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Title: Mr. Belloc objects to "The outline of history"
Author: H. G. Wells
Release date: December 5, 2023 [eBook #72333]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: George H. Doran Co, 1926
Credits: Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. BELLOC OBJECTS TO "THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY" ***
MR. BELLOC OBJECTS
TO “THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY”
[Illustration: Hilaire Belloc]
MR. BELLOC OBJECTS
TO “THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY”
BY
H. G. WELLS
_With Portraits_
NEW [Illustration] YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1926,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
[Illustration]
MR. BELLOC OBJECTS TO “THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY”
--B--
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
In the autumn of 1925 and the spring and summer of 1926 there was
published a revised and illustrated version of the _Outline of
History_, by Mr. H. G. Wells. There followed a series of articles by
Mr. Belloc attacking this _Outline_ and Mr. Wells. These articles were
published in the Catholic _Universe_, in the _Southern Cross_ of Cape
Colony, in the American _Catholic Bulletin_, and possibly elsewhere.
Every fortnight, keeping pace with the issue of the _Outline_, these
attacks appeared; in all, twenty-four voluminous articles. They were
grossly personal and provocative in tone, and no doubt a great joy
and comfort to the faithful. Mr. Wells prepared a series of articles
in reply; and as no one outside the public of these Catholic journals
seemed to have heard of Mr. Belloc’s attacks, he offered them to the
editors concerned, proposing, if necessary, to give the use of this
interesting matter to them without payment. Six articles he asked to
have published--in reply to twenty-four. This offering was declined
very earnestly by these editors. To the editor of the Catholic
_Universe_ Mr. Wells protested in the terms of the following letter:--
MY DEAR SIR,
I am sorry to receive your letter of May 19th. May I point out to
you that Mr. Belloc has been attacking my reputation as a thinker,
a writer, an impartial historian, and an educated person for
four-and-twenty fortnights in the _Universe_? He has misquoted; he
has misstated. Will your Catholic public tolerate no reply?
Under the stimulus of this remonstrance, the editor of the _Universe_,
after a month’s delay and various consultations with Mr. Belloc and
the directors of his paper, offered Mr. Wells the “opportunity of
correcting definite points of fact upon which he might have been
misrepresented,” but declined to allow him to defend his views or
examine Mr. Belloc’s logic and imputations in his columns. Mr. Wells
was disinclined for a series of wrangles upon what might or might
not be a “point of fact.” He then offered his articles to various
non-Catholic papers, but, with one accord, they expressed their lack
of interest in either Mr. Belloc himself or in his exposition of
Catholic ideas about natural selection, the origin of man, and the
general course of history. Yet it seems to Mr. Wells that, regarded
as a mental sample, Mr. Belloc is not without significance, and that
the examination of the contemporary Catholic attitude towards the
fundamental facts of history is a matter of interest beyond Catholic
circles. Accordingly he has decided to issue these articles in the
form of a book, and he has urged the publishers to advertise them, as
freely as may be permitted, in the Catholic press. He has retained the
“cross-heads” customary in journalistic writing.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I MR. BELLOC’S ARTS OF CONTROVERSY 13
II THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION STATED 29
III MR. BELLOC AS A SPECIMEN CRITIC OF NATURAL SELECTION 44
IV MR. BELLOC’S ADVENTURES AMONG THE SUB-MEN: MANIFEST TERROR
OF THE NEANDERTHALER 64
V FIXITY OR PROGRESS 80
MR. BELLOC OBJECTS
TO “THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY”
I
MR. BELLOC’S ARTS OF CONTROVERSY
I am the least controversial of men. Public disputations have rarely
attracted me. For years I have failed to respond to Mr. Henry Arthur
Jones, who long ago invented a set of opinions for me and invited me to
defend them with an enviable persistence and vigour. Occasionally I may
have corrected some too gross public misstatement about me--too often
I fear with the acerbity of the inexperienced. But now, in my sixtieth
year, I find myself drawn rather powerfully into a disputation with Mr.
Hilaire Belloc. I bring an unskilled pen to the task.
I am responsible for an _Outline of History_ which has had a certain
vogue. I will assume that it is known by name to the reader. It is a
careful summary of man’s knowledge of past time. It has recently been
reissued with considerable additions in an illustrated form, and Mr.
Belloc has made a great attack upon it. He declares that I am violently
antagonistic to the Catholic Church, an accusation I deny very
earnestly, and he has produced a “Companion” to this _Outline_ of mine,
following up the periodical issue, part by part, in the _Universe_ of
London, in the _Catholic Bulletin_ of St. Paul, Minnesota, in the
_Southern Cross_ of Cape Colony, and possibly elsewhere, in which my
alleged errors are exposed and confuted.
In the enthusiasm of advertisement before the “Companion” began to
appear, these newspapers announced a work that would put Mr. Belloc
among the great classical Catholic apologists, but I should imagine
that this was before the completed manuscript of Mr. Belloc’s work had
come to hand, and I will not hold Catholics at large responsible for
all Mr. Belloc says and does.
It is with this _Companion to the Outline of History_ that I am to deal
here. It raises a great number of very interesting questions, and there
is no need to discuss the validity of the charge of Heresy that is
levelled against me personally. I will merely note that I am conscious
of no animus against Catholicism, and that in my _Outline_ I accept the
gospels as historical documents of primary value, defend Christianity
against various aspersions of Gibbon’s, and insist very strongly upon
the rôle of the Church in preserving learning in Europe, consolidating
Christendom, and extending knowledge from a small privileged class to
the whole community. I do not profess to be a Christian. I am as little
disposed to take sides between a Roman Catholic and a Protestant. Mr.
Belloc will protest against that “Roman,” but he must forgive it; I
know no other way of distinguishing between his Church and Catholics
not in communion with it, as I am between a pterodactyl and a bird.
DISCONCERTING POSE OF MR. BELLOC
In this art of controversy it is evident that great importance attaches
to pose. This is plain from the very outset of Mr. Belloc’s apologia.
From the beginning I have to be put in my place, and my relationship
to Mr. Belloc has to be defined. Accustomed as I am to see Mr. Belloc
dodging about in my London club, and in Soho and thereabouts, and even
occasionally appearing at a dinner-party, compactly stout, rather
breathless and always insistently garrulous, I am more than a little
amazed at his opening. He has suddenly become aloof from me. A great
gulf of manner yawns between us. “Hullo, Belloc!” is frozen on my
lips, dies unuttered. He advances upon me in his Introduction with a
gravity of utterance, a dignity of gesture, rare in sober, God-fearing
men. There is a slow, formal compliment or so. I have, I learn, “a
deservedly popular talent in fiction.” I am sincere, an honest soul.
My intentions are worthy. But the note changes; he declares I am a
“Protestant writing for Protestants,” and there is danger that my
_Outline_ may fall into Catholic hands. Some Catholics may even be
infected with doubt. His style thickens with emotion at this thought,
and he declares: “One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more
important than twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or a million of
the average reading public of England and America.” That is why he
is giving me his attention, syndicating these articles and swelling
himself up so strongly against me. That is why he now proposes to
exhibit and explain and expose me in the sight of all mankind. It is
controversy, and everyday manners are in abeyance.
The controversial pose reveals itself further. The compliments and
civilities thin out and vanish. Mr. Belloc becomes more magisterial,
relatively larger, relatively graver, with every paragraph. He assumes
more definitely the quality of a great scholar of European culture
and European reputation, a trained, distinguished, universally
accepted historian. With what is evidently the dexterity of an expert
controversialist and with an impressiveness all his own, he seems to
look over and under and round the man he knows, and sketches in the man
he proposes to deal with, his limitations, his pitiful limitations, the
characteristics, the disagreeable characteristics, that disfigure him.
It is a new Wells, a most extraordinary person. I learn with amazement
the particulars with which it is necessary to instruct that Catholic
soul in danger before the matter of my book can be considered. I see
myself in the lurid illumination of Catholic truth.
REMARKABLE PORTRAIT OF MR. WELLS
To begin with, I am “an intense patriot.” This will surprise many
readers. I dread its effect on Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, whose favourite
tune upon the megaphone for years has been that I am the friend of
every country but my own. Will he intervene with a series of articles
to “My dear Belloc”? I hope not. I might plead that almost any chapter
of the _Outline of History_ could be quoted against this proposition.
But Mr. Belloc is ruthless; he offers no evidence for his statement,
no foothold for a counter-plea. He just says it, very clearly, very
emphatically several times over, and he says it, as I realise very
soon, because it is the necessary preliminary to his next still more
damaging exposures.
They are that I am an Englishman “of the Home Counties and London
Suburbs”--Mr. Belloc, it seems, was born all over Europe--that my
culture is entirely English, that I know nothing of any language or
literature or history or science but that of England. And from this
his creative invention sweeps on to a description of this new Wells
he is evoking to meet his controversial needs. My admiration grows. I
resist an impulse to go over at once to Mr. Belloc’s side. This, for
example, is splendid. This new Wells, this suburban English Protestant,
has written his _Outline of History_ because, says Mr. Belloc, “he
does not know that ‘foreigners’ (as he would call them) have general
histories.”
That “as he would call them” is the controversial Mr. Belloc rising to
his best.
Mr. Belloc, I may note in passing, does not cite any of these general
histories to which he refers. It would surely make an interesting
list and help the Catholic soul in danger to better reading. The
American reader, at whose prejudices this stuff about my patriotism
is presumably aimed, would surely welcome a competing Outline by a
“foreigner.” Mr. Belloc might do worse things than a little translation
work.
Then the Royal College of Science shrivels at his touch to a mechanics’
institute, and the new Wells, I learn, “does really believe from the
bottom of his heart all that he read in the text-books of his youth.”
The picture of this new Wells, credulous, uncritical devourer of the
text-books supplied by his suburban institute, inveterate Protestant,
grows under the pen of this expert controversialist. I have next to
be presented as a low-class fellow with a peculiar bias against the
“Gentry of my own country,” and this is accordingly done. “Gentlemen”
with whom I have quarrelled are hinted at darkly--a pretty touch of
fantasy. A profound and incurable illiteracy follows as a matter of
course.
GATHERING COURAGE OF MR. BELLOC
Mr. Belloc’s courage gathers with the elaboration of his sketch. He
is the type to acquiesce readily in his own statements, and one can
see him persuading himself as he goes along that this really is the
Wells he is up against. If so, what is there to be afraid of? If
there is a twinge of doubt, he can always go back and read what he
has written. The phraseology loses its earlier discretion, gets more
pluckily abusive. Presently words like “ignorance” and “blunders”
and “limited instruction” come spluttering from those ready nibs.
Follows “childish” and “pitiable” and “antiquated nonsense.” Nothing
to substantiate any of it--just saying it. So Mr. Belloc goes his way
along the primrose path of controversy. He takes a fresh sip or so from
his all too complaisant imagination. New inspirations come. I have
“copied” things from the “wrong” books. That “copied” is good! One
can see that base malignant Wells fellow, in his stuffy room all hung
with Union Jacks, with the “wrong,” the “_Protestant_” book flattened
out before him, copying, copying; his tongue following his laborious
pen. Presently I read: “It is perhaps asking too much of our author
to adopt a strictly scientific attitude.” This, from an adept in that
mixture of stale politics and gossip which passed for history in the
days of Mr. Belloc’s reading, to even the least of Huxley’s students,
is stupendous!
Still he swells and swells with self-importance and self-induced
contempt for his silent and invisible antagonist. The pen runs on, for
does not the Catholic press wait for its latest great apologist? The
thin film of oily politeness in the opening paragraphs is long since
gone and done with, and Mr. Hilaire Belloc is fully himself again and
remains himself, except for one or two returns to patronising praise
and the oil squirt, for the rest of these remarkable papers.
His are, I suppose, the accepted manners of controversy--and what
wonderful manners they are! I note them, but I cannot emulate them.
There is, however, one reference to the unlettered suburbanism of
this ideal Wells too good to lose. I had almost let it slip by. It
is an allusion to a certain publication in French. “There may be no
translation,” Mr. Belloc throws out superbly at the height of his form,
“but Mr. Wells ought to have heard of”--the out-of-date monograph
in question. “There may be no translation...”! How feeble sounds my
protest that for all practical purposes I read French as well as I do
English, and that in all probability if it came to using a German,
Spanish, Portuguese, or Italian scientific work I could give Mr. Belloc
points and a beating.
REFLECTIONS UPON THE REAL MR. BELLOC
But I have said enough to justify incidentally my habitual avoidance
of the arts of controversy. I cannot inflate myself in this fashion.
I cannot do the counter to this attitude. I was born and I shall die
“familiar.” What seems to make Mr. Belloc feel brave and happy would
make me feel sick. On this he has presumed overmuch. There are limits
to my notorious gentleness and modesty, and they have been reached
by Mr. Belloc in these articles. His skill is undeniable; no other
writer could better his unpremeditated condescension, his apparently
inadvertent insults. And yet the facts beneath all this insolent
posturing are quite well known and easily verifiable. I cannot imagine
whom it is intended to deceive for any length of time.
Mr. Belloc is a man four years my junior, and his academic career was
briefer and not more brilliant than mine. Since he came down from
Oxford to the world of London thirty years ago, he has done no original
historical work of any distinction. He has been a popular writer as
I have been a popular writer, and he is no more if no less a scholar
than I am. There has been much incidental and inconsequent brightness
in his discursive career--funny verses and stories, an amusing rather
than a serious period in Parliament, much pamphleteering, lecturing
and speaking; he has been active and erratic; now he would be
urging on an anti-Semitic campaign; now, in association with Horatio
Bottomley, attempting to hound Masterman, his old friend and rival,
out of politics; the war made him the most confident of military
“experts,” and he has done quite a number of clever revivifications
of this or that historical event. That is his record. It gives him
a respectable position in the republic of letters, in which also
my position is respectable. No doubt he has every right and very
considerable qualifications for the criticism of such a popular work
as my _Outline_. But there is nothing in his career and nothing in his
quality to justify this pose of erudition and insolent superiority
he assumes towards me, and which he has made an integral part of his
attack. He has assumed it entirely in relation to this controversy. He
has thrown ordinary courtesy and good manners to the winds because only
in that way can he hope for a controversial advantage over me.
THE CLUE TO MR. BELLOC’S DISCONCERTING POSE
This disconcerting pose is part of his attack. That is why I am obliged
to discuss it here. Upon many points the attack is almost pure pose;
there is no tangible argument at all. It is very important to note that
and bear that in mind. It has to be borne in mind when Mr. Belloc is
accused of inordinate vanity or of not knowing his place in the world.
I doubt even if he is really very vain. I realised long ago that his
apparent arrogance is largely the self-protection of a fundamentally
fearful man. He is a stout fellow in a funk. He is the sort of man
who talks loud and fast for fear of hearing the other side. There is
a frightened thing at the heart of all this burly insolence. He has a
faith to defend, and he is not sure of his defence. That mitigates much
of his offence, even if it mitigates little of his offensiveness.
Let me say a word or so more of excuse and explanation for him. These
personalities of his are, so to speak, not a personal matter. There is
more in them than that. Mr. Belloc’s attack upon my _Outline_ does not
stand alone among his activities; it is part of a larger controversy
he wages against the modern, the non-Catholic vision of the world. He
has carried on that controversy since his Balliol days. The exigencies
that oblige him to pretend, against his better knowledge and common
civility, that I am petty and provincial and patriotic and wilfully
ignorant and pitifully out-of-date, oblige him to pretend as much about
most of those who stand for modern science and a modern interpretation
of history. He would pretend as hard about Sir Ray Lankester, for
example, or about Professor Gilbert Murray or Sir Harry Johnston or
Professor Barker, as he does about me. It is a general system of
pretence. It is a necessary part of--I will not say of _the_ Catholic
attitude, but of _his_ Catholic attitude towards modern knowledge.
The necessity for a pose involving this pretence is not very difficult
to understand. Long before Mr. Belloc embarked upon the present dispute
he had become the slave of a tactical fiction, which reiteration had
made a reality for him. He evoked the fiction as early, I believe, as
his Oxford days. It may have been very effective at Oxford--among the
undergraduates. Then perhaps it was consciously a defensive bluff,
but certainly it is no longer that. He has come at last to believe
absolutely in this creature of his imagination. He has come to believe
this: that there is a vast “modern European” culture of which the
English-speaking world knows nothing, of which the non-Catholic world
knows nothing, and with which he is familiar. It is on his side.
It is always on his side. It is simply and purely Belloccian. He
certainly believes it is there. It sustains his faith. It assuages the
gnawing attacks of self-criticism that must come to him in the night.
Throughout these papers he is constantly referring to this imaginary
stuff--without ever coming to precisions. Again and again and again and
again--and again and again and again, he alludes to this marvellous
“European” science and literature, beyond our ken.
He does not quote it; it does not exist for him to quote; but he
believes that it exists. He waves his hand impressively in the
direction in which it is supposed to be. It is his stand-by, his
refuge, his abiding fortress. But, in order to believe in it, it is
necessary for him to believe that no other English-speaking men can
even read French, and that their scepticism about it is based on some
“provincial” prejudice or some hatred of Catholics, or southern people,
or “Dagoes,” or “foreigners,” or what you will. That is why _Nature_
wilfully ignores the wonderful science of this “Europe”; and why our
Royal Society has no correspondence with it. But he has to imagine it
is there and make his readers imagine it is there, and that there is
this conspiracy of prejudice to ignore it, before he can even begin
to put up any appearance of a case against such a résumé of current
knowledge as the _Outline of History_.
GRACEFUL CONCESSIONS TO MR. BELLOC
All this rough and apparently irrelevant stuff about his own great
breadth and learning and my profound ignorance and provincialism,
to which he has devoted his two introductory papers, is therefore
the necessary prelude to putting over this delusion. That stream of
depreciation is not the wanton personal onslaught one might suppose
it to be at the first blush. If he has appeared to glorify himself
and belittle me, it is for greater controversial ends than a mere
personal score. We are dealing with a controversialist here and a great
apologist, and for all I know these may be quite legitimate methods in
this, to me, unfamiliar field.
Few people will be found to deny Mr. Belloc a considerable amplitude of
mind in his undertaking, so soon as they get thus far in understanding
him. Before he could even set about syndicating this _Companion to the
Outline of History_ he had to incite a partisan receptivity in the
Catholic readers to whom he appeals, by declaring that a violent hatred
for their Church is the guiding motive of my life. He had to ignore
a considerable array of facts to do that, and he has ignored them
with great courage and steadfastness. He had to arouse an indifferent
Catholic public to a sense of urgent danger by imposing this figure of
a base, inveterate, and yet finally contemptible enemy upon it. His is
a greater task than mere dragon-slaying. He had to create the dragon
before he could become the champion. And then, with his syndication
arrangements complete, while abusing me industriously for ignorance,
backwardness, and general intellectual backwoodism, he had to write the
whole of these articles without once really opening that Humbert safe
of knowledge which is his sole capital in this controversy. Time after
time he refers to it. Never once does he quote it. At most he may give
us illusive peeps....
Now and then as we proceed I shall note these illusive peeps.
I can admire great effort even when it is ill-directed, and to show
how little I bear him a grudge for the unpleasant things he has induced
himself to write about me, and for the still more unpleasant things
he tempts me--though I resist with a success that gratifies me--to
write about him, I contemplate a graceful compliment to Mr. Belloc.
In spite of the incurable ignorance of French and that “dirty Dago”
attitude towards foreigners Mr. Belloc has so agreeably put upon me,
it is my habit to spend a large part of the winter in a house I lease
among the olive terraces of Provence. There is a placard in one corner
of my study which could be rather amusingly covered with the backs of
dummy books. I propose to devote that to a collection of Mr. Belloc’s
authorities. There shall be one whole row at least of the Bulletins of
the Madame Humbert Society, and all the later researches of the Belloc
Academy of Anonymous Europeans, bound in bluff leather. There will be
_Finis Darwinis_ by Hilario Belloccio, and _Hist. Eccles._ by Hilarius
Belloccius. I may have occasion to refer to other leading authorities
in the course of this controversy. I shall add to it as we proceed.
And so, having examined, explained, disposed of, and in part apologised
for, Mr. Belloc’s personalities and the pervading inelegance of his
manners, I shall turn with some relief from this unavoidably personal
retort to questions of a more general interest. I propose as my first
study of these modern Catholic apologetics, so valiantly produced by
Mr. Belloc and so magnificently published and displayed by the Catholic
press, to follow our hero’s courageous but unsteady progress through
the mysteries of Natural Selection. And after that we shall come to
Original Sin and Human Origins in the light of Mr. Belloc’s science and
the phantom science of those phantom naturalists and anthropologists he
calls to his assistance.
II
THE THEORY OF NATURAL SELECTION STATED
My first article upon Mr. Belloc’s _Companion to the Outline of
History_ dealt, much against my inclination and as charitably and
amiably as possible, with the oddities of Mr. Belloc’s manner and
method, and those remarkable non-existent “European authorities” to
whom he appeals habitually in moments of argumentative stress. I do
not propose to go on thus girding at Mr. Belloc. He is a Catholic
apologist, endorsed by Catholic authorities, and there is matter of
very great importance for our consideration in what he has to say about
the history of life and mankind.
After his second paper is finished his abuse of me becomes merely
incidental or indirect. He goes on to a staggering rush at Natural
Selection. Let us see to where Catholic thought has got--if Mr. Belloc
is to be trusted--in relation to this very fundamental matter.
It is Mr. Belloc’s brilliant careless way to begin most of his
arguments somewhere about the middle and put the end first. His
opening peroration, so to speak, is a proclamation that this “Natural
Selection”--whatever it is--is “an old and done-for theory of
Darwin and Wallace.” It is “a laughing-stock for half a generation
among competent men.” Mr. George Bernard Shaw does not believe in
it! G. B. S. among the Fathers! That wonderful non-existent “latest
European work” which plays so large a part in Mr. Belloc’s dialectic is
summoned briefly, its adverse testimony is noted, and it is dismissed
to the safe again. And then there is a brief statement of how these
two vile fellows, Darwin and Wallace, set out upon this reprehensible
theorising. What a ruthless exposé it is of the true motives of
scientific people!
“The process of thought was as follows:
“‘There is no Mind at work in the universe; therefore changes of
this sort must come from blind chance or at least _mechanically_.
At all costs we must get rid of the idea of design: of a desired
end conceived in a Creative Mind. Here is a theory which will make
the whole process entirely mechanical and dead, and get rid of the
necessity for a Creator.’”
And so having invented and then as it were visited and spat upon the
derided and neglected tomb of Natural Selection and assured us that
God, Mr. Shaw, “European opinion,” and all good Catholics are upon his
side, Mr. Belloc plucks up courage and really begins to write about
Natural Selection.
NATURAL SELECTION IS PURE COMMON-SENSE
What is this Natural Selection which has been dead for half a century,
but which Mr. Belloc still exerts himself industriously through four
long papers to kill all over again? It is the purest common-sense, the
most obvious deduction from obvious facts. I have set out the idea as
plainly as I could in the _Outline of History_ Mr. Belloc is attacking.
It is put so plainly there that, before he can begin to argue against
it, he has to misstate it; he has to tell the story all over again
in his own words and get it suitably askew. It was quite open to
him to quote from my account, but he preferred to compile his own
misstatement. Indeed, in all this argument against Natural Selection
he never once quotes my actual words. He paraphrases throughout.
He has put some words between inverted commas in one place, so as
inadvertently to produce the impression that they are mine, but they
are not mine.
Now the facts upon which the idea of Natural Selection rests are
matters of universal knowledge. “Every species of living thing is
continually dying and being born again as a multitude of fresh
individuals”; that is the primary fact. No species seems to be
perfectly adapted to its conditions, and even the happiest species
tends to multiply until it is in a state of need and pressure. So
far surely we are dealing with things beyond dispute. And next comes
the fact of individuality. Every living unit is individual with
a difference of its own. Every individual has its own distinctive
differences, and each of these differences may or may not be an
advantage or a disadvantage. Individuals with advantageous differences
will generally get on better in life, prosper and so be able to breed
more freely, than those with disadvantageous differences. Offspring
have a tendency to repeat the distinctive differences of their parents.
Therefore, taking a species as a whole by the million or billion or
million billion--for few species of animals or plants are represented
by fewer individuals than a million--there will be in each successive
generation a greater number of individuals with the differences that
are advantageous relative to the number with disadvantages. In other
words, the average of the species will have moved more or less in the
direction of the advantageous differences, whatever they may be, and
however numerous they may be. If, for example, the species is chased
and has to climb or run for it, there will be rather more good climbers
and sprinters in the new generation. There may be other dangers and
other needs; they will not affect the premium set on quickness and the
fate of the slow. And if the circumstances of the species continue to
press in the same direction, the movement of the average will be in
the same direction in this respect for so long as they continue to
press. Over a few score or even a few hundred generations, and under
conditions not very strenuous, a species may not change very much.
It may seem to be _fixed_ in its general characteristics, just as the
continents seem to be fixed in their general outline. But, as the range
of time extends and the pressure of necessity continues, the change
becomes more striking.
NATURAL SELECTION HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ORIGIN OF VARIATIONS
That is the process of Natural Selection, the “laughing-stock” of
Mr. Belloc’s mysterious conclave of “European” savants. Natural
Selection has nothing to do with the reason for the differences between
individuals. It has no more to do with those than gravitation has to
do with the differences in the heaviness of different substances. But
it is necessary to state as much here, because in some queer muddled
way Mr. Belloc seems to be persuaded that it has. These differences
may arise by pure chance; they may come about through the operation of
complex laws, they may come in shoals and have their seasons. These
things have nothing to do with Natural Selection.
Now, Wallace and Darwin were two excellent Europeans who happened to
be interested in natural history. In spite of the sinister motives
invented for them by Mr. Belloc, I doubt if any Catholic sufficiently
educated to have read their lives will agree that they had even a
latent animus against Catholic truth or even a subconscious desire to
“get rid of a Creator” in their minds. They no more thought of “getting
rid of a Creator” when humbly and industriously they gathered their
facts and put fact to fact than an honest bricklayer thinks of “getting
rid of a Creator” when he lays his bricks with care and builds a sound
piece of wall. They went about the world studying natural history.
They considered life with a patience and thoroughness and freedom
from preconceptions beyond the imagination of a man of Mr. Belloc’s
habits. They found no such “fixity of species” as he is inspired to
proclaim. They found much evidence of a progressive change in species,
and they saw no reason to explain it by a resort to miracles or magic.
A Catholic priest of the Anglican communion named Malthus had written
a very interesting and suggestive book upon over-population and the
consequent struggle for existence between individuals. It turned
the attention of both these diligent and gifted observers to just
that process of Natural Selection I have stated. Independently both
of them came to the conclusions that species changed age by age and
without any necessary limits, and mainly through the sieve of Natural
Selection, and that, given a sufficient separation to reduce or prevent
interbreeding and a sufficient difference in the selective conditions
at work, two parts of the same species might change in different
directions, so as at last to become distinct and separate species.
Darwin’s book upon the subject was called _The Origin of Species_.
It was a very modest and sufficient title. He did not even go to the
length of calling it the origin of genera or orders or classes. He did
not at first apply it to man.
This is the theory of the origin of species through Natural Selection.
It was not pretended by either of these pioneers that Natural Selection
was the sole way through which the differences of species came about.
For example, Darwin devoted a considerable part of his working life
to such collateral modes of differentiation as the hypothesis that
Sexual Selection also had its share. Criticism has whittled down that
share to practically negligible proportions, but I note the hypothesis
here because it absolutely disposes of the assertion which Mr. Belloc
hammers on the table, that the Theory of Natural Selection excludes any
other modes of specific differentiation.
TESTING THE THEORY
Very rapidly this conception of Natural Selection was extended by
naturalists until it came to be regarded as the general process of
life. They came to realise that all species, all genera, all classes of
life, whatever else may be happening to them, are and always have been
varying through the process of Natural Selection, some rapidly, some
slowly; some so slowly as hardly to change at all through vast ages. I
have stated the _a priori_ case by which, given birth and death and
individuality and changing conditions and sufficient time, it appears
logically inevitable that the change and differentiation of species
_must_ occur, and must be now going on. If we had no material evidence
at all it would still be possible to infer the evolution of species.
That _a priori_ case has never been answered, and it seems to me
unanswerable. But scientific men, with their obstinate preference for
observation and experiment over mere logical gymnastics, rarely rest
their convictions on _a priori_ cases. A sustaining scepticism is a
matter of conscience with them. To them an _a priori_ case is merely
a theory--that is to say, a generalisation under trial. For nearly
three-quarters of a century, therefore, biologists have been examining
whatever instances they could discover that seemed to contradict this
assumption that the process of specific change under Natural Selection
is the general condition of life. To this day this view is still called
the Theory of Natural Selection, though to a great number it has come
to have the substantial quality of an embracing fact.
It would have been amusing if Mr. Belloc had told us more of his ideas
of the scientific world. Apparently he knows scarcely anything of
museums or laboratories or the spirit and methods of research. And
manifestly he has not the faintest suspicion of the way in which the
whole world of vital phenomena has been ransacked and scrutinised to
test, correct, supplement, amplify, or alter this great generalisation
about life. He probably shares the delusion of most other men in the
street, that scientific theories are scientific finalities, that
they are supposed to be as ultimate as the dogmas of some infallible
religion. He imagines them put over chiefly by asseveration, just as
the assertions of a polemical journalist are put over. He has still to
learn that theories are trial material, testing targets, directives for
research. Shooting at established theories is the normal occupation
of the scientific investigator. Mr. Belloc’s figure of the scientific
investigator is probably a queer, frowsty, and often, alas! atheistical
individual, poking about almost aimlessly among facts in the hope of
hitting upon some “discovery” or “getting rid of a God.” He does not
understand the tense relevance of the vast amount of work in progress.
But for three-quarters of a century the thought and work of myriads
of people round and about the world have borne directly or almost
directly upon the probing, sounding, testing, of the theory of Natural
Selection. It stands clarified and, it would seem, impregnable to-day.
SOME IRRELEVANT QUESTIONS
Among questions bearing upon it but not directly attacking it has
been the discussion of the individual difference. For example, are
differences due to individual experiences ever inherited? Or are
only inherent differences transmissible? What rôle is played by what
one might call “normal,” relatively slight differences, and what
by the “sports” and abnormal births in specific change? Do species
under stress, and feeding on strange food or living in unaccustomed
climates, betray any exceptional tendency to produce abnormality? Have
there been, so to speak, storms and riots of variation in some cases?
Can differences establish themselves while outer necessity remains
neutral? Can variations amounting to specific differences in colour
and form arise as a sort of play of the germ plasm and be tolerated
rather than selected by nature? In what manner do normal differences
arise? What happens to differences in cases of hybridisation? Here are
sample questions that have been the seeds of splendid work and great
arguments. Some of them were already under discussion in Darwin’s time;
he was a pioneer in such explorations; many ideas of his have stood the
test of time, and many suggestions he threw out have been disproved.
When some casual “may be” of Darwin’s is examined and set aside, it
is the custom of polemical journalists to rush about and proclaim to
all who may be sufficiently ill-informed to listen that Darwin is
“exploded.” Such explosions of Darwin are constantly recurring like
gun-fire near a garrison town, and still he remains. None of these
subsidiary questions affect the stability of this main generalisation
of biology, the Theory of Natural Selection.
The actual attack and testing of the Theory of Natural Selection
have yielded negative results. The statement of the theory may have
been made finer and exacter, that is all. And yet the conditions of
its survival have been very exacting. If the theory is to stand, the
whole of plant and animal life in time and space must be arranged in
a certain order. It must be possible to replace classification by a
genealogical tree. Every form must fall without difficulty into its
proper place in that tree. If it is true that birds are descended
from reptiles or men from apes, then there must be no birds before
the reptiles appear, and no men before apes. The geological record is
manifestly a mere fragmentary history, still for the most part unread,
but, however fragmentary it is, it must be consistent. One human skull
in the coal measures blows the whole theory to atoms. The passage
from form to form must be explicable by intermediate types capable of
maintaining themselves; there may be gaps in the record, but there must
be no miraculous leaps in the story. If an animal living in the air is
to be considered as a lineal descendant of some animal living in the
water, then the structure of the former bit by bit and step by step
must be shown to be adapted, modified, changed about from that of the
latter; it must have ears for water-hearing modified for air-hearing,
and its heart and breathing arrangements must be shown to be similarly
changed over, and so on for all its structure. All these requirements
will follow naturally from the necessities of a process of Natural
Selection. They follow logically upon no other hypothesis. They are not
demanded, for example, by the idea of a Creator continually interfering
with and rectifying some stately, unaccountable process of “Evolution,”
which seems to be Mr. Belloc’s idea--so far as he ventures to display
any idea of his own--in the matter. Such things as vestigial structures
and a number of odd clumsinesses in living things--many still very
imperfect adaptations to an erect position, for example--become
grotesque in relation to such a view. A Creator who put needless or
inconvenient fish structures into the anatomy of a land animal and
made the whole fauna and flora of the land a patch-up of aquatic forms
of life must be not so much a Divinity as a Pedant. But it is the
burthen of the whole beautiful science of comparative anatomy that the
structure of animals and plants, and their succession in time, fall
exactly into the conditions defined by the Theory of Natural Selection.
In the most lovely and intricate detail, in a vast multitude of
examples, in plants and in animals alike, this theme of the adaptation
of pre-existing structure is worked out.
We should in accordance with the Theory of Natural Selection expect
to find traces of the ancestral form, not only in the lay-out of the
adult animal, but in every phase of its life history, and that, in
fact, is just what we do find. There is no more fascinating branch of
comparative anatomy than embryology. Each life cycle we discuss tends
to repeat the ancestral story, and only under the stress of necessity
does it undergo modification at any point. There is little toleration
in the life process for unnecessary divergencies. Economies are
effected by short cuts and reductions, and special fœtal structures are
granted reluctantly. So that even in man we find peeping through the
adaptations imposed upon the human type by its viviparous necessities,
and in spite of the advantage of every economy of force, memories,
for example, of the gill slits, of the fish heart and kidney, of the
reptilian skull, of the mammalian tail. I mention this fact in the
_Outline_, and upon it Mr. Belloc comments in a manner that leaves
one’s doubts poised between his honesty and his intelligence. He
declares, which is totally untrue, that I “repeat the old Victorian
tag”--I doubt if there ever was such a tag--that the embryo “climbs up
the family tree.” He puts these words in inverted commas as though I
have really adopted and used them, and for the life of me it is only by
straining my charity to the utmost that I can accept that this was an
accident. Of course every text-book of embryology for the last forty
years has made it perfectly plain, as I have stated here, that the life
cycle can be and is modified at any point, and that an embryo has much
more serious work in hand than reciting its family history. It betrays
its ancestral origins to analysis; but that is an altogether different
matter. Mr. Belloc, however, is so densely ignorant himself upon these
questions that he can imagine, or think it worth while to pretend to
imagine and attempt to persuade his readers by the expedient of these
inverted commas, that I entertain such a view. And then follow this,
which I quote that the reader may the better understand a certain
occasional acerbity in my allusions to Mr. Belloc:--
“He doesn’t know that Vailleton of Montpellier has knocked the
last nail into the coffin of that facile and superficial Victorian
shortcut (and blind alley). He has probably never heard of
Vailleton, and when he does he will suspect him for a foreigner.
That is what I mean by being provincial and not abreast of one’s
time.”
It is perfectly true that I have never heard of any Vailleton in
biological science. Nor has anyone else. There is “no sich person.”
Perhaps Mr. Belloc has not been able to read the manuscript of some
adviser, or his memory may have played a trick upon him. Possibly he
has in mind that eminent Victorian embryologist, Vialleton, who, so far
from being the very newest thing in “European” biology, must now be
getting on for seventy. He is half-way back to Haeckel, the originator
of the family-tree idea, a German embryologist and not, as a matter
of fact, the Victorian English Protestant Mr. Belloc supposes him to
be. Possibly years and years ago some French student may have run away
with the idea that embryos conscientiously repeat their phylogeny,
and Professor Vialleton may have thought it well to discuss this idea
in one of his books. It is not an idea I have ever entertained, much
less stated, and its only interest here is that it gives Mr. Belloc a
chance of showing how rudely he can set out his inaccuracies and his
misconceptions.
But this is an incidental comment. I will reserve for my next section
a consideration of the remarkable arguments--“crushing arguments” the
enthusiastic cross-heads of his editor declare them to be--that Mr.
Belloc produces against this view of life as being in a state of change
under the action of Natural Selection, that I have put here before the
reader.
III
MR. BELLOC AS A SPECIMEN CRITIC OF NATURAL SELECTION
The chief arguments against the Theory of Natural Selection with which
Mr. Belloc has favoured us are neatly set out by him in two triads.
His passion for orderly arrangement is greater than his logic, and we
shall find that the second and third arguments of his second triad
are substantially the same. He is rather exceptionally ignorant of
modern scientific literature, and his arguments do not cover all the
countervailing considerations upon which systematic observation and
research work have been based--the speculations of Dr. Fairfield Osborn
would have been a godsend for him--but the things he has to say are
conveniently simple; they embody some prevalent misconceptions, and
they will be useful in accentuating the more salient points in my
account of the theory given in my second paper.
He produces first certain remarkable _a priori_ arguments--his “three
_a prior_ arguments.” The first is beautifully absurd. It is difficult
to believe it is advanced in anything but a spirit of burlesque.
He says that an advantage is not an advantage. He says that an
advantage does not give an advantage unless it is combined with other
advantages. You will think I am misrepresenting him. Then please read
this:--
“(1) The advantageous differences making for survival are not of
one kind in any particular case, but of an indefinitely large
number (_e.g._, climate getting colder needs not only warmer
coat, but power to digest new food, protective colouring so
as not to show dark against snow, etc., an indefinitely large
number of qualities). Now the chance of _all_ being combined
(and co-ordinated) in a single individual, _without design_,
_accidentally_, let alone of their thus appearing in many
individuals _accidentally and without design_, approximates to
zero.”
This is, so to speak, the short uncompleted form of the first argument.
It is expanded later to a copiousness too great to admit of quotation.
This expansion carries the statement right to its conclusion, that
only an individual possessing all the possible differences that
are advantageous at any particular time can survive. Otherwise its
differences have no “survival value.” They may be advantages, but
not sufficient advantages to score an advantage. I know this sounds
tipsy, but there it is in black and white in Mr. Belloc’s wonderful
Article V for any one to consult. It follows plainly that, except for a
miracle, every species must be exterminated in every generation. I can
see no other way out of it. No individual, he declares, can survive
without the full set of advantageous differences, and the chance of any
individual having the full set of advantageous differences, he declares
after some abstruse verbal gestures, is zero. There is Mr. Belloc with
his unfailing logic, his clear mathematical demonstration, and all
the rest of it. There is the lucid Latin mind shining above my Nordic
fog! Yet the previous generation got along without any of the set! And
species do survive.
Did Mr. Belloc imagine he was saying something else? It is not for me
to speculate. Helping out an antagonist in a controversy is apt to be
resented. He has, I think, simply got into a muddle here, and he is
not sufficiently self-critical to get out of it again. So he tries
to muddle through. It is quite reasonable to say that when a species
is under stress of changing conditions it is usual for the need for
adaptation to be felt upon a number of points and not simply upon
one, and that, since every advantage counts, the individuals with the
greatest combination of advantageous differences have the best chances.
But that does not alter the fact that even a single advantage is an
advantage. What happens in nature is not an extermination of all who
are not completely in the fashion of the new differences. That seems
to be Mr. Belloc’s idea, but it is a wrong idea. What does happen is
a diminution in each generation of the number of the disadvantaged
in relation to the number of the advantaged. That is quite another
affair. Mr. Belloc has not grasped this. His third _a priori_ argument
shows as much even more plainly than his first, and to that I shall
presently come.
MR. BELLOC’S MENTAL INDIGESTION
I fancy this stuff he has written here is an outcome of an indigestion
of Samuel Butler by Mr. Belloc. I should not have thought Mr. Belloc
had read Samuel Butler, and I doubt if he has read him much. But there
is a decided echo of _Luck or Cunning_ in the one indistinct paragraph
in which, without committing himself too deeply, Mr. Belloc seems to
convey his own attitude towards the procedure of Evolution. “Design,”
whatever that is, is at work, and Natural Selection is not. “There
is an innate power possessed by the living thing to attempt its own
adaptation.” It is quite a delusion apparently that rabbits that cannot
run or sparrows that are not quick on the wing are killed off more
frequently than the smarter fellows. That never happens, though to the
atheistically minded it may seem to happen. If it happens, it would
“get rid of a God.” But there are rabbits which, unlike Mrs. Micawber,
do make an effort. You must understand that all creation, inspired by
design, is striving. The good fungus says to itself, “Redder and more
spots will benefit me greatly,” and tries and tries, and presently
there are redder hues and more spots. Or a happily inspired fish says:
“There is a lot of food on land and the life is more genteel there, so
let me get lungs.” And presently it gets lungs. Some day Mr. Belloc
must take a holiday in Sussex and flap about a bit and get himself some
wings and demonstrate all this. But perhaps this is caricature, and
Mr. Belloc when he talks about that “innate disposition” just means
nothing very much--just an attempt or something. I will not pretend to
understand Mr. Belloc fully upon this point.
MR. BELLOC’S BIRD-LIZARD
I will return to the essential misconception of the Theory of Natural
Selection betrayed in this first _a priori_ when I consider Mr.
Belloc’s third feat of logic. But first let me glance at his second. In
this he says, very correctly, that every stage in the evolution of a
living creature must be a type capable of maintaining itself and every
change must be an advantageous change. I have noted this very obvious
point already in my second paper. But then Mr. Belloc instructs us that
the chances of its being so are, for no earthly reason, zero--that
fatal zero again!--and goes on to a passage so supremely characteristic
that it must be read to be believed:--
“A bird has wings with which it can escape its enemies. If it began
as a reptile without wings--when, presumably, it had armour or some
other aid to survival--what of the interval? Natural Selection
sets out to change a reptile’s leg into a bird’s wing and the
scales of its armour into feathers. It does so by making the leg
less and less of a leg for countless ages, and by infinite minute
gradations, gradually turning the scales into feathers.
“By the very nature of the theory _each stage_ in all these
millions is an advantage over the last towards survival! The thing
has only to be stated for its absurdity to appear. Compare the ‘get
away’ chances of a lizard at one end of the process or a sparrow at
the other with some poor beast that had to try and scurry off on
half-wings! or to fly with half-legs!
“Postulate a design, say, ‘Here was something in the making,’ and
the process is explicable, especially if fairly rapid so as to
bridge over the dangerously weak stage of imperfection. Postulate
Natural Selection and it is manifestly impossible.”
Let us note a few things of which Mr. Belloc shows himself to be
unaware in this amusing display of perplexity. In the first place he
does not know that the Mesozoic reptiles most closely resembling birds
were creatures walking on their hind-legs, with a bony structure of the
loins and a backbone already suggestive of the avian anatomy. Nor is
he aware that in the lowliest of living birds the fore-limbs are mere
flappers, that the feathers are simpler in structure than any other
bird’s feathers, and that the general development of a bird’s feather
points plainly to the elongation of a scale. He has never learnt that
feathers came before wings, and that at first they had to do, not with
flying, but with protection against cold. Yet all this was under his
nose in the _Outline of History_ in text and picture. The transition
from a quilled to a feathered dinosaur presents indeed no imaginative
difficulties, and the earliest birds ran and did not fly. One of the
earliest known extinct birds is _Hesperornis_, a wingless diving bird.
It is figured on page 30, and there is another bird on page 34 that Mr.
Belloc might ponder with advantage. A whole great section of living
birds, like the ostrich and the emu, have no trace in their structure
of any ancestral flying phase; their breast-bones are incapable of
carrying the necessary muscular attachments.
[Illustration: H. G. Wells.
Low]
But after the feather was fully developed it opened up great
possibilities of a strong and light extension of the flapper, helpful
in running or useful in leaps from tree to tree. _Archæopteryx_,
another early bird, which is also figured in the _Outline_, has a sort
of bat-wing fore-limb with feathers instead of membrane. It was a
woodland creature, and flew as a flying fox or a flying lemur or even
a bat flies. All these facts are widely known, and all that trouble
about the half-leg, half-wing, dissolves before them. But consider
what a hash they make of Mr. Belloc’s argument, and how pitifully it
scurries off before them on its nondescript stumps of pretentious
half-knowledge, half-impudence! So much for zero the second.
TROUBLES OF MR. BELLOC AS A MATRIMONIAL AGENT
The final of this wonderful trinity of _a prioris_ is a repetition of
an argument advanced ages ago by Queen Victoria’s Lord Salisbury, when
he was President of the British Association. Even then it struck people
that he had been poorly coached for the occasion. Assuming that one or
two individuals have got all these “survival value” differences in the
correct proportions--against which the chances are zero--how by any
theory of Natural Selection are we to suppose they will meet, breed,
and perpetuate them? So this argument runs. The chances are again
declared to be zero, the third zero, and Mr. Belloc, I gather, calls
in Design again here and makes his Creative Spirit, which has already
urged these two individuals, lions, or liver flukes or fleas or what
not, to make an effort and adapt themselves, lead them now to their
romantic and beneficial nuptials, while the Theory of Natural Selection
grinds its teeth in the background and mutters “Foiled again.”
But this third argument reinforces the first, in showing what is the
matter with Mr. Belloc’s ideas in this group of questions. He has got
the whole business upside down. I rather blame the early Darwinians in
this matter for using so inaccurate a phrase as the “Survival of the
Fittest.” It is to that phrase that most of Mr. Belloc’s blunderings
are due. Yet he ought not to have been misled. He had a summary of
modern views before him. He criticises my _Outline of History_, he
abuses it, and yet he has an extraordinary trick of getting out of its
way whenever it swings near his brain-case. I warn the readers of that
modest compendium expressly (and as early as page 16) that the juster
phrase to use is not the Survival of the Fittest, but the Survival of
the Fitter. I do what I can throughout to make them see this question
not in terms of an individual, but in terms of the species.
Yet Mr. Belloc insists upon writing of “the Fittest” as a sort of
conspicuously competitive prize boy, a favourable “sport,” who has to
meet his female equivalent and breed a new variety. That is all the
world away from the manner in which a biologist thinks of the process
of specific life. He sees a species as a vast multitude of individuals
in which those without individual advantages tend to fail and those
with them tend to be left to continue the race. The most important fact
is the general relative failure of the disadvantaged. The fact next in
order of importance is the general relative survival of the advantaged.
The most important consequence is that the average of the species
moves in the direction of advantageous differences, moving faster or
slower according to its rate of reproduction and the urgency of its
circumstances--that is to say, to the severity of its death-rate. Any
one particular individual may have any sort of luck; that does not
affect the general result.
I do not know what Mr. Belloc’s mathematical attainments are, or indeed
whether he has ever learnt to count beyond zero. There is no evidence
on that matter to go upon in these papers. But one may suppose him
able to understand what an average is, and he must face up to the fact
that the characteristics of a species are determined by its average
specimens. This dickering about with fancy stories of abnormal nuptials
has nothing to do with the Theory of Natural Selection. We are dealing
here with large processes and great numbers, secular changes and
realities broadly viewed.
I must apologise for pressing these points home. But I think it is
worth while to take this opportunity of clearing up a system of foggy
misconceptions about the Theory itself that may not be confined
altogether to Mr. Belloc.
MR. BELLOC COMES TO HIS EVIDENCE
And now let us come to Mr. Belloc’s second triad of arguments--his
arguments, as he calls them, “from Evidence.” The sole witness on
Evidence called is his own sturdy self. He calls himself into the box,
and I will admit he gives his testimony in a bluff, straightforward
manner--a good witness. He says very properly that the theory of
Natural Selection repudiates any absolute fixity of species. But we
have to remember that the rate of change in any species is dependent
upon the balance between that species and its conditions, and if this
remains fairly stable the species may remain for as long without
remarkable developments, or indulge in variations not conditioned
by external necessities. The classical _Lingula_ of the geological
text-books, a warm-water shell-fish, has remained much the same
creature throughout the entire record, for hundreds of millions of
years it may be. It was suited to its submarine life, and hardly any
variation was possible that was not a disadvantage. It swayed about
within narrow limits.
This admission of a practical stability annoys Mr. Belloc; it seems
to be a mean trick on the part of the Theory of Natural Selection. He
rather spoils his case by saying that “according to Natural Selection”
the swallow ought to go on flying “faster and faster with the process
of time.” Until it bursts into flames like a meteor and vanishes from
our world? And the _Lingula_ ought to become more and more quiescent
until it becomes a pebble? Yet plainly there is nothing in the Theory
of Natural Selection to make the swallow fly any faster than its needs
require. Excess of swiftness in a swallow may be as disadvantageous as
jumping to conclusions can be to a controversialist.
But here is a statement that is spirited and yet tolerably fair:--
“If Natural Selection be true, then what we call a Pig is but a
fleeting vision; all the past he has been becoming a Pig, and all
the future he will spend evolving out of Pigdom, and Pig is but a
moment’s phase in the eternal flux.”
This overlooks the melancholy possibility of an extinction of Pigs, but
it may be accepted on the whole as true. And against this Mr. Belloc
gives us his word, for that upon examination is what his “Evidence”
amounts to--that Types are Fixed. He jerks in capitals here in a rather
convincing way. It is restrained of him, considering how great a part
typography plays in his rhetoric, that he has not put it up in block
capitals or had the paper perforated with the words: Fixed Types.
“We have the evidence of our senses that we are surrounded by fixed
types.”
For weeks and months it would seem Mr. Belloc has walked about Sussex
accumulating first-hand material for these disputations, and all this
time the Pigs have remained Pigs. When he prodded them they squealed.
They remained pedestrian in spite of his investigatory pursuit. Not one
did he find “scuttling away” with a fore-limb, “half-leg, half-wing.”
He has the evidence of his senses also, I may remind him, that the
world is flat. And yet when we take a longer view we find the world is
round, and Pigs are changing, and _Sus Scrofa_ is not the beast it was
two thousand years ago.
Mr. Belloc is conscious of historical training, and I would suggest
to him that it might be an improving exercise to study the Pig
throughout history and to compare the Pigs of the past with the Pigs
of a contemporary agricultural show. He might inform himself upon the
bulk, longevity, appetites, kindliness, and general disposition of
the Pig to-day. He might realise then that the Pig to-day, viewed not
as the conservative occupant of a Sussex sty, but as a species, was
something just a little different as a whole, but different, definably
different, from the Pig of two thousand or five thousand years ago. He
might retort that the Pig has been the victim of selective breeding
and is not therefore a good instance of Natural Selection, but it was
he who brought Pigs into this discussion. Dogs again have been greatly
moulded by man in a relatively short time, and, again, horses. Almost
all species of animals and plants that have come into contact with
man in the last few thousand years have been greatly modified by his
exertions, and we have no records of any detailed observations of
structure or habits of creatures outside man’s range of interest before
the last three or four centuries. Even man himself, though he changes
with relative slowness because of the slowness with which he comes to
sexual maturity, has changed very perceptibly in the last five thousand
years.
MR. BELLOC A FIXED TYPE
Mr. Belloc says he has not (“Argument from Evidence”). He says it
very emphatically (“Crushing Argument from Evidence”--to adopt the
phraseology of his cross-heads). Let me refer him to a recent lecture
by Sir Arthur Keith (Royal Society of Medicine, Nov. 16, 1925) for a
first gleam of enlightenment. He will realise a certain rashness in his
statement. I will not fill these pages with an attempt to cover all
the changes in the average man that have gone on in the last two or
three thousand years. For example, in the face and skull, types with
an edge-to-edge bite of the teeth are giving place to those with an
overlapping bite; the palate is undergoing contraction, the physiognomy
changes. And so on throughout all man’s structure. No doubt one can
find plentiful instances to-day of people almost exactly like the
people of five thousand years ago in their general physique. But that
is not the point. The proportions and so forth that were exceptional
then are becoming prevalent now; the proportions that were prevalent
then, now become rare. The average type is changing. Considering that
man only gets through about four generations in a century, it is a
very impressive endorsement of the theory of Natural Selection that he
has undergone these palpable modifications in the course of a brief
score of centuries. Mr. Belloc’s delusion that no such modification has
occurred may be due to his presumption that any modification would have
to show equally in each and every individual. I think it is. He seems
quite capable of presuming that.
TRIUMPHANT DEMAND OF MR. BELLOC
Mr. Belloc’s next Argument from Evidence is a demand from the geologist
for a continuous “series of changing forms passing one into the other.”
He does not want merely “intermediate forms,” he says; he wants the
whole series--grandfather, father, and son. He does not say whether
he insists upon a pedigree with the bones and proper certificates of
birth, but I suppose it comes to that. This argument, I am afraid,
wins, hands down. Mr. Belloc may score the point. The reprehensible
negligence displayed by the lower animals in the burial of their dead,
or even the proper dating of their own remains, leaves the apologist
for the Theory of Natural Selection helpless before this simple
requisition. It is true that we now have, in the case of the camels,
the horses, and the elephants, an extraordinary display of fossil
types, exhibiting step by step the development and differentiation of
species and genera. But this, I take it, rather concerns his Third than
his Second Argument from Evidence.
A MAGNIFICENT GENERALISATION
The third argument is essentially a display of Mr. Belloc’s inability
to understand the nature of the record of the rocks. I will assume
that he knows what “strata” are, but it is clear that he does not
understand that any uniform stratum indicates the maintenance of
uniform conditions while it was deposited and an absence of selective
stresses, and that when it gives place to another different stratum,
that signifies a change in conditions, not only in the conditions of
the place where the stratum is found, but in the supply of material. An
estuary sinks and gives place to marine sands, or fresh water brings
down river gravels which cover over an accumulation of shingle. Now if
he will think what would happen to-day under such circumstances, he
will realise that the fauna and flora of the stratum first considered
will drift away and that another fauna and flora will come in with
the new conditions. Fresh things will come to feed and wade and drown
in the waters, and old types will no longer frequent them. The fossil
remains of one stratum are very rarely directly successive to those
below it or directly ancestral to those above it. A succession of
forms is much more difficult and elusive to follow up, therefore,
than Mr. Belloc imagines. And then if he will consider what happens to
the rabbits and rats and mice on his Sussex estate, and how they die
and what happens to their bodies, he may begin to realise just what
proportion of the remains of these creatures is ever likely to find its
way to fossilisation. Perhaps years pass without the bones of a single
rabbit from the whole of England finding their way to a resting-place
where they may become fossil. Nevertheless the rabbit is a very common
animal. And then if Mr. Belloc will think of palæontologists, millions
of years after this time, working at the strata that we are forming
to-day, working at a gravel or sand-pit here or a chance exposure
there, and prevented from any general excavation, and if he will ask
himself what proportion of the rare few rabbits actually fossilised are
likely to come to light, I think he will begin to realise for the first
time in his life the tremendous “gappiness” of the geological record
and how very childish and absurd is his demand for an unbroken series
of forms. The geological record is not like an array of hundreds of
volumes containing a complete history of the past. It is much more like
a few score crumpled pages from such an array, the rest of the volumes
having either never been printed, or having been destroyed or being
inaccessible.
In his Third Argument from Evidence Mr. Belloc obliges us with a
summary of this record of the rocks, about which he knows so little.
I need scarcely note here that the only evidence adduced is his own
inspired conviction. No “European” palæontologist or biologist is
brought out of the Humbert safe and quoted. Here was a chance to puzzle
me dreadfully with something “in French,” and it is scandalously thrown
away. Mr. Belloc tells us, just out of his head, that instead of there
being that succession of forms in the geological record the Theory
of Natural Selection requires, there are “enormously long periods of
stable type” and “(presumably) rapid periods of transition.” That
“presumably” is splendid; scientific caution and all the rest of
it--rapid periods when I suppose the Creative Spirit got busy and types
woke up and said, “Turn over; let’s change a bit.”
There is really nothing to be said about this magnificent
generalisation except that it is pure Bellocking. Wherever there is a
group of strata, sufficiently thick and sufficiently alike to witness
to a long-sustained period of slight alterations in conditions, there
we find the successive species approximating. This is not a statement à
la Belloc. In spite of the chances against such a thing occurring, and
in defiance of Mr. Belloc’s assertion that it does not occur, there are
several series of forms in time, giving a practically direct succession
of species. Mr. Belloc may read about it and at the same time exercise
this abnormal linguistic gift which sits upon him so gracefully, his
knowledge of the French language, in Deperet’s _Transformations du
Monde Animal_, where all these questions are conveniently summarised.
There he will get the results of Waagen with a succession of Ammonites
and also of Neumayr with _Paludina_, and there also he will get
information about the sequence of the species of _Mastodon_ throughout
the Tertiary age and read about the orderly progress of a pig group,
the _Brachyodus_ of the Eocene and Oligocene. There is a touch of irony
in the fact that his own special protégé, the Pig, should thus turn
upon him and rend his Third Argument from Evidence.
More recondite for Mr. Belloc is the work of Hilgendorf upon
_Planorbis_, because it is in German; but the drift of it is visible
in the Palæontology wing of the London Natural History Museum, Room
VIII. A species of these gasteropods was, during the slow processes of
secular change, caught in a big lake, fed by hot springs. It underwent
progressive modification into a series of successive new species as
conditions changed through the ages. Dr. Klähms’ specimens show this
beautifully. Rowe’s account of the evolutionary series in the genus
_Micraster_ (_Q.J.M.S._, 1899) is also accessible to Mr. Belloc, and
he will find other matter to ponder in Goodrich’s _Living Organisms_,
1924. The finest series of all, longer in range and completer in its
links, is that of the Horse. There is an excellent little pamphlet by
Matthew and Chubb, well illustrated, _The Evolution of the Horse_,
published by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, so
plain, so simple, so entirely and humiliatingly destructive of Mr.
Belloc’s nonsensical assertions, that I pray him to get it and read it
for the good of his really very unkempt and neglected soul.
Thus we observe that Mr. Belloc does not know the facts in this case
of Natural Selection, and that he argues very badly from such facts as
he misconceives. It is for the reader to decide which at the end is
more suitable as a laughing-stock--the Theory of Natural Selection or
Mr. Belloc. And having thus studied this great Catholic apologist as
an amateur biologist and arrived at the result, we will next go on to
consider what he has to say about the origins of mankind--and Original
Sin.
IV
MR. BELLOC’S ADVENTURES AMONG THE SUB-MEN: MANIFEST TERROR OF THE
NEANDERTHALER
From Mr. Belloc’s feats with Natural Selection we come to his
adventures among his ancestors and the fall of man. These are, if
possible, even more valiant than his beautiful exposure of the
“half-educated assurance” of current biological knowledge. He rushes
about the arena, darting from point to point, talking of my ignorance
of the “main recent European work in Anthropology,” and avoiding
something with extraordinary skill and dexterity. What it is he is
avoiding I will presently explain. No one who has read my previous
articles need be told that not a single name, not a single paper, is
cited from that galaxy of “main recent European” anthropology. With
one small exception. There is a well-known savant, M. Marcellin Boule,
who wrote of the Grottes de Grimaldi in 1906. Some facetious person
seems to have written to Mr. Belloc and told him that M. Boule in 1906
“definitely proved the exact opposite” of the conclusions given by Mr.
Wright in his _Quaternary Ice Age_ (1914), and quoted in my _Outline_.
Mr. Belloc writes this down, elevates M. Boule to the magnificence of
“Boule” simply and follows up with the habitual insults. By counting
from his one fixed mathematical point, _zero_ in some dimension unknown
to me, he concludes that I must be twenty years out of date, though the
difference between 1906 and 1914, by ordinary ways of reckoning, is
really not minus twenty but plus eight.
The same ungracious humorist seems to have stuffed up Mr. Belloc
with a story that for the last twenty years the climate of the
earth has ceased to vary with the eccentricity of the earth’s
orbit, and that any natural consequences of the precession of the
equinoxes no longer occur; that climate has, in fact, cut loose from
astronomical considerations, and that you can find out all about it
in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. You cannot. Mr. Belloc should have
tried. Some day he must find time to puzzle out M. Boule’s curve of
oscillation of the Mediterranean and correlate it with Penck’s, and go
into the mystery of certain Moustierian implements that M. Boule says
are not Moustierian; and after that he had better read over the little
discussion about changes of climate in the _Outline of History_--it is
really quite simply put--and see what it is I really said and what his
leg-pulling friend has been up to with him in that matter. It may be
kinder to Mr. Belloc to help him with a hint. Croll made an excellent
book in which he pointed out a number of astronomical processes which
must produce changes of climate. He suggested that these processes
were sufficient to account for the fluctuations of the glacial age.
They are not. But they remain perfectly valid causes of climatic
variation. Croll is no more done for than Darwin is done for. That is
where Mr. Belloc’s friend let Mr. Belloc down.
But Mr. Belloc does not always work on the information of facetious
friends, and sometimes one is clearly in the presence of the unassisted
expert controversialist. When, for example, I say that the Tasmanians
are not racially Neanderthalers, but that they are Neanderthaloid,
he can bring himself to alter the former word also to Neanderthaloid
in order to allege an inconsistency. And confident that most of his
Catholic readers will not check him back by my book, he can ascribe to
me views about race for which there is no shadow of justification. But
it is disagreeable to me to follow up such issues, they concern Mr.
Belloc much more than they do the living questions under discussion,
and I will not even catalogue what other such instances of unashamed
controversy occur.
MR. BELLOC AS ICONOCLAST
In the course of the darting to and fro amongst human and sub-human
pre-history, Mr. Belloc criticises me severely for quoting Sir Arthur
Keith’s opinion upon the Piltdown remains. I have followed English
authorities. All these remains are in England, and so they have been
studied at first hand mostly by English people. No one can regret this
insularity on the part of _Eoanthropus_ more than I do, but it leaves
Mr. Belloc’s “European opinion on the whole” rejecting Sir Arthur
Keith as a rather more than usually absurd instance of Mr. Belloc’s
distinctive method. “_What_ European opinion?” you ask. Mr. Belloc does
not say. Probably Belloking of Upsala and Bellokopoulos of Athens.
Mr. Belloc--forgetting that in an earlier edition of the _Outline_ I
give a full summary of the evidence in this case, up-to-date--informs
his Catholic audience that I have apparently read nothing about the
Piltdown vestige but an “English work.” And then he proceeds to fall
foul of the “restoration” of _Eoanthropus_. It is an imaginary picture
of the creature, and I myself think that the artist has erred on the
human side. Mr. Belloc objects to all such restorations.
Well, we have at least a saucerful of skull fragments and a doubtful
jawbone to go upon, and the picture does not pretend to be, and
no reader can possibly suppose it to be, anything but a tentative
restoration. But why a great Catholic apologist of all people, the
champion of a Church which has plastered the world with portraits
of the Virgin Mary, of the Holy Family, and with pictures of saints
and miracles in the utmost profusion, without any warning to the
simple-minded that these gracious and moving figures to which they
give their hearts may be totally unlike the beings they profess to
represent--why he should turn iconoclast and object to these modestly
propounded restorations passes my comprehension. At Cava di Tirrene
near Naples I have been privileged to see, in all reverence, a hair
of the Virgin, small particles of St. Peter, and other evidences of
Christianity; and they did not seem to me to be so considerable in
amount as even the _Eoanthropus_ fragments. And again, in this strange
outbreak of iconoclastic rage, he says:--
“Again, we have the coloured picture of a dance of American Red
Indians round a fire solemnly presented as a ‘reconstruction’ of
Palæolithic society.”
He has not even observed that the chief figures in that picture are
copied directly from the actual rock paintings of Palæolithic men
although this is plainly stated.
MR. BELLOC DISCOVERS A MARE’S-NEST
And yet he must have looked at the reproductions of these rock
paintings given in the _Outline_. Because in his ninth paper he comes
out with the most wonderful of all the mare’s-nests he has discovered
in the _Outline of History_, and it concerns these very pictures. You
see there is an account of the Reindeer men who lived in France and
North Spain, and it is said of them that it is doubtful if they used
the bow. Mr. Belloc declares that it is my bitter hatred of religion
that makes me say this, but indeed it is not. It is still doubtful if
the Reindeer hunters had the bow. The fires of Smithfield would not
tempt me to say certainly either that they had it or that they did not
have it, until I know. But they seem to have killed the reindeer and
the horse and bison by spearing them. Mr. Belloc may have evidence
unknown to the rest of mankind in that Humbert safe of his, otherwise
that is the present state of our knowledge. But, as I explain on pages
56 and 57 in language that a child might understand, simultaneously
with that reindeer-hunting life in the north there were more advanced
(I know the word will disgust Mr. Belloc with its horrid suggestion of
progress, but I have to use it) Palæolithic people scattered over the
greater part of Spain and reaching into the South of France who had the
bow. It says so in the text: “Men carry bows” runs my text, describing
certain rock pictures reproduced in my book. I wrote it in the text;
and in the legends that are under these pictures, legends read and
approved by me, the statement is repeated. The matter is as plain as
daylight and as plainly stated. Mr. Belloc will get if he says over to
himself slowly: “Reindeer men, bows doubtful; Azilian, Capsian men to
the south, bows certainly.” And now consider Mr. Belloc, weaving his
mare’s-nest:--
“Upon page 55 he writes, concerning the Palæolithic man of the cave
drawings, this sentence: ‘_it is doubtful if they knew of the bow_.’
“When I first read that sentence, I was so staggered, I could
hardly believe I had read it right.
“That a person pretending to teach popular prehistorical science in
1925 should tell us of the cave painters that it was ‘_doubtful if
they knew of the bow_’ seemed to me quite out of nature.
“It was the more extraordinary because here before me, in Mr.
Wells’s own book, were reproductions of these cave paintings, with
the bow and the arrow appearing all over them! Even if he did not
take the trouble to look at the pictures that were to illustrate
his book, and left that department (as he probably did) to hack
work, he ought, as an ordinary educated man, to have known the
ultimate facts of the case.
“Palæolithic man was an archer, and an archer with an efficient
weapon.
“The thing is a commonplace; only gross ignorance can have
overlooked it; but, as I have said, there is a cause behind that
ignorance. Mr. Wells would not have made this enormous error if he
had not been possessed with the necessity of making facts fit in
with his theology.”
THE CHASING OF MR. BELLOC BEGINS
There is a real splendour in these three almost consecutive passages.
And note incidentally how this facile controversialist bespatters
also my helpers and assistants. They do “hack work.” Palæolithic man,
speaking generally, was _not_ an archer. Only the later Palæolithic
men, dealing with a smaller quarry than the reindeer, seem to have
used the bow. Manifestly it is not I who am fitting my facts with
my theology here, but Mr. Belloc. He is inventing an error which is
incredible even to himself as he invents it, and he is filling up space
as hard as he can with indignation at my imaginary offence.
Why is he going on like this? In the interests of that Catholic soul
in danger? Possibly. But his pen is running so fast here, it seems to
me, not so much to get to something as to get away from something. The
Catholic soul most in danger in these papers of Mr. Belloc’s is Mr.
Belloc’s, and the thing he is running away from through these six long
disputations is a grisly beast, neither ape nor true man, called the
Neanderthaler, _Homo Neanderthalensis_. This _Homo Neanderthalensis_
is the real “palæolithic” man. For three-quarters of the “palæolithic”
age he was the only sort of man. The Reindeer men, the Capsian men, are
“modern” beside him. He was no more an archer than he was an electrical
engineer. He was no more an artist than Mr. Belloc is a man of science.
Instead of bothering with any more of the poor little bits of
argey-bargey about this or that detail in my account of the earlier
true men that Mr. Belloc sees fit to make--instead of discussing
whether these first human savages, who drew and painted like Bushmen
and hunted like Labrador Indians, did or did not progress in the arts
of life before they passed out of history, let me note now the far more
important matters that he refuses to look at.
Mr. Belloc makes a vast pother about _Eoanthropus_, which is no more
than a few bits of bone; he says nothing of the other creature to
whom I have devoted a whole chapter: the man that was not a man. Loud
headlines, challenging section headings, appeal in vain to Mr. Belloc’s
averted mind. Of this Neanderthal man we have plentiful evidence,
and the collection increases every year. Always in sufficiently old
deposits, and always with consistent characteristics. Here is a
creature which not only made implements but fires, which gathered
together ornamental stones, which buried its dead. Mr. Belloc says
burying the dead is a proof of a belief in immortality. And this
creature had strange teeth, differing widely from the human, more
elaborate and less bestial; it had a differently hung head; it was
chinless, it had a non-opposable thumb. Says M. Boule, the one
anthropologist known to Mr. Belloc: “In its absence of forehead the
Neanderthal type strikingly resembles the anthropoid apes.” And he adds
that it “must have possessed only a rudimentary psychic nature ...
markedly inferior to that of any modern race.” When I heard that Mr.
Belloc was going to explain and answer the _Outline of History_, my
thought went at once to this creature. What would Mr. Belloc say of it?
Would he put it before or after the Fall? Would he correct its anatomy
by wonderful new science out of his safe? Would he treat it like a
brother and say it held by the most exalted monotheism, or treat it as
a monster made to mislead wicked men?
He says nothing! He just walks away whenever it comes near him.
But I am sure it does not leave him. In the night, if not by day,
it must be asking him: “Have I a soul to save, Mr. Belloc? Is that
Heidelberg jawbone one of us, Mr. Belloc, or not? You’ve forgotten me,
Mr. Belloc. For four-fifths of the Palæolithic age I was ‘man.’ There
was no other. I shamble and I cannot walk erect and look up at heaven
as you do, Mr. Belloc, but dare you cast me to the dogs?”
No reply.
The poor Neanderthaler has to go to the dogs, I fear, by implication,
for Mr. Belloc puts it with all the convincing force of italics,
that “_Man is a fixed type._” We realise now why he wrote the four
wonderful chapters about Natural Selection that we have done our best
to appreciate. It was to seem to establish this idea of _fixed types_.
Man had to be shown as a “Fixed Type” for reasons that will soon be
apparent. Apart from Mr. Belloc’s assertion, there is no evidence that
man is any exception to the rest of living creatures. He changes. They
all change. All this remarkable discourse about bows or no bows and
about the high thinking and simple living of these wandering savages
of twenty or more thousand years ago, which runs through half a dozen
papers, seems to be an attempt to believe that these early men were
creatures exactly like ourselves; and an attempt to believe that the
more animal savages of the preceding hundred thousand years did not for
all practical purposes exist at all. An attempt to believe and induce
belief; not an attempt to demonstrate. Mr. Belloc emerges where he went
in, with much said and nothing proved, and the _Outline_ undamaged
by his attack. And emerging he makes a confession that he never was
really concerned with the facts of the case at all. “Sympathy or
antagonism with the Catholic faith is the only thing of real importance
in attempting to teach history”--and there you are! All these
argumentative gesticulations, all these tortured attempts to confute,
are acts of devotion to Mr. Belloc’s peculiar vision of the Catholic
faith.
I am afraid it is useless for me to suggest a pilgrimage to Mr.
Belloc, or I would ask him to visit a popular resort not two hours
by automobile from the little corner of France in which I am wont to
shelter my suburban Protestantism from the too bracing English winter.
That is the caves at Rochers Rouges, at which, as it happens, his one
quoted authority, M. Boule, worked for several years. There in an
atmosphere entirely “Latin” and “continental,” under the guidance of
Signor Alfredo Lorenzi, he can see for himself his Fixed Type Man at
successive levels of change. No northern man need be with him when
he faces the facts of these caves; no Protestant shadow need dog his
steps; his French, that rare distinguished gift, will be understood,
and he may even air such Provençal or Italian as he is master of.
The horrid Neanderthaler is not in evidence. But there, protected
by glass covers, he will be able to see the skeletons of Cro-Magnon
man and Grimaldi man lying in the very positions in which they were
discovered. He will see for himself the differences of level at
which they were found and have some help in imagining the ages that
separate the successive types. He will note massiveness of skull and
protrusion of jaw. He will see the stone implements they used, the
ashes of their fires, and have some material for imagining the quality
of their savagery. He can hunt about for arrow-heads to bear out his
valiant assertion that Palæolithic man was “an archer with an efficient
weapon.” He will hunt until stooping and the sunshine make him giddy,
in vain. And then, with these bones fresh in his mind, he should go to
the Museum at Monaco and see the skeleton of a modern human being. He
will find no end of loud talk and valiant singing and good red wine
necessary before he can get back to his faith in man as a _Fixed Type_.
WHERE WAS THE GARDEN OF EDEN?
It is extremely difficult to find out what Mr. Belloc, as a
representative Catholic, believes about human origins. I was extremely
curious to get the Catholic view of these matters, and I heard of the
advent of these articles with very great pleasure, because I thought
I should at last be able to grasp what I had hitherto failed to
understand in the Catholic position. But if Mr. Belloc has said all
that there is to say for Catholicism upon these points, Catholicism is
bankrupt. He assures me that to believe in the Biblical account of the
Creation is a stupid Protestant tendency, and that Catholics do not
do anything of the sort. His attitude towards the Bible throughout is
one almost of contempt. It is not for me to decide between Christians
upon this delicate issue. And Catholics, I gather, have always believed
in Evolution and are far above the intellectual level of the American
Fundamentalist. It is very important to Catholic self-respect to keep
that last point in mind. Catholic evolution is a queer process into
which “Design” makes occasional convulsive raids; between which raids
species remain “fixed”; but still it is a sort of Evolution. My peasant
neighbours in Provence, devout Catholics and very charming people, have
not the slightest suspicion that they are Evolutionists, though Mr.
Belloc assures me they are.
But, in spite of this smart Evolutionary town wear of the Church, it
has somehow to be believed by Catholics that “man” is and always has
been and will be the same creature, “fixed.” That much Mr. Belloc gives
us reiteratively. A contemporary writer, the Rev. Morris Morris, has
written an interesting book, _Man Created During Descent_, to show that
man’s immortal soul was injected into the universe at the beginning of
the Neolithic period, which makes those Azilians and Capsians, with
their bows and carvings, mere animals. The new Belloc-Catholic teaching
is similar, but it puts the human beginnings earlier. Somewhen after
the Chellean and Moustierian periods, and before the Reindeer men, I
gather that “man” appeared, according to Catholic doctrines, exactly
what he is now. Or rather better. He was clad in skins and feathers,
smeared with paint, a cave-hunting wanderer with not even a dog at his
heels; but he was, because Mr. Belloc says so, a devout monotheist
and had a lucid belief in personal immortality. His art was pure and
exalted--there were little bone figures of steatopygous women in
evidence. He had no connection with the Neanderthal predecessor--or
else he had jumped miraculously out of the Neanderthaler’s bestial
skin. Sometimes it seems to be one thing and sometimes the other. But
all that stuff about Adam and Eve and the Garden and the Tree and the
Serpent, so abundantly figured in Catholic painting and sculpture,
seems to have dropped out of this new version of Catholic truth.
Yet those pictures are still shown to the faithful! And what the Fall
becomes in these new revelations of Catholicism, or whether there
was a Fall, historically speaking, Mr. Belloc leaves in the densest
obscurity. I have read and re-read these articles of his, and I seek
those lucid Latin precisions he has promised me in vain. Was and is
that Eden story merely symbolical, and has the Church always taught
that it is merely symbolical? And if so, what in terms of current
knowledge do these symbols stand for? Is it symbolical of some series
of events in time or is it not? If it is, when and what were the
events in time? And if it is not, but if it is symbolical of some
experience or adventure or change in the life of each one of us, what
is the nature of that personal fall? What is the significance of the
Garden, the Innocence, the Tree, the Serpent? To get anything clear
and hard out of Mr. Belloc’s papers in reply to these questions is
like searching for a diamond in a lake of skilly. I am left with the
uncomfortable feeling that Mr. Belloc is as vague and unbelieving about
this fundamental Catholic idea as the foggiest of foggy Protestants
and Modernists, but that he has lacked the directness of mind to admit
as much even to himself. Yet surely the whole system of salvation, the
whole Christian scheme, rests upon the presumption of a fall. Without
a fall, what is the value of salvation? Why redeem what has never been
lost? Without a condemnation what is the struggle? What indeed, in that
case, is the Catholic Church about?
What modern thought is about is a thing easier to explain. In the
_Outline of History_, against which Mr. Belloc is rather carping
than levelling criticism, there is set out, as the main form of that
_Outline_, a progressive development of conscious will in life. It is
not a form thrust upon the massed facts by any fanatical prepossession;
it is a form they insisted upon assuming under my summarising hand.
What is going on in this dispute is not that I am beating and putting
over my ideas upon Mr. Belloc or that he is beating and putting over
his ideas upon me, but that the immense increase of light and knowledge
during the past century is imposing a new realisation of the quality
and depth and import of life upon us both, and that I am acquiescent
and he is recalcitrant. I judge his faith by the new history, and he
judges the new history by his faith.
V
FIXITY OR PROGRESS
I am glad to say that we are emerging now from the worst of the
controversial stuff, irritating and offensive, in which Mr. Belloc
is so manifestly my master, and coming to matters of a more honest
interest.
I have stuck to my argument through the cut and slash, sneer and
innuendo of Mr. Belloc’s first twelve papers. I have done my best to
be kind and generous with him. I have made the best excuses I can for
him. I have shown how his oddities of bearing and style arise out of
the difficulties of his position, and how his absurd reasonings about
Natural Selection and his deliberate and tedious bemuddlement of the
early Palæolithic sub-men with the late Reindeer men and the Capsian
men are all conditioned by the necessity he is under to declare and
believe that “man” is, as he puts it, a “Fixed Type,” the same in the
past and now and always. He is under this necessity because he believes
that otherwise the Christian faith cannot be made to stand up as a
rational system, and because, as I have shown by a quotation of his own
words, he makes their compatibility with his idea of Catholic teaching
his criterion in the acceptance or rejection of facts.
I will confess I do not think that things are as bad as this with
Christianity. I believe a far better case could be made for Catholicism
by an insistence that its value and justification lie in the change and
in the direction of the human will, in giving comfort and consolation
and peace, in producing saints and beautiful living; and that the truth
of the history it tells of space and time is entirely in relation
to the development of these spiritual aspects, and has no necessary
connection whatever with scientific truth. This line of thought is
no novelty, and I do not see why Catholics should not keep to it and
leave the outline of history alone. I do not say that it is a line of
apologetics that would convince me altogether, but it is one that would
need far more arduous discussion and merit, far more respect than Mr.
Belloc’s _a priori_ exploits, his limping lizards and flying pigs.
But it is not my business to remind Catholics of their own neglected
philosophers, and clearly the publication of Mr. Belloc’s articles by
the _Universe_, the _Catholic Bulletin_, and the _Southern Cross_ shows
that the Catholic world of to-day is stoutly resolved to treat the fall
of man and his unalterable nature as matters of fact, even if they are
rather cloudy matters of fact, and to fight the realities of modern
biology and anthropology to the last ditch.
So the Catholics are pinned to this dogma of the fixity of man and
thereby to a denial of progress. This vale of tears, they maintain,
is as a whole a stagnant lake of tears, and there is no meaning to it
beyond the spiritual adventures of its individual lives. Go back in
time or forward, so long as man has been or will be, it is all the
same. You will find a world generally damned, with a select few, like
Mr. Belloc, on their way to eternal beatitude. That is all there is to
the spectacle. There is, in fact, no outline of history; there is just
a flow of individual lives; there is only birth and salvation or birth
and damnation. That, I extract from Mr. Belloc and other contemporary
writers, is the Catholic’s vision of life.
THE IDEA OF FIXED HUMANITY
And it is not only the Catholic vision of life. It is a vision far
more widely accepted. I would say that, if we leave out the ideas of
damning or beatitude, it is the “common-sense” vision of the world.
The individual life is, to common-sense, all that matters, the entire
drama. There is from this popular and natural point of view no large,
comprehensive drama in which the individual life is a subordinate
part. Just as to the untutored mind the world is flat, just as to Mr.
Belloc during his biological research work in Sussex the species of pig
remained a “fixed type,” so to the common intelligence life is nothing
more or less than “Me,” an unquestioned and unanalysed Me, against the
universe.
The universe may indeed be imagined as ruled over and pervaded by God,
and this world may be supposed to have extensions of hell and heaven;
all sorts of pre-natal dooms and debts may affect the career of the Me,
but nevertheless the Me remains in the popular mind, nobbily integral,
one and indivisible, and either it ends and the drama ends with it, or
it makes its distinct and special way to the Pit, or, with Belloc and
the Catholic community, to the beatitude he anticipates.
The individual self is primary to this natural, primitive, and
prevalent mode of thinking. But it is not the only way of thinking
about life. The gist of the _Outline of History_ is to contradict
this self-centred conception of life and show that this absolute
individualism of our thought and destinies is largely illusory. We
do not live in ourselves, as we so readily imagine we do; we are
contributory parts in the progress of a greater being which is life,
and which becomes now conscious of itself through human thought.
THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE
Now here I think we get down, beneath all the frothings and
bespatterings of controversy, to the fundamental difference between
Mr. Belloc and myself. It is this which gives our present controversy
whatever claim it can have to attention. Neither Mr. Belloc nor myself
is a very profound or exhaustive philosopher. In ourselves we are very
unimportant indeed. But we have this in common, that we can claim to
be very honestly expressive of the mental attitudes of clearly defined
types of mind, and that we are sharply antithetical types.
By nature and training and circumstances Mr. Belloc stands for the
stout sensible fellow who believes what he sees; who considers that
his sort always has been and always will be; who stands by accepted
morals and time-honoured ways of eating and drinking and amusement;
who loves--and grips as much as he can of--the good earth that gives
us food for our toil; who begets children honestly by one beloved wife
until she dies and then repeats the same wholesome process with the
next; who believes in immortality lest he should be sorry to grow old
and die; who trusts in the Church and its teaching because visibly the
Church is a great and impressive fact, close at hand and extremely
reassuring; who is a nationalist against all strangers because,
confound it! there are nations, and for Christendom against all pagans;
who finds even Chinamen and Indians remote and queer and funny. I do
not think that is an unfair picture of the ideals of Mr. Belloc and of
his close friend and ally, Mr. Chesterton, as they have spread them out
for us; and I admit they are warm and rosy ideals. But they are ideals
and not realities. The real human being upon this swift-spinning planet
is not that stalwart, entirely limited, fixed type resolved to keep
so, stamping about the flat world under God’s benevolent sky, eating,
drinking, disputing, and singing lustily, until he passes on to an
eternal individual beatitude with God and all the other blessed ones.
He is less like that every day, and more and more conscious of the
discrepancy.
I have read and admired and sympathised with the work of Mr. Belloc and
Mr. Chesterton since its very beginnings, but I find throughout it all
a curious defensive note. It may be I attribute distresses to them that
they do not feel. But it seems to me they are never quite sure in their
minds about this “fixed” human being of theirs--the same yesterday,
now, and for ever. Mr. Belloc must be puzzled not a little by that
vast parade of Evolution through the immeasurable ages which he admits
has occurred--a parade made by the Creative Force for no conceivable
reason, since a “fixed type” might just as well have been created
straight away. He must realise that if man is the beginning and end of
life, then his Creator has worked within fantastically disproportionate
margins both of space and time. And in his chapters upon animal and
human origins Mr. Belloc’s almost obstinate ignorance of biological
facts, his fantastic “logic,” his pathetic and indubitably honest
belief in his non-existent “European authorities,” his fumbling and
evasion about Palæolithic man, and above all his petty slights and
provocations to those whose views jar upon him, have nothing of the
serenity of a man assured of his convictions, and all the irritability
and snatching at any straw of advantage of a man terribly alarmed for
his dearest convictions. When Mr. Belloc gets to his beatitude he will
feel like a fish out of water. I believe Mr. Belloc and his friend Mr.
Chesterton are far too intelligent not to be subconsciously alive to
the immense and increasing difficulties of their positions, and that
they are fighting most desperately against any conscious realisation of
the true state of affairs.
THE IDEA OF PROGRESSIVE HUMANITY
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.
THE NEW THOUGHT AND THE OLD
Mr. Belloc is completely justified in devoting much more than half his
commentary to these fundamental issues and dealing with my account of
the appearance of Christianity and the story of the Church much more
compactly. It is this difference at the very roots of our minds which
matters to us, and it is the vital question we have to put before
the world. The rest is detail. I do believe and assert that a new
attitude to life, a new and different vision of the world, a new moral
atmosphere and a different spirit of conduct, is coming into human
affairs, as a result of the scientific analysis of the past hundred
years. It is only now reaching such a clearness of definition that it
can be recognised for what it is and pointed out.
The essential distinction of the newer thought in the world is in its
denial of the permanence of the self and in its realisation of the
self’s comparative unimportance. Even in our individual lives we are
increasingly interested in common and generalised things. The older
commoner life, the religious life just as much as the most worldly
life, seems to us excessively self-conscious. The religious life, its
perpetual self-examination for sin and sinful motives, its straining
search after personal perfection, appears in the new light as being
scarcely less egotistical than a dandy’s. And this new way of living
and thinking is directly linked on to the idea of progress, which
makes life in general far more interesting than any individual life
can be, just as the self-centred life, whether it be religious and
austere or vain or self-indulgent, is directly connected with the old
delusions of permanence which rob life in general of any sustained
interest. When one is really persuaded that there is nothing new under
the sun, then there is nothing worth living for whatever outside the
personal adventure, the dance between permanent individual beatitude or
permanent individual damnation.
As this modern conception of life as a process of progressive change
in which individuality of our order can be sometimes excessively
exaggerated as it has been in the past and sometimes minimised as is
happening now--as this conception establishes itself, it changes the
spirit of living and the values of our general ideas about living
profoundly. Lit only by a very bright light held low, an ordinary road
becomes a tangle of vivid surfaces and black shadows, and you cannot
tell a puddle or a gutter from a ditch or a precipice. But in diffused
daylight you can see the proportions of every irregularity. So too with
changing illumination our world alters its aspects, and things that
once seemed monstrous and final are seen to be mere undulations in a
practicable progress. We can realise now, as no one in the past was
ever able to realise it, that man is a creature changing very rapidly
from the life of a rare and solitary great ape to the life of a social
and economic animal. He has traversed most of this tremendous change
of phase in something in the nature of a million years. His whole
being, mind and body alike, betrays the transition. We can trace the
mitigations of his egotism through the development of religious and
customary restraints. The recent work of the psycho-analyst enables us
to understand something of the intricate system of suppressions and
inhibitions that this adaptation to a more and more complex social
life has involved. We begin to realise how man has symbolised and
personified his difficulties, and to comprehend the mechanisms of his
uncongenial but necessary self-restraint.
OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES
The disposition of those who apprehend this outline of history that
modern science has made plain to us, and who see all life as a system
of progressive change, is by no means antagonistic to religion. They
realise the immense importance and the profound necessity of religion
in this last great chapter of the story, the evolution of human
society. But they see religion within the frame of fact; they do not,
like Mr. Belloc, look through religion at fact. Man has accommodated
his originally fierce and narrow egotism to the needs of an ever wider
and more co-operative social life, very largely through the complex
self-subjugations that religion has made possible. Within the shell and
cover of religion the new less self-centred habits of mind have been
able to develop. An immense mass of imaginative work, of mythology,
of theology, that now seems tortuous, mystical, and fantastic, was
necessary for the casting of the new moral being of socialised man.
We seem to be entering upon a phase in which moral and intellectual
education may be able to free themselves from the last vestiges of
the mythology in which that new moral being was moulded; but it is
ungracious and false to the true outline of history to deny the
necessary part that the priest, the sacrifice, the magic ceremonial
for tribal welfare, the early tribal religions, have played in this
transfiguration of the sub-human into the modern human mind, upon which
all our community rests to-day.
It is because of our sense of this continuity of our present
dispositions with the religions upon which they are founded that so
many of us are loth to part with all the forms and phrases of the old
creeds and all the disciplines of time-honoured cults. Perhaps some of
us (the present writer in the crowd among others) have been over-eager
to read new significances into established phrases, and clothe new
ideas in the languages of the old scheme of salvation. It may be we
have been pouring new wine into old bottles. It may be better to admit
frankly that if man is not fixed Christianity is, and that mankind is
now growing out of Christianity; that indeed mankind is growing out of
the idea of Deity. This does not mean an end to religion, but it means
a fresh orientation of the religious life. It means a final severance
with those anthropomorphic conceptions of destiny, that interpretation
of all things in terms of personality and will with which religion
began. For many of us that still means a wrench and an effort. But the
emphatic assertions of Mr. Belloc, the stand that Catholicism, as he
expounds it, makes against any progressive adaptation to the new spirit
in human life, may render that effort easier.
In this examination of Mr. Belloc’s opening and more fundamental
attacks upon the _Outline of History_ I have shown sufficiently that
Mr. Belloc is incapable of evidence or discussion, that he imagines
his authorities, that he is careless and ignorant as to his facts and
slovenly and tricky in his logic. I have dealt kindly but adequately
with his atrocious bad manners and his insolence and impudence. I do
not think it is worth while to go on through the second half of his
outpourings with any particularity. It is exactly the same kind of
thing, but upon more familiar ground and less fundamental issues. Mr.
Belloc quibbles. He falsifies. For example, he imagines traditions to
reinforce the Gospel account of Christ’s teaching and to show that
the founder of Christianity was aware of his godhead and taught the
doctrine of the Trinity; he declares--just out of his head--that I
do not know it was the bull and not Mithra who was sacrificed in the
system of Mithraism, though I state that quite plainly in a passage
he has ventured to ignore. And so on. The wonderful methods of the
Palæolithic bow story repeat themselves with variations, time after
time. Why should I trouble to repeat the exposure in every case? I have
done enough to demonstrate the quality of this effort to bluff and
bawl away accepted knowledge and manifest fact, and that is all that I
set out to do.
And this apparently is the present state of Catholic teaching.
This stuff I have examined is the current utterance of organised
Christianity, so far as there is any utterance, upon the doctrines of
the Creation and the Fall--doctrines upon which rest the whole scheme
of Christian salvation and the entire fabric of a Christian’s faith.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced. Several apparent misspellings may be intentional, and
have not been changed.
Page 69: “Mr. Belloc will get if he says” probably is missing an “it”
after “get”.
Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs and
outside quotations.
Page 95: Part of the last paragraph was misprinted. Transcriber has
attempted to correct that error. The original text was:
And this apparently is the present state of
Catholic teaching. This stuff I have examined is
ance of organised Christianity, so far as there is
representative stuff. This is the current utter-
ance of organised Christianity, so far as there is
any utterance, upon the doctrines of the Creation
and the Fall--doctrines upon which rest the whole
scheme of Christian salvation and the entire fabric
of a Christian’s faith.
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