CHAPTER III

MR. WELLS AND THE FALL OF MAN

As we approach the problem of Man it behoves us, before dealing with Mr. Wells’s views on that animal, to examine a little further his competence as a teacher of Science to the multitude.

I have pointed out that where Mr. Wells has to deal with ascertained facts he is not only an accurate but an excellent précis writer, and that his summary of such facts as are contained in our older books of reference is clear, vivid, and in good proportion.

But the judgment of evidence is very badly done, the reasoning weak and yielding to imagination; while the theories supported and the positive errors repeated are most of them years and years behind the times.

I will give examples.

In the course of his account of Evolution Mr. Wells repeats (on page 37) with complete confidence, as though it were scientific fact, the old and now worthless theory called “Recapitulation.” It was a theory invented by Haeckel (about 1870) purporting to be based on the work done by Von Baer more than 40 years earlier—though, as a fact, Haeckel characteristically suppressed one of Baer’s four points.

The Theory of Recapitulation was as follows:—The embryo—in particular of man—bears witness to transformism by showing as it develops one phase after another of its ancestral past: as the current phrase went when Mr. Wells and I were young, it “climbs up its family tree.” It was imagined that the embryo represents as it grows the various stages, from the original aquatic life onwards to general tetrapodal forms, then to more immediate ancestors from which the present form of the animal came. Vialleton of Montpellier, probably the greatest contemporary authority in Europe on Embryology, has disproved the theory and left it wrecked. He has knocked the last nail into the coffin of that facile and superficial short-cut (and blind alley). Here again I must make myself quite clear, for Mr. Wells’s tendency to confusion of mind (a defect attaching, perhaps, to his deservedly famous gift of imagination) may easily make him accuse me of opinions I do not hold.

I do not make this allusion to the great work of Vialleton (which I have had by me since it came out and which I study with increasing admiration) as a criticism of Evolution in general. Who could? I allude to it because Mr. Wells’s ignorance of its existence is inexcusable in a man proposing to deal with such subjects even in the most summary and popular fashion. That Mr. Wells does, as a fact, know nothing of Vialleton’s mass of instance and argument, and its modern effect, is clear from a protest he issued against me just before the publication of this book. He there said that perhaps some French student had believed the embryo to repeat its ancestry “conscientiously,” and that Vialleton “may have thought it well to discuss this idea in one of his books”!

I might as well write that Darwin “may have thought it well” to discuss (and attempt to destroy) Design. Why, the whole of this work is one long and victorious attack upon the idea which Mr. Wells took for granted! It is not a casual refutation of some nonsense about the embryo exactly reproducing every minute stage of its ancestral past; it is a fundamental, detailed, complete refutation of the idea which Mr. Wells repeats.

Out of any number of citations which might be taken from Vialleton’s hundreds of pages I then gave, and here give again, one: and it is sufficient. “Ontogenesis” (that is the development of the Embryo) “always begins with a general form and _not_” (my italics) “with a form recalling another simpler form passed through in an earlier phase of development.”

So much for that. It is but one out of many examples of our Author’s being behind the times. Here is another.

In describing the glacial epochs, he trots out with the most naïf confidence (on pp. 20–22) the hopelessly dead astronomical theory which did duty in the textbooks of his youth and mine—for I also have believed these things. Relying on a popular volume which, at the time, had great effect, he puts down the main cause of glaciation to the combination of varying eccentricity in the earth’s orbit with varying inclination of the axis, of which he gives a large diagram. Under the effect of the two movements (which Leverrier calculated more than a lifetime ago) the Northern and Southern Hemispheres would alternately suffer from cold and enjoy greater warmth. When the Northern Hemisphere was getting colder and colder, the Southern would be getting warmer and warmer, and vice versa.

This was called “Croll’s astronomical theory of glaciation,” and was made popular by a book of Sir Robert Ball’s in 1893.

[1893, as I have said, seems, from internal evidence, to be about the date when Mr. Wells’s stock of information crystallized.]

Now Croll’s astronomical theory broke down quite early under criticism. It was dead before the end of the nineteenth century. The eleventh edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ is not exactly recent. Its well-worn covers testify to its age in all our libraries, and I see that a thirteenth edition is due. But even the eleventh edition of the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ could have informed Mr. Wells that Croll’s theory had broken down. Would he like something quite recent? Professor Coleman—Emeritus Professor of Geology at Toronto—has just issued a study of glacial periods, and I find on page 274 the curt sentence, “Croll’s theory at present receives little attention.” And why? Because fact, that dreadful enemy to theorizing, has killed it. If it were true, glaciation would have been alternate in north and south. As a fact, it has been proved simultaneous—the South American clay deposits alone show that.

This is not to say that astronomical factors have played no part in glaciation. That they did not do so would be incredible. But it is to say that Mr. Wells still takes for granted in this year of grace 1926, and states as facts, theories which the average educated man knows to have been exploded as long ago as the nineties of the last century.

Mr. Wells suffers, in this connection, from another fault besides that of stating the old and exploded theories of his youth as facts. He also affirms as fact what is doubtful. Thus he builds a whole series of assertions (p. 154) on the—at first sight—apparently obvious, but, in fact, much disputed idea that as the ice receded the sea-level rose. It is clear that the melting of great quantities of ice would, other things being equal, raise the sea-level. It is also presumable, on the isostatic theory, that the earth rose when and where relieved of ice pressure (the raised beaches seem proof of this). That—other things being equal—would mean a _lowering_ of sea-level when the ice melted (thus the highest-known raised beach of glacial times in America indicates a _fall_ of the sea-level since the ice melted by nearly 700 feet). Which of the two factors predominated? Only observation of such phenomena as raised beaches, fossils, submerged forests, etc., can decide, and the matter is still debated. Boule in 1906 affirmed a high sea under glacial conditions. The periods of high glaciation were, according to him, the periods of high sea-level, and the interglacial epochs the periods of low sea-level. Wright (in 1914) inclines to the opposite. The Scandinavian observers noted in one locality a rise of sea-level at the first receding of the ice, then a lowering of it. The latest opinion is mainly in favour of a rise in sea-level since the last Ice-age. Coleman, the last authority, tentatively suggests a rise.

But to affirm a rise as proved is bad science. In these and many other points Mr. Wells is evidently a man confusing theory with fact.

However, the few things really known by him about Pre-history are very well put. The narrative is straightforward and a fair summary. It is also to Mr. Wells’s credit that, unlike his fellow disseminators of popular “science,” he frequently uses in this section, as elsewhere, those qualifying words which distinguish fact from probabilities or doubtful possibilities. He has “may,” “probably,” and “it would seem,” where many another of his sort would have written “did,” “was,” “certainly.” But what might here have been of excellent effect in ridding uninstructed people of their dogmatism is more than neutralized by too much positiveness in diagrams and riotous make-believe in pictures.

For instance, on pages 35 and 36, regarding a table of Geological Epochs, he writes: “These divisions _probably_ mark off too precisely,” etc. But the accompanying diagram gives a timetable like Bradshaw, with exactly 50,000 years for the last glacial epoch, 550,000 for those intriguing anomalies the Javanese skull and thigh-bone, and 100,000 for the vastly debated Piltdown fragments.

He does not, by the way, remark that the original guess at the cranial capacity of the Piltdown man was too small, certainly by 30 per cent, and possibly by 50 per cent. He does not tell his readers the remarkably high angle of the forehead, nor the really disturbing fact that there appear to have been no strong orbital ridges. And why are his readers not given all this? Because—like so many facts in Pre-history—they interfere with the simple “progress” idea and would make the reader understand how very little we do know about early man and his ancestry, and what an intolerable amount of theory there is to a halfpennyworth of fact. For the Piltdown man, on all the orthodox hypotheses, has got to be enormously older than Neanderthal man—and yet has a much more modern brain-box.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wells’s artist constructs out of these little pieces of bone a human being wholly imaginary in all its functions.

This person appears on page 43 in a detailed picture as “Eoanthropos.” He is having a good time hunting, and looking uncommonly like an acquaintance of my own; but he is entirely made up out of the artist’s head. Again, we have the coloured picture of a dance of American Red Indians round a fire solemnly presented as a “reconstruction of Palæolithic society.”

I know very well the excuse that is offered for such things. The public for which such books are written can digest a definite timetable, and, better still, a picture, more easily than carefully thought out pros and cons; _something_ must be put simply before their eyes, and one can’t put doubt pictorially. Nevertheless, the effect produced and intended to be produced is utterly false and misleading. The Piltdown fragments would fit into a soup plate. No one knows and no one ever will know whether the ape-jaw belongs to the scraps of human, and rather high human, skull; on the one hand you have the very high authority of Keith, on the other the main weight of continental opinion. No one can confidently tell the exact posture and shape the total skull may have had. Of the creature as a whole, apart from these insufficient fragments of skull and that almost impossible jaw, we know absolutely nothing. To conceal all this and to present a finished picture of him as a fully known being is like writing a full biography on the evidence of a torn quarter of visiting-card.

But though this lack of scientific habit in Mr. Wells is woeful enough and very misleading, a defect of infinitely greater importance is his incapacity for dealing with the fundamental questions of our nature and destiny which are alone of real moment.

He seems to be aware of some clash between the materialist assumptions of his narrow world and another much more majestic philosophy, much more comprehensive; but he does not know what that opposing philosophy is. It is evident throughout all his work that he has not even consulted an elementary treatise on Catholic philosophy. Sometimes he seems to think that Catholicism is a jumble of irrational tenets like those of the old Bible Christians, for whose descendants he is writing and whom alone he really understands. There are other times when he brings in the name of the Catholic Church in a fashion which betrays his hatred of it, but clearly in ignorance of what the doctrines and nature of the Catholic Church may be.

He is like a man who, hearing a piece of Mozart, complains angrily of the noise it makes, but has never heard of the theory and emotion of music.

He suffers, therefore, as do much the greater part of his readers, from two forms of ignorance, very fatal to a proper handling of our chief human problems.

First, he is ignorant of the fact that he and they are working not on common sense accepted by all men, but on a highly particular philosophical theory (called once the Epicurean, but to-day the Materialist, Theory) which may be accepted or denied, but which can no more be taken for granted as universally admitted than can the Catholic Faith itself. He thinks he is only dealing with ascertained fact, whereas he is really acting on a religion; and as that religion is false, it compels him to force facts to fit it. This is the very mark of the provincial mind. It mistakes its local superstition for the very nature of things. It is from this inability to define their own first principles, from this conception that they are dealing with ascertained physical truth alone, that people of this kind are at once debarred from understanding their superiors and from reasoning clearly upon their own postulates.

Secondly, he is ignorant of the Catholic philosophy which he instinctively opposes. He does not know what it is that he is combating, nor what a crushing advantage of scope and examination it has over the insufficient and parochial experience lying behind his own work. He approaches the Catholic Church as a man who has only done a little suburban gardening might approach a fifty-acre field—with a spade.

All this comes out most clearly at the very opening of his discussion of human origins on pages 37 and 38. He there exposes in one paragraph all that ignorance to which I allude. He says with rather ponderous sarcasm that the Catholic Church is no more committed to a denial of the now widely accepted view of man’s origin “than it is to a doctrine of a flat earth, or of a stationary earth round which the sun revolves”; but adds that though the Church is apparently not committed to any particular view in such matters (he has grasped that much), yet “many believers dissent from the scientific opinion _because they feel it is more seemly to suppose that man has fallen rather than risen_” (my italics).

In that one sentence on Original Sin you have the whole of the writer’s ignorance upon the matter (and upon the very terms used in its discussion) exposed. It is as though some foreigner were to say of English constitutional practice: “The English legal system is not committed to the denial of historical evidence on the vices of James the First, but many individual lawyers believe that the King can do no wrong—because they think it more seemly.”

Why did he not look up the point in any book of reference? It is astonishing to me that, with his active mind and interest in his contemporaries, and his reliance upon books of reference, he has not done so.

The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin has nothing to do with the stages of man’s material culture. The fact that man now in Europe uses iron in places where he once used stone for his implements, has no possible connection with the doctrine of Original Sin. The traces of beings not men but, as are apes, man-like, exceptionally discovered, and belonging presumably to a remote past, can no more affect the Catholic doctrine of Original Sin than Pasteur’s discovery of fermentation being due to a micro-organism affects the truth that men can and do get drunk.

The Catholic doctrine of Original Sin is this. That man, our known human nature as true men, was created by God to be supernatural, that is, enjoying beatitude; but fell, through the rebellion of his will, into a natural state. This, and this alone, says the Catholic Faith, explains man’s dual destiny, his sense of exile, the lack of correspondence between his ideal and his practice. It is not “many individuals” in the Catholic Church who affirm this great and luminous doctrine because it is “more seemly.” It is _all_ Catholics who affirm it, and they do so because, whether pleasant or unpleasant, it is true.

We affirm the Fall: _First_ on the authority of the Catholic Church itself, which we have discovered from experience to be the only teaching body whose voice and nature correspond with reality; answering justly the queries and fulfilling the needs and ends of man. _Secondly_, because this truth, like all other truths which we receive from that same Authority, we discover to be but one in a consistent scheme of many co-ordinated doctrines, which scheme alone explains the world, and is consonant with the nature of the individual and with the nature of society: with the nature of man himself as he discovers it to be when he examines the recesses of his own being and with the nature of man in corporate action. Nor has the firm hold which the high Catholic intelligence maintains upon this essential and reasonable dogma of the Fall any conceivable link with the denial or the acceptation of some piece of physical evidence. It does not depend upon the existence of the Garden of Eden somewhere between Mosul and Baghdad, nor upon the date 4004 B.C.

The truth is that Mr. Wells, in some confused way, regards the Catholic Church as a sect; an extreme right wing of the various Protestant sects, with which he is fully acquainted, from which he himself derives, and whose ethics and general attitude towards life are part of his being. For he goes on to tell us “that no considerable Christian body _now_ (my italics) insists upon the exact and literal acceptance of the Bible narrative.” He does not know—so ignorant is he of history—that this attitude towards the Bible came very late—in the seventeenth century—and was during its brief career highly local. He does not know that this conception of the Old Testament as an exact text book of history and science, not a word of which must be taken as allegory or generalization, was mainly confined to England and her colonies. The Catholic Church never held it or could of its nature hold it.

I wonder what effect it would have upon him to read a few passages from, say, Origen, on the allegorical interpretation of Genesis, or from St. Augustine? He need not do more than that. He need not waste energy in a long examination of the Christian past. It would be quite enough for him to consult a couple of passages, or, indeed, for any competent historian to inform him that the only body of people who ever dreamt of taking Genesis as a literal and sufficient guide to all the details of history and physical science were the members of a small and local Puritan sect (now rapidly disappearing) of which he is himself a product and which held this amazing view of the Jacobean translation of the Hebrew scripture into archaic English. These people loom so large in Mr. Wells’s personal experience as to obscure all else; but I can assure him that they count for next to nothing in the general culture of Europe.

So much for the first of Mr. Wells’s ventures into Theology, where it regards the relation of God to man. He and his like often profess to regard such things as of no importance. They are the most important things in the world. Indeed, they are the only important things; and the proof of their importance is to be found in the fact that the materialists can never leave them alone.

The materialists are always loudly protesting that they “do not meddle with Theology,” that they “have nothing to do with Theology.” They deal with nothing else. Their whole object is Theological—though they do not know it. Mr. Wells himself protests that he is not concerned with Theology in his _Outline_. It is his one preoccupation—though he may not realize it. The only criticism that really moves him is theological criticism. The only opponent he seriously challenges is a theological opponent; and the moment he attempts to _reason_ upon his subject, Theology at once and inevitably appears.

I have neither the space nor the inclination to deal with minor blemishes in this part of the work.

I do not even insist on Mr. Wells’s failure to perceive (though he honestly quotes the facts) the implications of those perpetually recurring anomalies in our few shreds of evidence—e.g. more human teeth with less human craniums and vice versa. For though he misses the lesson of these unceasing breakdowns of each new “scientific” dogma upon the origin of man’s body (which lesson is, that Hypothesis should never be taught as Science), he shirks none of the things he knows, and, when he _is_ abreast of modern knowledge, he states it clearly and well. For instance, he is acquainted with the exploding of the last dogma but two (still popular with most of his readers, I fear), the arboreal ancestry of Man. He knows it has broken down, and he admits it quite freely. Such a confession is greatly to his credit.

It is ascertained fact that many human and some very few doubtfully human remains of various types have been found under conditions which suggest high antiquity. It is ascertained fact that presumably older fragments are those of animals resembling men, in some cases, perhaps, even more closely than any known monkey of to-day—though the resemblance of monkeys to men has been a commonplace throughout History. Nor is it any surprise to learn, as we recently have done (though Mr. Wells makes no allusion to them), that in sundry other tests less striking (the make up of blood, for instance) the animals most like us in structure and gesture have common qualities with us. It is only what was to have been expected.

But none of these things—though of curious interest—is on the same plane as the theological discussions upon which Mr. Wells embarks and makes shipwreck. That is why I have concentrated here upon the nature and doctrine of the Fall.

If you go wrong on that, your whole philosophy of politics and of individual human life will be wrong in its practical applications, and you prepare the ruin, certainly of society and perhaps of your own soul.