It happens that my circumstances, and perhaps my mental temperament,
have brought my mind into almost dramatic opposition to that of Mr.
Belloc. While his training was mainly in written history, the core
of mine was the analytical exercises of comparative anatomy and
palæontology. I was brought up upon the spectacle of life in the
universe as a steadily changing system. My education was a modern one,
upon material and questionings impossible a hundred years ago. Things
that are fundamental and commonplaces to me have come, therefore,
as belated, hostile, and extremely distressing challenges to the
satisfactions and acceptances of Mr. Belloc.
Now, this picture of a fixed and unprogressive humanity working
out an enormous multitude of individual lives from birth to either
eternal beatitude or to something not beatitude, hell or destruction
or whatever else it may be that Mr. Belloc fails to make clear is the
alternative to beatitude--this picture, which seems to be necessary to
the Catholic and probably to every form of Christian faith, and which
is certainly necessary to the comfort of Mr. Belloc, has no validity
whatever for my mind. It is no more possible in my thought as a picture
of reality than that ancient cosmogony which made the round earth
rest upon an elephant, which stood upon a tortoise, which stood upon
God-knows-what.
I do not know how the universe originated, or what it is fundamentally;
I do not know how material substance is related to consciousness and
will; I doubt if any creature of my calibre is capable of knowing such
things; but at least I know enough to judge the elephant story and the
fixed humanity story absurd. I do not know any convincing proof that
Progress _must_ go on; I find no invincible imperative to progressive
change in my universe; but I remark that progressive change does go on,
and that it is the form into which life falls more and more manifestly
as our analysis penetrates and our knowledge increases. I set about
collecting what is known of life and the world in time and space, and I
find the broad outline falls steadily and persistently into a story of
life appearing and increasing in range, power, and co-operative unity
of activity. I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I
see ever-increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set
to it all. Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as
I apprehend them, swim in expectation. This is not an outline I have
thrust upon the facts; it is the outline that came naturally as the
facts were put in order.
And it seems to me that we are waking up to the realisation that the
individual life does not stand alone, as people in the past have seemed
to imagine it did, but that it is far truer to regard it as an episode
in a greater life, which progresses and which need not die. The episode
begins and ends, but life goes on.
Mr. Belloc is so far removed from me mentally that he is unable to
believe that this, clearly and honestly, is how I see things; he is
moved to explain it away by saying that I am trying to “get rid of a
God,” that I am a rotten Protestant, that this is what comes of being
born near London, that if I knew French and respected the Gentry all
this would be different, and so on, as the attentive student of his
great apology for Catholicism has been able to observe. But all the
while he is uncomfortably on the verge of being aware that I am a
mere reporter of a vast mass of gathered knowledge and lengthened
perspectives that towers up behind and above his neat and jolly
marionette show of the unchanging man and his sins and repentances and
mercies, his astonishing punishments, and his preposterous eternal
reward among the small eternities of the mediæval imagination. I
strut to no such personal beatitude. I have no such eternity of
individuation. The life to which I belong uses me and will pass on
beyond me, and I am content.