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.