MR. WELLS AND THE FALL OF MAN
As we approach the problem of Man it behoves us, before dealing with Mr.
Wells’s views on that animal, to examine a little further his competence
as a teacher of Science to the multitude.
I have pointed out that where Mr. Wells has to deal with ascertained
facts he is not only an accurate but an excellent précis writer, and
that his summary of such facts as are contained in our older books of
reference is clear, vivid, and in good proportion.
But the judgment of evidence is very badly done, the reasoning weak and
yielding to imagination; while the theories supported and the positive
errors repeated are most of them years and years behind the times.
I will give examples.
In the course of his account of Evolution Mr. Wells repeats (on page 37)
with complete confidence, as though it were scientific fact, the old and
now worthless theory called “Recapitulation.” It was a theory invented
by Haeckel (about 1870) purporting to be based on the work done by Von
Baer more than 40 years earlier—though, as a fact, Haeckel
characteristically suppressed one of Baer’s four points.
The Theory of Recapitulation was as follows:—The embryo—in particular of
man—bears witness to transformism by showing as it develops one phase
after another of its ancestral past: as the current phrase went when Mr.
Wells and I were young, it “climbs up its family tree.” It was imagined
that the embryo represents as it grows the various stages, from the
original aquatic life onwards to general tetrapodal forms, then to more
immediate ancestors from which the present form of the animal came.
Vialleton of Montpellier, probably the greatest contemporary authority
in Europe on Embryology, has disproved the theory and left it wrecked.
He has knocked the last nail into the coffin of that facile and
superficial short-cut (and blind alley). Here again I must make myself
quite clear, for Mr. Wells’s tendency to confusion of mind (a defect
attaching, perhaps, to his deservedly famous gift of imagination) may
easily make him accuse me of opinions I do not hold.
I do not make this allusion to the great work of Vialleton (which I have
had by me since it came out and which I study with increasing
admiration) as a criticism of Evolution in general. Who could? I allude
to it because Mr. Wells’s ignorance of its existence is inexcusable in a
man proposing to deal with such subjects even in the most summary and
popular fashion. That Mr. Wells does, as a fact, know nothing of
Vialleton’s mass of instance and argument, and its modern effect, is
clear from a protest he issued against me just before the publication of
this book. He there said that perhaps some French student had believed
the embryo to repeat its ancestry “conscientiously,” and that Vialleton
“may have thought it well to discuss this idea in one of his books”!
I might as well write that Darwin “may have thought it well” to discuss
(and attempt to destroy) Design. Why, the whole of this work is one long
and victorious attack upon the idea which Mr. Wells took for granted! It
is not a casual refutation of some nonsense about the embryo exactly
reproducing every minute stage of its ancestral past; it is a
fundamental, detailed, complete refutation of the idea which Mr. Wells
repeats.
Out of any number of citations which might be taken from Vialleton’s
hundreds of pages I then gave, and here give again, one: and it is
sufficient. “Ontogenesis” (that is the development of the Embryo)
“always begins with a general form and _not_” (my italics) “with a form
recalling another simpler form passed through in an earlier phase of
development.”
So much for that. It is but one out of many examples of our Author’s
being behind the times. Here is another.
In describing the glacial epochs, he trots out with the most naïf
confidence (on pp. 20–22) the hopelessly dead astronomical theory which
did duty in the textbooks of his youth and mine—for I also have believed
these things. Relying on a popular volume which, at the time, had great
effect, he puts down the main cause of glaciation to the combination of
varying eccentricity in the earth’s orbit with varying inclination of
the axis, of which he gives a large diagram. Under the effect of the two
movements (which Leverrier calculated more than a lifetime ago) the
Northern and Southern Hemispheres would alternately suffer from cold and
enjoy greater warmth. When the Northern Hemisphere was getting colder
and colder, the Southern would be getting warmer and warmer, and vice
versa.
This was called “Croll’s astronomical theory of glaciation,” and was
made popular by a book of Sir Robert Ball’s in 1893.
[1893, as I have said, seems, from internal evidence, to be about the
date when Mr. Wells’s stock of information crystallized.]
Now Croll’s astronomical theory broke down quite early under criticism.
It was dead before the end of the nineteenth century. The eleventh
edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is not exactly recent. Its
well-worn covers testify to its age in all our libraries, and I see that
a thirteenth edition is due. But even the eleventh edition of the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ could have informed Mr. Wells that Croll’s
theory had broken down. Would he like something quite recent? Professor
Coleman—Emeritus Professor of Geology at Toronto—has just issued a study
of glacial periods, and I find on page 274 the curt sentence, “Croll’s
theory at present receives little attention.” And why? Because fact,
that dreadful enemy to theorizing, has killed it. If it were true,
glaciation would have been alternate in north and south. As a fact, it
has been proved simultaneous—the South American clay deposits alone show
that.
This is not to say that astronomical factors have played no part in
glaciation. That they did not do so would be incredible. But it is to
say that Mr. Wells still takes for granted in this year of grace 1926,
and states as facts, theories which the average educated man knows to
have been exploded as long ago as the nineties of the last century.
Mr. Wells suffers, in this connection, from another fault besides that
of stating the old and exploded theories of his youth as facts. He also
affirms as fact what is doubtful. Thus he builds a whole series of
assertions (p. 154) on the—at first sight—apparently obvious, but, in
fact, much disputed idea that as the ice receded the sea-level rose. It
is clear that the melting of great quantities of ice would, other things
being equal, raise the sea-level. It is also presumable, on the
isostatic theory, that the earth rose when and where relieved of ice
pressure (the raised beaches seem proof of this). That—other things
being equal—would mean a _lowering_ of sea-level when the ice melted
(thus the highest-known raised beach of glacial times in America
indicates a _fall_ of the sea-level since the ice melted by nearly 700
feet). Which of the two factors predominated? Only observation of such
phenomena as raised beaches, fossils, submerged forests, etc., can
decide, and the matter is still debated. Boule in 1906 affirmed a high
sea under glacial conditions. The periods of high glaciation were,
according to him, the periods of high sea-level, and the interglacial
epochs the periods of low sea-level. Wright (in 1914) inclines to the
opposite. The Scandinavian observers noted in one locality a rise of
sea-level at the first receding of the ice, then a lowering of it. The
latest opinion is mainly in favour of a rise in sea-level since the last
Ice-age. Coleman, the last authority, tentatively suggests a rise.
But to affirm a rise as proved is bad science. In these and many other
points Mr. Wells is evidently a man confusing theory with fact.
However, the few things really known by him about Pre-history are very
well put. The narrative is straightforward and a fair summary. It is
also to Mr. Wells’s credit that, unlike his fellow disseminators of
popular “science,” he frequently uses in this section, as elsewhere,
those qualifying words which distinguish fact from probabilities or
doubtful possibilities. He has “may,” “probably,” and “it would seem,”
where many another of his sort would have written “did,” “was,”
“certainly.” But what might here have been of excellent effect in
ridding uninstructed people of their dogmatism is more than neutralized
by too much positiveness in diagrams and riotous make-believe in
pictures.
For instance, on pages 35 and 36, regarding a table of Geological
Epochs, he writes: “These divisions _probably_ mark off too precisely,”
etc. But the accompanying diagram gives a timetable like Bradshaw, with
exactly 50,000 years for the last glacial epoch, 550,000 for those
intriguing anomalies the Javanese skull and thigh-bone, and 100,000 for
the vastly debated Piltdown fragments.
He does not, by the way, remark that the original guess at the cranial
capacity of the Piltdown man was too small, certainly by 30 per cent,
and possibly by 50 per cent. He does not tell his readers the remarkably
high angle of the forehead, nor the really disturbing fact that there
appear to have been no strong orbital ridges. And why are his readers
not given all this? Because—like so many facts in Pre-history—they
interfere with the simple “progress” idea and would make the reader
understand how very little we do know about early man and his ancestry,
and what an intolerable amount of theory there is to a halfpennyworth of
fact. For the Piltdown man, on all the orthodox hypotheses, has got to
be enormously older than Neanderthal man—and yet has a much more modern
brain-box.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wells’s artist constructs out of these little pieces of
bone a human being wholly imaginary in all its functions.
This person appears on page 43 in a detailed picture as “Eoanthropos.”
He is having a good time hunting, and looking uncommonly like an
acquaintance of my own; but he is entirely made up out of the artist’s
head. Again, we have the coloured picture of a dance of American Red
Indians round a fire solemnly presented as a “reconstruction of
Palæolithic society.”
I know very well the excuse that is offered for such things. The public
for which such books are written can digest a definite timetable, and,
better still, a picture, more easily than carefully thought out pros and
cons; _something_ must be put simply before their eyes, and one can’t
put doubt pictorially. Nevertheless, the effect produced and intended to
be produced is utterly false and misleading. The Piltdown fragments
would fit into a soup plate. No one knows and no one ever will know
whether the ape-jaw belongs to the scraps of human, and rather high
human, skull; on the one hand you have the very high authority of Keith,
on the other the main weight of continental opinion. No one can
confidently tell the exact posture and shape the total skull may have
had. Of the creature as a whole, apart from these insufficient fragments
of skull and that almost impossible jaw, we know absolutely nothing. To
conceal all this and to present a finished picture of him as a fully
known being is like writing a full biography on the evidence of a torn
quarter of visiting-card.
But though this lack of scientific habit in Mr. Wells is woeful enough
and very misleading, a defect of infinitely greater importance is his
incapacity for dealing with the fundamental questions of our nature and
destiny which are alone of real moment.
He seems to be aware of some clash between the materialist assumptions
of his narrow world and another much more majestic philosophy, much more
comprehensive; but he does not know what that opposing philosophy is. It
is evident throughout all his work that he has not even consulted an
elementary treatise on Catholic philosophy. Sometimes he seems to think
that Catholicism is a jumble of irrational tenets like those of the old
Bible Christians, for whose descendants he is writing and whom alone he
really understands. There are other times when he brings in the name of
the Catholic Church in a fashion which betrays his hatred of it, but
clearly in ignorance of what the doctrines and nature of the Catholic
Church may be.
He is like a man who, hearing a piece of Mozart, complains angrily of
the noise it makes, but has never heard of the theory and emotion of
music.
He suffers, therefore, as do much the greater part of his readers, from
two forms of ignorance, very fatal to a proper handling of our chief
human problems.
First, he is ignorant of the fact that he and they are working not on
common sense accepted by all men, but on a highly particular
philosophical theory (called once the Epicurean, but to-day the
Materialist, Theory) which may be accepted or denied, but which can no
more be taken for granted as universally admitted than can the Catholic
Faith itself. He thinks he is only dealing with ascertained fact,
whereas he is really acting on a religion; and as that religion is
false, it compels him to force facts to fit it. This is the very mark of
the provincial mind. It mistakes its local superstition for the very
nature of things. It is from this inability to define their own first
principles, from this conception that they are dealing with ascertained
physical truth alone, that people of this kind are at once debarred from
understanding their superiors and from reasoning clearly upon their own
postulates.
Secondly, he is ignorant of the Catholic philosophy which he
instinctively opposes. He does not know what it is that he is combating,
nor what a crushing advantage of scope and examination it has over the
insufficient and parochial experience lying behind his own work. He
approaches the Catholic Church as a man who has only done a little
suburban gardening might approach a fifty-acre field—with a spade.
All this comes out most clearly at the very opening of his discussion of
human origins on pages 37 and 38. He there exposes in one paragraph all
that ignorance to which I allude. He says with rather ponderous sarcasm
that the Catholic Church is no more committed to a denial of the now
widely accepted view of man’s origin “than it is to a doctrine of a flat
earth, or of a stationary earth round which the sun revolves”; but adds
that though the Church is apparently not committed to any particular
view in such matters (he has grasped that much), yet “many believers
dissent from the scientific opinion _because they feel it is more seemly
to suppose that man has fallen rather than risen_” (my italics).
In that one sentence on Original Sin you have the whole of the writer’s
ignorance upon the matter (and upon the very terms used in its
discussion) exposed. It is as though some foreigner were to say of
English constitutional practice: “The English legal system is not
committed to the denial of historical evidence on the vices of James the
First, but many individual lawyers believe that the King can do no
wrong—because they think it more seemly.”
Why did he not look up the point in any book of reference? It is
astonishing to me that, with his active mind and interest in his
contemporaries, and his reliance upon books of reference, he has not
done so.
The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin has nothing to do with the stages
of man’s material culture. The fact that man now in Europe uses iron in
places where he once used stone for his implements, has no possible
connection with the doctrine of Original Sin. The traces of beings not
men but, as are apes, man-like, exceptionally discovered, and belonging
presumably to a remote past, can no more affect the Catholic doctrine of
Original Sin than Pasteur’s discovery of fermentation being due to a
micro-organism affects the truth that men can and do get drunk.
The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin is this. That man, our known human
nature as true men, was created by God to be supernatural, that is,
enjoying beatitude; but fell, through the rebellion of his will, into a
natural state. This, and this alone, says the Catholic Faith, explains
man’s dual destiny, his sense of exile, the lack of correspondence
between his ideal and his practice. It is not “many individuals” in the
Catholic Church who affirm this great and luminous doctrine because it
is “more seemly.” It is _all_ Catholics who affirm it, and they do so
because, whether pleasant or unpleasant, it is true.
We affirm the Fall: _First_ on the authority of the Catholic Church
itself, which we have discovered from experience to be the only teaching
body whose voice and nature correspond with reality; answering justly
the queries and fulfilling the needs and ends of man. _Secondly_,
because this truth, like all other truths which we receive from that
same Authority, we discover to be but one in a consistent scheme of many
co-ordinated doctrines, which scheme alone explains the world, and is
consonant with the nature of the individual and with the nature of
society: with the nature of man himself as he discovers it to be when he
examines the recesses of his own being and with the nature of man in
corporate action. Nor has the firm hold which the high Catholic
intelligence maintains upon this essential and reasonable dogma of the
Fall any conceivable link with the denial or the acceptation of some
piece of physical evidence. It does not depend upon the existence of the
Garden of Eden somewhere between Mosul and Baghdad, nor upon the date
4004 B.C.
The truth is that Mr. Wells, in some confused way, regards the Catholic
Church as a sect; an extreme right wing of the various Protestant sects,
with which he is fully acquainted, from which he himself derives, and
whose ethics and general attitude towards life are part of his being.
For he goes on to tell us “that no considerable Christian body _now_ (my
italics) insists upon the exact and literal acceptance of the Bible
narrative.” He does not know—so ignorant is he of history—that this
attitude towards the Bible came very late—in the seventeenth century—and
was during its brief career highly local. He does not know that this
conception of the Old Testament as an exact text book of history and
science, not a word of which must be taken as allegory or
generalization, was mainly confined to England and her colonies. The
Catholic Church never held it or could of its nature hold it.
I wonder what effect it would have upon him to read a few passages from,
say, Origen, on the allegorical interpretation of Genesis, or from St.
Augustine? He need not do more than that. He need not waste energy in a
long examination of the Christian past. It would be quite enough for him
to consult a couple of passages, or, indeed, for any competent historian
to inform him that the only body of people who ever dreamt of taking
Genesis as a literal and sufficient guide to all the details of history
and physical science were the members of a small and local Puritan sect
(now rapidly disappearing) of which he is himself a product and which
held this amazing view of the Jacobean translation of the Hebrew
scripture into archaic English. These people loom so large in Mr.
Wells’s personal experience as to obscure all else; but I can assure him
that they count for next to nothing in the general culture of Europe.
So much for the first of Mr. Wells’s ventures into Theology, where it
regards the relation of God to man. He and his like often profess to
regard such things as of no importance. They are the most important
things in the world. Indeed, they are the only important things; and the
proof of their importance is to be found in the fact that the
materialists can never leave them alone.
The materialists are always loudly protesting that they “do not meddle
with Theology,” that they “have nothing to do with Theology.” They deal
with nothing else. Their whole object is Theological—though they do not
know it. Mr. Wells himself protests that he is not concerned with
Theology in his _Outline_. It is his one preoccupation—though he may not
realize it. The only criticism that really moves him is theological
criticism. The only opponent he seriously challenges is a theological
opponent; and the moment he attempts to _reason_ upon his subject,
Theology at once and inevitably appears.
I have neither the space nor the inclination to deal with minor
blemishes in this part of the work.
I do not even insist on Mr. Wells’s failure to perceive (though he
honestly quotes the facts) the implications of those perpetually
recurring anomalies in our few shreds of evidence—e.g. more human teeth
with less human craniums and vice versa. For though he misses the lesson
of these unceasing breakdowns of each new “scientific” dogma upon the
origin of man’s body (which lesson is, that Hypothesis should never be
taught as Science), he shirks none of the things he knows, and, when he
_is_ abreast of modern knowledge, he states it clearly and well. For
instance, he is acquainted with the exploding of the last dogma but two
(still popular with most of his readers, I fear), the arboreal ancestry
of Man. He knows it has broken down, and he admits it quite freely. Such
a confession is greatly to his credit.
It is ascertained fact that many human and some very few doubtfully
human remains of various types have been found under conditions which
suggest high antiquity. It is ascertained fact that presumably older
fragments are those of animals resembling men, in some cases, perhaps,
even more closely than any known monkey of to-day—though the resemblance
of monkeys to men has been a commonplace throughout History. Nor is it
any surprise to learn, as we recently have done (though Mr. Wells makes
no allusion to them), that in sundry other tests less striking (the make
up of blood, for instance) the animals most like us in structure and
gesture have common qualities with us. It is only what was to have been
expected.
But none of these things—though of curious interest—is on the same plane
as the theological discussions upon which Mr. Wells embarks and makes
shipwreck. That is why I have concentrated here upon the nature and
doctrine of the Fall.
If you go wrong on that, your whole philosophy of politics and of
individual human life will be wrong in its practical applications, and
you prepare the ruin, certainly of society and perhaps of your own soul.