SUMMARY
I propose at this conclusion of a long examination upon Mr. Wells’s
_Outline of History_, first, to present a summary of the author’s work
as a typical popular teacher of our time in the English-speaking
countries, and then to end on a much more important note; the attitude
of the popular mind in that same world with regard to the only questions
which are of ultimate moment in human life: the decay of Christian
religion in that world, and the pace at which Christian truth is being
lost in it; the religious revolution through which the English-speaking
Protestant culture is passing, and the pace of that revolution.
The two subjects are closely connected, for it is clear that a man could
not be a popular writer on these things unless he agreed more or less
with his audience. Yet they are distinct; because the Follower of the
Herd, the popular expositor of which Mr. Wells is an example, is not
quite the same thing as the average of the Herd. It is in tune with the
average of the Herd; but it presents a separate object of study from the
Herd. You find in the Author the way in which reading and evidence react
upon a certain kind of mind: you find in his innumerable readers what
kind of faith or philosophy must be inhabiting them that they should
devour wholesale the stuff thus delivered to them as food.
First, then, as to the Author. The most prominent point I discover in
Mr. Wells as an historian is the acceptation of authority. It is a false
authority, and it is an acceptation bearing everywhere that mark which
is to the Catholic mind almost incomprehensible: blind acceptation of
textbooks. He does not reason with himself, and say: “What are my first
principles? Why and how have I come to believe in them”? On the
contrary, he takes them for granted, as though they were something so
native to the human race that no class of reader could question them.
For instance, all through his work he takes it for granted that the
supernatural does not exist; that the conception of it as real is an
illusion—particularly in the case of miracles.
He holds then, unconsciously, a certain philosophy and certain first
principles: to wit, what is called materialist _Monism_; that effect
follows fatally from material cause. That, therefore, we are in the
hands of fate and have no free will. That the words “right” and “wrong”
in human decisions are meaningless.
Yet he has no idea of what his own first principles are; for he
contradicts them at every turn. He is full of indignation—against the
Catholic Church, for instance—and indignation involves an idea of right
and wrong. He has a strong moral sense—as, for instance, of man’s duty
to his fellow-men. Again, his attitude towards the miraculous in the
story of Our Lord, and particularly towards the Resurrection, is not
only that of a man who disbelieves—which is natural enough—but that of a
man who thinks that everybody else will disbelieve the moment the
unusual character of such events is pointed out to them. Mr. Wells
thinks that people who believe are simply people who have not yet had
the advantage of being told that the things in which they believe are
not obvious nor of daily occurrence. He starts from a first principle
that only the obvious or the common can be true. Yet if he set down that
first principle in black and white its absurdity would appear, even to
him.
This inability to tell you what his first principles were or why he held
them, this taking for granted as admitted what all the best minds of
humanity have discovered to be worthy of profound questioning and
anxious debate, I call blind faith—faith which accepts without question
and without even the knowledge that question is possible. I have heard
it discussed whether such faith even in _true_ authority is an advantage
or a disadvantage. You get it in little children, and in some morally
admirable but intellectually over-simple minds. But to have that faith
in various _false_ (and conflicting) authorities which have no common
basis of intelligible theory is a very bad mark indeed against a man’s
intelligence.
The next major quality I discover in Mr. Wells’s historical writing is
one closely allied to the first. It is ignorance of the other side: not
knowing what is to be said for the case which the author not so much
rejects as remains unaware of.
For instance, Man imagines Gods; therefore, it would seem, the Gods he
worships are illusions: therefore any God he worships, including the
supreme God of Catholic theology, is a man-made illusion.
Well and good. That has been the attitude of a great many people, from
the remotest antiquity. But people worth arguing with know that there is
another, exactly contrary, attitude which may be stated thus: Men make
up Gods precisely because they have an instinctive recognition of the
existence of a God and of subordinate spirits: the process is one
corresponding to reality, though led into errors of appreciation. Both
positions may be argued, and have been argued, by the strongest of human
intelligences. One man will say, like Diderot, that the whole affair is
a mere projection of Man himself by his own imagination upon the void,
and be confirmed in this view by every new discovery of men’s gods in
various eras and places. While another will say, like Newman, “On the
contrary, if I find in all false religion something in common with true
religion, it does not weaken my hold on true religion; it confirms it.”
Now we find Mr. Wells in strange ignorance of the fact that this
opposite point of view exists.
Nor is this all. Over and over again he shows ignorance of general
European movements, of the results of modern scholarship, of definite
discoveries which have changed all our thought since he was young. Not
only does he not know his Europe: he does not know his books.
A very striking example of this I have noted in the early part of this
book. Mr. Wells thought, when I spoke of a widespread European (and
American) criticism of Natural Selection which is making that theory
untenable, that I had imagined the whole thing! He denied the existence
of such authorities and challenged me, in a violent pamphlet, to quote
names. He (and the reader) will find a few of the most prominent in an
appendix to this book.
Next I notice a violent necessity in him for simplification. The general
lines of History must indeed be simple; an outline must never allow
confusion through too much detail. But I do not mean that our author has
a powerful grasp of general ideas; I mean that he suffers from a weak
simplification due to an inability to grasp the multitudinous complexity
and the inhabiting mystery of things.
One example of this extreme simplification through weakness is the
facile reference of everything social to race. Thus the “black-white”
races of the Mediterranean have certain devotions, as, for instance, to
Our Lady; the superior “Nordic” stock has not. Then, what will you do
with the fact that the one province in Europe where there was the most
passionate devotion to Our Lady for century after century was Britain?
The desperate need for simplicity leads Mr. Wells to leave it out
altogether.
I might multiply instances. They abound throughout the work.
Now, all these characters are allied to, or rather spring from, that
quality which I noted in my author at the beginning of this long
examination, and which I have called “Provincialism.” It is an essential
insufficiency for his task. He does not know his Europe; he does not
know the world. He writes in the few terms and with the few conceptions
of a man going by the labels he finds in the newspapers and textbooks of
his native place: certain printed generalizations which he read in his
youth and never questioned. He is, therefore, when he talks of the great
world of Man, out of touch with the stuff of his subject. It is this, no
doubt, coupled with an excellent economy of words and lucidity of style,
which has given him his wide public for this book; it is also this which
makes the book read second-rate to minds of a higher culture, or of a
deeper and more varied experience; and it is this which confines its
existence as a book to a very brief period of time.
We are reading in this _Outline of History_ the work of a mind closely
confined to a particular place and moment—the late Victorian London
suburbs. Such a mind has an apparatus quite inferior to the task of
historical writing.
And that is why I said in my first review of this book, what I here
repeat: “It will have a vast circulation, especially in the New
World—and an early grave.”
I must end upon a much graver note. What are we to say of that world in
which a book like this has a sale which, however ephemeral, is at any
rate enormous?
The question is one that my contemporaries do not seem to have put to
themselves sufficiently. I mean, my Catholic contemporaries (for outside
the Catholic Church very few people nowadays put any questions to
themselves ultimately: they are content to drift and feel).
There has not, in my judgment, been nearly enough astonishment, alarm,
or even aroused and curious interest in the vast social transformation
of which we are the spectators.
Some of my contemporaries have criticized me with indignation when I
have said that, outside the Catholic body, the last fragments of
Catholic doctrine were rapidly dissolving before our eyes: yet surely
the huge sales of such a book as this are proof enough that what I have
said in this matter was true.
Within my own memory there remained of the Catholic scheme a most
insufficient, but still solid, skeleton structure maintaining society in
the English-speaking non-Catholic world. Within my own memory the
Incarnation was commonly held by rich and poor in England and America,
and very much of what the Incarnation implies was taken for granted in
the structure of society. An attack upon that doctrine, stated in so
many words, would have been violently offensive not forty years ago. As
for a mere taking for granted that it was false, the books doing this
were then thought eccentric. By a curious irony, the non-Catholic
English-speaking world connected such blasphemy with the specifically
Catholic cultures which were (in those days) alluded to as
“Continental.”
Side by side with this fundamental doctrine of our Lord’s Divinity,
which certainly such a brief time ago was the commonplace of all our
society, it possessed sundry other essential dogmas of Catholic
truth—the Personality of God, His omnipotence, His creation of all
things, the Immortality of the Human Soul, _and_ the dual destiny of
mankind: the conviction that man by his own free will might lose the
grace of God, and that if he lost it his eternal existence would be
marred and deprived of the end for which it was created. In plain
English, men believed in Heaven and Hell: particularly wicked men—upon
whom such ideas have the most salutary effect. The whole range of
emotions which arise from such doctrines as surely, and are as
inseparable from them, as a scent from a flower or the emotions of
landscape from the living eye, permeated society.
Not only were these doctrines retained with all their effect, but the
chief Catholic social disciplines still had value. Property was still
held to be a right, not a mere arrangement or a system. Its proper
distribution was thought a good: its capture by a few, an evil: the
Socialist attack on it as a principle, inhuman. The family was still the
unit of the State. The control of the parent over the child was taken
for granted and the action of the State, or of any other authority, was
regarded as a delegation, and a perilous delegation at that. Marriage
was normally regarded as indissoluble.
Behind all this remaining grasp of the last but most essential factors
in the general scheme of Catholic society—all that by which men could
still vaguely be called “Christians”—went the common-sense appreciation
of the truth that Man was Man: that we could not deal with Man by
experiment as a changeable being, that he was not a mere phase in
process of passing, but a fixed type with a known nature.
Man was—within my own memory—even to the highbrow non-Catholic world,
what he still is (I am glad to say) to the populace—the most certain,
the most fixed, known thing in the world; for Man knows himself as he
knows no other thing. Hence was there a security in the sense and
application of justice; hence was there a powerful comprehension of the
past. For it was rightly taken for granted that men had always acted
upon much the same motives. Hence was there a hearty recognition of the
human conscience (which every man discovers in himself), and a
corresponding contempt for sentimental excuses of misconduct.
Not only was this true of the dogmas, the disciplines, and the social
effect of such remains of the Catholic Church as survived in the
non-Catholic English-speaking world about us; but it was true of the
intellectual heritage. Plain logic was accepted. The reason was given
its due place. Men did not move by suggestion or by repetition; they
still examined; and the presentation to that older generation (which I
and all my contemporaries can remember) of statements unproved, the
confusion of scientific hypothesis with scientific fact, were ridiculed.
They were less and less ridiculed, it is true, as the nineteenth century
drew to its close. Confusion of thought became more prevalent, and the
swallowing whole of the last unproved and improbable affirmation in
Biology, Pre-history, or Textual Criticism was already growing to be a
habit. But the habit was not yet universal.
Now the lesson to be learnt from the immense sale of such a second-rate
popular book as Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ is that the old
doctrines, for the great mass of our modern English-speaking
non-Catholic population have gone. Mr. Wells ridicules the Resurrection;
the Incarnation he could, of course, not grasp, but _also_—and here is
the significant point—he does not think that others really entertain it.
He does not admit any part of the Christian scheme. On the intellectual
side he proposes as true things of which we know nothing; and as
obviously untrue things on which the best minds of Europe have long been
assured.
Note you, in all this he is not an innovator. He challenges no one. He
risks nothing. He follows the sheep. Mr. Wells makes no attempt to be a
leader. He merely puts, in a nice, clear, simple fashion, that which the
myriads to whom he addresses himself already believe—that there is no
Creator, no Saviour, no Resurrection, no Immortality, no Communion of
Saints.
Is not this a portent? In my judgment it is. It is not true that the
modern world as a whole has suffered such a revolution. The Catholic
culture in the continent of Europe not only stands strong, but is
rapidly increasing in strength. The two branches of reaction against it
(the German Protestant reaction of which Prussian atheism was the
climax, and the more respectable anti-clericalism of French and Italian
tradition) are both manifestly weakening. The doctrines that would
dissolve society have been exposed and are now counter-attacked with an
increasing vigour. Europe—the Soul of the world—is hesitating whether it
will not return to the Faith: without which it cannot live.
But is that so in the world to which we belong, or at least of which we
Catholics are exceptional inhabitants? Is it true of that
English-speaking culture which was founded upon the Bible and whose
peculiar virtues and weaknesses, advantages and disadvantages (many of
them alien to us Catholics, but all well comprehended by us), were the
texture of life in England and Scotland, in the English Dominions, and
in the United States?
I think not. Men hesitate to say it; they are afraid of facing the truth
in the matter, but truth it is: the foundations have gone.
I do not mean that in their place other foundations may not be
discovered. I do not predict chaos, though chaos is a very possible
result of it all. What I do say is, that Christian morals and doctrine,
and all that they meant, are, in our English-speaking world much more
than in any other part of contemporary white civilization, in
dissolution.
This is no place in which to discuss the remedies (if any practical
remedies be available) or even the probable results of so vast a
revolution; but it is the place in which to emphasize the truth that the
revolution has taken place.
It is a revolution in doctrine, discipline, morals, and intellectual
action, as complete as any that we can find recorded in History since
the conversion of the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church. It applies
only to a section of the modern world, the section which I have
mentioned: Britain, America and the Dominions; but that is a very
important section of the modern world, and (what is of chief interest to
us) it is the section wherein we live, of which we are citizens, to
which we owe allegiance, and with whose fate our own and that of our
children is bound up.
I will add no more.
APPENDIX
It is cumbersome to load a book intended for general reading with
quotations from Authorities and a mass of footnotes. Moreover, a reader
of intelligence desires to hear the arguments rather than a mere list of
expert names.
On this account, in the first draft of this book (which appeared in the
form of a series of articles in the Press), while giving some of the
main arguments against the old Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, I
omitted particular names, and only alluded in general terms to that mass
of modern criticism, increasing in volume, which has undermined it.
Mr. Wells was foolish enough to write a hurried pamphlet in which he
made the strange affirmation that my arguments against Natural Selection
were of my own invention and that I cited no modern critics of Darwinism
because no such critics existed: the intellectual movement of which I
spoke was a figment of my brain, and I could quote no authorities
supporting it.
From this it was clear, though astonishing, that Mr. Wells had
undertaken to write popular stuff about Evolution without so much as a
casual acquaintance with the advance of biology in our generation.
I therefore append here the names of some few among the many authorities
upon biological science who have exposed the error of Natural Selection.
It is a short list, drawn up at random, and in no particular order of
date, and containing only some forty odd names such as a man of quite
ordinary general education like myself with only a general interest in
such matters can jot down from memory. It could, of course, be extended
indefinitely by anyone setting out to make a complete total of the
first-class scholars who have left Darwinism the wreck it is to-day. I
do not pretend, of course, to more than a very slight reading among any
of these few. I give them only as sample names out of an increasing
roll, professors in the great universities (Paris, Vienna, Leipzig,
Harvard, Montpellier, Tübingen, Amsterdam, Columbia, Bologna, etc.
etc.), a President of the British Association, men eminent in special
research, and famous biologists who have determined the current of
modern opinion in the course of my lifetime:—
CUÉNOT
DELAGE
ROSA (DANIELE)
KOLLIKER
DIAMIARE
CARAZZI (DAVID)
BATESON
CHAUFFARD
HENSLOW
HYATT
COPE
EIMER
PIEPERS
HARTMANN
DE VRIES
NÄGELI
PACKARD
JAECKEL
GOETTE
HABERLANDT
SACHS
KASSOVITTZ
STROMER
DEPÉRET
VOGT
MORGAN
DAVENPORT
LE DANTEC
FLEISCHMANN
DRIESCH
DENNERT
DI BARNARDO
WIGAND
WOOLF
SCHMARDA
SERGI
PFEFFER
VIALLETON
CONN
OSBORN
DACQUÉ
A few quotations may not come amiss:—
“We [biologists in general] have come to the
conviction that the principle of Natural
Selection cannot have been the chief factor in
determining species....”
(PROFESSOR BATESON, President of British Association, 1914, speaking in
Melbourne.)
“Natural Selection never explains at all the
specifications of the animal and vegetable forms
that are actually found....”
“For men of clear intellect Darwinism has long
been dead....”
(DRIESCH.)
“We have now the remarkable spectacle that just
when many scientific men are all agreed that
there is _no part_ [my italics] of the Darwinian
system that is of any great influence, and that,
as a whole, the theory is not only unproved, but
impossible, the ignorant, half-educated masses
have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted
as a fundamental fact....”
(DWIGHT, Professor of Anatomy at Harvard University.)
“Selection does _not_ [my italics] bring
about transgressive variation in a general
population....”
(PROFESSOR MORGAN, Professor of Experimental Zoology at University of
Columbia, writing in 1919.)
“Animals and plants would have developed much as
they did even had no struggle for existence
taken place....”
(NÄGELI.)
“Selection is in no way favourable to the origin
of new forms.”
“The struggle for existence, and the selection
that goes with it, restricts the appearance of
new forms, and is in no way favourable to the
production of these forms. It is an inimical
factor in evolution.”
(KORCHINSKY.)
“On the question of knowing whether Natural
Selection can engender new specific forms, it
seems clear to-day that it cannot.”
(DELAGE.)
“One could possibly imagine a gradual
development of the adaptation between one muscle
cell and one nerve-ending, through selection
among an infinity of chance-made variations: but
that such shall take place coincidentally in
time and character in hundreds or thousands of
cases in one organism is inconceivable.”
(WOLFF, _Beitrage zur Kritik der Darwinischen Lehre._)
“The Darwinian theory, favourably received till
of late, has lost ground more and more, and may
now be said to have failed.”
(ROSA, Professor of University of Padua, _Lamarckismo_, etc. Bulletin of
the Italian Entomological Society, 1910.)
“In conclusion, we may say that the Darwinian
theory has completely failed.”
(CARAZZI, writing in 1919. See also his speech at Florence in November
of the same year.)
“Never yet has it been possible to refer [to a
common origin] methodically and without error
any two types or even large groups.”
(DACQUÉ, _Paleontologie Systematik und Descendenzslehre_. Jena, 1911.)
“It is pretty clear that we must wholly abandon
the Darwinian hypothesis.”
(CUÉNOT, _La Génèse des Espèces Animales_. 1921. Second edition.)
I think that is enough.
INDEX
Albigenses, 97
Alphabet, 53
Alva, 100
Andaman Islanders, 38
_A priori_ Arguments, 20, 21–4
Arabs, 80–3
Arian Heresy, 76
Aryan tongues, 48
Augustine, St., 32, 95
Austrasia (Neustria), 85–6
Averroës, 81
Bear, Polar, 16, 21
Bernard Shaw, Mr., 10
Bible Christian, 10, 13, 31, 32, 43, 50, 90
Buddhism, 59–63
Carthage, 45, 57, 64
Catholic Church, 6, 7, 31, 49, 58, 70, 72–4, 82, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 98
Cato, 64
Cave drawings, 43
Charles V, 101–2
Chinese Culture, 52, 53, 56, 77–9
Clovis, 86
Cobbett, 6
Coleman, Professor, 29, 30
Count, Roman Title, 87
Creation, 9 ff., 12
Croll’s “Theory of Glaciation,” 8, 29
Cromwell, Oliver, 105–6, 109
Crusades, 89, 90
Dark Ages, 84–8
Darwin, Charles, 12, 13, 73
Design, 11–15, 17, 22
Driesch, 11, 27
Dwight, Professor, 26, 27
Elephant, 17
Eoanthropos, 30
Evolution, 10, 17, 48.
_See also_ Natural Selection
Experience, Argument from, 20
Fall of Man, 28, 32, 33
Fathers of the Church, their support, of Evolution, 12, 26
Feudalism, 84
Filioque clause, 78–9, 87
Franks, 86
Frazer. _See_ “Golden Bough”
Frederic II, 91
Fustel, 86
Gentry, 6, 49
Geological argument, 21, 26
God, 11–13, 27, 34–9, 40
“Golden Bough,” 8, 45
Gospels, Mr. Wells’s attitude towards, 5, 68–72, 87
Grant Allen, 8, 36
Huc, Abbé, 62–3
Huguenots, 100, 102
Human Sacrifice, 45–6.
_See also_ Sacrifice
Huss, 95, 96
Ignatius, St. 73
Immaculate Conception, 77–8
Immortality, 42, 61, 80
Incarnation, 62, 64, 67–72
Islam, 77–84, 87, 88, 97
James II, 106–7
Jewish Race, 39, 59
Julius Cæsar, 65–6
Kingship versus Priesthood, 55, 56, 57, 58, 91
Lamarck, 11, 27
Lang, Andrew, 39, 45
Language, Development of, 47, 48
Lichfield, Strange case of Commercial Traveller in, 103
Luther. _See_ Reformation
Man, Age of, 26
Marco Polo, 82–3
Marie Antoinette, 108
Materialist, 31, 42
Medicine, Practice of, in Dark Ages, 85
Mediterranean, 49, 52
Mesopotamian Culture, 52
Middle Ages, 89–93
Mithras, 74–6
Modernist, 35, 61, 68–9, 75, 108
Mogul Empire, 98
Mohammed. _See_ Islam
Mongols, 82
Monism, 110
Morillet, 42
Muret, Battle of, 97
Napoleon, 5, 109
Natural Selection, 10 ff., 14
Arguments against, 19 ff.
Implication, 15
Summarized, 18
Neanderthal Man, 30, 44, 49
Nestorians, 87
Normans, 86
“Old Man,” Supposed origin of God, 35–6
Original Sin, 31, 32
Ottoman. _See_ Turks
Our Lady, 71, 75
Our Lord, Mr. Wells’s description of, 68–73
Palæolithic Man, 30, 42, 43, 44
Parliament, 104–5
Paul, St., 72–4
Persecution, 70, 107–8
Persian Gulf, 52
Pig, 25
Piltdown, Fossil fragments of, 30
Popes, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 91, 100
Priesthood, 51 ff., 54, 55, 56, 57–8
Protestant Culture, its present attitude, 110–14
Provincialism, 4
Recapitulation, Theory of, 28
Red Sea, 52
Reformation, 89, 92, 93, 97–103
Resurrection, Mr. Wells on, 74–5
Robespierre, 108–9
Rome, 64, 65–8
Russians in England, Legend of, 75
Sacrament, 40
Sacrifice, 40, 41, 45, 74–5
Savages, Evidence from, 38
Shakespeare, 102–3
Stonehenge, 46
Sumerian kingship, 56
Thomas Aquinas, St., 34, 95
Trinity, Doctrine of Mr. Wells’s ignorance upon, 34, 78–9
Turks, 82
Type, “Fixed” or “Stable,” 16, 21, 24–5, 26, 38
Veneration, 40, 41
Vialleton, Professor, 12, 28, 29
Wallace, biologist, 12, 13
Weissmann, 17
Wells, Mr. _See also_ Bible Christian, 3–4
Attitude to Christ, 68–9, 75–6
Disadvantages, 5–8, 43–5, 49, 51–2, 64, 67, 73, 74–6, 83, 97, 103–4
Dislike of Catholicism, 2, 3, 6, 47, 54, 58–9, 64, 85, 89, 93–4, 99
Dislike of Rome, 65–6
Linguistic gifts, 8
Out-of-dateness, 29
Summarized, 110–12
Talents, 2, 3–4, 50, 51–2, 64, 82
Westphalia, Peace of, 107
Wycliffe, 92–3, 96
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Page Changed from Changed to
8 thought slight, is sound: the though slight, is sound: the
outline outline
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Used numbers for footnotes.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.