Exactly the same habit of clear thinking which makes us know the limitations of reason and makes us accept a mystery, gives us our admiration for that divine gift of reason in man and our contempt for people who, like Mr. Wells, have never been trained to use it, and flounder the moment they try to think hard.
For instance, nowhere is Mr. Wells’s intellectual weakness more apparent than in his inability to understand what is meant by a fixed type, or general form. He meets it with the dear old fallacy which has been known for more than two thousand years under the name of Sorites—I may inform Mr. Wells that this is not the name of a disease of the body but of the intelligence. It consists in always asking, “where do you draw the line?” and on that pretence trying to avoid definition.
A fixed type does not mean that there is no difference between one individual or another, nor exact identity of form between one time and another. It means that there is a general idea which can be recognised and on which one can predicate: as, that cats mew and dogs bark, that ducks swim and hens don’t.
Mr. Wells has innumerable readers, and among them let me suppose a reader who has stolen a horse. He is asked in Court what he has to say in his own defence. Taught by Mr. Wells, I suppose he would say: “M’lud, my defence is that there is no such thing as a horse. You cannot draw the line between Eohippus, Hippus Alogos vel Hodiernus, and that glorious thing with wings and a halo which the horse will no doubt become here on earth if we give it time.” I am afraid he would not be allowed to get on very far with his defence. The judge and jury would still ignorantly go on believing that there was such a thing as a horse, an animal which behaved in a certain way and is very easy to recognise, and the humble pupil of Mr. Wells would go to gaol.
So also there is such a thing as man, though Mr. Wells seems to doubt it. Man has a particular nature, and that nature is subject to questions which it is of enormous importance to him to decide. His individuality, his soul, is, for instance, either immortal or mortal. It is of first-rate importance to decide on that—infinitely more important than it is to decide on exactly how and by what stages his body came to be; just as it is infinitely more important for a man to decide between right and wrong action in manhood than to make a selection of his photographs as a baby.
We Catholics are interested in this Animal Man, because we think (making clear use of our reason) that it is more important for man to know what happens to man and what man really is than for man to know any other subject. We believe that he has been created by an omnipotent God, to whom he is responsible for good or evil action committed by his own free will—for in man’s free will we also believe; we believe his soul to be immortal, and to be tested for eternal beatitude or eternal loss thereof.
Anyone is free to say “These doctrines are particular, you admit yourself that you hold them on Faith and not on positive evidence. I for my part do not accept them.” There is no lack of reason in making that negative statement.
But a mind that can imagine that there is no such thing as man and indeed no such thing as a thing; a mind (to put it in the old language) which is nominalist in that degree, is in great peril of ceasing to be a mind at all.
The particular point on which Mr. Wells comes his worst cropper in connection with the Catholic Church is a blunder to which he devotes a whole chapter of his pamphlet, and over ten pages of print furiously reviling me.
He has got hold of the idea that the discovery of Neanderthal skulls and skeletons destroys Catholic theology. He imagines that we wake up in the middle of the night in an agony of imperilled faith because a long time ago there was a being which was as human as we are apparently in his brain capacity, in his power to make instruments, to light fires, and in his reverent burial of the dead, but who probably, perhaps certainly, bent a little at the knee, carried his head forward, was sloping in the chin. He thinks that unless a private individual like myself, with hardly any more reading on anthropology than Mr. Wells himself, can give a definite theological definition on whether the owners of these skeletons were true men or not, all the theological statements about man as we know him are worthless.