However, the few things really known by him about Pre-history are very well put. The narrative is straightforward and a fair summary. It is also to Mr. Wells’s credit that, unlike his fellow disseminators of popular “science,” he frequently uses in this section, as elsewhere, those qualifying words which distinguish fact from probabilities or doubtful possibilities. He has “may,” “probably,” and “it would seem,” where many another of his sort would have written “did,” “was,” “certainly.” But what might here have been of excellent effect in ridding uninstructed people of their dogmatism is more than neutralized by too much positiveness in diagrams and riotous make-believe in pictures.
For instance, on pages 35 and 36, regarding a table of Geological Epochs, he writes: “These divisions probably mark off too precisely,” etc. But the accompanying diagram gives a timetable like Bradshaw, with exactly 50,000 years for the last glacial epoch, 550,000 for those intriguing anomalies the Javanese skull and thigh-bone, and 100,000 for the vastly debated Piltdown fragments.
He does not, by the way, remark that the original guess at the cranial capacity of the Piltdown man was too small, certainly by 30 per cent, and possibly by 50 per cent. He does not tell his readers the remarkably high angle of the forehead, nor the really disturbing fact that there appear to have been no strong orbital ridges. And why are his readers not given all this? Because—like so many facts in Pre-history—they interfere with the simple “progress” idea and would make the reader understand how very little we do know about early man and his ancestry, and what an intolerable amount of theory there is to a halfpennyworth of fact. For the Piltdown man, on all the orthodox hypotheses, has got to be enormously older than Neanderthal man—and yet has a much more modern brain-box.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wells’s artist constructs out of these little pieces of bone a human being wholly imaginary in all its functions.
This person appears on page 43 in a detailed picture as “Eoanthropos.” He is having a good time hunting, and looking uncommonly like an acquaintance of my own; but he is entirely made up out of the artist’s head. Again, we have the coloured picture of a dance of American Red Indians round a fire solemnly presented as a “reconstruction of Palæolithic society.”
I know very well the excuse that is offered for such things. The public for which such books are written can digest a definite timetable, and, better still, a picture, more easily than carefully thought out pros and cons; something must be put simply before their eyes, and one can’t put doubt pictorially. Nevertheless, the effect produced and intended to be produced is utterly false and misleading. The Piltdown fragments would fit into a soup plate. No one knows and no one ever will know whether the ape-jaw belongs to the scraps of human, and rather high human, skull; on the one hand you have the very high authority of Keith, on the other the main weight of continental opinion. No one can confidently tell the exact posture and shape the total skull may have had. Of the creature as a whole, apart from these insufficient fragments of skull and that almost impossible jaw, we know absolutely nothing. To conceal all this and to present a finished picture of him as a fully known being is like writing a full biography on the evidence of a torn quarter of visiting-card.
But though this lack of scientific habit in Mr. Wells is woeful enough and very misleading, a defect of infinitely greater importance is his incapacity for dealing with the fundamental questions of our nature and destiny which are alone of real moment.
He seems to be aware of some clash between the materialist assumptions of his narrow world and another much more majestic philosophy, much more comprehensive; but he does not know what that opposing philosophy is. It is evident throughout all his work that he has not even consulted an elementary treatise on Catholic philosophy. Sometimes he seems to think that Catholicism is a jumble of irrational tenets like those of the old Bible Christians, for whose descendants he is writing and whom alone he really understands. There are other times when he brings in the name of the Catholic Church in a fashion which betrays his hatred of it, but clearly in ignorance of what the doctrines and nature of the Catholic Church may be.
He is like a man who, hearing a piece of Mozart, complains angrily of the noise it makes, but has never heard of the theory and emotion of music.
He suffers, therefore, as do much the greater part of his readers, from two forms of ignorance, very fatal to a proper handling of our chief human problems.