I could add not only further examples justifying the terms I have used, but a great many other terms equally justified. I must leave it to the ampler space of my book, The Companion to his work, which Mr. Wells will have the pleasure of seeing before him in a very few weeks.
II
MR. WELLS AS BIOLOGIST
I come now to what is the pith of Mr. Wells’s whole pamphlet. It is evidently the matter upon which he is most pained; it is also the matter on which he has most woefully exposed his lack of modern reading.
Through page after page—thirteen whole pages—he slangs and bangs away at me—because I have exposed his ignorance of modern work upon Darwinism.
There are in this furious attack two quite distinct points: first, his accusation that I pose as being a man having special learning, with European reputation in such affairs (very silly nonsense!); secondly, his treatment of the arguments which I have put before my readers against the old and exploded theory of Darwinian Natural Selection, upon which theory, remember, all these popular materialists still desperately rely in their denial of a Creative God and of Design in the universe.
As to the first point: there can be no question of my having put on airs of special knowledge in any of these affairs. Not only have I not pretended to any special knowledge on geology or pre-history, or biology: I have not even pretended to special knowledge on matters where I have a good deal of reading in modern and mediæval history. When I took up the atheist challenge presented by Mr. Wells’s book, I did so as a man of quite ordinary education, because it was amply evident on a first summary reading of it that the writer was not a man of even average education. I pretend to no more than that working acquaintance with contemporary thought which is common to thousands of my kind, and I think it the more shame to Mr. Wells that with no expert training I can make hay of his pretensions. Any man of average education, reading and travel could have done the same.
Suppose somebody were to write a little popular manual on chemistry with the object of showing that there is no God, and were to say of the Atom that it had existed from all eternity, because it had no lesser parts, but was eternally simple and indivisible. The man of ordinary education would at once reply: “Have you never heard of the Electron?” He would be justified in putting it much more strongly, and in saying, “Is it conceivable that you are so hopelessly out of date that you have never heard of the Electron and of the modern theory of the Atom?”
This does not mean that the person asking this most legitimate and astonished question would be posing as an expert in chemistry; it would simply mean that in ordinary conversation with his fellows he was abreast of his time. Any of us whatsoever, even if he read no more than newspaper articles, would have a right to say, “My good fellow, you are out of court with your absurd old-fashioned simple Atom.”
Now suppose the person whom he had thus most justly criticised were to lose his temper and say, “You are making up all this about electrons out of your own head! You do not quote a single modern authority by name in favour of this new-fangled theory of yours about electrons! The reason you do not quote any name or authority is that you can’t! There are no such names!” Would he not have delivered himself into the hands of his opponent?
That is precisely what Mr. Wells has done. He has shown himself utterly ignorant of all modern work in his own department, and he must not cry out too loud at the consequences of his rashness.