Hilaire Belloc

“ If you take the history of opinion upon matters of positive fact, you will generally discover that the discovery of the truth affects at first but a small circle, and that a popular error may cover a whole society. ”

“ And so on. I could write a whole book upon that rather dreary and negative subject, the abysmal lack of acquaintance Mr. Wells shows with the thought of his time. I could expose him here in the matter of Couenot, or of Vialleton’s book, as I exposed him in the Manchester Guardian, or print in detail quotations from Carazzi, which I leave for another occasion.
But I think I have said enough to expose Mr. Wells’s pretence of reading in modern biology.
The bubble is pricked and has burst. ”

“ If a man should call me a very poor Latin scholar (which I am—but then I do not write popular manuals on Latin poetry) , would it be any reply to tell him that I had been as a boy at a school of which Cardinal Newman was the head, or as a young man that I had been at Balliol; or that among my intimate acquaintances whom I listen to fascinated upon classical themes were some of the greatest scholars of my time? Whether Mr. Wells is a scientific man or not must be decided, not by his having attended classes under Huxley, but by the use he has made of his reading ”

“ Reality—that is the Faith—is a delusion. Now that you know it to be a delusion you are naturally down in the mouth. But cheer up, I have a consolation for you. All will yet be well; nay, much better. All is going forward. ”

“ Exactly the same habit of clear thinking which makes us know the limitations of reason and makes us accept a mystery, gives us our admiration for that divine gift of reason in man and our contempt for people who, like Mr. Wells, have never been trained to use it, and flounder the moment they try to think hard. ”

“ Wells has just brought out against me a small pamphlet, under the title of Mr. Belloc Objects to the “Outline of History.” It is an excited, popular, crude attack, full of personal insult and brawling, and ample proof that he is hit. But it is singularly weak in argument, confused in reply, and, as I shall show in a moment, shirks nine-tenths of the very damaging criticism which I directed against his book.
That book denies a creative God. There is no God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. The Incarnation is a myth; the Resurrection a falsehood ”

“ Wells had never heard of Dennert.
Let us turn to Dwight:—
“We have now the remarkable spectacle that just when many scientific men are all agreed that there is no part (my italics) of the Darwinian system that is of any great influence, and that as a whole the theory is not only unproved, but impossible, the ignorant, half-educated masses have acquired the idea that it is to be accepted as a fundamental fact....” ”

“ Wells substitutes for argumentix is wholly irrelevant. When you are discussing the competence of a man to write history, it is utterly meaningless to throw about the jeers of the gutter on his dress, accent or any other private detail concerning him. If you discover a man pretending to write about Roman antiquity and yet wholly blind to the effect of Latin literature, you rightly point out his ignorance. ”

“ Thus my first argument is the well-known one of accident being quite unable to explain the co-ordination of variations necessary to adaptation.
The point is this, that not only one accidental advantageous variation which might give an animal a better chance of survival has to be considered, but the general adaptation of all the organism to new conditions; not only that, but the marvellous adaptation of thousands upon thousands of special relations within complex organisms such as are the higher animals. ”

“ But a mind that can imagine that there is no such thing as man and indeed no such thing as a thing; a mind (to put it in the old language) which is nominalist in that degree, is in great peril of ceasing to be a mind at all.
The particular point on which Mr. Wells comes his worst cropper in connection with the Catholic Church is a blunder to which he devotes a whole chapter of his pamphlet, and over ten pages of print furiously reviling me.
He has got hold of the idea that the discovery of Neanderthal skulls and skeletons destroys Catholic theology. ”

“ Wells objects most emphatically that I have done him the grievous wrong of calling him a patriot.
I am quite willing to withdraw the words, to admit my blunder, and to apologise to Mr. Wells for having made it. Every man is the judge of his own thoughts, and if he assures me that he hates his country, or is even indifferent to its fate, I will readily accept the statement. I will substitute in my book for the word “patriot” the word “national,” my only point being that Mr. Wells is highly local in his outlook. ”

“ MR. WELLS SHIRKS The most violent positive part of Mr. Wells’s attack upon me is, as I have said, his challenge upon the matter of Natural Selection, his jeer that my arguments are wholly my own, ridiculous and unsupported; and his amazing assertion, which he makes, quite naïvely and sincerely, that there has been nobody in modern criticism opposing the Darwinian theory. I think I have sufficiently exposed Mr. Wells in these particulars.
But quite as important as this huge positive error on his part is the negative factor in his pamphlet which I here emphasise for the reader. ”

“ Wells’s pamphlet is one that we must always expect from your Bible Christian who has lost his God. He becomes a materialist troubled with Pantheism, and very eager to get away from the Puritan disease of his youth—yet a vision remains. He comes forward as the “Seventh Monarchy man,” which is, indeed, the natural term of your Bible Christian—even after he has lost his God.
“I see knowledge,” says Mr. Wells at the end of his diatribe, “increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limit set to it at all. ”

“ Mr. Wells complains that I accuse him of not having read Vialleton, and brings forward, in triumphant proof of my own ignorance of that great scientist, the fact that I passed an error in proof, allowing “Vailleton” to stand for “Vialleton.”
Here it is I that must defend myself.
I bought Vialleton’s great book (which is a destructive criticism of Darwinism of a 17-inch calibre) the week in which it came out, and have consulted it ever since. If Mr. Wells is reduced for ammunition to the picking out of one misprint in some hundred thousand words of matter, he must be in a terrible way. ”

“ Now, let me ask my reader, in conclusion, is it not remarkable that a man setting out to inform a large audience that God, and our Lord’s Divinity, and our own immortal destiny are all nonsense, doing so by a pretended “science” and favouring me as an insufficient critic of his book, can only find in some scores of my exposures of him six points, half of which tell heavily against himself, while two of the remainder are due to his own confusion and only one—my over-emphasis on glacial sea level—has any substance in it? ”

“ On the contrary, if the strength of the word is exactly consonant to the degree of error noted the criticism is more just than if a milder word had been used. To say that a man who poisons his mother in order to obtain her fortune is “reprehensible” is bad criticism. To call him an “inhuman criminal” is sound criticism. ”

“ How will he meet my objection that the man who tries to talk about the Roman Empire, and our civilisation which is its product, without any mention or conception of Latin literature and its effect, is incompetent? ”

“ Does he not know that the human race as a whole, or at any rate the leading part of it, including his own immediate honourable ancestry, pay some reverence to Almighty God, and humbly admits His creative power and Sustained Omnipotence? ”

“ Wells off his balance.
Now for the condemnatory words to which he objects,—presumably on account of their force—words which I have, indeed, used in connection with his work, and shall certainly use again: such words as “ignorance,” “blunders,” “childish,” “unscientific,” etc. I see I must again explain to Mr. Wells an obvious principle in criticism which he fails to grasp. A word is not out of place in criticism unless it is either irrelevant or false in statement or in degree. The mere strength of a word does not put it out of court. ”

“ He envisages the Catholic Church as teaching an inchoate heap of unconnected doctrines, each of them highly concrete, each of them flagrantly impossible, and the chief of them an historical statement that in a particular place and at a particular time, to wit, in the neighbourhood of Baghdad 5930 years ago, there took place the Fall of Man. He has no conception that we object to a book like his and to methods such as he uses because we use the human reason, and are all brought up to know that the human reason is absolute in its own sphere. ”

“ You do not praise (if you are a serious critic) simply as a sort of sop or counterbalance to blame; you praise because you find things worthy of praise—and you blame where you find things worthy of blame. ”

“ It is of first-rate importance to decide on that—infinitely more important than it is to decide on exactly how and by what stages his body came to be; just as it is infinitely more important for a man to decide between right and wrong action in manhood than to make a selection of his photographs as a baby. ”

“ Wells suddenly starts to describe a type of Paleolithic Man upon whom the guess has been made that he came at the very end of the process and had a more advanced culture, including bows and arrows.
What is any man to make of such a confusion?
First, Paleolithic Man as an artist, illustrated by a picture of him shooting away like the devil. Then, the casual remark that he was too degraded to shoot at all. Then the end of Paleolithic Man and his replacement by Neolithic Man. Then Paleolithic Man reappearing, pages after, with bows and arrows all complete? ”

“ We believe that he has been created by an omnipotent God, to whom he is responsible for good or evil action committed by his own free will—for in man’s free will we also believe; we believe his soul to be immortal, and to be tested for eternal beatitude or eternal loss thereof.
Anyone is free to say “These doctrines are particular, you admit yourself that you hold them on Faith and not on positive evidence. ”

“ Wells is unscientific because he does not survey the whole of evidence upon a point, and weigh it, and especially because he is perpetually putting forward hypothesis as fact—which may be called the very criterion of an unscientific temper ”

“ God may use us or we may use ourselves, or some other third Will, not God’s or our own, may use us: but “the life to which we belong” does not use us. Talking like that is harmless when it is mere metaphor, it is asinine when it sets up to be definition. ”

“ They imply real knowledge, finally accepted after full enquiry upon complete evidence; and that is why there is nothing less scientific in the world than this so-called popular “science,” which is perpetually putting forward exploded guesses of the last century as ascertained facts. ”

“ My second argument is equally a commonplace with educated men, and in saying that I am the author of it Mr. Wells is again flattering me a great deal too much, and again betraying his own astonishing lack of acquaintance with the subject he professes to teach.
I pointed out, as hundreds have pointed out before me, that Darwinism obviously breaks down from the fact that it demands each step in evolution to be an advance in survival value over the last. ”

“ Wells’s manifold lack of acquaintance with his most serious opponent is seen in plenty of other lights.
For instance, there is his idea that scale destroys the Faith. “Only let me convince you,” he pathetically urges, “that the material universe existed long before man, and that the scheme of redemption only applies26 to the comparatively brief human period in geology. Only let me convince you, and you will see how foolish all this Christian talk is.” ”

“ But surely when a man tells you that you have no authorities behind you, and that you are making things up out of your own head, even such a list as this must sound pretty startling to him. Mr. Wells had no idea of its existence. If he had he would not have questioned it.
I have no quarrel with ignorance of this kind, as such.18 There is no particular reason why any general writer, myself or Mr. Wells, or Jones or Brown or Robinson, should have even this amount of knowledge on a special department of modern science. ”

“ Yet another example. Finding me to have overlooked a tiny misprint (“ai” for “ia”) in the printing of a proper name, he writes a whole page about it.
The proper adjective for absurdities of that kind is the adjective “childish.” I could give any number of other examples, but I think these are quite enough.
In point of fact, I only use the word “childish” rarely—I do not know how often in my whole book, but at a guess I should say not more than three times. But each time I am sure that it is well deserved. ”

“ This wild protest, that there are any number of other Catholics—Scotto-Catholics, Americano-Catholics, Morisco-Catholics, Indo-Catholics, Mongolo-Catholics—is frankly ridiculous, and ridiculous after a fashion which it is legitimate to call “childish”: the mere explosion of a man in a passion. ”

“ I need not waste my reader’s time on that sort of thing. It is sheer stupid enthusiasm, indulged in to fill the void left by the loss of reason: by a man losing himself in a fog of cheap print and becoming fantastically unaware of things as they are. ”

“ Wells tells me that we of the Faith are backward people, who “because it is necessary for their comfort believe in Heaven and Hell”41 (a comfortable place Hell!) I answer that he appreciates the Faith as a man born blind might appreciate colour. When he tells me that this Catholic sort (to which I belong) are besotted to stand by accepted morals, beget children honestly, love one wife and live decently, I answer him that he is becoming disgusting. ”

“ Suppose a foreigner were to write an Outline of Nineteenth Century History, and to say in it that Islanders were always rascals, that the love of sport and games was degrading—and particularly vicious that of football and cricket—that the English language was an offensive vehicle of thought and had produced nothing worthy ”