It is a relief to turn from the vanity and peevishness of Mr. Gomme to two more serious antagonists. Mr. Belloc is something of a special pleader, and both he and Dr. Downey forgo few controversial advantages. Dr. Downey is not ashamed to write of my “showman’s gestures” and so forth, but they both have minds and tempers that are disciplined; they are intelligently interested in The Outline of History as a whole; a passionate objection to my existence does not appear among their motives. They realise I have a definite standpoint and they state an understandable difference.

Mr. Belloc’s criticisms appeared in the Dublin Review and the London Mercury, and I do not think he has reprinted them. We had a brief but animated dispute in the London Mercury and the Catholic Tablet arising out of his comments, and I will not renew the particular issues then discussed, except in so far as they arise again out of Dr. Downey’s pamphlet. I will direct myself rather to Dr. Downey than to Mr. Belloc.

Like Mr. Gomme, Dr. Downey^[2] has gone to the first edition of the Outline, and, like Mr. Gomme, he has not checked his comments by any reference to the current version. He is thus able to score very effectively over phrases and passages that the owners of the book edition will look for in vain. The weak point in the story of David and Michal, as it was told in the part issues, for instance, has been corrected, and my misstatement of the Sabellian view of the Trinity has been put right. Let me admit that I did not know what Sabellianism was when I wrote The Outline of History. Arianism I knew, and Trinitarianism I knew, but not the views of the Sabellians. It was not an oversight, it was complete ignorance that caused that misstatement, and Dr. Downey is legitimately entitled to all the advantage this confession entails. The fact remains that the second edition of The Outline of History does not contain the four or five words that betrayed my ignorance of this refinement of doctrine, but gives instead a correct statement of this Sabellian view. I doubt if there was any general delusion that I was an expert in the theological disputes of the early Church even before Dr. Downey called attention to the matter. Unlike Mr. Gomme, who evidently found the list of errata at the end of the Newnes edition of the Outline very useful, Dr. Downey has not troubled to look at that list. He would have found this Sabellian error already set right there.

A criticism like that of Dr. Downey necessarily goes from point to point, and it is impossible to follow him closely without developing these notes into a confused miscellany of discussions. I leave with some regret a very fundamental and interesting issue, the issue between Realism and Nominalism, which is so closely interwoven with, and related to, the issue between the methods of thought of such Catholics as Dr. Downey and Mr. Belloc on the one hand, and of those who have been through the disciplines of modern science on the other. This issue has been very constantly in my mind throughout my life; my first printed article (in the Fortnightly Review in 1898) dealt with it, and it is discussed very fully in my First and Last Things. It crops up again and again in my writings, because I am persuaded that very many of the intellectual tangles of our time are due to the differences in intellectual temperament and training that the dispute between Realist and Nominalist developed and emphasised, and can only be resolved after a thorough discussion of these fundamentals of thought. I have sought in the limited space of the Outline to call attention to the fact that this difference is at the root of the main divergencies in the intellectual and religious life of our world, and I have expressed an opinion, which Dr. Downey and a hastily injected footnote from Mr. Ernest Barker completely fail to modify, that the method of the Catholic Church was, and is, essentially Realist. Mr. Barker says that, although Realism was at first the Church philosophy, after Occam Nominalism became the philosophy of the Church; Dr. Downey says it didn’t, and that Occam’s followers were prohibited from teaching; Mr. Barker says that Luther denounced Nominalism (upon which I am moved to remark that I do not care very greatly what Luther did or did not denounce); and there are technical uses and common uses of the word “class” and “species” which give great scope for a brilliant controversialist. I will confess I quail before the dusty possibilities of this three-cornered wrangle. And since I want to come to terms with Catholic teachers if I can—because it is surely as much their task as mine to supplant the present mischievous narrow teaching of national egotism in schools throughout the world by some wider and more widening instruction—I will in future editions of the Outline drop any reference to the philosophy of the Church out of this discussion of the opposition of Realist and Nominalist.

But my attitude towards the human story will not become catholic by that or any similar concession. 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. You may pretend and attempt to do so, but that will be a dishonesty. You cannot even arrange a chronological table without a bias to prefer one sort of fact to another. 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 issue of the Fall has been made a very important one in Catholic theology. In the Outline I discuss some consequences of this insistence upon the Fall in the account given of the moral disorganisation of the middle and later nineteenth century. I may be profoundly wrong, but I share a now widespread belief that there is no evidence of anything in the nature of a moral Fall, such as Catholic theology requires, in human history; that, on the contrary, there is now a pressure of evidence, which I find irresistible, towards the belief that the human species arose through a quite natural series of changes, side by side with various kindred species of apes and man-like creatures, out of a monkey-like ancestry deriving itself through vast periods of time from reptilian and fish-like progenitors. Most interesting of all the species related to men are these man-like creatures, the Neanderthal men, who also made fires and shaped huge flint implements and buried their dead. I give these facts as I conceive them, and Dr. Downey finds it necessary to treat my description as though it was a complete argument designed to state and prove the human family tree, and to pretend that, when I mention such intermediate types between ape and man as Pithecanthropus, I mean that they are genetically intermediate. It is, I submit, rather girlish to write in this fashion: “We are thrilled to think that in this chapter Mr. Wells is at last about to solve the knotty problem of our simian ancestry.” I do not believe Dr. Downey was thrilled a bit. Dr. Downey heads one page “Exit the Ape Ancestor Theory”—it is what the London journalist would call a streamer headline—because he has found an article by Major Thomas Cherry pointing out the many reasons there are for doubting a very close genetic connection between man and the living arboreal anthropoids. This eager headline is followed on the next page by a still more eager comment, by which Dr. Downey comes one of those controversial croppers that will happen in this sort of fragmentary discussion. He quotes Major Cherry, “the specialised monkey foot may be ruled out as a stage in the ancestry of man,” and adds, “sad blow to Mr. Wells with his diagrammatic picture of ‘foot of man and gorilla.’” On several occasions in his criticism of the Outline Dr. Downey uses the dramatic phrase, “one rubs one’s eyes.” Well, if he will rub his eyes again and have a good look at that picture and read the context, he will find that it is given to show the difference, not the resemblance, of the two feet, and that the “sad blow” recoils with some severity upon himself. Because it shows that I at any rate am tied to no brief, and have no hesitation in giving a piece of evidence that may seem to qualify the general drift of my story.

If Dr. Downey, by the bye, had looked up the current edition of the Outline, he would not have found that figure. It has gone, and the section has been recast so as to include an excellent note by Mr. R. I. Pocock which makes it simpler and clearer.

I hope, if Catholics will not accept and use The Outline of History, they will give us one of their own, and when they do there will be no part I shall read with greater interest and curiosity than the part devoted to these curious subhuman creatures and the account of the Fall that occurred, if I read Dr. Downey aright, between the disappearance of Neanderthal Man and the appearance of the Cro-Magnon people in Europe. Both Dr. Downey and Mr. Belloc make a great fuss because I have given pictures of Pithecanthropus and the Neanderthal Man, and because there is an imaginative picture by Sir Harry Johnston of “Our Neanderthaloid ancestor” in the Newnes edition. They point out that these pictures are made up with only a few bones and theories to go upon. They are. They are to help the imagination of the weaker brethren, and they pretend to do no more than that. But it was amusing to read this objection in Dr. Downey’s pamphlet just after a visit to the Vatican, where portraits of Adam and Eve and the snake who tempted them occur in some profusion. I have seen at Cava di Tirrene a hair of the Virgin Mary, a bone of St. Matthew, and a number of other osseous and horny fragments of saints and divine persons, very reassuring evidence of the material truth of the Catholic religion, but I have still to learn of any vestiges of Adam to compare with the thigh bone, the teeth and the skull fragments of Pithecanthropus. If Catholicism is to avail itself of illustration, I do not see why Mr. Belloc and Dr. Downey should display this iconoclastic fervour towards a secular history.

Dr. Downey follows Mr. Belloc in a curious disposition to score a point by declaring that this or that view of mine is twenty-five years old, quite out of date: “Mr. Wells has not kept pace with the rationalist movement,” and so forth. I do not understand this passion in Catholics for the latest mental wear; for my own part, if a thing is convincing to me, I do not care when it was first believed nor who has given it up. I thought that was the way with Catholics too. But Mr. Belloc assured the readers of the Dublin Review that Natural Selection had not been believed in for twenty-five years; it was quite a discarded idea. If the intellectual smart set regards Natural Selection as out of date, that shows merely that the intellectual smart set has taken leave of common sense. The proposition is invincible that, given a species in which the individuals reproduce in greater or less abundance young with individual differences, and sooner or later die, and in which the individual young favour their individual parents, then in every generation the individuals less adapted to survive and reproduce are, as a rule, likely to die sooner and to bear fewer offspring than the individuals more adapted to these ends, and therefore that, conditions remaining constant, the average specimen of the species must become more and more perfectly adapted as time goes on to the conditions of its existence. And equally invincible is the proposition that a permanent change of conditions must involve a change in the average of a species to which no apparent limit is set short of perfect adaptation, and the parallel proposition that the average specimens of each of two sections of a species living under widely different conditions of survival, and separated from each other, must ultimately become widely different. I write of this not, as Dr. Downey says, with the “full-blooded confidence of the Sciolist,” but with the assurance of a normally sane man. If anyone can start from the premises I have just given and arrive at any other than the conclusion at which I have arrived, there is need for a psychological Einstein.

It does not affect this question a jot that Mr. Bateson, always something of an enfant terrible among biologists, celebrated the centenary of Charles Darwin, and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, by writing in a collection of pious contributions to Darwin’s memory that “the time is not ripe for a discussion of the Origin of Species.” That was just Mr. Bateson’s fun. He himself has discussed it immensely. 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. I doubt if they have ever looked into a biological book except in a state of controversial prepossession. At the moment I am unable to verify Dr. Downey’s quotation from Mr. Bourne’s Animal Life and Human Progress (1919), in which Mr. Bourne is made to say that the “extinction of the less fit and the survival of the fittest no longer commands the universal assent of zoologists,” but I am disposed to think that it must be clipped in some way. This sentence, I guess, is only the tail of a sentence. As it stands it is nonsense. [My guess, I find on returning to England, is correct. Even the authorship of the book is improperly ascribed to Professor (not Mr.) Bourne. It is a collection of papers by various hands. The passage in Professor Bourne’s paper runs as follows:—

“I have been at some pains to convince you that the current doctrine that evolution in animals and plants depends upon a ratio of increase so high as to lead to unrestricted competition among the individuals of a species, and in consequence to a Struggle for Existence, with extinction of the less fit and Survival of the Fittest, no longer commands the universal assent of zoologists. Indeed it has been severely undermined by the discoveries of recent years.”

Dr. Downey quotes from the words “extinction of the less fit” to the end.

I do not wish to accuse Dr. Downey of any deliberate attempt to deceive in this misquotation. He did not understand the point Professor Bourne was driving at—generally he shows little or no grip upon these biological questions. Professor Bourne here is not discussing Natural Selection at all; he is discussing the entirely different question of whether there is normally a bitter struggle for existence between the individuals of the same species. If Dr. 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. But Dr. Downey did not, I think, read on. He just took the words that seemed to suit his purpose—rather carelessly—and threw the book down. It is a little tedious, however, that one should have to verify the quotations of an antagonist in this way.]

When it comes to the question of the origin of religion I find Dr. Downey displaying the same controversial ingenuity and missing my plain intention in much the same way. He makes me out to be a follower of Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen, which is rather hard on me: Herbert Spencer is my philosophical bÊte noire; I have rarely mentioned him in my writings without some indication of my antipathy, and in The Outline of History I have never mentioned him at all. In a list of the opinions of various writers taken haphazard, to show what divergent views exist about the origin of religion, I mention Grant Allen’s Evolution of the Idea of God—Dr. Downey, I don’t know why, says “with evident respect.” Then he goes on for some pages confuting Grant Allen and pretending that he is confuting me. 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. I wish I could think of Dr. Downey reading any scientific book for instruction rather than to find little bits for controversial use. I would send him to Lang and Atkinson’s Social Origins and to the psycho-analytical work of Jung. He would learn then something of the real quality of the double stream of evidence, in human institutions and in childish psychology, for the importance of Old Man fear in the religious and social development of mankind.

Upon the third issue raised by Dr. Downey, the rÔle of the Church towards knowledge, I am not very well equipped for discussion. Was Cardinal Newman right in saying that the case of Galileo is the exception that proves the rule, the rule that the Church has never put barriers in the way of scientific progress? I rub my eyes when I find Dr. Downey endorsing this—these habits are catching. Lord Bacon, says Dr. Downey, “violently opposed the Copernican system.” But did he make anyone kneel and recant? I must learn more about these questions. Certainly they were good Catholics who discovered America and first circumnavigated the globe—a point Dr. Downey misses. I shall find perhaps that there were Catholic schools of human anatomy in the Middle Ages and that the Inquisition was a debating society that took for its motto “Hear all sides,” and that it had a burning curiosity to learn some new thing.... I promise further inquiry here and such amendment of the text of the Outline in my next edition as these inquiries may justify. As I have said already, I look to the Catholic Church as an organisation logically obliged to teach the universal brotherhood of mankind, to apply the healing parable of the Good Samaritan to political and social life, and to discourage the vile nationalism that at present darkens and embitters so many human lives. It impresses me as being rather a weak and negligent teacher of these things nowadays, but I have no disposition to go into blank antagonism to the Church on that account. I offer Catholics The Outline of History for use in their schools in the most amiable spirit. If they will not have it, I will not grieve, if only they will produce a universal history of their own. I shall certainly read such a history with interest and delight. It will be different. Catholics, I gather, do not believe in “progress.” It will be, I presume, a History of the Creation (explaining logically why the ichthyosaurus was made), the Salvation and the subsequent Stagnation of mankind.

Before I leave these two critics I may perhaps say a word or two about their manner towards me. Mr. Belloc’s is rather amusing. I am a journalist and writer of books, some novels, some books on public questions. I am a university graduate of respectability rather than distinction in biological science. Mr. Belloc is a journalist and writer of books, some novels, some books on public questions, and a university graduate of respectability rather than distinction—I believe in modern history. He is a younger man than myself, and by that measure less experienced in life and affairs. But for some unfathomable reason he writes as if he were a monstrously wise old historian and I were a bright little boy who had gone to the wrong authorities instead of coming to him before I wrote my little essay. He is lucky not to have adopted this attitude towards me thirty years ago, because then I should have put him across my knees and established a truer relationship in the simple way boys have. Dr. Downey varies in his manner from the pitying and paternal to sprightly defiance. Sometimes he is almost flippant. He closes my last chapter “feeling that—

But how else could one write an Outline of History? A slight flavour of the encyclopÆdia is unavoidable, as Dr. Downey will find out for himself when his turn to write an Outline of History arrives; the rocks, and Moses and Mahomet will insist on coming in. If he leaves out the rocks as being irrelevant to a Catholic history, the critics will throw them at him.

But in one section Dr. Downey has a third manner with regard to me. When first I turned over Dr. Downey’s pamphlet I was much surprised to find a little group of pages studded with such delightful phrases as “we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Wells,” “graceful pen,” “sympathy and insight.” The reader will guess, of course, that I rubbed my eyes. He will guess wrong. I did nothing of the sort, I rub my eyes very rarely, but probably they dilated. On Loyola and the Protestant princes, it seems, I am perfectly sound—and then my style becomes admirable....

Yet only the other day I had a letter from an indignant Protestant in Australia explaining that in these very sections my style and my history reached its nadir of smattering ineptitude.