Read Ebook: Mr. Belloc still objects to Mr. Wells's Outline of history by Belloc Hilaire

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 241 lines and 18546 words, and 5 pages

He tries to make capital of my giving the name of the very eminent anthropologist, E. Boule, without putting "Monsieur" before it, and says that I "elevate Monsieur Boule to the eminence of 'Boule.'" That is childish. All the world cites eminent men by their unsupported name. It is a sign of honour. For instance, that great authority, Sir Arthur Keith , says "Boule." Didn't Mr. Wells know that?

He says that he uses the term "Roman" Catholic because it is the only one he knows with which to distinguish between the many kinds of Catholics. Whereas the term is only used either because it is the legal and traditional word of English Protestantism, or, much more legitimately, to distinguish between us of the world-wide Roman Communion and those sincere men who emphasise Catholic doctrine in the English Church and call themselves "Anglo-Catholics." This wild protest, that there are any number of other Catholics--Scotto-Catholics, Americano-Catholics, Morisco-Catholics, Indo-Catholics, Mongolo-Catholics--is frankly ridiculous, and ridiculous after a fashion which it is legitimate to call "childish": the mere explosion of a man in a passion.

Yet another example. Finding me to have overlooked a tiny misprint in the printing of a proper name, he writes a whole page about it.

The proper adjective for absurdities of that kind is the adjective "childish." I could give any number of other examples, but I think these are quite enough.

In point of fact, I only use the word "childish" rarely--I do not know how often in my whole book, but at a guess I should say not more than three times. But each time I am sure that it is well deserved. However, if he prefer a more dignified adjective, such as "immature" or "unstable" or "puerile," or any other, I am quite willing to meet him, so long as he allows me to say that he only too often in his violence does write things which make him ridiculous from their lack of poise.

And what of the adjective "confused" or "muddle-headed"? Well, I can give examples of that innumerable. For instance, he cannot conceive that I should call him unscientific, seeing that he was one of Huxley's students. What on earth has that got to do with my accusation? If a man should call me a very poor Latin scholar , would it be any reply to tell him that I had been as a boy at a school of which Cardinal Newman was the head, or as a young man that I had been at Balliol; or that among my intimate acquaintances whom I listen to fascinated upon classical themes were some of the greatest scholars of my time? Whether Mr. Wells is a scientific man or not must be decided, not by his having attended classes under Huxley, but by the use he has made of his reading; and it is easy to prove that that use has been deplorable.

Mr. Wells is unscientific because he does not survey the whole of evidence upon a point, and weigh it, and especially because he is perpetually putting forward hypothesis as fact--which may be called the very criterion of an unscientific temper; because he introduces mere fiction as an illustration of supposed fact and the material for a magazine shocker as though it were history.

It is quite unscientific to tell people that a point highly debated and not yet concluded ranks as ascertained scientific fact.

It is quite unscientific, in talking of early Christian doctrine, to leave out tradition; still more is it unscientific to work on it without any knowledge of the sub-Apostolic period. It is unscientific in the highest degree to leave out an elementary mathematical argument as though it were mere juggling with figures, and to play to the gallery by saying that your critic has got some wonderful system of figures or other which nobody can follow.

The words "science" and "scientific" do not imply a smattering of biology or geology; still less do they imply mere popular materialism. They imply real knowledge, finally accepted after full enquiry upon complete evidence; and that is why there is nothing less scientific in the world than this so-called popular "science," which is perpetually putting forward exploded guesses of the last century as ascertained facts.

As for muddle-headedness, what can be more muddle-headed than mixing up the general theory of evolution with the particular materialist theory of Natural Selection? And yet that is what Mr. Wells is perpetually doing!

It is true that a great many other people do it too, but that is no excuse. The whole of his argument on pages 18, 19 and 20 is precisely of that kind. It would be incredible to me that any man could get confused between two such completely separate ideas had I not most wearisome and repeated experience of it--and here is Mr. Wells repeating it again!

The general theory of transformism may be compared to saying that a man travelled from London to Birmingham. But the theory of Natural Selection may be compared to saying that he travelled by motor-car and not by railway.

Another example of bad muddle-headedness is his mixing up the Catholic use of relics and the Catholic use of sacred images with the unwarranted illustration of the unknown prehistoric past, and the unwarranted basing of a detailed conclusion upon the insufficient evidence of a few bones.

I say in my criticism of Mr. Wells, and I say quite rightly, that to put forward a picture of an imaginary being called "Eoanthropus," giving him a particular weapon and gait and gesture, and an expression , was utterly unwarranted upon the exceedingly doubtful evidence of the fragments called "The Piltdown skull." Sacred images in Catholic use are not--and surely everybody ought to know that--attempts at reconstruction, still less are they fakes to try and get people to believe that, for instance, an Archangel has goose wings and curly hair. They are symbols; are powerful and useful aids to devotion, not reconstructions.

Nor are relics in any way parallel to fossil evidences. We venerate a relic of St. Agnes , both because it is a striking memorial of that very holy witness to the Faith, who gave up her life for it, and because we believe that the sanctity of the person can upon occasion give virtue and power to such things. But we do not say, "In case you do not believe St. Agnes ever existed, here is a fragment of her bone." To mix up two things so entirely different is muddle-headedness turned glorious.

MR. WELLS AS BIOLOGIST

I come now to what is the pith of Mr. Wells's whole pamphlet. It is evidently the matter upon which he is most pained; it is also the matter on which he has most woefully exposed his lack of modern reading.

Through page after page--thirteen whole pages--he slangs and bangs away at me--because I have exposed his ignorance of modern work upon Darwinism.

There are in this furious attack two quite distinct points: first, his accusation that I pose as being a man having special learning, with European reputation in such affairs ; secondly, his treatment of the arguments which I have put before my readers against the old and exploded theory of Darwinian Natural Selection, upon which theory, remember, all these popular materialists still desperately rely in their denial of a Creative God and of Design in the universe.

As to the first point: there can be no question of my having put on airs of special knowledge in any of these affairs. Not only have I not pretended to any special knowledge on geology or pre-history, or biology: I have not even pretended to special knowledge on matters where I have a good deal of reading in modern and mediaeval history. When I took up the atheist challenge presented by Mr. Wells's book, I did so as a man of quite ordinary education, because it was amply evident on a first summary reading of it that the writer was not a man of even average education. I pretend to no more than that working acquaintance with contemporary thought which is common to thousands of my kind, and I think it the more shame to Mr. Wells that with no expert training I can make hay of his pretensions. Any man of average education, reading and travel could have done the same.

Suppose somebody were to write a little popular manual on chemistry with the object of showing that there is no God, and were to say of the Atom that it had existed from all eternity, because it had no lesser parts, but was eternally simple and indivisible. The man of ordinary education would at once reply: "Have you never heard of the Electron?" He would be justified in putting it much more strongly, and in saying, "Is it conceivable that you are so hopelessly out of date that you have never heard of the Electron and of the modern theory of the Atom?"

This does not mean that the person asking this most legitimate and astonished question would be posing as an expert in chemistry; it would simply mean that in ordinary conversation with his fellows he was abreast of his time. Any of us whatsoever, even if he read no more than newspaper articles, would have a right to say, "My good fellow, you are out of court with your absurd old-fashioned simple Atom."

Now suppose the person whom he had thus most justly criticised were to lose his temper and say, "You are making up all this about electrons out of your own head! You do not quote a single modern authority by name in favour of this new-fangled theory of yours about electrons! The reason you do not quote any name or authority is that you can't! There are no such names!" Would he not have delivered himself into the hands of his opponent?

That is precisely what Mr. Wells has done. He has shown himself utterly ignorant of all modern work in his own department, and he must not cry out too loud at the consequences of his rashness.

Why on earth Mr. Wells challenged me to give names opposed to the old Darwinian position I cannot conceive. It was a tactical blunder, so enormous that I can make nothing of it, save on the supposition that he, being a sincere man, does honestly believe no modern destructive criticism of Natural Selection--let alone of Transformism--to be in existence.

So much for my pose of great learning. I pose to about as much learning in the matter as anyone among thousands of my own sort who by current reading keep abreast of the mere elements of modern thought.

Now let us turn to the main point.

So there has been no destructive criticism of the old Darwinian hypothesis? So there are no names to be quoted against the particular distinctively Darwinian invention of Natural Selection? Indeed!

Let us see.

There is a certain Professor Bateson, who has left on record the following judgment:--

"We" "have come to the conviction that the principle of Natural Selection cannot have been the chief factor in determining species...."

And who is this Professor Bateson, Mr. Wells will ask ?

Well, he was the President of the British Association when it met in Melbourne in 1914, and the sentence I have just quoted dates from that year.

Now let us turn to something totally different. I give it, not in German, which I cannot read, but in what I believe to be an adequate translation:--

"Natural Selection never explains at all the specifications of the animal and vegetable forms that are actually found...."

And who is the unknown fellow I have got hold of here? Driesch: and his conclusion is much older than that which we have from Professor Bateson. Here, again, from the same insignificant little fellow, we have this--thirty whole years ago:--

"For men of clear intellect Darwinism has long been dead...."

"Oh!" I can hear Mr. Wells saying, "but who is this Driesch?" Well, he stands among the greatest of the German biologists to all educated men. But Mr. Wells has never heard of him.

Here Mr. Wells will, I am sure, protest and say, "Oh, this Dennert you tell me about is surely extreme." I am rather inclined to agree. But that is not the point. He wanted modern authorities, and I am giving him a few. Mr. Wells had never heard of Dennert.

Let us turn to Dwight:--

Who is this fellow Dwight? cries Mr. Wells. Whoever heard of him? I do not know whether Mr. Wells has ever heard of him, but he wrote in the year 1918. And he happened to hold the position of Professor of Anatomy at Harvard University.

At it again! In the year 1919 there was published by a certain Professor Morgan :--

Indeed, Professor Morgan's whole book, and one might say his whole work, is a moderate but sufficient destruction of the old orthodox Darwinian stuff. Mr. Wells is now becoming restive. "Who's this chap Morgan? I haven't heard of him. He's a nobody?" Well, I am no student. I am only a general reader--but I should imagine that Professor Morgan was somebody, for he is the Professor of Experimental Zoology in the University of Columbia.

Shall I go on among these authorities whom Mr. Wells assures us don't exist? We have Le Dantec, with his whole crushing book of 1909. Le Dantec is only a Frenchman, it is true, but, after all, he was at the time the newly-appointed Professor of General Biology at the University of Paris giving his lectures at the Sorbonne.

I might go right back to N?geli, of whom certainly Mr. Wells has heard, for his work dates from some years before 1893--the date when Mr. Wells seems to have stopped making notes in class. But perhaps Mr. Wells would like the actual words of that authority--which again I quote :--

"Animals and plants would have developed much as they did even had no struggle for existence taken place...."

Would Mr. Wells like to hear Korchinsky? It will be news for him:--

"Selection is in no way favourable to the origin of new forms."

And again, from the same authority:--

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet