amazing ignorance upon the Catholic Church. That ignorance is, of
course, still more apparent in his book. But I am concerned here only
with the way in which it appears in his pamphlet. He inherits the old
prejudice--flourishing strongly in the best No-Popery days--that for
some unexplained reason a Catholic is opposed to that most interesting
intellectual activity, the pursuit of physical knowledge. He envisages
the Catholic Church as teaching an inchoate heap of unconnected
doctrines, each of them highly concrete, each of them flagrantly
impossible, and the chief of them an historical statement that in a
particular place and at a particular time, to wit, in the neighbourhood
of Baghdad 5930 years ago, there took place the Fall of Man. He has no
conception that we object to a book like his and to methods such as he
uses because we use the human reason, and are all brought up to know
that the human reason is absolute in its own sphere.
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.
I can understand many a blunder about the Catholic position on the part
of people living in a world where they do not meet Catholics and who
know next to nothing of the past of Europe or of the way in which our
civilisation is a product of the Catholic Faith. I often come across
even well-educated men who have surprisingly little knowledge of the
Church; but what I cannot understand is that a man thus ignorant should
also be ignorant of the ordinary rules of thought.
A man’s Faith may possibly be shaken by some philosophical
argument--though my own experience is that when it is shaken, still
more when it is lost, the cause at work is not intellectual but always
moral--the Faith is lost through wrong doing. But that the Faith could
conceivably be lost through not being able to define at what exact
moment true man appeared, is to me quite inconceivable. I confess I
cannot understand the mental processes of a writer who puts a test of
that kind.
We are arguing as to whether Wordsworth is a good poet or no. One man
says he is, quoting from his best; another man says he isn’t, quoting
from his worst. There barges in a third party who says cheerfully, “The
whole discussion is futile. There was no such person as Wordsworth as a
writer at all. And to prove that, here is a record of what he was like
and what he did at the age of six, and another when he was inarticulate
upon his death-bed. Where do you draw the line?”
We are discussing whether an individual is responsible for a particular
action; for instance, writing a confused book. One man says, “It was
not his fault; it was due to bad training.” The other says, “It was his
fault, for any rational being ought to write more clearly than that.” A
third party barges in, and says, “The whole discussion is futile, for
there was no such writer. I can prove it by a photograph of him as a
baby, in which it is quite clear that he couldn’t write books at all.”
But Mr. Wells’s manifold lack of acquaintance with his most serious
opponent is seen in plenty of other lights.
For instance, there is his idea that scale destroys the Faith. “Only
let me convince you,” he pathetically urges, “that the material
universe existed long before man, and that the scheme of redemption
only applies to the comparatively brief human period in geology. Only
let me convince you, and you will see how foolish all this Christian
talk is.” But we have all of us known all about that, not only since
first the Church began, but since first man began to trouble himself
about divine things at all. Is not the sky at night sufficient evidence
of scale? Is not the brevity of human life? Is not the magnitude of the
world upon which we live--of even a part of which no man could have
comprehensive knowledge in a thousand years?
There is I think in all of this an honest desire upon Mr. Wells’s
part--I may say a burning missionary zeal--to convert us to Atheism,
something on the same level as that of those from whom he derives.
They were convinced, you will remember, not so long ago, that to
turn the inhabitants of Wugga-Mugga into honest folk like themselves
attending chapel, meeting at tea-fights, and even keeping one or two
servants, all that was wanted was a translation of the Old Testament in
Wugga-Mugganese--which translation they then did order in prodigious
quantities and export to Wugga-Mugga by the ton, to the huge profit of
a great number of salaried officials in the W.M. Bible Society, and to
honest rum-drinking sea captains as well; but to no appreciable effect
upon Wugga-Muggaland, its monarch, aristocracy and common folk.
So I fear it will be with this effort at conversion of the Catholic
to Atheism by an exceedingly insufficient rehash of text-books thirty
years old. Mr. Wells sometimes pleads that all this doesn’t matter,
because the Catholic Church no longer counts. Well, that plea itself is
a very good example of ignorance. If he had a general acquaintance with
Europe he would know, not only that the Catholic Church counts, but
that it is beginning to count more and more. That is no proof of its
right to the claim it advances of a divine authority; but it is proof
that there is a great social phenomenon present to the eye of every
educated and travelled man to-day--the resurrection of the Catholic
Nations, the new attitude of the academic youth on the Continent, and
particularly in Paris; the new wave in literature; the breakdown of
the nineteenth-century materialism in philosophy--which is not present
in the experience of Mr. Wells.
He tells us rather pathetically that he must know all about the
Catholic Church, because he now winters on the Riviera. I answer that
the experience is insufficient. If every rich Englishman who wintered
on the Riviera acquired thereby a general grasp on the modern spirit
of Europe, we should have among them a public to be envied; but from
what I have seen of those who thus escape the English winter, the
Monte Carlo Express and the Cosmopolitan hotels do not make for common
culture, let alone for an understanding of divine things.
I have no space to enlarge on the point. Mr. Wells knows as much about
the Catholic Church as he does of the classical spirit, of great verse,
of the architecture inherited from the ancients, or indeed of any
other noble tradition. Yet it should be a commonplace with anyone who
attempts to write upon European history that some general knowledge of
what the Faith may be is a first essential in his affair.
That knowledge is rare and fragmentary in many considerable
anti-Catholic historians; in Mr. Wells it is absent.
IV
MY ERRORS
I owe it to Mr. Wells that any error or misstatement I may have
committed in the great bulk of work which I did showing up the paucity
of his knowledge and the confusion of his mind, should be corrected.
I now, therefore, deal with the specific, particular points, in which
he says that I have misrepresented him or misunderstood him; and these
I will take in their order, as they appear in his somewhat hysterical
protest.
Of these alleged misstatements Mr. Wells manages to scrape up exactly
six, out of I know not how many in the detailed and destructive
criticism which I directed against his work.
But even six alleged misstatements (out of perhaps some hundreds of
critical remarks) should in justice be dealt with, and I will deal with
them here.
I will take his complaints in their order as they appear in his angry
little pamphlet.
(1) I recommend him occasionally to a translation of foreign work,
though he is, as a fact, better equipped than I am in the reading of
Italian, Spanish, German, and Portuguese; while French comes to him
much the same as his native tongue.
I accept his statement unreservedly, and beg leave to tell him that in
German, Italian, Spanish, and even Portuguese, I am no use at all; and
that I am altogether his inferior in French. For I have perpetually
to consult better scholars than myself on the meaning of French words
which I come across; I write the language painfully, and, on the few
occasions when I have to speak it in public, I spend a vast amount of
effort and am a burden to my friends before I can get my paper ready
for delivery.
But it is only fair to myself to give him the reasons for my deplorable
blunder. I honestly took it for granted that he was ignorant of
Continental languages. I had no idea of his quite remarkable linguistic
achievements, which are excelled only by two men out of my wide circle
of acquaintance. And the reason that I fell into this error was that
his _Outline of History_ betrayed no acquaintance with general European
culture. My own acquaintance with that culture is no more than the
general familiarity with it possessed by all men of average education,
and average experience in travel, and average meeting with their
fellows. Why Mr. Wells should have concealed far greater advantages
I do not know; but, at any rate, he has certainly done so most
successfully. No one reading his _Outline of History_ could imagine for
a moment that he had an urbane and comprehensive view of Christendom
based on the reading of French, German, Italian, Spanish--and
Portuguese.
However, I was wrong, and I duly apologise.
(2) He accuses me of having put into his mouth the words “climbing up
the family tree,” as applied to the embryo; which words, as a fact,
he never used. Here, again, I am to blame--not, indeed, for having
said that Mr. Wells used words which he never used, but for not
having written with that clarity which the occasion demanded. I had
no intention of saying that Mr. Wells had used this particular phrase
himself. I quoted it between inverted commas, not because I ascribed it
to himself, but because it was a sort of current slang phrase familiar
enough when Mr. Wells and I were young and were both being taught the
nonsense which he still so loyally defends.
The idea was that the embryo reproduced in various stages of its
development the various stages of its ancestry in the evolutionary
process. The proper scientific term for this conception or theory
is “Recapitulation.” To this theory of Recapitulation Mr. Wells
amply commits himself in his book. He brings it out specifically in
connection with man. How his allusions to Recapitulation look in
the light of modern scientific work we shall see in a moment. The
particular point here is that he did not use the particular phrase
“climbing up the family tree.” He did not, and I never intended to say
that he did. I readily apologise for any misconception that may have
arisen on that head. But I confess I cannot for the life of me see how
the matter can be of the least importance!
Supposing Mr. Wells were to write a criticism of my book, _Europe and
the Faith_, and were to say, “Mr. Belloc is for ever referring the main
institutions of Europe to the Roman Empire,” and then were to add, out
of his wide acquaintance with French literature, that fine expression
from Verlaine, “O Rome! O Mère!”
I don’t think I should rush into print and protest that I had been
abominably maligned. I should say that I was not the author of the
expression (if anybody bothered to ask me), but that it put my opinion
more tersely than I could have put it myself.
However, if Mr. Wells cannot bear the misunderstanding, he will be
relieved to know that in my book I have got rid of it by the simple
process of adding the words “as it was called in Mr. Wells’s youth and
mine” before the offending phrase (and a very good epigrammatic one it
is) “climbing up the family tree.”
(3) Mr. Wells complains that I accuse him of not having read Vialleton,
and brings forward, in triumphant proof of my own ignorance of that
great scientist, the fact that I passed an error in proof, allowing
“V_ai_lleton” to stand for “V_ia_lleton.”
Here it is I that must defend myself.
I bought Vialleton’s great book (which is a destructive criticism of
Darwinism of a 17-inch calibre) the week in which it came out, and have
consulted it ever since. If Mr. Wells is reduced for ammunition to the
picking out of one misprint in some hundred thousand words of matter,
he must be in a terrible way.
But on the attached point, that I accuse him of never having read
Vialleton, and that (as Mr. Wells himself roundly affirms) Vialleton
does not knock Recapitulation sideways, I can only repeat that I have
made no error at all; but that, on the contrary, it is clear Mr. Wells
has never read the book, and probably never heard of it until he saw
the name quoted in my criticism. Had he really read Vialleton he could
not have had the face to pretend that this great authority did not
oppose the old-fashioned views Mr. Wells was putting forward.
Mr. Wells is foolish enough--and ignorant enough--to say that this
leading European authority, one of the greatest living authorities on
his subject, “_may_ have seen fit in _one_ of his works” (my italics)
to set right some “French student” (why French?) who had imagined that
the embryo reproduced in detail all its ancestral life.
I might as well say that Darwin “may” in some one of his works have
seen fit to set right some English student who imagined all animals to
have been created out of mud in a week.
Why! the whole of that great book is nothing but one continuous
bombardment of everything--let alone Recapitulation--which Mr. Wells
was taught in his youth.
He will hear all about it in my book, and I am sure that he will wish,
when he reads what modern science really says, that he had never talked
about things of which he knows so little.
(4) He complains that I have abused him for stating as dogma (with
large diagrams) Croll’s astronomical theory of glaciation as
propounded--thirty-three years ago!--by Sir Robert Ball. But I did
right to expose anything so monstrous. Not that astronomical factors
may not, or rather must not, have been at work; but that the particular
theory which he puts forward for his innocent readers as admitted
scientific fact, has been dead and done for since 1894. Surely one has
a right in 1926 to point out that the popular teacher laying down in
that year as fact an hypothesis which was exploded over thirty years
ago should be exposed.
(5) He says that I have attacked him for not accepting the theory that
times of high glaciation were also times of high sea-level, and vice
versa. He says that he has followed in this authorities later than the
authorities of twenty years ago which I quoted.
He is perfectly right. I owe him an apology for this, and when my
book comes out the passage shall be wholly modified in consonance with
recent work. I over-emphasised the certitude of Boule and others;
I admit that the point is in doubt and ought not to be treated as
certain. Mr. Wells was obviously wrong in treating it as certain
upon his side, for the whole debate still remains doubtful (as, for
instance, in the latest work of all, Professor Coleman), but that does
not excuse me for having been too positive on my own side.
(6) The last accusation Mr. Wells brings against me is that I
misrepresent him in similar fashion upon two points, the Neanderthal
quality of the Tasmanians (now extinct) and the use of the bow by
Paleolithic Man.
As both these accusations turn on the same point (to wit, whether I was
justified in reading confused writing as I did), they are essentially
one accusation, and I will treat them as such.
In the matter of the bow being used by late Paleolithic Man the
position is this.
Mr. Wells gives a long description of later Paleolithic Man (pages
51–56). In the course of this description he tells us (on page 54)
that later Paleolithic Man disappeared and that a new culture took his
place, possessing (what Paleolithic Man had not) domesticated animals,
a knowledge of husbandry, bows and arrows, and the rest of it.
This, of course, is the orthodox doctrine of the famous Gap between
Paleolithic Man and Neolithic Man on which our generation were all
brought up. It is true that there are now guesses at the discovery of a
link between them; still the gap is very marked.
He ends up with a summary of the whole affair on page 55, carried over
to page 56, where the section ends.
Now, _in the middle_ of this description of later Paleolithic Man (who,
remember, had no bows and arrows), he has a set of paragraphs (on page
53) describing the well-known fact that these men executed drawings
on rock surfaces. On the same page is given a specimen of these
drawings, and above it, by way of title, the caption, “Mural Painting
by Paleolithic Man.” This mural painting is nothing else but bows and
arrows! It is a picture of four men hunting with large bows, three of
them actually shooting arrows, and the unfortunate animals stuck full
of arrows so that there may be no doubt.
Yet in the course of this very same description he says that it is
“doubtful if they knew of the bow!” And that phrase comes on page 55,
two whole pages _after_ the description of Mural drawings and pictures
of bows and arrows.
The division about later Paleolithic Man--who, he has told us, was
supplanted by Neolithic Man--comes to an end and a new division begins.
In this new division Mr. Wells suddenly starts to describe a type of
Paleolithic Man upon whom the guess has been made that he came at the
very end of the process and had a more advanced culture, including bows
and arrows.
What is any man to make of such a confusion?
First, Paleolithic Man as an artist, illustrated by a picture of him
shooting away like the devil. _Then_, the casual remark that he was too
degraded to shoot at all. _Then_ the end of Paleolithic Man and his
replacement by Neolithic Man. _Then_ Paleolithic Man reappearing, pages
after, with bows and arrows all complete?
It looks uncommonly as though Mr. Wells had written his first section,
putting an end to Paleolithic Man and introducing Neolithic Man, before
he had been told of the supposed later Paleolithic men who had bows and
arrows: that he put in these latest Paleolithic men as an afterthought.
But that is only an inference from reading his confused order, and if
he tells me that what he had _meant_ to say was that there were two
kinds of late Paleolithic men, one of whom had bows and arrows and
the others had not, of course I accept what he says. Only, he should
have written it plainly, and he should not have illustrated the part
describing the men who had no bow and arrows with a large picture in
which bows and arrows are the main thing.
The other case of the Tasmanian is a similar example of confused
writing. Let the reader judge.
We have on page 43 and what follows a description of Neanderthal Man.
It is, as is usual with Mr. Wells, a mass of vague guess work, on
very little evidence, put forward as certain facts. We have also the
judgment of the author that those who regard Neanderthal Man as no
ancestor of ours, but a side-line of development, have his approval;
though he admits that the other view is held. This on page 49.
Then Mr. Wells steps sideways again. “No doubt” our own breed, “which
includes the Tasmanians, was a very similar and parallel creature.”
There is, of course, no ground for that “no doubt,” but that is by the
way. He next goes on to say that some imaginary ancestor of ours and
of the Tasmanians (whom he generously admits to be men), is not so
far from us as to have allowed contemporary types to have eliminated,
not indeed Neanderthal but the Neanderthaloid types. Then, on page
52, there is a smart return to the original position that Neanderthal
Man was not an early type of our own breed, and that true men did not
intermix with him.
Mr. Wells may protest against my calling all this sort of thing a
rigmarole, but I think that is the right word for it. It is certainly
not history, and, above all, it is not clear.
The confused impression left upon the reader’s mind by the confused
writing is that Neanderthal Man was not true man, and yet that true
man must have passed through a Neanderthal stage, having been both
Neanderthal and not Neanderthal: as it were, so to speak, and somehow.
However, a critic’s misreading, though caused by the confusion of the
author’s style and the lack of orderly arrangement in his mind, is none
the less a misreading, and Mr. Wells may rest assured that when my book
appears it shall be corrected. My perplexed guess at what Mr. Wells
really meant shall be replaced by his own statement of what he meant,
and I will, in these two cases of the Bow and the Tasmanian, emphasise
the muddlement of his method while apologising for the error into which
it led me as to his intention.
With this I conclude my review of Mr. Wells’s specific grievances of
misstatement.
They are, as I have pointed out, only six in number. Out of a prolonged
examination--covering nearly a hundred thousand words--he could find no
others.