H. G. Wells

“ Perhaps some of us (the present writer in the crowd among others) have been over-eager to read new significances into established phrases, and clothe new ideas in the languages of the old scheme of salvation. It may be we have been pouring new wine into old bottles. It may be better to admit frankly that if man is not fixed Christianity is, and that mankind is now growing out of Christianity; that indeed mankind is growing out of the idea of Deity. This does not mean an end to religion, but it means a fresh orientation of the religious life. ”

“ It is quite reasonable to say that when a species is under stress of changing conditions it is usual for the need for adaptation to be felt upon a number of points and not simply upon one, and that, since every advantage counts, the individuals with the greatest combination of advantageous differences have the best chances. But that does not alter the fact that even a single advantage is an advantage. What happens in nature is not an extermination of all who are not completely in the fashion of the new differences. ”

“ A Creator who put needless or inconvenient fish structures into the anatomy of a land animal and made the whole fauna and flora of the land a patch-up of aquatic forms of life must be not so much a Divinity as a Pedant. But it is the burthen of the whole beautiful science of comparative anatomy that the structure of animals and plants, and their succession in time, fall exactly into the conditions defined by the Theory of Natural Selection. ”

“ We seem to be entering upon a phase in which moral and intellectual education may be able to free themselves from the last vestiges of the mythology in which that new moral being was moulded; but it is ungracious and false to the true outline of history to deny the necessary part that the priest, the sacrifice, the magic ceremonial for tribal welfare, the early tribal religions, have played in this transfiguration of the sub-human into the modern human mind, upon which all our community rests to-day. ”

“ He has come at last to believe absolutely in this creature of his imagination. He has come to believe this: that there is a vast “modern European” culture of which the English-speaking world knows nothing, of which the non-Catholic world knows nothing, and with which he is familiar. It is on his side. It is always on his side. It is simply and purely Belloccian. He certainly believes it is there. It sustains his faith. It assuages the gnawing attacks of self-criticism that must come to him in the night. ”

“ Go back in time or forward, so long as man has been or will be, it is all the same. You will find a world generally damned, with a select few, like Mr. Belloc, on their way to eternal beatitude. That is all there is to the spectacle. There is, in fact, no outline of history; there is just a flow of individual lives; there is only birth and salvation or birth and damnation. That, I extract from Mr. Belloc and other contemporary writers, is the Catholic’s vision of life. ”

“ I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set to it all. Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend them, swim in expectation. ”

“ Belloc must be puzzled not a little by that vast parade of Evolution through the immeasurable ages which he admits has occurred—a parade made by the Creative Force for no conceivable reason, since a “fixed type” might just as well have been created straight away. He must realise that if man is the beginning and end of life, then his Creator has worked within fantastically disproportionate margins both of space and time. ”

“ So too with changing illumination our world alters its aspects, and things that once seemed monstrous and final are seen to be mere undulations in a practicable progress. We can realise now, as no one in the past was ever able to realise it, that man is a creature changing very rapidly from the life of a rare and solitary great ape to the life of a social and economic animal. He has traversed most of this tremendous change of phase in something in the nature of a million years. ”

“ The Idea of Progressive Humanity
It happens that my circumstances, and perhaps my mental temperament, have brought my mind into almost dramatic opposition to that of Mr. Belloc. While his training was mainly in written history, the core of mine was the analytical exercises of comparative anatomy and palæontology. I was brought up upon the spectacle of life in the universe as a steadily changing system. My education was a modern one, upon material and questionings impossible a hundred years ago. ”

“ Do species under stress, and feeding on strange food or living in unaccustomed climates, betray any exceptional tendency to produce abnormality? Have there been, so to speak, storms and riots of variation in some cases? Can differences establish themselves while outer necessity remains neutral? Can variations amounting to specific differences in colour and form arise as a sort of play of the germ plasm and be tolerated rather than selected by nature? ”

“ We should in accordance with the Theory of Natural Selection expect to find traces of the ancestral form, not only in the lay-out of the adult41 animal, but in every phase of its life history, and that, in fact, is just what we do find. There is no more fascinating branch of comparative anatomy than embryology. Each life cycle we discuss tends to repeat the ancestral story, and only under the stress of necessity does it undergo modification at any point. There is little toleration in the life process for unnecessary divergencies. ”

“ So the Catholics are pinned to this dogma of the fixity of man and thereby to a denial of progress. This vale of tears, they maintain, is as a whole a stagnant lake of tears, and there is no meaning to it beyond the spiritual adventures of its individual lives. ”

“ And Catholics, I gather, have always believed in Evolution and are far above the intellectual level of the American Fundamentalist. It is very important to Catholic self-respect to keep that last point in mind. Catholic evolution is a queer process into which “Design” makes occasional convulsive raids; between which raids species remain “fixed”; but still it is a sort of Evolution. My peasant neighbours in Provence, devout Catholics and very charming people, have not the slightest suspicion that they are Evolutionists, though Mr. Belloc assures me they are. ”

“ Every form must fall without difficulty into its proper place in that tree. If it is true that birds are descended from reptiles or men from apes, then there must be no birds before the reptiles appear, and no men before apes. The geological record is manifestly a mere fragmentary history, still for the most part unread, but, however fragmentary it is, it must be consistent. One human skull in the coal measures blows the whole theory to atoms. ”

“ With what is evidently the dexterity of an expert controversialist and with an impressiveness all his own, he seems to look over and under and round the man he knows, and sketches in the man he proposes to deal with, his limitations, his pitiful limitations, the characteristics, the disagreeable characteristics, that disfigure him. It is a new Wells, a most extraordinary person. I learn with amazement the particulars with which it is necessary to instruct that Catholic soul in danger before the matter of my book can be considered. ”

“ The individual life is, to common-sense, all that matters, the entire drama. There is from this popular and natural point of view no large, comprehensive drama in which the individual life is a subordinate part. Just as to the untutored mind the world is flat, just as to Mr. Belloc during his biological research work in Sussex the species of pig remained a “fixed type,” so to the common intelligence life is nothing more83 or less than “Me,” an unquestioned and unanalysed Me, against the universe. ”

“ Belloc insists upon writing of “the Fittest” as a sort of conspicuously competitive prize boy, a favourable “sport,” who has to meet his female equivalent and breed a new variety. That is all the world away from the manner in which a biologist thinks of the process of specific life. He sees a species as a vast multitude of individuals in which those without individual advantages tend to fail and those with them tend to be left to continue the race. The most important fact is the general relative failure of the disadvantaged. ”

“ And this new way of living and thinking is directly linked on to the idea of progress, which makes life in general far more interesting than any individual life can be, just as the self-centred life, whether it be religious and austere or vain or self-indulgent, is directly connected with the old delusions of permanence which rob life in general of any sustained interest. ”

“ The essential distinction of the newer thought in the world is in its denial of the permanence of the self and in its realisation of the self’s comparative unimportance. Even in our individual90 lives we are increasingly interested in common and generalised things. The older commoner life, the religious life just as much as the most worldly life, seems to us excessively self-conscious. The religious life, its perpetual self-examination for sin and sinful motives, its straining search after personal perfection, appears in the new light as being scarcely less egotistical than a dandy’s. ”

“ Belloc’s articles by the Universe, the Catholic Bulletin, and the Southern Cross shows that the Catholic world of to-day is stoutly resolved to treat the fall of man and his unalterable nature as matters of fact, even if they are rather cloudy matters of fact, and to fight the realities of modern biology and anthropology to the last ditch. ”

“ The universe may indeed be imagined as ruled over and pervaded by God, and this world may be supposed to have extensions of hell and heaven; all sorts of pre-natal dooms and debts may affect the career of the Me, but nevertheless the Me remains in the popular mind, nobbily integral, one and indivisible, and either it ends and the drama ends with it, or it makes its distinct and special way to the Pit, or, with Belloc and the Catholic community, to the beatitude he anticipates. ”

“ I do believe and assert that a new attitude to life, a new and different vision of the world, a new moral atmosphere and a different spirit of conduct, is coming into human affairs, as a result of the scientific analysis of the past hundred years. ”

“ He might retort that the Pig has been the victim of selective breeding and is not therefore a good instance of Natural Selection, but it was he who brought Pigs into this discussion. Dogs again have been greatly moulded by man in a relatively short time, and, again, horses. Almost all species of animals and plants that have come into contact with man in the last few thousand years have been greatly modified by his exertions, and we have no records of any detailed observations of structure or habits of creatures outside man’s range of interest before the last three or four centuries. ”

“ He has put some words between inverted commas in one place, so as inadvertently to produce the impression that they are mine, but they are not mine.
Now the facts upon which the idea of Natural Selection rests are matters of universal knowledge. “Every species of living thing is continually dying and being born again as a multitude of fresh individuals”; that is the primary fact. No species seems to be perfectly adapted to its conditions, and even the happiest species tends to multiply until it is in a state of need and pressure. ”

“ The disposition of those who apprehend this outline of history that modern science has made plain to us, and who see all life as a system of progressive change, is by no means antagonistic92 to religion. They realise the immense importance and the profound necessity of religion in this last great chapter of the story, the evolution of human society. But they see religion within the frame of fact; they do not, like Mr. Belloc, look through religion at fact. ”

“ The Catholic soul most in danger in these papers of Mr. Belloc’s is Mr. Belloc’s, and the thing he is running away from through these six long disputations is a grisly beast, neither ape nor true man, called the Neanderthaler, Homo Neanderthalensis. This Homo Neanderthalensis is the real “palæolithic” man. For three-quarters of the “palæolithic” age he was the only sort of man. The Reindeer men, the Capsian men, are “modern” beside him. He was no more an archer than he was an electrical engineer. He was no more an artist than Mr. Belloc is a man of science. ”

“ 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?49 Natural Selection sets out to change a reptile’s leg into a bird’s wing and the scales of its armour into feathers. It does so by making the leg less and less of a leg for countless ages, and by infinite minute gradations, gradually turning the scales into feathers.
“By the very nature of the theory each stage in all these millions is an advantage over the last towards survival! ”

“ Yet surely the whole system of salvation, the whole Christian scheme, rests upon79 the presumption of a fall. Without a fall, what is the value of salvation? Why redeem what has never been lost? Without a condemnation what is the struggle? What indeed, in that case, is the Catholic Church about?
What modern thought is about is a thing easier to explain. In the Outline of History, against which Mr. Belloc is rather carping than levelling criticism, there is set out, as the main form of that Outline, a progressive development of conscious will in life. ”

“ And next comes the fact of individuality.32 Every living unit is individual with a difference of its own. Every individual has its own distinctive differences, and each of these differences may or may not be an advantage or a disadvantage. Individuals with advantageous differences will generally get on better in life, prosper and so be able to breed more freely, than those with disadvantageous differences. ”

“ They came to realise that all species, all genera, all classes of life, whatever else may be happening to them, are and always have been varying through the process of Natural Selection, some rapidly, some slowly; some so slowly as hardly to change at all through vast ages. I have stated36 the a priori case by which, given birth and death and individuality and changing conditions and sufficient time, it appears logically inevitable that the change and differentiation of species must occur, and must be now going on. ”