Greatly as I admire Mr. Wells’s scientific romances, and have always admired them, I am compelled to use exact terms in this criticism. I cannot do otherwise, because the truth of History is a sacred thing—the most sacred next to the truths of Religion. If History is falsely written, the reader not warned of it obtains a distorted view of human action and comes to misunderstand all the most essential things of life, including Religion itself; and Mr. Wells’s History is obviously and fatally distorted through Provincialism.

Provincialism does not mean a limitation of experience to some one small department of life—we are all of us subjected to such limitations, and any man’s petty personal experience is always infinitely small compared with the total possible field of knowledge. Nor does Provincialism mean seeing things through the medium of one’s own habitat and character, both necessarily limited. All men must see, and can only see, through some such limited medium.

No, Provincialism means thinking that one “knows all about it”; Provincialism means a satisfied ignorance: a simple faith in the non-existence of what one has not experienced. Provincialism involves a contempt for anything foreign and, what is worse, an actual denial of things which the provincial person has not been made familiar with.

It is Provincialism in a yokel when he laughs at you for not knowing the way to his local railway station. It is not Provincialism to say, “I don’t know about this. It is new to me. I must examine it before I accept it.” But it is Provincialism to say, as the Frenchman in the story did of Joan of Arc, “It can’t be true. If it were I should have heard of it.”

It is not Provincialism to say, “I far prefer the atmosphere and institutions of my own country to those of any other.” But it is Provincialism to think that the Cathedral of Seville must necessarily be inferior to the Crystal Palace because it was built by Dagoes, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is either a humbug or a fool. It would not have been provincial in Mr. Wells to have written “the character of Napoleon repels me; give me rather the honest Englishman of my acquaintance than this hard and profound Southerner”; but it is dreadfully provincial to belittle Napoleon’s immense capacities. It would not be Provincialism in me, who do not know German, to say that Heine in translation had not moved me, and that when the German of Heine was read aloud to me it seemed to me harsh compared with the exquisite music of Keats; but it would be gross Provincialism in me were I to lay it down, ignorant as I am of German, that Heine was no poet, that his reputation was exaggerated, and that, say, Schiller was his superior in the management of the German tongue; yet that is how Mr. Wells treats Napoleon.

Now this vice of Provincialism runs right through Mr. Wells’s Outline of History from beginning to end.

The moment he is on a thing that is not of his own religion and social experience he rejects it or blunders on it. I shall have many occasions for pointing this out in my criticism of the book, but I may mention here, by way of example, one out of these many, to which I shall return. This is Mr. Wells’s hopelessly provincial attitude towards the fragmentary record of the Gospels. He can only think of the events recorded as though they were taking place in the time and place he himself has known—they took place, as a fact, in the first century and in the Roman Empire. He imagines them taking place in a world where the supernatural elements of the story could only have been introduced gradually and after the death of the founder; whereas, in point of fact, the atmosphere of that time was in every class of society especially apt to the reception of the supernatural. There was scepticism among them—but the scepticism of society in the first century was not like our scepticism and—quite apart from the question whether such a state of mind were wise or unwise—the men of the first century accepted the Thaumaturge and expected the marvellous in connection with religion.

The next disadvantage which I find in Mr. Wells for the writing of an outline of History is one which he has developed somewhat late in his life, which is more and more warping his writing as a whole, and which is quite fatal to any attempt at History. This is his entertaining unreasoning reactions which one may now without exaggeration term rabid.

These reactions have a common root. They are all provoked by anything traditional. It is Tradition, its usage and Nobility which irks our author. Lineage offends him, and whatever is venerable and great.

He suffers these reactions against the Gentry—especially the Gentry of his own country—against soldiers, great military characters in history, against certain contemporaries of his, but, most of all, against the Catholic Church. To be thus provoked to action by others—not to direct one’s pen of one’s own initiative, but to have it jerked into action by the strength of another—is weakening to all authors, but it is death to the historian. For History, of all forms of writing, most demands a general and balanced action of the mind, free from all control save that of a calm, inward judgment.

Here I would have my reader note the exact words I use; for I use them with discretion and after having fully weighed them. I do not mean that the dislike of a particular type—such as that of the English gentleman—or of certain individuals, or of a powerful institution, such as is the Catholic Church—necessarily makes a man a bad historian. Every vivid writer must have affections and distastes, and History that is not vivid is not worth writing. But when the distaste becomes unreasoning through violence, when it has that quality which we call “rabid”—a quality of impulse and unrestraint, the quality which makes men yell or pile on superlatives or descend to mere insult—then you have a quality useful perhaps in pamphleteering, but fatal to the reputation of an historian.

I do not mean that this quality is to be deplored in all writing or speaking: far from it. It is of great value in rhetoric; it will often move men in the direction desired; it is often justly applied to something evil against which an honest indignation is felt. What I do say is that in History it is out of place in proportion to its being unreasoning: and unreason is the very essence of these instinctive reactions. Cobbett’s History of the Reformation, for instance, is a first-rate piece of literary work, but bad history, because in his hatred of the Reformation he accepts anything against it—such as the impossible story of Anne Boleyn being Henry VIII’s daughter—and loses the faculty for weighing evidence.

To judge by his books, Mr. Wells came up against the English idea of a Gentleman early in life. He probably thought it an illusion, and a harmful one, from the first. Very many will here agree with him. But later on he became obsessed by the thing. He came to hate everything connected with what used to be called in England “the governing class.” He grew to hate Latin and Greek because these are, or were, the basis of a gentleman’s schooling; soldiering, because it was by tradition a gentleman’s profession—he hates it all, even down to the spurs worn by officers.

But Mr. Wells’s violent and blind reaction against the Catholic Church is a much more important matter. Here he is quarrelling with the very matter of History; for the foundation and career of the Catholic Church is the chief event in the history of mankind.

To judge (again) by his books, Mr. Wells seems to have come up against the Catholic Church late in life—he does not yet really know what it is. But here, again, he found a power opposed to many ideas which he cherished, and (more exasperating) to many things which he sympathized with and practised. Perhaps he felt that in a world turned Catholic a man like himself would have difficulty in carrying on, and therefore came to hate the idea of a world turned Catholic as a fish would hate the idea of a world without water. But this mere impulse—this mere instinctive kick, lacking sufficient knowledge and lacking reasoning power—this mere attack without any sufficient ammunition of instruction—this mere impatience—makes it impossible for the man who suffers thus to write History as it should be written.

For instance, his hatred of the Church makes him wish to believe that its influence is dying. Instead of looking around him, and seeing that Catholic influence over the more intelligent of modern men is markedly increasing, he shuts his eyes and screams his passionate refusal to accept so plain, if unpalatable, a fact. It has recently led him to write that sufficient income and interesting occupation would make Catholic priests pour out of the Church en masse: a judgment clearly ridiculous.

Again, in dealing with the Galileo case, he will have it that the advance of physical science broke down the Catholic scheme. The motive of such a statement is clearly to suggest that the Faith is incompatible with real knowledge and that all extension of ascertained truth tends to destroy the Christian Religion.

But that is not rational history; it lacks even elementary instruction; a schoolboy ought to know better than to write thus. The historical process whereby so much of Europe was lost to European religion was not first an advance of physical science, then a loosening of the Catholic authority, and, lastly, a wide denial of that authority and the establishment of various heresies. The historical process was just the other way—first came the violent explosion of spiritual revolt and anarchy which nearly wrecked our civilization altogether; then, later, a large but not complete recovery; then, last, and principally in societies which had retained or recovered the Catholic culture, a new and remarkable advance in physical science.

It is not historically possible that astronomical discovery in the seventeenth century, the telescope, and the great new development of mathematics, could lead to the denial of Catholic doctrine in the sixteenth. Not only is it impossible in History; it could not possibly be true in psychology. No one with an elementary knowledge of Catholic spirit and doctrine could conceive that doctrine and spirit to be affected by any discovery in the plane of physical science. You might as well say that a man’s judgment on his duties to his country would be affected by a new ordnance survey, or his admiration of Bach by the discovery of zinc photography for printing music.

With all this I will deal later in more detail when I come to those parts of Mr. Wells’s work which specially show his general animus against the Faith. Meanwhile, let me conclude with another disadvantage which I find in him for the task he has undertaken. It is the inability he has shown for consulting the right people.

It is a laudable thing in any popular novelist who has acquired a large public and can attract its attention to set out with the sincere intention of instructing his fellow-beings, even in a department wherein he has had hitherto no practice.

Thus some such popular novelist might say to himself: “I think people ought to know more about the laws of health. I will therefore use my wide circulation and my large audience for the purpose of spreading knowledge upon hygiene.” There is nothing blameworthy in this, nor need the effort be insufficient. The popular novelist, being hitherto ignorant of modern medicine, would have to go for instruction to men who were already experienced in the matter: he would have to read certain textbooks; he would have to “get up the subject,” and might, if he selected his tutors and guides with a good flair for the right sources, produce a really useful elementary treatise upon a matter of which he had, till lately, known nothing. His name being well known to the multitude, his little effort would probably have a wide sale, and that wide sale would do nothing but good. But it is essential that he should make himself acquainted with the difference between what was certain and what was hypothetical; with the most recent debates upon disputed points; with at least the main arguments on either side, etc., and it would further be essential that he should hear the latest results of research. For though a theory is not better than another merely for being later than that other, yet as there is new fact continually being discovered, and new arguments concluded, their bearing upon theory must be appreciated.

Now, Mr. Wells has been very remiss indeed in this duty of consulting the right authorities, before sitting down to write even so elementary a history as this “Outline” of his. He had, at the outset, not more faculty for writing an elementary history than any other best-seller might have for writing a book on elementary mathematics; indeed, a good deal less, for our schools give a certain amount of elementary training in mathematics, but as yet no training to speak of in history. But it was manifestly apparent from the first issue of his book that Mr. Wells was rarely given the latest historical theories, let alone the latest historical discoveries.

What is more extraordinary in a man so interested in such things, he does not know the modern trend of controversy in Pre-history and Anthropology. He remains away back in what I may call “the early Golden-Bough-Period”—that of Grant Allen’s Evolution of the Idea of God in Pre-history. From internal evidence it would seem, as I shall point out in the text, that his studies in these matters stopped short—or at any rate crystallized—in 1893, the date of Ball’s book on Croll’s Theory of Glaciation and of the Weissmann articles in the Contemporary Review.

And I am appalled to discover that he knows nothing of all the modern work against Darwinism, in which system—that is, in Darwinian Natural Selection—he retains the simple faith of the day—over thirty years ago—when he was “doing” elementary science in a class.

It is the same with the recorded history of Europe. His informers referred him to no books wherein he might learn what force that Catholic Church was which made Europe. He did not compare—perhaps he never heard of—the various sources ascribed to our main political institutions, and the increasing evidence for their Latin origin.

Now these disadvantages taken together have ruined the book. Had they not done so, I should have taken for Catholic readers a different line. I should have said: “This History is full of knowledge; its statements in Anthropology and Biology are cautious and well balanced, its conclusions on historical cause and effect are correct; its knowledge of fundamental historical processes, though slight, is sound: the outline is just. Nevertheless, do not follow the author in his antagonism to the Faith, in defence of which we have arguments both historical and philosophical of such and such a kind.” As it is, my task is an easier one. I can say to my readers: “Mr. Wells’s sketch of History is not insincere in spirit; it is simply out of drawing from lack of common instruction. He has not kept abreast of the modern scientific and historical work. He has not followed the general thought of Europe and America in matters of physical science. While, in history proper, he was never taught to appreciate the part played by Latin and Greek culture, and never even introduced to the history of the early Church.

“And this is the more remarkable as he assures us that he has a wide knowledge of modern languages, in which he reads French like English, and can handle German, Spanish, Italian and even Portuguese.

“With all this Mr. Wells suffers from the very grievous fault of being ignorant that he is ignorant. He has the strange cocksureness of the man who only knows the old conventional textbook of his schooldays and thinks it universal knowledge.”

So much for the general consideration of the author, and of what he has attempted, and failed, to do. I next turn to the particular consideration of points in his writing which will illustrate the truth of the contentions I have advanced in this Introduction.

CHAPTER II
MR. WELLS AND THE CREATION OF THE WORLD

Mr. Wells sets out to recite not only History properly so-called, the known and conscious records of the human race, but also Pre-history, i.e. our knowledge, little as it is, of life on this earth prior to the advent of man or his predecessors, and of man himself prior to any surviving record.

In the department of Pre-history the first task which meets the writer is that of telling the order in which, according to the geological record, the rocks composing the earth’s surface were presumably laid down, and the order in which the vestiges of life appear in these rocks.

This task Mr. Wells has successfully performed. Anyone can put down the main known facts in their order, for it is a mere matter of reference to encyclopædias; but Mr. Wells has done so with concision, lucidity and accuracy: qualities which are apparent here as throughout the work. He is even careful to modify phrases which might be too absolute. For instance, he tells us that astronomers “give us reason to believe the slowing down of the rotation of the earth,” instead of saying, as many another would, “have proved....” He also acts with sense in giving very wide limits to the guesswork of modern physicists upon the scale of time by which we should judge the geological process, though he does not warn his readers, as he should do, that it is only guesswork, and that the deductions upon which it depends are taken from first principles, which are many of them incapable of verification and others mere hypotheses.

It is, perhaps, asking too much of our author to adopt a strictly scientific attitude: that is, to distinguish between hypothesis and proved fact. And this is particularly true of a study so full of hypothesis as geology. Men pretend to vastly more knowledge than they have in that branch of knowledge—as, for instance, on the rate of stratification. A man cannot but be influenced by his own time, and Mr. Wells is influenced by the unscientific loose thinking and insufficiently supported affirmations of his generation and place.

The chief mark of our time is a decline in the logical faculty, and with that decline goes an increasing inability to distinguish between what is proved, what is probable and what is possible only. It is in fields (such as Pre-history) where very little indeed is known, and where there is immeasurable room for making things up out of one’s head, that the distinction between fact and fancy is most easily lost. Only a minority in Europe have appreciated as yet how small a proportion of what passes for ascertained fact upon the remote past is really known, and how vast a proportion is based upon mere analogy or such quite unproved assumptions. Among our older men dogmatic affirmation of much that is already disproved, and much that is increasingly doubtful, continues. Such a profound remark as Ferrero’s “The men of the nineteenth century thought they knew everything, we know that they knew nothing,” would shock them to hear.

Allowing, then, for that natural tendency towards repeating in age what one was dogmatically taught in youth, Mr. Wells’s précis of the geological process is quite exceptionally good.

He also states clearly our present ignorance upon the origin of life; our failure, so far, to find a link between organic and inorganic; and even our inability to affirm—what is presumable upon analogy and was taken for granted in antiquity and during the Middle Ages—that living proceeds from dead matter.

All this done, however, Mr. Wells tackles the fundamental question of Creation—and here, at once, the fundamental weakness of the book appears: at its very outset on page 11.

The author becomes deeply concerned with a discussion peculiar to his own local society, and of a sort so childish that a thinking man has difficulty in taking it seriously: the discussion between the old-fashioned Protestant who thinks of creation as a sort of conjuring trick and the new-fashioned one who cannot believe in creation at all because he has discovered (rather late in the day) that things grow.

The old-fashioned Bible Christian thought that the Hen appeared mature in a twinkling, out of air, like the mango tree of the Indian jugglers. His newly enlightened son has discovered that it comes from an egg. Mr. Wells, upon this page 11, appears in the rôle of the newly enlightened, and is most earnest to convince his erring and belated fellows that life can have come into existence as a “natural” process: an idea which he conceives as repugnant to “religious” minds. It is astonishing that either of these two back-waters of culture should survive: the back-water of the Bible Christian enlightened by elementary “science,” which gets rid of a Creator, and the back-water of the not yet enlightened Bible Christian, who can’t think of creation except as the sudden appearance of familiar objects out of surrounding space. We may wonder with amusement what Mr. Wells would make of such a Catholic sentence as “God made this oak.” I suppose he would think it a confusion of acorns with God. He should read St. Thomas.

However, though the philosophy is pitiable, the précis of familiar facts in this summary of observed origins is very well done, and all these statements, though they are no more than what you may find in any popular textbook, are put much better than in most.

So much for Mr. Wells’s brief summary of the geological evidence as given in all our encyclopædias and books of reference. It is most readable, and accurately presents the ascending complexity of vegetable and animal life in the past.

But the man writing upon this process has another and far harder task to perform than the mere cataloguing of facts set down in textbooks. There comes a moment when he must try to solve a certain problem: when he must think. He must face a question which is as old as human enquiry, and which searches the very depths of his own nature and of the world around him. It is this:—

“Under the action of what Force did this difference between various kinds of living things come to be? Under what Cause did the organism differentiate and meet its environment, and develop into its myriad forms each fulfilling a function? What mind was at work, if any; and if no mind, then what?”

That question is the one capital enigma, the pre-eminent riddle of life set to the enquiry of man. For centuries upon centuries he has examined it and has found no reply, save in mystery.

A lifetime ago a group of men, intolerant of fundamental philosophical enquiry and intolerant of mystery, thought they had found the answer in a very simple and wholly mechanical method which explained Evolution in a new way. They called this method “Natural Selection,” and thereby—as they hoped—all necessity for design in the universe could be eliminated.

What that theory of Natural Selection was, I describe in a moment. It must suffice here to say that it made Evolution subject to blind chance—and that to-day it is quite dead.

It is characteristic of Mr. Wells’s work that now, in 1926, he still gives in all simplicity that exploded answer, which was so fashionable in the nineties. Mr. Bernard Shaw said the other day, with native charity, that no one under seventy still believed in Natural Selection. Page 16 of this new Part I of Mr. Wells’s book shows that Mr. Shaw estimated too highly the intelligence and culture of his contemporaries.

To trot out Natural Selection at this time of day as the chief agent in Evolution is almost like trotting out the old dead theory of immutable and simple elements in a popular chemistry. That is what was taught as chemistry when Mr. Wells was young, and Natural Selection was what was taught as the cause of differentiation between living beings when Mr. Wells was young. The one error is to-day nearly as obsolete as the other. There is still continuing the remains of an obstinate defence, urged by the strongest of human motives, religion: for there are still those who agree with Weissmann that Natural Selection must be maintained at all costs, and with no matter what fantastic affirmations, because “It is the only alternative to Design” in the Universe—that is, to God.

But there can be no doubt which way the battle has turned.

When Driesch said, twenty long years ago, “Darwinism is dead,” he was hardly premature.

To quote him now is to repeat a commonplace.

Let me not be misunderstood. I should not criticize Mr. Wells for ignorance if he had written thus: “Many explanations have been given of how Evolution has worked. The Ancients ascribed it to some inherent power in living things which they called ‘entelechy,’ i.e. the power to realize an end. The eighteenth century, led by Lamarck, tended at its close as did the earlier nineteenth to something similar, but emphasized the will and effort of the organism. In the mid-nineteenth century there was proposed by Darwin and Wallace a new mechanical explanation which got rid of design and of ‘an end’ to which organisms worked. Its authors called it ‘Natural Selection.’ For a short time it was so completely the fashion that it seemed impregnable. But Criticism soon began, and grew menacing by the end of the century. With the opening of the twentieth this Criticism had grown greater by far in volume and force, especially in America and on the Continent. To-day it seems overwhelming. None the less, I hold to those who with many modifications still maintain the old theory.”

But Mr. Wells did not write thus, with an appreciation of the position as it stands to-day. He set down Natural Selection in all its crudity as an admitted final truth, a piece of unquestioned modern science, and left his unfortunate readers under that impression.

To do that is morally inexcusable save on the plea of ignorance of all that vast bulk of criticism with which the average educated man is generally acquainted—at least as to its main results. And if he plead such ignorance as his excuse, then he admits himself quite unfitted to put forward even the simplest outline of Evolution to-day.

The point is one of first-class importance, for it illustrates at once the fixity and the weakness of that anti-Catholic—and irrational—spirit which will support any thesis however blown upon, so it be still of some service against the Christian Faith.

Let me give as briefly as possible the story of this old-fashioned theory of Natural Selection—which seemed so convenient for getting rid of God—and of its breakdown. I will first note the motives under which it arose during the mid-nineteenth century; next describe the theory itself; after that, give the arguments by which it was more and more shown to be untenable. Those arguments have long been familiar to all educated Europe.

Organic Genetic Evolution, i.e. the theory that one kind of living being arises from another kind, is as old as human observation and human thought. Common experience suggests it to everyone, because we know of no way in which living beings can appear upon earth save as the product of other living beings.

When, therefore, men first took notice of, say, donkeys and horses, or tigers and cats, they naturally said to themselves, “These things look as though they had a common ancestor.” The next step is to suppose that there would be a common ancestor to more widely different types. It is even admissible, though not probable, that all life on this earth sprang from one very simple origin. Our old Pagan forefathers—those of them who were civilized—discussed all this centuries ago, and the Fathers of the Christian Church spoke in the same terms.

Though criticism, and instruction in physical science as well, declined in the Dark Ages, and though popular imagination had then, as ever, a simple imagery, the idea was not so much contradicted or denied as neglected.

In the Middle Ages it reappears, very vaguely, under the conception of Mediate Creation. God is the Creator of every living thing. Yet every living thing has a parent or parents. That is an example of Mediate Creation; and it at once suggests the idea that groups as well as individuals might originate in the same way. Indeed, St. Thomas, the great teacher of the Middle Ages, by concluding exceptionally that the creation of Man was not mediate, but direct, implies the possibility or probability of Mediate Creation for organisms other than Man.

With the growth of Modern Science in the eighteenth century full discussion of the Idea was revived, and from a hundred and fifty years ago Evolution was discussed throughout educated Europe. During the nineteenth century a great mass of evidence was accumulated in its favour, and to-day it is almost (but not quite) universally held by specialists who have authority to speak upon such matters.

It is true that the process Organic Evolution may have taken becomes more and more doubtful as modern research and debate advance.

Have the various species of Plants and Animals branched out from one original living cell or from many? It is uncertain.

Have the new origins of life appeared in succession and separately at long intervals of time? It is possible or probable.

Is transformism, that is, the change of one fully-developed mature and complex type into another, true? For instance, could a Reptile have changed into a Bird? Half a lifetime ago nearly everybody answered “Yes.” To-day—especially since the great work of Vialleton—more and more people are answering “No.”

These and any number of other doubts and criticisms—and some disproofs—have arisen in our time, though Evolution in the widest sense of the word—that is, the doctrine that living things are genetically connected, is still the main doctrine taught and held in Biology.

But Evolution in general is not the point. It involves no fundamental issue. It clashes with no theology or philosophy, unless we dignify by those terms an attachment to pictures of ready-made beasts in the family Bible. It is when men come to discuss how the difference between varying types arose that we enter at once upon a quarrel between opposing philosophies, Christian and anti-Christian. No Catholic, nor indeed any man possessed of a philosophy, would trouble himself much over the confirmation or disproof of Evolution. Evolution simply means continuous growth; a tree growing from a seedling is an example of evolution; growth is the universal phenomenon apparent in ourselves and all organic life around us, and to discover it generalized is no shock, but rather an extension of the obvious.

But when we come to ask how and why the vast variety of living things past and present grew and differentiated as they did: whether a Spirit is at work or no: whether the process be intended or motiveless—then the essential quarrel is engaged between those for whom the Universe is blind and those who see it to be the work of God.

That quarrel, which had long been acute in the general field of philosophy, became acute in the particular field of Biology in the late middle of the nineteenth century—over sixty years ago.

Darwin and Wallace and their school belonged to a generation—lived in a place and a time—to which the mysterious action of Will upon the Universe—and, indeed, any mystery—was incomprehensible. Mystery in any form the typical nineteenth-century “Liberal”—as he was called abroad—rejected; and it has been well said that his very politics were founded on the idea that even human life was not mysterious.

We must remember that they had but just escaped—most of their fellow-citizens were still plunged in—the base Puritan superstitions of the seventeenth century. The Vision, the Shrine, the Miracle, the Supernatural in Sacred Place and Thing, they had become too dull to grasp. It was inevitable that such particular rejections of mystery should lead at last to the more general rejection of Divine Action. At the same time they were in reaction against the old Puritan Bibliolatry, which, in their ignorance of Catholic truth, they thought of as “orthodoxy.”

It occurred to them, after doing a great deal of work upon the evidence for transformism—that is, for the change of one living type into another—that the (to them) impossible idea of Design could be eliminated; and it was under the more or less conscious action of a prejudice against Design that they propounded this theory of Natural Selection.

The process of their prejudice against Design moved as follows:

“We must never have recourse to Mind in order to explain the Universe; that would be ‘unscientific’; for to be ‘scientific’ is to allow for nothing but material causes. Therefore the appearance of separate kinds of living beings must come from blind chance, or at least mechanically. At all costs we must get rid of the idea of Design; of a desired End conceived and maintained in a Creative Will. Here is a theory which will make the whole process entirely mechanical and dead.” Incidentally, it made it possible to get rid of the necessity for a Creator. It was upon that aspect and use of the theory that the enemies of religion immediately seized, and it is precisely because it is supposed to get rid of God the Creator (and Judge) that some defence for Natural Selection is still being kept up, especially (in part from Patriotism) among Darwin’s fellow-citizens, but also abroad.

Darwin thought (and so did Wallace, who was a man of exactly the same type, belonging to the same generation and surroundings) that since the mysterious action of Will in the Universe was out of tune with his own mood, the evident order and purpose of organic life must be explained in another way, by the action of dead, unintelligent forces.

Whether God could create, did He choose, by the action of blind chance, trained theologians may decide. But it is obvious that if a system of blind chance were demonstrably true, those great modern intellects who say in their hearts “There is No God” have a powerful weapon, in the Theory of Natural Selection. They seized that weapon with gusto; and they are still desperately clinging to the handle though the business part of the instrument has long been battered shapeless by their conquering opponents.

Here I must pause to make an important point. I have said that the motives which made the first theorizers incline to an atheist solution were not consciously atheist. Indeed, it was characteristic of their generation that they could not define their own first principles. Further, they lived at a time when Christian principles were still powerful around them in the Protestant middle classes of England, and probably they honestly desired to combine incompatibles.

I want to make this point quite clear, because it is one upon which there has been a great deal of misunderstanding.

Neither Darwin nor Wallace, nor a host of other lesser known people who were all theorizing in much the same way a lifetime ago, were philosophic atheists after the type of the great Lucretius.[^[1]] They were not of that calibre. None of them could think out a consistent philosophical theory, true or false. Most of them would have told you, in a muddle-headed sort of way, that they reverently believed in a Creator, while actively preaching the crudely mechanical and accidental processes which alone they could grasp.

[1]. It is more accurate to say of Lucretius that he did not deny the Gods: only their action on our affairs. But the great Epicurean philosophy of Antiquity was essentially Atheist, though in a form far nobler than the vulgar “No Goddism” of yesterday.

But though these men characteristically confused themselves about what they did and did not ultimately believe (or rather feel) in religion—i.e. what their ultimate philosophy really was—any modern reader, especially any reader with the clear intelligence of the Catholic, can see what was running through their emotional brains. The idea of Design was intolerable to them. It was inextricably connected in their minds with what they thought the word “Creation” meant. They had been taught in their childhood that “Creation” meant millions and millions of quite separate, mature, complicated things appearing suddenly, unconnected one with the other: magic full-grown oak trees without acorns to grow from.

To get rid of this folly they took refuge in another, and produced that theory of “Natural Selection” which seemed to them to account for the different types of living beings without having to admit a conscious and permanent Divine Intention. It seemed to them to solve, in a simple fashion any child could understand, the awful and ancient riddle which has perplexed Europe for certainly three thousand years, and perhaps much more. To the question, “How did differentiation among living organisms come to be”? they thought they had got the answer on what was virtually an atheist basis—a getting rid of intelligence from the Universe. They would not admit a Divine Plan of the oak tree and an inherent power, tending towards that end, implanted in the acorn. They called a profound view of this sort “mysticism,” using that word as a term of abuse—and using it, of course, in a totally wrong meaning. No, they would get their oak and elm out of some general parent tree without an Idea being at work, without Fiat, without an underlying Spirit.

So they propounded the theory of Natural Selection.

The theory of Natural Selection was this:

No living thing can possibly be exactly like its parent: for every organism is individual. The difference may be very slight, but it is always present.

Now, it is also obviously true, from experience, that the conditions under which organic beings live—what is called their environment, i.e. their surroundings—change unceasingly. That again is necessarily true if the material Universe be, as it is, under the condition of Motion. These surroundings are perpetually changing slightly; sometimes they change suddenly and catastrophically, as, for instance, when there is a flood.

Now, some particular change—as, for instance, the climate getting gradually colder or wetter or dryer—will suit some particular small variation apparent in a certain proportion of any given set of organic beings. For instance, out of a million sheep-like animals, ten thousand must in different degrees have very slightly woollier coats than the common run, and, if the climate is slowly getting colder, this minority of woollier sheep are better suited to the change.

All organisms die; but those better suited to a particular surrounding condition have a greater chance of survival than those less suited. (This dreadfully self-evident truth was solemnly set down in an academic formula: it was called “Survival of the Fittest,” or, more clumsily, “Survival of the Fitter”!) Bit by bit, therefore, through the mechanical process of the slightly less fit specimens dying off more rapidly, and leaving presumably less progeny, while a small number of slightly more fit lived longer and presumably left more progeny inheriting their advantages, the type of animal could be, and was, by the blind action of matter and with no necessity for its own or any other will, and with no design in the process at all, adapted to the changing condition. Since conditions are always changing, organic types (i.e. living things, vegetable and animal) were perpetually conforming to their environment by this process of “Survival of the Fittest,” wherein a mechanical process inevitably and blindly picked out—selected—(whence the term “Natural Selection”) those who were to survive and form a new type. In this fashion all organic things came to be what they are at any particular moment and also to change perpetually into new things.

This doctrine of Natural Selection was thus made to explain the diversity and the unity of the living world.

Let us see how some simple organism, living on the tidal belt of the sea-shore (between high and low water-mark), and able both to exist in the air and under water will, according to the doctrine of Natural Selection, differentiate out and produce a land animal. Out of a million of these organisms there are, perhaps, ten thousand in which you can discover some slight superiority, present in varying degrees among them, for standing a long dry spell. There are another ten thousand who show in varying degrees some tiny, almost imperceptible, superiority of standing a long spell without air under water. Raising of the land or the set of winds gives a season of abnormally low high tides. The animals just on the upper edge of the tidal belt die out for lack of their regular tidal supply of water, except some few who can, having the slight differential advantage apparent among them, stand the strain of living so long in the air. The progeny of these, again, will tend to survive according to the degree in which they can stand the lack of water about them. The less fit for air-life are gradually sifted out by this natural process; the more fit for air-life survive.

There is the theory of “Natural Selection” in its broadest outline. It was excellently adapted to the generation for which it was produced. It looked as simple as the old theory of Free Trade did in economics, or the old theory of Universal Suffrage in politics, or any other of the old crude mechanical conceptions born of the denial of mystery. It accounted for everything straightforwardly and at a blow. If you used its loose phraseology repeatedly, without ever gripping the full implication of the terms, without the capacity for holding a theory down hard and examining it closely, it seemed perfectly sufficient—and the old riddle was solved.

“Natural Selection,” “the Survival of the Fittest,” the very gradual and quite blind, purposeless, undesigned forcing of the living organism into correspondence with its material environment, the formation of the living thing by the pressure of the nonliving—of death—was sufficiently proved. All the old ideas of Design, the looking for mysterious forces at work in the world, and for a Mind behind it all in order to explain the suitability of each organ to its function, could be scrapped. There was no creative God required. Those who wanted to be rid of Him could (and did) say that men had only imagined such a Being from an ignorant projection of themselves on to the Universe. It was not life that transformed itself to meet and master matter, but (as Delage admirably put it in his refutation of Darwinism) matter which, through death, ordered life.

Such was the theory of Natural Selection.

Now, as we are about to examine why this theory of Natural Selection is untenable, and to discover why it burst after so very short a fashionable run, we must, by way of preliminary, clearly understand its implications. We must understand—what its original promoters did not—the things which, whether you know it or not, you are accepting when you accept Natural Selection. After that we can understand the arguments which have destroyed it.

Put as I have just put it, and as it used to be put in all the old-fashioned textbooks of Mr. Wells’s youth, it sounds not only simple, but convincing It is when one looks into what it implies that the old Darwinian theory of Natural Selection gets shaky.