I am not examining whether primitive man was right or wrong in this or that religious practice, or even in his acceptance of God. I am asking, Did he, in point of fact, act as Mr. Wells says he acted? If a materialist seeks to upset my faith in the Catholic dogma of Immortality by philosophical argument, he may be formidable in his assault on that ground. But if he produces the historical argument, and says that my forefathers did not believe in their own survival, I must test his statement. If he prove to be quite wrong in his affirmation, then he ceases to be a formidable opponent in that respect: as an historian he is, on that prime matter, worthless.
Let us see how our Author deals with very early palæolithic sepulture.
Here Mr. Wells depends for his views directly upon Morillet, one of the great founders of modern archæology. Morillet laid it down (in a book dating from 1883) that palæolithic man was without religion, and only came to religion by a gradual exercise of invention: by an increasing illusion. Morillet based that negation of his on the supposed fact (accepted in 1883) that there were no palæolithic tombs. Mr. Wells knows that since 1883 those tombs have been discovered, but he is too rootedly conservative to admit the effect of the evidence. He is still a devoted pupil of Morillet, forty-two years after his master—it is a terribly long time for a man to cling to the superstitions of his youth!
As palæolithic sepulture has been discovered since Morillet—and objects buried with the dead—instead of modifying his old-fashioned error, Mr. Wells begins forcing new facts to fit exploded theory. He tells us (on p. 68) that men buried the dead with ornaments and little domestic sanctities of food and arms, not because men loved the dead, and could not be rid of the idea of their spirit carrying on, but because “they doubted they were dead”! He makes it very clear what he means by this. He means that men doubted whether the actual physical body were dead or no! He adds that this “is just as reasonable to suppose” as that men showed by such burial offerings an idea of Immortality!
Well, to such a knock-down sentence as that one can only have one answer: It is nonsense. It is not “just as reasonable” to suppose that a man didn’t know a corrupting carcase to be dead. It is wildly unreasonable to suppose that man would carefully bury his fellow-man in a carefully made tomb, deposit with him objects that showed great toil in their making, and were, therefore, a sacrifice of value, and at the same time did not know that he was physically dead. That such nonsense can be talked at all is the best proof that, rather than give up a false theory, men will do anything with facts. It is exactly of a piece with the Bible Christian naturalists and geologists of the mid-nineteenth century, who said that fossils were freakish tricks to try their faith in the literal interpretation of Genesis. It is False Faith afraid to reason.
It is the very mark of False Faith that it fights shy of reason. So did the Bible Christian of the Victorian Age, who would not face geological science. So does his immediate lineal descendant, Mr. Wells.
When a False Faith is challenged by awkward facts it suppresses, denies, or distorts them. The facts have got to fit the dogma.
Materialistic Faith is at this warping of scientific truth perpetually—and nowhere more than in Mr. Wells’s book.
If I thought this straining, ignoring, and twisting of ascertained fact—that is, of true science—to be an insincere trick in Mr. Wells, I would call it that. But I do not think it is. I think it is the unconscious action of a man untrained to clear thinking.
Take, for example, his attitude towards the known facts with regard to palæolithic man, so far as they regard the origin of religion in departments other than burial. Palæolithic man made the pictures everyone has heard of in the depths of the caves and elsewhere. Mr. Wells remarks on page 68 that “one sees no scope in such a life” (that of the palæolithic hunter) “for superstition or speculation.”