H. G. Wells

“ The Outline of History is not a catholic history; it is rather an ultra-protestant history—using protestant in a sense that would shock a good Ulsterman profoundly—in a sense, that is, that would make Professor Huxley a good protestant. Dr. Downey in his opening passage regrets that I have allowed my “preconceived philosophical and religious notions to enter so largely into what purports to be a record of fact.” But no one can write a history of mankind without expressing one’s own philosophical and religious ideas at every turn. You cannot stand on nothing and hold up a world. ”

“ No doubt he thought he was confuting me, but if he had turned back to The Outline of History instead of going off at this tangent, he would have seen that I do not write of the fear and worship of the Old Man—which, as Dr. Downey will learn some day, is not quite the same thing as ancestor worship—as anything more than one factor in the complex synthesis of religion. And the case for considering obsession by the thought of the Old Man, an important factor in that synthesis, rests on very much stronger foundations than Grant Allen’s not very substantial book. ”

“ Economically, intellectually, and in many other ways the world becomes one community. But, while there has been this enormous enlargement of human interests, there has been, if anything, a narrowing down of the scope of historical teaching. If the reader will look into the sort of history that is taught in schools to-day and compare it with the yellow old books of our great-grandfathers, he will find rather a shrinkage towards the intensive study of particular periods and phases of history than an extension to meet the more extensive needs of a new age. ”

“ The idea of education as learning still dominates us, and so it is that while we have numbers of teachers of history who are or who attempt to be, or who pose as historians who teach, we have comparatively few teachers of history who are teachers whose instrument is history. In relation to the science of history, and indeed to all the sciences, the importance of teacher as teacher is still insufficiently recognised.
Now the virtues required of the historian as of the specialist in any other science are extreme accuracy, fulness, delicacy and discrimination within the department of his work. ”

“ It has been suggested that the Outline could have been told as a history of art. Or, as the Marxists are disposed to insist, as a history of economic relationship and its consequences. (Because the Marxists believe that first a man produces and then he exists.) Either method may be possible, but to my mind neither is possible. For me, I can only imagine a history of art or of economic development being written after the Outline as I conceive it has been apprehended. And the same remark applies to a project which is, I gather, afoot in the United States for a History of Woman. ”

“ Perhaps a time will come when, over and above the professors and teachers actively in contact with pupils and classes, there will be a considerable organisation of educationists whose work will be this intermediate selection and preparation of knowledge for educational purposes. But in Britain at any rate there are no signs of any development of this broader, more philosophical grade of teacher. The British universities have no philosophy of education and hardly any idea of an educational duty to the community as a whole. ”

“ Such master teachers may be appearing in the United States of America or in some foreign country; in America, for example, such teachers of history as Professors Breasted, John Harvey Robinson and Hutton Webster seem to be doing interpretative work in history of a very original and useful type. Given a class of such educational scholars able to sustain an intelligent criticism and to co-operate generously and intelligently, one can imagine the kind of Outline of History that would be possible, simple, clear, accurate, without fussy pedantries and beautifully proportioned and right. ”

“ But the Church does not seem to give its priests any systematic instruction in the history of mankind, after the period covered by the Bible story. Much less does it attend to the minds of its laity in this matter. Everywhere the Catholic priest, instead of restraining the local and patriotic prejudices of his flock, seems rather to be swayed by them. In very many centuries the Catholic Church plays a very important political rôle; it is almost inevitable that the facilities offered by its organisation and solidarity should be used politically. ”

“ And the teaching of history in schools has followed the movement of the student of history towards concentration and not the needs of the common citizen towards ampler views, because there has never yet been a proper recognition of the difference in aim between study for knowledge, the historical study of the elect, on the one hand, and teaching, the general education of the citizen for the good not only of the citizen but of the community, on the other. ”

“ The national consciousness of Ireland is too tragically inflamed to tolerate any drawing of Irish history to the scale of the world’s affairs, a scale which makes it a mere point of irritation in the hide of the present British Empire, itself the mushroom growth chiefly of the last hundred years. Some sentences and phrases in the Outline, coloured by the writer’s intense dislike for the extreme nationalism of Sinn Fein, are unjust to Ireland and will need modification. ”

“ If any sort of men can be expected to have the same political ideas wherever they are found, and to have had something like an identical historical training, it is surely the priesthood of the Catholic Church. ”

“ Downey had read on he would surely have grasped the idea—for Professor Bourne is very plain and simple—that a species may undergo natural selection without any struggle for existence between individuals at all. ”

“ It is not that the writer has stepped into the field of popular history teaching and done something impertinently and roughly that would otherwise have been done well. It is that he has stepped in and done something urgently necessary that would not otherwise have been done at all.
The Outline of History takes the form of a story of mankind for popular reading. ”

“ He is usually not concerned with a philosophical review of the whole field of his science and very chary of invading any unfamiliar provinces of his subject, because of the great risks he will run there of making, if not positive blunders, at least incomplete statements. The specialists will catch him out, and though the point may be an utterly trivial one, he will have been caught out, and that discredits the historian excessively. But the teacher’s concern is primarily with the taught and with giving them a view of their universe as a whole. ”

“ The material may be the same, the science of physics, biology or history as the case may be, but the method of treatment may be widely different in the two cases.
Education is really one of the newest of the arts and sciences. The idea of particular, exceptional people pursuing learning has been familiar to the world for scores of centuries, but the idea of preparing the minds of whole classes or whole communities for co-operations and common actions by a training in common ideas is comparatively a new one. ”

“ But he has discussed it from the point of view of the cause of the individual difference, and the theory of Natural Selection is not concerned with that. Natural Selection is merely a logical deduction from the facts of inheritance and individual difference. It explains neither, and no clear-headed biologist has ever thought that it did.
Both Mr. Belloc and Dr. Downey are indeed in a hopeless muddle between the discussion of the origin of variations and the question of the reaction of a variable species to its environment. Among all these biological questions they are helplessly at sea. ”

“ Gomme has looked at all at the end of The Outline of History it was, I believe, to consult the list of errata and make sure that nothing in the way of a misspelling, a wrong date or misplaced title had been overlooked. Because he gives no quarter in that respect. He is determined to make the worst of things. He has just nosed through the few parts that matter to him, he has scored it heavily with pencil; one can almost see his notes of exclamation, his “No!” his “Did he not?” in the margin, and then he has written up these marginal comments and rushed into print with them. ”

“ I am “tendential”; that is perfectly true. But I give my readers full warning that my views are views. And the bulk of Dr. Downey’s pamphlet (and Mr. Belloc’s criticisms) is not so much an exposure of “errors” in the narrower sense of the word, as a discussion of quite fundamental differences of interpretation between the story I tell and the story implicit in orthodox Catholic teaching.
Three main issues are raised by Dr. Downey, and they are all acutely interesting ones: the Historical Fall of Man, the Origin of Religion, and the rôle of the Catholic Church in restraining knowledge. ”

“ The Hope of a Better Teaching of History I will revert for a moment to my suggestion of an Outline of History for Catholics from the Catholic point of view. It is, I submit, a very desirable thing at the present time. I 32suppose the Church, at its head and as a whole, has a policy, a definable relationship towards the States and nations of the world. As an organisation one feels that it should make for peace and human co-operation—wherever it operates. ”

“ He just takes up the part dealing with his classical knowledge—which is indeed the only knowledge that matters—and looks for mistakes or, what are really worse than mistakes, things he does not understand and opinions he does not share. ”

“ Some of the criticism to which the Outline has been subjected affords an opportunity for profitable comment. To “answer” all its critics would be a preposterously self-important thing to do, but, from the point of view of our general education, some of them do repay examination. And accordingly he is setting down these present notes to the Outline; partly comments upon the educational significance of its general reception and partly a consideration of the mental attitudes, the moral and intellectual pose, into which it has thrown certain of its critics. ”

“ The chapter upon the changes in the earth’s climate seems to be a little heavy for many readers and may perhaps be taken out, and the work that is now being done by Rivers, Elliot Smith and their associates upon the opening cultural phases from which the first civilisations arose and the application of the results of psycho-analysis to human history, may soon make it possible to rewrite the account of the stone ages in a much fuller and clearer, more assured and less speculative fashion. ”

“ So far from sneering at the writer’s brief year or so of special reading and at such superficialities and inadequacies as The Outline of History may betray (and does betray) , it would rather become the teacher of history to realise how 8much better it is than anything the teaching organisation of which he is a part deserved. ”

“ For the plain truth is that such outbreaks of beauty scarcely affect the Outline—as such. They may be very important to the human soul and so forth, and a list of them—an Outline of History can do no more than that—may be very necessary to struggling examinees ”

“ Rather have the peoples of the earth climbed up their several hills, some higher than others (difficult as it may be to say which) , all different; but the hills of Greece and Rome are among the highest; while we, climbing up our own, already perhaps higher than they, have the good fortune of being able to look across to their summits to learn something of their achievement, and receive light from those radiant peaks. ”

“ In America, where there is much more freedom and variety in educational method than in Europe, much may be achieved by a steady insistence on the part of groups of parents and journalists upon the introduction of the new teaching of history into schools and colleges. But in Europe, where the schools of both boys and girls are much more dominated by the requirements of the various leaving-schools, qualifying and competitive examinations by which they pass on into business or professional or student life, the method of attack may need to be a different one. ”

“ He uses up time, space and endowment in his futilities, and so he stands in the way of a proper development of lower form work leading up to the Modern Side. The classical interests are still very strong in the Universities, they are a bar to the proper education of the British Civil Service and so a world-wide nuisance, and as a patriot, a parent and a schoolmaster I have raged against them. ”

“ The modern community has yet to develop a type of teacher with the freedom and leisure to make a thorough 7and continuous study of contemporary historical and other scientific knowledge in order to use these accumulations to the best effect in general education. ”

“ The West is learning with extreme reluctance the share of China in human history.
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A Voice from the Classical Side The feud which finds expression in Mr. A. W. Gomme’s pamphlet is one of much older origin than the publication of The Outline of History. Mr. Gomme is a teacher of the Greek language, and it is thirty years and more since I first attacked the imposture of the Greek teaching in our public schools. Long before I sank below the possibility of serious consideration by my fellow-countrymen by becoming a novelist, I was a writer upon education ”