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A COMPANION TO MR. WELLS’S “OUTLINE OF HISTORY”

BY

HILAIRE BELLOC

328–330 STOCKTON ST. SAN FRANCISCO. CAL.

1927

Made and Printed in Great Britain at

The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.

TO

My Brother-in-Law

JOHN HOGAN

OF

Napa, California

CONTENTS

A COMPANION TO MR. WELLS’S

“OUTLINE OF HISTORY”

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

My object in these pages is to follow, for Catholic readers, Mr. Wells’s Outline of History; to point out the principal popular errors, most of them now out of date, which its author has repeated, and to state the opposing truths with their supporting evidence and reasoning.

If it be asked why I should devote such labour to a book which is but a passing fashion, and that not in the classes or districts which count most, I answer that, though ephemeral, the work has had a wide circulation, and is therefore of some momentary effect worth checking, while it is also representative of its type: writing of wide circulation which repeats as facts for general acceptation theories once respectable and now exploded. Now to check erroneous statement is always worth while.

If it be asked why I envisage a Catholic audience in particular, I answer that the issue in such matters lies between the Catholic Church and its modern opponents. The hosts of modern writers in all countries, of whom Mr. Wells is a local example, act more or less consciously in reaction against the Catholic Church. It is her doctrines they are concerned to attack; and soon, with the increasing effect of the Church upon the one hand, the increasing abandonment (outside her boundaries) of all transcendental belief on the other, there will be but two opposed camps: the Faith and its enemies.

Already the denial of a Personal God, of Immortality, of the Redemption, of the Fall, of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, is no longer directed against some vague “Christianity”—a word with twenty meanings or none—but against that defined and existing corporation which alone defends in its entirety that body of dogma upon which our civilization has been founded and with the loss of which it will perish.

Further, I have the legitimate motive of sustaining others. There are Catholics into whose hands a work of this kind falls, and it is possible that here and there a Catholic may be disturbed in his faith by popular literature of this kind. For the sake of this very small number of chance Catholics, who may suffer from a popular (though ephemeral) work of this kind, I desire to examine the book and distinguish its merits from its absurdities. One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more important than a host of the average reading public of England and America, drowsily accepting stuff they have heard all their lives, and reading it because they have always believed it to be true.

A Catholic disturbed in his faith is like a man troubled with his sight. A Catholic losing his faith is like a man going blind. One should take a great deal of trouble to prevent a man from going blind.

I am aware that to aver such a motive reads presumptuous and a little ridiculous. For faith is strongest in the humble. But the motive is there, and at any rate the important thing is that Mr. Wells’s widely read, though necessarily short-lived, survey of human affairs, with its violently anti-Catholic motive, should not be of effect on any Catholic mind so far as a Catholic critic can provide the antidote.

Every man, even the idlest, occupies his time with something or other. The vast majority of men have their energies absorbed by their daily tasks. So when a man comes forward with a mass of historical facts, drawn from Encyclopædias (which not one man in a thousand has had the leisure to look up in those books of reference), and tacks on to these historical facts all manner of false conclusions (destructive of the only truth worth having, destructive of the one grasp on reality which is of any value to men), the reader may well be misled.

He may easily say to himself, “Since all these historical facts are presumably true, the conclusions tacked on to them are also probably true.” And in this way a false philosophy is insinuated.

Mr. Wells’s main motive—the honestly held conviction which drives him to writing matter of this kind—is reaction against the Catholic Church. But as this motive is not stated—(and, indeed, I fancy, not fully conscious in the mind of the writer)—the reader may take his work to be neutral matter. In doing so, false history, and, therefore, false philosophy (for history is but the illustration of philosophy) may, without his knowledge, pass into his mind. It is this which it is important to prevent.

At the outset of my task it behoves me to set forth the great talents with which Mr. Wells has been endowed by Almighty God, and especially the talents suitable to the writer of general history. For, indeed, he seemed from his earlier works admirably fitted for writing a general outline of history, and would, by the consent of all, have been thought apt for the task—had he not undertaken it.

First, he writes very clearly; he practises an excellent economy in the use of words. This, for popular exposition, is essential; and he never fails in it. He never lapses into verbosity. He is direct, simple, clear.

Next, he possesses a sense of time. Now in history nothing is more valuable. Within his lights, within the measure of his limited instruction, he does see time in right scale; and that is so rare in any historian that one cannot welcome it too warmly.

Next, we should remark that Mr. Wells has (as his works of fiction amply show) a strong power of making the image he has framed in his own mind arise in the mind of his reader. This is, indeed, his chief talent.

It is a talent extremely rare: the very essential of good imaginative writing, but of particular importance in historical writing. For History, as the great Michelet finely put it, should be a resurrection of the flesh. Were I engaged upon a critique of Mr. Wells’s more permanent literary claims I would dilate on this: for such a gift is of quite exceptional power in him. None of our contemporaries possesses it in anything like the same degree. But I am not concerned here with his style, and must reluctantly leave it.

Next, it is worth noting that Mr. Wells is exceedingly accurate in his use of reference books and proof-readers. The dates are always right, and the names and all the mechanical details of the book are similarly exact. I have a particular right to praise such a quality because in my own case (as in the case of the great Michelet, whom I have just quoted) I despair of accuracy. My own writings on History are full of misprints: “right” for “left” in descriptions of battles, “north” for “south,” “east” for “west,” transposed letters and the rest of it. Mr. Wells’s writing is quite remarkable for its freedom from such irritating verbal blemishes.

But much more important than these advantages which he possesses for a writing of an Outline of History is his sincerity. He feels the importance of History to mankind, and especially, I think, to that part of mankind which he knows best—the mankind of the English Home Counties and London Suburbs. He feels instinctively that he and his must now obtain a general view. It is due to Mr. Wells to say that hardly anyone else in our restricted society feels this as strongly as he does. Our newspapers, our politicians, and even our financiers, cosmopolitan though they are, do not feel the need of trying to understand the past of Europe and of the world. They are still soaked in what is left of the old self-sufficiency. But Mr. Wells has woken up, and it is to his credit.

I put his sincerity thus last in this category of his advantages for writing History, because it is the chief. He is conspicuously and naively sincere. This good quality is apparent in every line of the work as it first appeared. It is equally apparent in the first part of the new revised edition. He does really believe from the bottom of his heart all that he read in the textbooks of his youth. He does really and from the bottom of his heart believe that the little world he knows is the whole world; and that his doctrines of goodwill, vague thinking, loose loving, and the rest—all soaked in the local atmosphere of his life—may be the salvation of mankind. It is not vanity or pride (though, of course, it is ignorance); it is a perfectly honest conviction. He cannot imagine how things could possibly be otherwise; and that, by the way, is the root of his recently acquired hatred of the Catholic Church, which has now become, directly and indirectly, the universally present savour in his writing.

He is sincerely bewildered and exasperated at the power of Something so different from the only world he knows. He hopes vaguely that the Church may be dying: he suspects it is not—the doubt worries him. It moves him to hatred; but that hatred is sincere. This sincerity of his, even where it is misguided and untaught, is respectable. He does sincerely desire to do good to his fellow-men within the narrow circle of his experience and understanding.

If the reader will add up all these advantages for the writing of History, he will find them amount, I think, to a very notable sum.

There are few men who could have produced a general history better than Mr. Wells—had he not suffered from certain graver disadvantages to which I shall presently allude. To be sincere is essential. To have the motive of History is both singular and decisive. To have clarity, economy and a sense of time is rare and of high value. To be accurate in detail of dates, etc., is a most excellent minor virtue in any historian.

Mr. Wells has called me an inveterate antagonist. He is wrong. From the first moment that the Time Machine appeared, so many years ago, I have consistently praised his talents in private conversation and in public writing, and I shall praise them still.

Before I leave this point of his advantages in the writing of History, let me deal very briefly with certain false accusations that have been made against him.

The first and, I think, the stupidest, is that of brevity. I have heard people say, “Here is a man pretending to write a history of the world in a few months and in a few pages,” and they have laughed at him on that ground. The accusation is unintelligent. You can give the outline of the history of anything in a sentence, or a paragraph, or a pamphlet, or a book, or an encyclopædia. If Napier, the great historian of the Peninsular War—perhaps the greatest English writer of History—had been asked to state in one sentence the outline of that struggle, he might have replied, “The Spanish national feeling engaged with French usurpation was supported by a small English regular army possessed of the command of the sea. These two forces combined achieved, after Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, the driving out of the French from the Peninsula.” If he had been given a page in which to write the thing he could have added phrases upon the talent of Wellington as a defensive General, the misconception of the French upon the Spanish national feeling, the skill with which the lines of Torres Vedras were drawn, etc. Had he been given fifty pages, he could have added more details still—and so on, up to a shelf full of books. But the outline from such a pen would have been good History had it covered ten lines or ten thousand. It is thoughtless to say that a man has no right to give an outline of any movement, however great, in any space, however small. The Catechism puts the whole vast business of man through time and eternity into one short phrase, “That we were made to know, love, and serve God, and to be happy with Him for ever.” You could add to that all the rest of true philosophy in as much detail as you like, and still expand; but the original brief outline of less than a score of words remains true. Mr. Wells has a perfect right to produce an outline of general History in one volume, or half a volume, or a page, and, so far as the manner of it goes, he has done it excellently: the drawing is firm, the intention honest; it is the shape of the Outline that is wrong.

Again, he is wrongly accused of superficiality. That is an accusation made by people who see—what, indeed, is obvious—that the book has no lasting value, and that therefore they can call it hard names with impunity, secure against the judgment of posterity. The book is ephemeral, certainly; but no honest critic can call it superficial. The book is not superficial at all. On the contrary, it goes to the roots of things, and considers what is really important to mankind. One may indeed call the writer superficial in so far as he knows nothing of beauty or tradition—that is due to his unavoidable limitations; but superficial his effort is not. It is as searching in the matter of cause and effect as its writer can make it. That is not saying very much, for its writer has never had the opportunity for digging deep into cause and effect; but the book does not suffer from that prime mark of superficiality—indifference. Mr. Wells means to say all that is in him, and if there is not very much in him, that is not his fault.

He has a neutral quality, neither an advantage nor a disadvantage in the writing of History; or, perhaps, rather an advantage than a disadvantage, and that is, an intense nationalism. An English scientist is supreme. An English book changes the world. An English mode of thought is self-evidently the best. The Catholic Church itself is hateful mainly because it is foreign. Such nationalism is often the unconscious accompaniment of limitation, but, upon the whole, it serves the historical sense. After all, any worker must be himself. He cannot create unless there is a flame within him. Such flames arise from intense conviction, and the historian steeped in his own country does better, in my judgment, despite his inevitable leanings, than one who pretends attachment to nothing: for attachment to nothing is sterility. The three great historians whom good judges most admire were all intense lovers of their country—an Athenian, a Frenchman and a Scotsman.

Now for the disadvantages.

The first and most glaring of these is Provincialism.

But here I must warn my readers that they will not discover in this criticism any of those personal descriptions or offensive allusions to private life by which our vulgarians aim at extending their large circulations. I am concerned only with this one book of Mr. Wells’s, and with History and Religion in it; not with domestic details in the Author’s life or the caricatures of them. The mental formation and social motive of an author must indeed be alluded to in any judgment of his work, as must his defects of instruction or judgment. The rest is irrelevant. I have even, in revising the text, cut out anything which might be mistaken for a personal allusion, and leave it, I believe, confined wholly to the criticism of historical statement, method and motive.

I have said, then, that with so many qualifications for writing a popular general History, Mr. Wells suffers from defects which ruin it; and the first of these is that his book is Provincial.

The word “Provincial” is a hard one; but it exactly applies to Mr. Wells’s History; therefore it must be used.

I find it the more difficult to use this necessary and precise word here because I know Mr. Wells, from an acquaintance of many years, to be abnormally sensitive to any printed judgment of his work.

Such extreme sensitiveness is not rare in men of vivid imagination, especially if they cultivate its literary expression. But in this case it is quite exceptionally developed; and I naturally hesitate to offend it.

Greatly as I admire Mr. Wells’s scientific romances, and have always admired them, I am compelled to use exact terms in this criticism. I cannot do otherwise, because the truth of History is a sacred thing—the most sacred next to the truths of Religion. If History is falsely written, the reader not warned of it obtains a distorted view of human action and comes to misunderstand all the most essential things of life, including Religion itself; and Mr. Wells’s History is obviously and fatally distorted through Provincialism.

Provincialism does not mean a limitation of experience to some one small department of life—we are all of us subjected to such limitations, and any man’s petty personal experience is always infinitely small compared with the total possible field of knowledge. Nor does Provincialism mean seeing things through the medium of one’s own habitat and character, both necessarily limited. All men must see, and can only see, through some such limited medium.

No, Provincialism means thinking that one “knows all about it”; Provincialism means a satisfied ignorance: a simple faith in the non-existence of what one has not experienced. Provincialism involves a contempt for anything foreign and, what is worse, an actual denial of things which the provincial person has not been made familiar with.

It is Provincialism in a yokel when he laughs at you for not knowing the way to his local railway station. It is not Provincialism to say, “I don’t know about this. It is new to me. I must examine it before I accept it.” But it is Provincialism to say, as the Frenchman in the story did of Joan of Arc, “It can’t be true. If it were I should have heard of it.”

It is not Provincialism to say, “I far prefer the atmosphere and institutions of my own country to those of any other.” But it is Provincialism to think that the Cathedral of Seville must necessarily be inferior to the Crystal Palace because it was built by Dagoes, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is either a humbug or a fool. It would not have been provincial in Mr. Wells to have written “the character of Napoleon repels me; give me rather the honest Englishman of my acquaintance than this hard and profound Southerner”; but it is dreadfully provincial to belittle Napoleon’s immense capacities. It would not be Provincialism in me, who do not know German, to say that Heine in translation had not moved me, and that when the German of Heine was read aloud to me it seemed to me harsh compared with the exquisite music of Keats; but it would be gross Provincialism in me were I to lay it down, ignorant as I am of German, that Heine was no poet, that his reputation was exaggerated, and that, say, Schiller was his superior in the management of the German tongue; yet that is how Mr. Wells treats Napoleon.

Now this vice of Provincialism runs right through Mr. Wells’s Outline of History from beginning to end.

The moment he is on a thing that is not of his own religion and social experience he rejects it or blunders on it. I shall have many occasions for pointing this out in my criticism of the book, but I may mention here, by way of example, one out of these many, to which I shall return. This is Mr. Wells’s hopelessly provincial attitude towards the fragmentary record of the Gospels. He can only think of the events recorded as though they were taking place in the time and place he himself has known—they took place, as a fact, in the first century and in the Roman Empire. He imagines them taking place in a world where the supernatural elements of the story could only have been introduced gradually and after the death of the founder; whereas, in point of fact, the atmosphere of that time was in every class of society especially apt to the reception of the supernatural. There was scepticism among them—but the scepticism of society in the first century was not like our scepticism and—quite apart from the question whether such a state of mind were wise or unwise—the men of the first century accepted the Thaumaturge and expected the marvellous in connection with religion.

The next disadvantage which I find in Mr. Wells for the writing of an outline of History is one which he has developed somewhat late in his life, which is more and more warping his writing as a whole, and which is quite fatal to any attempt at History. This is his entertaining unreasoning reactions which one may now without exaggeration term rabid.

These reactions have a common root. They are all provoked by anything traditional. It is Tradition, its usage and Nobility which irks our author. Lineage offends him, and whatever is venerable and great.

He suffers these reactions against the Gentry—especially the Gentry of his own country—against soldiers, great military characters in history, against certain contemporaries of his, but, most of all, against the Catholic Church. To be thus provoked to action by others—not to direct one’s pen of one’s own initiative, but to have it jerked into action by the strength of another—is weakening to all authors, but it is death to the historian. For History, of all forms of writing, most demands a general and balanced action of the mind, free from all control save that of a calm, inward judgment.

Here I would have my reader note the exact words I use; for I use them with discretion and after having fully weighed them. I do not mean that the dislike of a particular type—such as that of the English gentleman—or of certain individuals, or of a powerful institution, such as is the Catholic Church—necessarily makes a man a bad historian. Every vivid writer must have affections and distastes, and History that is not vivid is not worth writing. But when the distaste becomes unreasoning through violence, when it has that quality which we call “rabid”—a quality of impulse and unrestraint, the quality which makes men yell or pile on superlatives or descend to mere insult—then you have a quality useful perhaps in pamphleteering, but fatal to the reputation of an historian.

I do not mean that this quality is to be deplored in all writing or speaking: far from it. It is of great value in rhetoric; it will often move men in the direction desired; it is often justly applied to something evil against which an honest indignation is felt. What I do say is that in History it is out of place in proportion to its being unreasoning: and unreason is the very essence of these instinctive reactions. Cobbett’s History of the Reformation, for instance, is a first-rate piece of literary work, but bad history, because in his hatred of the Reformation he accepts anything against it—such as the impossible story of Anne Boleyn being Henry VIII’s daughter—and loses the faculty for weighing evidence.

To judge by his books, Mr. Wells came up against the English idea of a Gentleman early in life. He probably thought it an illusion, and a harmful one, from the first. Very many will here agree with him. But later on he became obsessed by the thing. He came to hate everything connected with what used to be called in England “the governing class.” He grew to hate Latin and Greek because these are, or were, the basis of a gentleman’s schooling; soldiering, because it was by tradition a gentleman’s profession—he hates it all, even down to the spurs worn by officers.

But Mr. Wells’s violent and blind reaction against the Catholic Church is a much more important matter. Here he is quarrelling with the very matter of History; for the foundation and career of the Catholic Church is the chief event in the history of mankind.

To judge (again) by his books, Mr. Wells seems to have come up against the Catholic Church late in life—he does not yet really know what it is. But here, again, he found a power opposed to many ideas which he cherished, and (more exasperating) to many things which he sympathized with and practised. Perhaps he felt that in a world turned Catholic a man like himself would have difficulty in carrying on, and therefore came to hate the idea of a world turned Catholic as a fish would hate the idea of a world without water. But this mere impulse—this mere instinctive kick, lacking sufficient knowledge and lacking reasoning power—this mere attack without any sufficient ammunition of instruction—this mere impatience—makes it impossible for the man who suffers thus to write History as it should be written.

For instance, his hatred of the Church makes him wish to believe that its influence is dying. Instead of looking around him, and seeing that Catholic influence over the more intelligent of modern men is markedly increasing, he shuts his eyes and screams his passionate refusal to accept so plain, if unpalatable, a fact. It has recently led him to write that sufficient income and interesting occupation would make Catholic priests pour out of the Church en masse: a judgment clearly ridiculous.

Again, in dealing with the Galileo case, he will have it that the advance of physical science broke down the Catholic scheme. The motive of such a statement is clearly to suggest that the Faith is incompatible with real knowledge and that all extension of ascertained truth tends to destroy the Christian Religion.

But that is not rational history; it lacks even elementary instruction; a schoolboy ought to know better than to write thus. The historical process whereby so much of Europe was lost to European religion was not first an advance of physical science, then a loosening of the Catholic authority, and, lastly, a wide denial of that authority and the establishment of various heresies. The historical process was just the other way—first came the violent explosion of spiritual revolt and anarchy which nearly wrecked our civilization altogether; then, later, a large but not complete recovery; then, last, and principally in societies which had retained or recovered the Catholic culture, a new and remarkable advance in physical science.

It is not historically possible that astronomical discovery in the seventeenth century, the telescope, and the great new development of mathematics, could lead to the denial of Catholic doctrine in the sixteenth. Not only is it impossible in History; it could not possibly be true in psychology. No one with an elementary knowledge of Catholic spirit and doctrine could conceive that doctrine and spirit to be affected by any discovery in the plane of physical science. You might as well say that a man’s judgment on his duties to his country would be affected by a new ordnance survey, or his admiration of Bach by the discovery of zinc photography for printing music.

With all this I will deal later in more detail when I come to those parts of Mr. Wells’s work which specially show his general animus against the Faith. Meanwhile, let me conclude with another disadvantage which I find in him for the task he has undertaken. It is the inability he has shown for consulting the right people.

It is a laudable thing in any popular novelist who has acquired a large public and can attract its attention to set out with the sincere intention of instructing his fellow-beings, even in a department wherein he has had hitherto no practice.

Thus some such popular novelist might say to himself: “I think people ought to know more about the laws of health. I will therefore use my wide circulation and my large audience for the purpose of spreading knowledge upon hygiene.” There is nothing blameworthy in this, nor need the effort be insufficient. The popular novelist, being hitherto ignorant of modern medicine, would have to go for instruction to men who were already experienced in the matter: he would have to read certain textbooks; he would have to “get up the subject,” and might, if he selected his tutors and guides with a good flair for the right sources, produce a really useful elementary treatise upon a matter of which he had, till lately, known nothing. His name being well known to the multitude, his little effort would probably have a wide sale, and that wide sale would do nothing but good. But it is essential that he should make himself acquainted with the difference between what was certain and what was hypothetical; with the most recent debates upon disputed points; with at least the main arguments on either side, etc., and it would further be essential that he should hear the latest results of research. For though a theory is not better than another merely for being later than that other, yet as there is new fact continually being discovered, and new arguments concluded, their bearing upon theory must be appreciated.

Now, Mr. Wells has been very remiss indeed in this duty of consulting the right authorities, before sitting down to write even so elementary a history as this “Outline” of his. He had, at the outset, not more faculty for writing an elementary history than any other best-seller might have for writing a book on elementary mathematics; indeed, a good deal less, for our schools give a certain amount of elementary training in mathematics, but as yet no training to speak of in history. But it was manifestly apparent from the first issue of his book that Mr. Wells was rarely given the latest historical theories, let alone the latest historical discoveries.

What is more extraordinary in a man so interested in such things, he does not know the modern trend of controversy in Pre-history and Anthropology. He remains away back in what I may call “the early Golden-Bough-Period”—that of Grant Allen’s Evolution of the Idea of God in Pre-history. From internal evidence it would seem, as I shall point out in the text, that his studies in these matters stopped short—or at any rate crystallized—in 1893, the date of Ball’s book on Croll’s Theory of Glaciation and of the Weissmann articles in the Contemporary Review.

And I am appalled to discover that he knows nothing of all the modern work against Darwinism, in which system—that is, in Darwinian Natural Selection—he retains the simple faith of the day—over thirty years ago—when he was “doing” elementary science in a class.

It is the same with the recorded history of Europe. His informers referred him to no books wherein he might learn what force that Catholic Church was which made Europe. He did not compare—perhaps he never heard of—the various sources ascribed to our main political institutions, and the increasing evidence for their Latin origin.

Now these disadvantages taken together have ruined the book. Had they not done so, I should have taken for Catholic readers a different line. I should have said: “This History is full of knowledge; its statements in Anthropology and Biology are cautious and well balanced, its conclusions on historical cause and effect are correct; its knowledge of fundamental historical processes, though slight, is sound: the outline is just. Nevertheless, do not follow the author in his antagonism to the Faith, in defence of which we have arguments both historical and philosophical of such and such a kind.” As it is, my task is an easier one. I can say to my readers: “Mr. Wells’s sketch of History is not insincere in spirit; it is simply out of drawing from lack of common instruction. He has not kept abreast of the modern scientific and historical work. He has not followed the general thought of Europe and America in matters of physical science. While, in history proper, he was never taught to appreciate the part played by Latin and Greek culture, and never even introduced to the history of the early Church.

“And this is the more remarkable as he assures us that he has a wide knowledge of modern languages, in which he reads French like English, and can handle German, Spanish, Italian and even Portuguese.

“With all this Mr. Wells suffers from the very grievous fault of being ignorant that he is ignorant. He has the strange cocksureness of the man who only knows the old conventional textbook of his schooldays and thinks it universal knowledge.”

So much for the general consideration of the author, and of what he has attempted, and failed, to do. I next turn to the particular consideration of points in his writing which will illustrate the truth of the contentions I have advanced in this Introduction.

CHAPTER II
MR. WELLS AND THE CREATION OF THE WORLD

Mr. Wells sets out to recite not only History properly so-called, the known and conscious records of the human race, but also Pre-history, i.e. our knowledge, little as it is, of life on this earth prior to the advent of man or his predecessors, and of man himself prior to any surviving record.

In the department of Pre-history the first task which meets the writer is that of telling the order in which, according to the geological record, the rocks composing the earth’s surface were presumably laid down, and the order in which the vestiges of life appear in these rocks.

This task Mr. Wells has successfully performed. Anyone can put down the main known facts in their order, for it is a mere matter of reference to encyclopædias; but Mr. Wells has done so with concision, lucidity and accuracy: qualities which are apparent here as throughout the work. He is even careful to modify phrases which might be too absolute. For instance, he tells us that astronomers “give us reason to believe the slowing down of the rotation of the earth,” instead of saying, as many another would, “have proved....” He also acts with sense in giving very wide limits to the guesswork of modern physicists upon the scale of time by which we should judge the geological process, though he does not warn his readers, as he should do, that it is only guesswork, and that the deductions upon which it depends are taken from first principles, which are many of them incapable of verification and others mere hypotheses.

It is, perhaps, asking too much of our author to adopt a strictly scientific attitude: that is, to distinguish between hypothesis and proved fact. And this is particularly true of a study so full of hypothesis as geology. Men pretend to vastly more knowledge than they have in that branch of knowledge—as, for instance, on the rate of stratification. A man cannot but be influenced by his own time, and Mr. Wells is influenced by the unscientific loose thinking and insufficiently supported affirmations of his generation and place.

The chief mark of our time is a decline in the logical faculty, and with that decline goes an increasing inability to distinguish between what is proved, what is probable and what is possible only. It is in fields (such as Pre-history) where very little indeed is known, and where there is immeasurable room for making things up out of one’s head, that the distinction between fact and fancy is most easily lost. Only a minority in Europe have appreciated as yet how small a proportion of what passes for ascertained fact upon the remote past is really known, and how vast a proportion is based upon mere analogy or such quite unproved assumptions. Among our older men dogmatic affirmation of much that is already disproved, and much that is increasingly doubtful, continues. Such a profound remark as Ferrero’s “The men of the nineteenth century thought they knew everything, we know that they knew nothing,” would shock them to hear.

Allowing, then, for that natural tendency towards repeating in age what one was dogmatically taught in youth, Mr. Wells’s précis of the geological process is quite exceptionally good.

He also states clearly our present ignorance upon the origin of life; our failure, so far, to find a link between organic and inorganic; and even our inability to affirm—what is presumable upon analogy and was taken for granted in antiquity and during the Middle Ages—that living proceeds from dead matter.

All this done, however, Mr. Wells tackles the fundamental question of Creation—and here, at once, the fundamental weakness of the book appears: at its very outset on page 11.

The author becomes deeply concerned with a discussion peculiar to his own local society, and of a sort so childish that a thinking man has difficulty in taking it seriously: the discussion between the old-fashioned Protestant who thinks of creation as a sort of conjuring trick and the new-fashioned one who cannot believe in creation at all because he has discovered (rather late in the day) that things grow.

The old-fashioned Bible Christian thought that the Hen appeared mature in a twinkling, out of air, like the mango tree of the Indian jugglers. His newly enlightened son has discovered that it comes from an egg. Mr. Wells, upon this page 11, appears in the rôle of the newly enlightened, and is most earnest to convince his erring and belated fellows that life can have come into existence as a “natural” process: an idea which he conceives as repugnant to “religious” minds. It is astonishing that either of these two back-waters of culture should survive: the back-water of the Bible Christian enlightened by elementary “science,” which gets rid of a Creator, and the back-water of the not yet enlightened Bible Christian, who can’t think of creation except as the sudden appearance of familiar objects out of surrounding space. We may wonder with amusement what Mr. Wells would make of such a Catholic sentence as “God made this oak.” I suppose he would think it a confusion of acorns with God. He should read St. Thomas.

However, though the philosophy is pitiable, the précis of familiar facts in this summary of observed origins is very well done, and all these statements, though they are no more than what you may find in any popular textbook, are put much better than in most.

So much for Mr. Wells’s brief summary of the geological evidence as given in all our encyclopædias and books of reference. It is most readable, and accurately presents the ascending complexity of vegetable and animal life in the past.

But the man writing upon this process has another and far harder task to perform than the mere cataloguing of facts set down in textbooks. There comes a moment when he must try to solve a certain problem: when he must think. He must face a question which is as old as human enquiry, and which searches the very depths of his own nature and of the world around him. It is this:—

“Under the action of what Force did this difference between various kinds of living things come to be? Under what Cause did the organism differentiate and meet its environment, and develop into its myriad forms each fulfilling a function? What mind was at work, if any; and if no mind, then what?”

That question is the one capital enigma, the pre-eminent riddle of life set to the enquiry of man. For centuries upon centuries he has examined it and has found no reply, save in mystery.

A lifetime ago a group of men, intolerant of fundamental philosophical enquiry and intolerant of mystery, thought they had found the answer in a very simple and wholly mechanical method which explained Evolution in a new way. They called this method “Natural Selection,” and thereby—as they hoped—all necessity for design in the universe could be eliminated.

What that theory of Natural Selection was, I describe in a moment. It must suffice here to say that it made Evolution subject to blind chance—and that to-day it is quite dead.

It is characteristic of Mr. Wells’s work that now, in 1926, he still gives in all simplicity that exploded answer, which was so fashionable in the nineties. Mr. Bernard Shaw said the other day, with native charity, that no one under seventy still believed in Natural Selection. Page 16 of this new Part I of Mr. Wells’s book shows that Mr. Shaw estimated too highly the intelligence and culture of his contemporaries.

To trot out Natural Selection at this time of day as the chief agent in Evolution is almost like trotting out the old dead theory of immutable and simple elements in a popular chemistry. That is what was taught as chemistry when Mr. Wells was young, and Natural Selection was what was taught as the cause of differentiation between living beings when Mr. Wells was young. The one error is to-day nearly as obsolete as the other. There is still continuing the remains of an obstinate defence, urged by the strongest of human motives, religion: for there are still those who agree with Weissmann that Natural Selection must be maintained at all costs, and with no matter what fantastic affirmations, because “It is the only alternative to Design” in the Universe—that is, to God.

But there can be no doubt which way the battle has turned.

When Driesch said, twenty long years ago, “Darwinism is dead,” he was hardly premature.

To quote him now is to repeat a commonplace.

Let me not be misunderstood. I should not criticize Mr. Wells for ignorance if he had written thus: “Many explanations have been given of how Evolution has worked. The Ancients ascribed it to some inherent power in living things which they called ‘entelechy,’ i.e. the power to realize an end. The eighteenth century, led by Lamarck, tended at its close as did the earlier nineteenth to something similar, but emphasized the will and effort of the organism. In the mid-nineteenth century there was proposed by Darwin and Wallace a new mechanical explanation which got rid of design and of ‘an end’ to which organisms worked. Its authors called it ‘Natural Selection.’ For a short time it was so completely the fashion that it seemed impregnable. But Criticism soon began, and grew menacing by the end of the century. With the opening of the twentieth this Criticism had grown greater by far in volume and force, especially in America and on the Continent. To-day it seems overwhelming. None the less, I hold to those who with many modifications still maintain the old theory.”

But Mr. Wells did not write thus, with an appreciation of the position as it stands to-day. He set down Natural Selection in all its crudity as an admitted final truth, a piece of unquestioned modern science, and left his unfortunate readers under that impression.

To do that is morally inexcusable save on the plea of ignorance of all that vast bulk of criticism with which the average educated man is generally acquainted—at least as to its main results. And if he plead such ignorance as his excuse, then he admits himself quite unfitted to put forward even the simplest outline of Evolution to-day.

The point is one of first-class importance, for it illustrates at once the fixity and the weakness of that anti-Catholic—and irrational—spirit which will support any thesis however blown upon, so it be still of some service against the Christian Faith.

Let me give as briefly as possible the story of this old-fashioned theory of Natural Selection—which seemed so convenient for getting rid of God—and of its breakdown. I will first note the motives under which it arose during the mid-nineteenth century; next describe the theory itself; after that, give the arguments by which it was more and more shown to be untenable. Those arguments have long been familiar to all educated Europe.

Organic Genetic Evolution, i.e. the theory that one kind of living being arises from another kind, is as old as human observation and human thought. Common experience suggests it to everyone, because we know of no way in which living beings can appear upon earth save as the product of other living beings.

When, therefore, men first took notice of, say, donkeys and horses, or tigers and cats, they naturally said to themselves, “These things look as though they had a common ancestor.” The next step is to suppose that there would be a common ancestor to more widely different types. It is even admissible, though not probable, that all life on this earth sprang from one very simple origin. Our old Pagan forefathers—those of them who were civilized—discussed all this centuries ago, and the Fathers of the Christian Church spoke in the same terms.

Though criticism, and instruction in physical science as well, declined in the Dark Ages, and though popular imagination had then, as ever, a simple imagery, the idea was not so much contradicted or denied as neglected.

In the Middle Ages it reappears, very vaguely, under the conception of Mediate Creation. God is the Creator of every living thing. Yet every living thing has a parent or parents. That is an example of Mediate Creation; and it at once suggests the idea that groups as well as individuals might originate in the same way. Indeed, St. Thomas, the great teacher of the Middle Ages, by concluding exceptionally that the creation of Man was not mediate, but direct, implies the possibility or probability of Mediate Creation for organisms other than Man.

With the growth of Modern Science in the eighteenth century full discussion of the Idea was revived, and from a hundred and fifty years ago Evolution was discussed throughout educated Europe. During the nineteenth century a great mass of evidence was accumulated in its favour, and to-day it is almost (but not quite) universally held by specialists who have authority to speak upon such matters.

It is true that the process Organic Evolution may have taken becomes more and more doubtful as modern research and debate advance.

Have the various species of Plants and Animals branched out from one original living cell or from many? It is uncertain.

Have the new origins of life appeared in succession and separately at long intervals of time? It is possible or probable.

Is transformism, that is, the change of one fully-developed mature and complex type into another, true? For instance, could a Reptile have changed into a Bird? Half a lifetime ago nearly everybody answered “Yes.” To-day—especially since the great work of Vialleton—more and more people are answering “No.”

These and any number of other doubts and criticisms—and some disproofs—have arisen in our time, though Evolution in the widest sense of the word—that is, the doctrine that living things are genetically connected, is still the main doctrine taught and held in Biology.

But Evolution in general is not the point. It involves no fundamental issue. It clashes with no theology or philosophy, unless we dignify by those terms an attachment to pictures of ready-made beasts in the family Bible. It is when men come to discuss how the difference between varying types arose that we enter at once upon a quarrel between opposing philosophies, Christian and anti-Christian. No Catholic, nor indeed any man possessed of a philosophy, would trouble himself much over the confirmation or disproof of Evolution. Evolution simply means continuous growth; a tree growing from a seedling is an example of evolution; growth is the universal phenomenon apparent in ourselves and all organic life around us, and to discover it generalized is no shock, but rather an extension of the obvious.

But when we come to ask how and why the vast variety of living things past and present grew and differentiated as they did: whether a Spirit is at work or no: whether the process be intended or motiveless—then the essential quarrel is engaged between those for whom the Universe is blind and those who see it to be the work of God.

That quarrel, which had long been acute in the general field of philosophy, became acute in the particular field of Biology in the late middle of the nineteenth century—over sixty years ago.

Darwin and Wallace and their school belonged to a generation—lived in a place and a time—to which the mysterious action of Will upon the Universe—and, indeed, any mystery—was incomprehensible. Mystery in any form the typical nineteenth-century “Liberal”—as he was called abroad—rejected; and it has been well said that his very politics were founded on the idea that even human life was not mysterious.

We must remember that they had but just escaped—most of their fellow-citizens were still plunged in—the base Puritan superstitions of the seventeenth century. The Vision, the Shrine, the Miracle, the Supernatural in Sacred Place and Thing, they had become too dull to grasp. It was inevitable that such particular rejections of mystery should lead at last to the more general rejection of Divine Action. At the same time they were in reaction against the old Puritan Bibliolatry, which, in their ignorance of Catholic truth, they thought of as “orthodoxy.”

It occurred to them, after doing a great deal of work upon the evidence for transformism—that is, for the change of one living type into another—that the (to them) impossible idea of Design could be eliminated; and it was under the more or less conscious action of a prejudice against Design that they propounded this theory of Natural Selection.

The process of their prejudice against Design moved as follows:

“We must never have recourse to Mind in order to explain the Universe; that would be ‘unscientific’; for to be ‘scientific’ is to allow for nothing but material causes. Therefore the appearance of separate kinds of living beings 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 and maintained in a Creative Will. Here is a theory which will make the whole process entirely mechanical and dead.” Incidentally, it made it possible to get rid of the necessity for a Creator. It was upon that aspect and use of the theory that the enemies of religion immediately seized, and it is precisely because it is supposed to get rid of God the Creator (and Judge) that some defence for Natural Selection is still being kept up, especially (in part from Patriotism) among Darwin’s fellow-citizens, but also abroad.

Darwin thought (and so did Wallace, who was a man of exactly the same type, belonging to the same generation and surroundings) that since the mysterious action of Will in the Universe was out of tune with his own mood, the evident order and purpose of organic life must be explained in another way, by the action of dead, unintelligent forces.

Whether God could create, did He choose, by the action of blind chance, trained theologians may decide. But it is obvious that if a system of blind chance were demonstrably true, those great modern intellects who say in their hearts “There is No God” have a powerful weapon, in the Theory of Natural Selection. They seized that weapon with gusto; and they are still desperately clinging to the handle though the business part of the instrument has long been battered shapeless by their conquering opponents.

Here I must pause to make an important point. I have said that the motives which made the first theorizers incline to an atheist solution were not consciously atheist. Indeed, it was characteristic of their generation that they could not define their own first principles. Further, they lived at a time when Christian principles were still powerful around them in the Protestant middle classes of England, and probably they honestly desired to combine incompatibles.

I want to make this point quite clear, because it is one upon which there has been a great deal of misunderstanding.

Neither Darwin nor Wallace, nor a host of other lesser known people who were all theorizing in much the same way a lifetime ago, were philosophic atheists after the type of the great Lucretius.[^[1]] They were not of that calibre. None of them could think out a consistent philosophical theory, true or false. Most of them would have told you, in a muddle-headed sort of way, that they reverently believed in a Creator, while actively preaching the crudely mechanical and accidental processes which alone they could grasp.

[1]. It is more accurate to say of Lucretius that he did not deny the Gods: only their action on our affairs. But the great Epicurean philosophy of Antiquity was essentially Atheist, though in a form far nobler than the vulgar “No Goddism” of yesterday.

But though these men characteristically confused themselves about what they did and did not ultimately believe (or rather feel) in religion—i.e. what their ultimate philosophy really was—any modern reader, especially any reader with the clear intelligence of the Catholic, can see what was running through their emotional brains. The idea of Design was intolerable to them. It was inextricably connected in their minds with what they thought the word “Creation” meant. They had been taught in their childhood that “Creation” meant millions and millions of quite separate, mature, complicated things appearing suddenly, unconnected one with the other: magic full-grown oak trees without acorns to grow from.

To get rid of this folly they took refuge in another, and produced that theory of “Natural Selection” which seemed to them to account for the different types of living beings without having to admit a conscious and permanent Divine Intention. It seemed to them to solve, in a simple fashion any child could understand, the awful and ancient riddle which has perplexed Europe for certainly three thousand years, and perhaps much more. To the question, “How did differentiation among living organisms come to be”? they thought they had got the answer on what was virtually an atheist basis—a getting rid of intelligence from the Universe. They would not admit a Divine Plan of the oak tree and an inherent power, tending towards that end, implanted in the acorn. They called a profound view of this sort “mysticism,” using that word as a term of abuse—and using it, of course, in a totally wrong meaning. No, they would get their oak and elm out of some general parent tree without an Idea being at work, without Fiat, without an underlying Spirit.

So they propounded the theory of Natural Selection.

The theory of Natural Selection was this:

No living thing can possibly be exactly like its parent: for every organism is individual. The difference may be very slight, but it is always present.

Now, it is also obviously true, from experience, that the conditions under which organic beings live—what is called their environment, i.e. their surroundings—change unceasingly. That again is necessarily true if the material Universe be, as it is, under the condition of Motion. These surroundings are perpetually changing slightly; sometimes they change suddenly and catastrophically, as, for instance, when there is a flood.

Now, some particular change—as, for instance, the climate getting gradually colder or wetter or dryer—will suit some particular small variation apparent in a certain proportion of any given set of organic beings. For instance, out of a million sheep-like animals, ten thousand must in different degrees have very slightly woollier coats than the common run, and, if the climate is slowly getting colder, this minority of woollier sheep are better suited to the change.

All organisms die; but those better suited to a particular surrounding condition have a greater chance of survival than those less suited. (This dreadfully self-evident truth was solemnly set down in an academic formula: it was called “Survival of the Fittest,” or, more clumsily, “Survival of the Fitter”!) Bit by bit, therefore, through the mechanical process of the slightly less fit specimens dying off more rapidly, and leaving presumably less progeny, while a small number of slightly more fit lived longer and presumably left more progeny inheriting their advantages, the type of animal could be, and was, by the blind action of matter and with no necessity for its own or any other will, and with no design in the process at all, adapted to the changing condition. Since conditions are always changing, organic types (i.e. living things, vegetable and animal) were perpetually conforming to their environment by this process of “Survival of the Fittest,” wherein a mechanical process inevitably and blindly picked out—selected—(whence the term “Natural Selection”) those who were to survive and form a new type. In this fashion all organic things came to be what they are at any particular moment and also to change perpetually into new things.

This doctrine of Natural Selection was thus made to explain the diversity and the unity of the living world.

Let us see how some simple organism, living on the tidal belt of the sea-shore (between high and low water-mark), and able both to exist in the air and under water will, according to the doctrine of Natural Selection, differentiate out and produce a land animal. Out of a million of these organisms there are, perhaps, ten thousand in which you can discover some slight superiority, present in varying degrees among them, for standing a long dry spell. There are another ten thousand who show in varying degrees some tiny, almost imperceptible, superiority of standing a long spell without air under water. Raising of the land or the set of winds gives a season of abnormally low high tides. The animals just on the upper edge of the tidal belt die out for lack of their regular tidal supply of water, except some few who can, having the slight differential advantage apparent among them, stand the strain of living so long in the air. The progeny of these, again, will tend to survive according to the degree in which they can stand the lack of water about them. The less fit for air-life are gradually sifted out by this natural process; the more fit for air-life survive.

There is the theory of “Natural Selection” in its broadest outline. It was excellently adapted to the generation for which it was produced. It looked as simple as the old theory of Free Trade did in economics, or the old theory of Universal Suffrage in politics, or any other of the old crude mechanical conceptions born of the denial of mystery. It accounted for everything straightforwardly and at a blow. If you used its loose phraseology repeatedly, without ever gripping the full implication of the terms, without the capacity for holding a theory down hard and examining it closely, it seemed perfectly sufficient—and the old riddle was solved.

“Natural Selection,” “the Survival of the Fittest,” the very gradual and quite blind, purposeless, undesigned forcing of the living organism into correspondence with its material environment, the formation of the living thing by the pressure of the nonliving—of death—was sufficiently proved. All the old ideas of Design, the looking for mysterious forces at work in the world, and for a Mind behind it all in order to explain the suitability of each organ to its function, could be scrapped. There was no creative God required. Those who wanted to be rid of Him could (and did) say that men had only imagined such a Being from an ignorant projection of themselves on to the Universe. It was not life that transformed itself to meet and master matter, but (as Delage admirably put it in his refutation of Darwinism) matter which, through death, ordered life.

Such was the theory of Natural Selection.

Now, as we are about to examine why this theory of Natural Selection is untenable, and to discover why it burst after so very short a fashionable run, we must, by way of preliminary, clearly understand its implications. We must understand—what its original promoters did not—the things which, whether you know it or not, you are accepting when you accept Natural Selection. After that we can understand the arguments which have destroyed it.

Put as I have just put it, and as it used to be put in all the old-fashioned textbooks of Mr. Wells’s youth, it sounds not only simple, but convincing It is when one looks into what it implies that the old Darwinian theory of Natural Selection gets shaky.

THE IMPLICATIONS OF NATURAL SELECTION

(1) In the first place, note that, according to this theory, there can be no stable type; there can be no fixity of species. All is in flux. Environment is never exactly the same, even for two days at a time, let alone for two successive thousand years. Very long slow changes in climate, or any other factor of environment, would necessarily involve long, unceasing, slight transformation, never halting. The theory necessarily demands a living world in a state of slow but incessant transformation, with no fixed mature results at the end of development.

It is only by the loosest sort of thinking, and by substituting imagination for close reasoning, that the ideas of Natural Selection and permanent stable types can be reconciled.

Thus some have said that the Seal was “sifted out” by Natural Selection, got more and more suited to its habitat by “survival of the fittest,” until it had no further need for adaptation: it was at last perfectly adapted to the purposes of its life.

Well, one of the most pressing needs of the seal under the conditions of its life is to scramble on to the icefloes in order to escape from its most deadly enemy. It does so most clumsily and ineffectually by the help of its flappers. For countless generations Natural Selection has had time to work if it were capable of bettering that state of affairs by producing flappers more serviceable. It has not done so. Why? Not because the seal is “in equilibrium,” but because, however it may have evolved, it is now a fixed type: mature: it is what is and can now no longer change its fundamental structure.

It is true that Darwin and others talk vaguely of the process “reaching equilibrium,” but that, according to his own theory, is a contradiction in terms. Under Natural Selection there can be none such.

Darwin, Wallace, and the rest did not think clearly enough to see that this was so, but so it is. If a hare runs fast because it has developed its speed through an immense series of faster and faster hares who “survived” because their speed made them “fitter” to escape enemies, then the process demands that the speed shall continually increase. Your hare of 1925 that can cover the measured mile in three and a half must develop into your hare of A.D. 20,000 who can cover it in three: for there is no doubt whatsoever that an increase of speed has survival value. And he must be developing all the time. There is no escape from that conclusion, if the theory of Natural Selection held water: which it doesn’t.

That is the first necessary result of Natural Selection. If the theory of Natural Selection is true there are not now, and cannot have been in the past, fixed types recognizable by marked and permanent characters.

(2) Next, observe that the theory of Natural Selection also demands a regular progression, and a very slow one. It involves, for instance, the development of a land animal out of a water animal by an immense accumulation of exceedingly slight differences in each generation, favourable to a water animal’s longer and longer bouts of staying out of water. These exceedingly slight differences in each generation are presupposed to be only such as we always observe between parent and child. Darwinian Natural Selection as a prime cause can admit no rapid, startling changes.

For it presupposes a purely blind, unintentional, “sieve-like” action, not merely as killing off the unfit—which is obvious—but as producing gradually increasing fitness, with no inherent power in the organism for adaptation. According to Darwinian Natural Selection, what works the change is a vast number of successive tiny differences such as always appear between parent and progeny.

To turn out, for instance, the white bear of the Arctic from the general undifferentiated type of subfusc beardom you must have hardly perceptible steps beginning with the slightly lighter hue of a few bears, and proceeding gradually for æons and æons until only the pure white survived (though however one could get at pure white by such a process it would have puzzled them to say!)

Natural Selection, then, imperatively demands for each species a slow ascension, a regular, inclined plane, produced over a prodigious space of time, in which the animal is getting whiter and whiter, or fleeter and fleeter, or what not, by infinitesimal degrees.

The theory of Natural Selection necessitates the presence, in all fossils, and even during any considerable historical period, of increasing progressive slight differences in type.

It is no good saying that Natural Selection might apply to new highly suitable variations coming at exactly the right moment to benefit the animal. Such variations indicate Design of some sort and Will. If the climate gets colder and very woolly types of an animal immediately begin to appear, that is not Natural Selection; that is a startling but obvious adaptation, due to some other cause, of organism to environment. It is the very negation of a blind, causeless, undefined, unwilled process which the theory of Natural Selection was intended to bolster up.

(3) Again, Natural Selection implies advance by the killing off of the organism not possessed of a specific advantage. How is it then that organisms not possessed of the advantage survive—as they certainly do—side by side with the advantaged and in the same environment? The Elephant’s trunk grew longer because the short-trunkites were killed off. What of the Tapir?

(4) Again, Natural Selection cannot allow itself to be ousted by any rival aid to development.

This is a very important point. The whole point of Natural Selection as the explanation of the difference between living beings is that it is mechanical. The moment you have to prop it up by saying “Animals with similar variations will tend to mate one with the other,” or “Striking change in environment will tend to produce corresponding variations,” you are abandoning Natural Selection, and covering up your retreat with mere verbiage. Why “tend”?

The theory of Natural Selection is a jealous god and it will admit no rival, nor even any support. You must make it your mainstay or give it up: for the whole point of it is that it permits you, if you will, to eliminate Will and Mind from the Universe. The moment you have to prop it up with some theory involving Will and Mind the essence of it disappears. Therefore does Weissmann, the most famous of its later defenders, ascribe to it “All-might” (to make a barbaric translation of his term) and desperately add that we “must” accept Natural Selection because the only alternative is design—that is God; the Inadmissible: the Dogmatically Denied.

Suppose a man to say, “No one threw that stone: it hit my window by the force of gravity.” Another then points out that a stone, merely falling, would have gone past the window, and that the stone, from the course it took, striking the window, must have been thrown by someone to take the glass at the angle it did. To this the man replies: “Well, yes, perhaps; but gravity influenced its course.” Clearly he has abandoned his case. He was arguing that the stone merely fell: that no Will or Design caused it to take the path it did. When he admits a thrower of the stone and merely brings in gravity as affecting the course of the stone he abandons his position altogether.

That is exactly parallel to the old-fashioned advocate of Natural Selection who reluctantly admits, on modern evidence—and mainly through the work of De Vries—great and rapid changes adapting animals to a new environment, but adds, “Anyhow, those that don’t change will be killed off.” Of course they will! But that isn’t the point. The point is that the killing off of the unfit is proved not to be the agent of change. The climate gets colder. Much thicker fleeces begin to appear. Such animals as don’t show the new thick fleeces begin to die out. Obviously!—But that doesn’t explain why the thicker fleeces began to appear. If you admit Mutation (the name for rapid change) or Saltatory Evolution (Evolution by jumps) poor old Natural Selection goes by the board.

In the same way Natural Selection does not mean that, upon a change of environment, things unsuitable to the new condition tend to disappear. Of course they do.

If there is a flood, fishes survive, cattle are drowned. The fishes are fitter to survive the flood than the cattle. And if the flood lasted long enough, there would at the end of it be plenty of fish and no cattle. But to talk of that as “Natural Selection” is to use the same word in two different senses.

The theory of Natural Selection as the agent of Evolution does not mean that floods drown cattle and don’t drown fish. We all know that. The theory means that successive floods turn cattle into fish—and that is a very different proposition!

The theory of Natural Selection does not mean that things die out when they cannot live; if it only meant that it would not be worth stating. It means that the chance of survival, through exceedingly small and inevitable slight differences between Parent and offspring, is the great cause producing the marvels in adaption and beauty and special action in a million forms which make up the life of this world. Its chief use has been to back up the denial of God, and now it has broken down the opponents of Design in the Universe must seek for a new reply.

They are still seeking it.

(5) Next note that the theory of Natural Selection implies a continual accumulation of fresh advantages; although for this there is no sort of necessity and, on a theory of blind chance, no possibility of such a thing. It is a mere gratuitous assumption with no reason behind it and all actual experiment against it. This is the point which Morgan (Professor of Experimental Zoology at Columbia University) so powerfully emphasizes in his critique of the Theory of Evolution which came out just after the war.

To apply the theory to that simple case of the animal on the tidal beach. Those with minute advantages over the average in the way of standing slightly longer immersion have survival-value over those who are only on or below the average. But why—by the mere blind selection of death—should the advantage accumulate from generation to generation? Why should new advantageous exceptions, each better than the last, appear in unbroken succession generation after generation?

(6) Lastly, there is the exceedingly important, the essential, point that, according to the theory of Natural Selection, each slight successive change in the whole series must give its possessor a survival-value. Not only must a fully formed flapper be an advantage (to a whale) over a leg, by the time it has become aquatic, but a half-formed flapper must be an advantage to the whale while it still uses the land. Clearly it was nothing of the kind. If transformism be true (which is not certain) then Design explains the leg into a flapper in spite of the intermediate disadvantages. If there is Design behind the transformation, if there is special protection for the heavily handicapped intermediate form, one can understand the possibility of it. Under Natural Selection it is impossible.

So much for the Implications of the Theory. I hope I have put them as clearly as may be, and accurately; not a very hard task, for it was an extremely crude and simple theory during its short life, and could be grasped (and refuted) by anyone.

Let me summarize these Implications.

(1) First, Change must be continual and types must be always in a state of flux. Stability of Type and Natural Selection form a contradiction in terms. You can have one or the other—but you cannot have both.

(2) Second, Natural Selection inevitably implies that, on searching the records of Evolution, we shall find only gradual change, proceeding continually, so that the ascending organisms follow, as it were, regular inclined planes showing no steps. The whole of Evolution should, under Natural Selection, prove to be of this kind. Thus you would have, say, tigers as they are now, gradually developing out of some tiger-like ancestor in the past by a regular and uninterrupted process, never achieving a fixed type but perpetually changing as time went on; and that perpetual change would be still going on to-day. The world about us would not show (as it does) a vast number of strongly separate types but a confused jumble of forms all melting one into the other.

(3) Third, Natural Selection presupposes Evolution through the killing off of individuals lacking certain advantages, how then do other types continue still to be with us in spite of lacking these advantages?

(4) Fourth, Natural Selection must stand or fall of itself. If you try to prop it up with Will or Design, inherent in the organism, or acting in any other fashion, you destroy its whole thesis. If you say, for instance, “the country becoming dryer, animals which adapted themselves to the new conditions survived, and those that could not adapt themselves died out,” that is no example of Natural Selection as an agent of Evolution. For when you say “Animals which adapted themselves to the new conditions,” you are presupposing some inherent power in the animal to adapt itself: you are presupposing a form of Will and Design, and thereby denying the purely mechanical action, the unintelligent “sieve,” of Natural Selection as an agent.

(5) Fifth, Natural Selection presupposes, quite gratuitously, that new survival values will be perpetually and progressively appearing. That sheep woollier than the average of a flock have survival value as the winters get colder is obvious: too obvious to need stating. But why should the next generation, under mere chance, produce a number of new still woollier variations, and the one after that yet another even woollier set; and so on indefinitely?

(6) Sixth, Natural Selection presupposes that in every stage of the slow process of development by infinitesimal differences, each successive difference is more advantageous than the last and has a special survival value.

A bird with fully formed wings has a survival value through being able to fly away from land enemies. But if it evolved from a reptile by Natural Selection, then each stage between the useful Reptilian fore-leg and the useful wing must have had a special advantage over the stage immediately preceding it. There must have been an advantage in the fore-leg getting stumpy, then in its getting stumpier, then its getting so stumpy that the beast couldn’t use it at all. And this must be true of every change in all the millions of tiny evolutionary changes proceeding through æons of time. All the way along, from the first signs of something which later on will be an advantage to the mature type, through myriads of generations, from the first origins when the organ was as yet rudimentary to the last when it was perfected, every step must have had a survival value over the last. And this must apply not only to broad cases, such as the reptile’s fore-leg turning into the bird’s wing, but to every one of innumerable organs and to every part of each organ. Otherwise the theory breaks down.

The implications then of Natural Selection as the blind agent of development, “give one furiously to think.” Merely stated roughly as I have done here, they shake the ordinary man’s confidence in it. But when we come to ordered proofs against it, we shall find those proofs conclusive.

To these I now turn.

THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST NATURAL SELECTION

When one has to examine any proposition and see whether it be true or no, two radically distinct forms of reasoning present themselves to the mind.

(A) You may find the thing asserted to be in itself impossible, granted certain self-evident principles of thought. For instance, a man who died on the 16th of the month cannot have died of poison taken on the 20th of the month. Or again, the sum of certain payments cannot be less than some one of those payments. This method is called the a priori method.

(B) The other approach made by reason to see whether a theory is true or false is the experimental one, that of positive evidence. You test, by the positive evidence at your disposal, whether the thing affirmed has really taken place or not. Sometimes the first of these methods is conclusive, in which case one has no reason to go any further. Sometimes, and more usually, the second is conclusive, and there is no opportunity or occasion to apply the first. For instance, if we are told that John Jones forged the will of a man who was born after John Jones’s death we know a priori that the story is nonsense. But if John Jones is said to have forged the will of a man who died while John Jones was still alive, then we must go into the evidence of handwriting and all the rest of it.

The reason that people rightly and necessarily supplement a priori reason in practical affairs by the experimental method is that a priori conclusions depend for their value on the rigid certitude of their premises. E.g. a man who died on the 16th cannot have died of poison bought on the 20th. But are we sure that the 16th is really the date of his death? To test that we require actual evidence.

One can conclude absolutely against a false theory by either of these two methods of reasoning. But when they concur, when you find the theory to be false both a priori and from the available evidence as well, then certitude could not be more certain: the combination of both methods of proof is overwhelming.

Now we shall see that this is exactly what happens in the case of this false theory of Evolution called Natural Selection. There are four crushing a priori arguments disposing of it, and, after that, there is overwhelming positive evidence against it, of which the main divisions are three in number.

The four conclusive a priori arguments are these:—

(1) Variations in nearly every case must continue to accumulate. Variations more and more advantageous must appear successively, Generation after Generation. This is not logically essential in every conceivable case, e.g. particoloured animals could grow whiter against snow. But in the vast majority of cases such accumulation is essential: e.g. to produce a taller type or to produce horns or to lengthen a tail.

Now the chances of such a regular series appearing by accident even in one case, let alone in millions, clearly approximate to zero.

(2) 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. On the same line of reasoning the chances of co-ordination between all the vastly numerous parts of one complex creature by accident approximate to zero.

(3) The chances of each very slight change being an advantageous one over the last in a series indefinitely prolonged of myriads or millions approximate to zero.

(4) Where more than one specially favoured progenitor is necessary to the production of an organism (e.g. among mammals, two, a male and female: with many plants three, a male and female and an insect go-between) the chance combination of such favoured progenitors accidentally and without design diminishes with each generation in geometrical ratio and rapidly approximates to zero.

The decisive character of these a priori arithmetical arguments will appear later.

Now for the arguments from evidence.

The arguments from evidence against Natural Selection come under three main heads:—

(1) Within humanly recorded historical experience no trace of such permanent progressive action is observable. There is no doubt of individual differences; there is also plenty of proof of slight changes swinging round the normal. There is manifest to every one differentiation of type: Negroes and Mongols among men for instance. But the main types are fixed. Negro and Mongol are both men. Man and other mature types are, within historical record, fixed. They are not on their way to becoming something else.

It is true that humanly recorded historical experience covers but a very brief fraction of the total time allowed for even the shortest estimates of the past of this world. None the less, it is sufficient to prove that types once achieved are permanent. Call it five thousand years (perhaps man-made prehistoric pictures may extend that limit), even that short period is enough to prove the existence of stable types. For if during five million years some animal form existing at the moment has been forever slowly changing by a process such that its present apparent fixity is an illusion, and is still proceeding to further slow changes indefinitely, then five thousand years ought to show a perceptible fraction of the movement; only a thousandth of it, no doubt, but one in a thousand is measurable: tiny, but measurable. Yet no fundamental change, still less any progressive change, is apparent. During all the historical epoch fixity of type is invariable.

(2) The geological record, so far from showing types perpetually in a state of flux, presents us with Fixed Types and Nothing but Fixed Types. A Fixed Type does not mean a Type which had no other Type for its ancestors; nor one which never passed through immature stages before reaching maturity. Nor does it mean a type without collaterals. It means a type which, when mature, is repeated indefinitely.

(3) The geological record does not as a fact show gradually progressive change by imperceptible degrees like an inclined plane, but on the contrary, a series of leaps, like a number of steps.

There, in brief summary, is a table of the main arguments which have undermined the old theory of Natural Selection.

I will now take them one by one:

(1) The first a priori argument against Natural Selection, that it presupposes quite arbitrarily that variations will accumulate, I have already dealt with.

(2) The second a priori argument against Natural Selection:

Natural Selection involves accidental survival-value not in one single feature but in many complex co-ordinated features all simultaneous and yet accidental. This without Design is mathematically impossible.

Natural Selection is usually spoken of by those who still put it forward for popular consumption in terms of one advantageous difference: for instance, slightly greater speed, slightly better protective colouring, etc. This escape from the difficulty is duly repeated here by Mr. Wells. He gives us, as an example of the way in which Natural Selection would work, the climate becoming more snowy and, of a number of whity-brown animals, the whiter tending to survive in each generation, and the quality of whiteness tending, therefore, to increase. No better instance could be found of the way in which this book merely follows (and repeats) the mistakes of a generation ago. For that instance of the whity-brown animal is the regular old tag which always cropped up whenever this theory of Natural Selection was advanced.

It should surely have been evident, even to the originators of the idea (as it is now at last evident to everybody worth counting), that what you need in order to adapt (a.) an animal to new circumstances, (b.) any developing function of a particular species, (c.) the development of many co-ordinated functions within one organism, is not one simple advantage, but an indefinitely large number of advantages, all of which have to be co-ordinated if survival-value is to be obtained.

When the climate gets colder, there will probably be more snow. But this is not the only thing that will happen. There will also be a change in the methods of progression over the surface of the earth. Paws advantageous for speed when there was no frost or snow may be disadvantageous when there is. There will also be a change in the things present for an animal to eat; many of the grasses and fruits present in the warmer time will presumably disappear and others better suited to the new, cold climate will increase. Again, a change of this kind does not take place in isolated fashion; it will be accompanied perhaps by longer nights in winter; probably by more cloudy skies, and by sudden floods in spring, and so on. Change of environment will nearly always mean not one, but a very great number of concomitant changes.

Change, then, in environment is always complex. But the organism which has to meet it is also complex, only because it is an organism. Every living organism is highly complex. It is its very complexity, that is, the vast number of its parts and the mysterious co-ordination between them, which makes it a living organism, and distinguishes it from dead matter. Even the simplest organic cell is chemically of a highly complex nature, and its principle of continuity is so different from a simple mechanical process that no one has ever been able to lay down a formula for it. In plain words, the very nature of a living organism escapes us on account of its complexity.

Here, then, you have a complex organism, consisting of an indefinitely large number of parts, all of which must be co-ordinated to the changed environment; and you have also an environment which, when it changes, changes not in one, but in a very large number of respects.

Now observe the inevitable, mathematical necessity of this relation. The environment changes not in one respect, or fifty, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in as many as you like to catalogue. The living animal consists not in one function, or a hundred, or a thousand, but in as many more as you care to examine. To every change of climate, or what not, there are an indefinitely large number of consequences. The organism has to be adapted to meet all the changes. But that living thing also must, in order to have a special survival-value, discover, somehow, a corresponding change in all its own innumerable functions. When such and such a proportion of the organisms shows one particular slight advantage for meeting one aspect of the change, such an advantage helps this favoured proportion, in that point only, to survive. But, in order to have special survival-value, the organism must also show advantages in every other respect. The chance of all these advantages coinciding in any one organism and accidentally corresponding to the very numerous changes in environment, is mathematically indistinguishable from zero. The animals with whiter coats than the average are not (if the matter be left to chance) the same as those with paws slightly better suited for snow than the average; nor are either of these the same as those with slight survival advantage over the average in digesting changed food—and so on with any number of conditions. Left to chance the combination could not arise. Yet it does arise.

It is equally true that the adaptations of function to function within each organism are vast in number and could never have arisen from blind accident.

This is the unanswerable point brought out half a lifetime ago and increasingly emphasized ever since.

Wolff put it admirably in his attack on Darwinism as early as 1898: “One might possibly imagine the adaptation between one muscle cell and one nerve-end, through Selection among innumerable chance-made variations, but that such shall take place in a 1000 cases in one organism is inconceivable.” And another great biologist has well said: “What is the survival value of horns without the structure to support them and muscles to use them?” Strange that Mr. Wells should never have heard of all this!

Animals are adapted, we know. They do co-ordinate an indefinitely large number of internal conditions to meet a whole complicated bundle of external conditions. They also have a myriad adaptions within themselves necessary to their existence as organisms quite apart from external change. But this could not possibly happen from blind chance. The mathematical chances are millions and millions to one against the possibility of such a thing. Grant Design moulding all nature—that is, God,—and this process is explicable. Grant even an inherent power possessed by the living thing to attempt its own adaptation, and the process is explicable. Leave it to the mechanical explanation of Natural Selection, and it is impossible.

(3) The third a priori proof against Natural Selection:

Natural Selection presupposes that each new infinitesimal stage in development out of millions in each type, is, by blind chance, an advantage over the last. This is mathematically impossible.

This third a priori proof that Natural Selection is a false theory lies in the simple consideration that it demands each stage in millions of stages in millions of types to show a survival-value. The chances against this being possible are many, many more millions than the number of stages multiplied by the number of types. The chance of a penny coming down heads a hundred times in succession is vastly less than one in a hundred; and when it comes to myriads of times, the chance is approximately zero. The chance of a hundred pennies chucked by a hundred men in unison doing this is far less. In other words, it can’t happen by chance.

Let me return to the case of the bird. 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 explain how the evolutionary process changes a reptile’s leg into a bird’s wing. It does so by making the leg less and less of a leg for countless ages.

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 skurry off on half-wings! or to fly with half-legs! The change took place?—No doubt. Some of our greatest Biologists say it didn’t and couldn’t. Most say it did. The hypothesis has much in its favour. But the change could not possibly have taken place by successive advantages any more than the turning of an egg into a full-grown hen takes place by successive survivals, or of a chrysalis into a moth.

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 stages of imperfection. Postulate Natural Selection, and it is manifestly impossible. Now Natural Selection wants that to happen not only with every kind of bird, but with every kind of living creature.

(4) The fourth a priori argument against Natural Selection:

When two or more progenital agents are required, Natural Selection, acting by blind chance alone, loses effect in geometrical proportion with each generation.

This argument is rather more difficult to follow than the first two, but it is worth understanding, because it is particularly strong, and because it was among the first rude blows against the Darwinian theory. Nägeli brought it out with crushing force as long ago as 1884—it is a commonplace with everyone—except Mr. Wells, who imagines (a great compliment!) that I made it up.

Where two or more progenitors are necessary, rare accidental advantages rapidly disappear in a few generations if the process be left to chance, as Natural Selection demands.

Suppose two progenitors required—as is the case with all animals—there are, of course, many cases in which the total number of factors necessary for the production of progeny is more than two and the argument far stronger, e.g. the pollen of one flower, the pistil of another flower, and the insect which acts as go-between. Take any proportion you like of slightly favoured specimens. Suppose out of a hundred individual males ten show in varying degrees the slight differentiation which gives them a survival-value under changing conditions of environment. It will not be anything like ten out of a hundred, and we have already seen that a single advantage is useless. But we can afford to give this nonsense every advantage in argument, so we will consider only one clear advantage and allow one-tenth of the males to have it. Now, suppose a similar number of females showing in varying degrees this slight valuable differentiation. Upon the mechanical theory of Natural Selection, the chances in favour of progeny inheriting that differentiation in the next generation are not one-tenth, but only one-tenth of one-tenth, i.e. one-hundredth. The chances of favoured progeny in the third generation are not one-hundredth, but one in ten thousand. In the fourth, the chances are already only one in a hundred million—which we may call zero.

The reason is clear. Here are a hundred male land birds compelled by change of environment to take to the water. Ten of them show an infinitesimal rudimentary webbing between the toes of their feet, and that is a first infinitesimal advantage in swimming. Ten hens are of the same kind. Left to mere chance there is no reason why a season’s mating should allocate the web-footed male to the web-footed female. Each one of the ten males has nine chances to one of paring with a non-advantaged mate, and only one chance of mating with a hen similar to himself and possessing, as he does, this infinitesimal advantageous differentiation. On the average you would have only one couple in each hundred handing on in full even that first tiny advantage to their progeny with a corresponding tiny survival-value. In the case of eighteen others it would be halved, and in the case of a hundred and eighty-one, it would be absent. It is so with each generation. Each little infinitesimal advantage can only be fully handed on to a fraction which is the square of the last, and in even diminished form to a fraction smaller in proportion to the flock in the third generation than in the second. Long before you got anything like an even rudimentary webbed foot the tiny advantage would have been absorbed. The advantage, left to chance, sinks into the common stock.

There is no getting away from this conclusion by saying, “Oh! we’re not talking of individuals, we’re talking of great masses.” The masses are made up of individuals, and the mathematical argument is exactly the same whether you are dealing with a hundred or ten million.

These four a priori arguments against the theory of Natural Selection as the agent of differentiation in species are as conclusive as arithmetic can make them, and there is really no need for any others—though many others have been urged—e.g. the mathematical chances against one special advantageous variation appearing by pure accident at exactly the time it was needed.

But, as I have said, apart from these a priori and sufficient arguments, there are conclusive arguments drawn from actual evidence, and all this evidence is in favour of this Fixed Type. A fixed type would be an impossibility under Natural Selection: it goes with a Creator and with Design; and certainly it is true of the real world.

Natural Selection, if it had been the agent of Evolution, would have prevented the formation of fixed types.

In the old materialist days when Natural Selection was triumphing, its supporters used to say, as we have seen, that it acted “until equilibrium was reached by the organism conforming to its environment.” That was typical of their hiding the weakness of their case under vague phrases which, closely analysed, proved self-contradictory.

If Natural Selection be the Agent of Evolution stability can never be reached. There is always some slight proportion of beings rather more suited to survive than the mass of its fellows, and that fact should cause a perpetual change rendering stability impossible.

A water-mammal has not “reached stability” when it can stay under water ten minutes, or an hour, or two hours. According to Natural Selection, it ought to progress unceasingly to longer and longer capacities of submersion. A swallow has not “reached stability” by Natural Selection when it flies sixty miles an hour; it ought to fly faster and faster with the process of time. It may well have reached stability in the sense that it is suited to its lot and makes no further effort. It may well have reached stability in the sense that its end has been achieved, its design completed. But if it got its fast flight only because a slightly faster minority of swallows always outlive and outbreed their slower rivals, by an assumed perpetual accumulation of little additions of speed, why should the process stop at the bird’s present capacity? Of course the series is a diminishing one. Each increment of speed is at a higher cost than the last. But no fast-flying bird has nearly reached a theoretical limit of speed—nor shows any tendency to reach it. Granted Design then an End,—a Fixed Type—a Normal to which individuals are planned and to which freak types tend to return—is explicable. Those who cannot bear the idea of Design, that is of a Creator implanting inherent powers, must try to invent some new theory which will allow of Fixed Types without Design. But if Fixed Types exist they cannot be due to Natural Selection, for Natural Selection and Fixed Types are contradictory terms.

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, while, all around us should be quarter-pigs, half-pigs, near-pigs, all-but-pigs, slightly super-pigs, just beginning—and so on. But there aren’t. There are just pigs. In other words, the evidence is all in favour of Fixed Types and all against a ceaseless process of change.

(1) We have the evidence of our senses that we are surrounded by Fixed Types, and are Fixed Types ourselves. We have all about us species, including man, which remain distinct species during all our experience and as far back as historical record can carry us.

(2) If that were not sufficient we have Fixed Types, and nothing but Fixed Types, in thousands and thousands (and continuing for what seem to be immense stretches of time) in the geological record.

(3) That same geological record shows us, not a gradual turning of one type into another, not a gradual ascent like an inclined plane—which Natural Selection would demand—but a series of steps with sharp divisions between.

These three arguments from experience are conclusive.

1. The First Argument from Evidence against Natural Selection:

The Fixed Type is apparent in all recorded human experience.

This is the argument based on human experience during the period of humanly recorded History, of which argument not nearly enough has been made.

For certainly 5000 years of this record types are fixed. That is not to say that maturity is not reached by growth, nor is it to say that a type cannot disappear. But it is an affirmation that the conceptions of ceaseless flux, of the absence of form, of no maturity in characteristics and nature, are baseless. As, indeed, the mere evidence of our senses and of common sense acting on that evidence, must convince anyone who prefers reality to print. Tell the plain man that there is no such thing as a fox or a salmon or a human being, and he will laugh in your face. And he will be quite right.

We are told that the 5000 years or so of recorded History (if we count prehistoric relics the period is probably longer) are so brief that they are a mere flash, and that we cannot observe in that tiny section of an immensely long period the slight process of change over which Natural Selection has been at work. We are under the illusion that types are fixed because the few thousand years over which we can compare them are as nothing compared with the whole period of development. Types only seem fixed to us in the same way as a revolving wheel seems at rest when discovered by a flash of lightning: the period of vision is too brief for the motion to be appreciated.

But people who talk like that have not made the very simple calculation of dividing the total period of a particular development by the few thousand years over which our direct experience stretches.

Take, for instance, the theory of Natural Selection as applied to ourselves. We know that over all these 5000 years the human body has not progressively changed. There have been various sorts of men, of course, and variations also round the normal. But the norm is set. Now even those who have indulged in the wildest guesswork to allow for development do not give true man more than 50,000 years.[^[2]] Now, one-tenth is a very sufficient fraction by which to measure any movement. If so highly differentiated and co-ordinated an organism as man has been subject to unceasing slow transformation during 50,000 years, and will go on changing slowly through the next 50,000, then certainly in one-tenth of that period some considerable change should be marked. None is so marked. Man, throughout those 5000 years, at least, is a certainly Fixed Type, as his own records and portraiture show.

[2]. Not to burden the text, I give in this footnote a few of the main guesses. Sollas 15,000 from the beginning of the Magdalenian. Waldmeyer 15,000 to 20,000 for true man. Boulay 10,000. Mainage (a very high authority) 15,000 from the Chellean. Holst, less than 7,000.

2. The Second Argument from Evidence:

Geological record is entirely in favour of Fixed Types.

The geological record also shows us nothing but Fixed Types. Each may have come by a transition more or less rapid out of some other—but at any rate fixed they are, and the longer the time demanded by the modern geologist for his periods, the longer the Fixed Type can be proved to exist. Some few survive to-day from the very early days of life on this earth. It was hoped, when the theory of Natural Selection was first broached, that evidence would appear for continuous change. None has so appeared. On the contrary, the more fossil evidence we acquire the more definitely does it appear that the Fixed Type is the normal—indeed the only—recorded thing. Of connected transitional changes (perhaps because they were too rapid to affect the fragmentary record of the rocks) none has been discovered. There are plenty of intermediary forms: there is not one connected series of changing forms passing one into the other.

All this evidence is no argument against transition. But it is damning evidence against the (a) very slow, (b) infinitesimally graduated, (c) continuous and unceasing transition or flux which Darwinian Natural Selection demands.

3. The Third Argument from Evidence:

The geological record shows not a gradual unceasing development such as Natural Selection demands, but sharp steps.

If Darwinian Natural Selection were the means by which simple ascended to complex forms, this ascent would necessarily have been a regular, very slow and uninterrupted process, continually at work.

The lines of ascent would have appeared in the geological record as so many inclined planes. They appear, in point of fact, as so many steps—each composed of very, very long flats separated, each from the one below, by a clean gap or break.

This character in the geological record does not get weaker as we come to know more and more of that record. On the contrary, it becomes increasingly emphasized.

There is evidence suggesting development of one type from another, but no evidence at all for the extremely gradual and continuous change of one type into another. On the contrary, each step noted in the process is a Fixed Type. What proportion the (presumably) rapid periods of transition and change may have borne to the immensely long periods of stable type, we cannot tell; but we do know that stable type is the rule, and that the process of change from one type into another must, compared with the long periods of fixity, have been the brief exception.

Yet, in the face of evidence so considerable and so widely known, the talk of Natural Selection still survives in these popular manuals. As Dwight (Professor of Anatomy at Harvard) very well put it fifteen years ago, “Just at the time when the uneducated are prating about the triumph of Darwinism it is fast losing caste among men of Science.”

But if it be asked why so patently false a theory was so tenaciously defended for some years by serious authorities—is still defended by a diminishing few—the answer is that the defenders of Natural Selection were so preoccupied with a totally different discussion (to wit, the defence of Evolution in general) that they confounded the two.

In England and North America, more than anywhere else, there were many people a lifetime ago who, from some inherited superstition, did not want to admit the idea of growth, though growth was going on all about them. They did not want to admit that two kinds of tree might have come from an original common type of tree; still less that one kind of animal could come from another apparently different; although they had before their eyes the oak tree coming out of an acorn, and the frog out of a tadpole. They seemed to be unaware of the age-long controversy upon the matter; they had never heard, apparently, of the modern founders of the evolutionary hypothesis, especially Lamarck and Buffon: the former of whom had a much more rational theory than Darwin’s, and put it forward before Darwin was born. Still less had they heard of the theory of Evolution among the Ancients and the Fathers of the Church.

Therefore, when patient observers of the middle of the nineteenth century (of whom the best known was Darwin) accumulated a great quantity of evidence in favour of Evolution, quite a number of their contemporaries tried to stand out against that evidence. It became, in England, a sort of national debate. The defenders of the ancient theory of Evolution, finding themselves caught in a religious quarrel—of a most irrational type, it is true—were at the same time carrying on a conflict, quite novel and wholly their own, in favour of blind, mechanical, Natural Selection as the agent of Evolution. Their special contribution, their only original idea, the only thing that properly can be called “Darwinism,” was Natural Selection—“the explanation of descent” (as Kohlbrugge, I read, has put it) “in terms of Materialism.” But in order to defend their new instrument of Natural Selection, they also had to support the old, old idea of Evolution. They confused the two together. Many still confuse them.

To this day, in discussing the matter with a woolly headed man, or with one who has not followed the matter closely, you will find him advancing these strong arguments, which certainly support Evolution, as though they also supported Natural Selection—with which last such arguments have nothing whatever to do. You will find people saying (for instance) that the exploded theory of Natural Selection must be true, because living organisms (including the human body) appear to show vestiges of ancient functions now atrophied. Such vestiges are properly advanced in defence of the general Evolutionary theory; they have no bearing whatever upon the essential point of Agency; and that alone is of real theological and therefore of fundamental interest.

For this great debate has one supreme query underlying it, which is this: whether we may see in the Universe a Creator and His Ends, or a blind Nothingness.

Natural Selection has been the theory used to do without God: the theory which crudely attempted to put the organic in terms of the mechanical and chance in the place of Design. It was a bubble which burst when it was touched by the finger of Reality.

I think I have said enough to show how strong are the considerations against Natural Selection, and why it is being more and more abandoned among Biologists as the Agent of Evolution.

But I am not writing this book as a treatise on such things. I am writing a criticism of Mr. Wells. And I would ask my reader in conclusion whether it is not remarkable to find Mr. Wells quietly taking Natural Selection for granted as the Agent of Evolution? Taking it for granted in 1926 as though we were still stuck fast at—say—1893?

Is it not remarkable to find a popular novelist swallowed whole when he propounds in Natural Science a theory which has been riddled for a generation? Is it not strange that he should take no account of such men as (to quote at random) Bateson, Eimer, Morgan, Delage, Le Dantec, Driesch, Dennert, Dwight, Nägeli, Sachs, Korchinsky, Wolff, Carazzi, Vialleton, Diamare, and a hundred others?

I pretend to no sort of special knowledge in these affairs.

I have no more than that general liberal education which Mr. Wells so greatly despises. Yet I have at least heard of these men and of their work, and I know, roughly, where discussion now stands.

For Mr. Wells it stands as it did over thirty years ago, with no knowledge of the revolution in thought in between!

I say that in a man professing to teach popular science, this degree of ignorance is quite inexcusable.[^[3]]

[3]. Not to crowd these pages too much, I have relegated to a short appendix at the end of this volume authorities and criticisms which the readers may consult for examples of insufficient reading on the part of our Author.

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.