Hilaire Belloc’s Companion to Mr. Wells’s "Outline of History"

When in 1926 Hilaire Belloc’s response to H. G. Wells’s famous attempt to précis human history in a popular book was published by Sheed and Ward, educated Europe was already tired of Darwin. No serious scientist outside of an active ideological claque could find in it any single element of value, certainly none as a proposed agent of Evolution.

Belloc had brilliantly collated all of the scientific, social (e.g. common sense based upon experience) data, as well as the philosophical arguments against Darwinism, in one tour de force — this little work, dashed off in newspaper articles even before they were put under one cover. But, as he immediately pointed out, nothing was in that book that had not been thoroughly tested and discussed before by the greatest minds then involved in debating Darwinism. This then is not in any way an attack upon evolution but upon a false explanation of that pretty obvious phenomenon. 

His main concern was that a popular novelist like Wells could be foisted upon the public by his publishers as though he were a professional historian or even a trained scientist. He was also concerned about the catastrophic silencing of genuine research into this mysterious probability known as evolution and discussed by St. Thomas Aquinas and scholars centuries earlier. 

"Outline of History" appeared in 1926. Real scientists sympathetic to Well's position kept sensibly out of sight, leaving the novelist  in the line of fire. Today there is less scruple. Science is being misused by people even less reliable than Wells ever was for the paradoxical reason that they are actually scientists. These trained scientists have bought into Darwinism, indeed into the very flaw at its centre, which is the notion that merely mechanical or vaguely contiguous physical causation explains the processes of real evolutionary theory.  It is not our task here to examine the public and popular advantages they gain at the expense of a good name among genuine scientists. For whatever reason, these less than scientific scientists, practically without exception, court the news and general information media; men such as Lord Winston or Richard Dawkins. Wells was less unworthy. He was a popular novelist of great imaginative and descriptive powers who indulged a journalistic impulse throughout most of his life. It is extremely unlikely that he was intentionally dishonest (although Hilaire Belloc had reason to scrutinize his motives closely) The scientific popularizers cannot be so readily exculpated. Many have pursued careers in universities -- an ambiance less rigorous and open to harsh examination than in the laboratory or at the forefront of genuine research, but one where the damage done to impressionable young people may be incalculable.  Thankfully, science, which progresses inevitably despite ideologies and evasive religiosity, continues to pose questions that demand answers which are not being supplied, and to raise objections to fashionable answers that are being offered on the drop of a hat. Dr. Michael Behe's elegantly presented conundrum, Darwin's Black Box, is a refreshing example of this rigorous approach to Natural Selection -- a book which I recommend to every genuine student of evolution. Make no mistake, Dr. Behe is no bible fundamentalist. He is an evolutionist, but one who recognises a physical paradox when he sees one. 

The schools of the Western world have been, accordingly, seriously damaged by this tendency to reduce reality to random accident and call the procedure "science". The word "scientism" was coined, therefore, to distinguish this false science from the genuine article. Belloc who had read the signs so long ago, had also discerned a weakness in our Post Reformation Civilisation (he claimed again and again it had foundered already) which allowed this brute denial of common sense to spread unchecked. He also believed that the loss of metaphysics was largely to blame for the loss of any intellectual defence.

The trick of Scientism is this; both J. S. Mill and later Huxley preached that without one great act of faith there could be no settled thing which could be called science. Science is a general term indicating the study of what causes things to move, change or even, in the first place, to be. It is also a matter of collecting connected things and assembling them into lesser generalities. So before proceeding we must recognise that chemistry, say, or physics, is a study of universals (in the simplest sense). We must have such towering faith in causes that we state without any more reflection that a particular spoon of sugar, of given capacity and content, will dissolve in water of such and such a temperature exactly in the same way as any other spoonful of sugar. Demonstration and experiment are merely first examinations of the data of what must be made a general or universal belief before we can properly speak of science as such. so we begin with Faith in causes. Now it so happens that men can erect grander generalities which they call Hypotheses or even Theories, indeed what they may then call Laws concerning the reliability of what particular things cause this or that in these or those circumstances. The very best physical scientists, (such as the great Pierre Duhem in his The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory -- ISBN 0-691-02524-X) point out that these are best understood as a means to economise our comprehension of information rather than as an explanation of phenomena as such. But when such an accommodation of information is widened even further to be known as a Cosmology, that is, to be imagined as a great unifying truth or principle, it becomes too much even for the great modern act of faith in physical causation. Each time men contrive such an all explaining causal tower it falls down, or it cannot be intellectually ratified, or tested.
Darwinism is such an erection. It is a cosmology that claims to explain the species in all their variety. It is the greatest act of faith known in the physical universe and goes like this; everything that lives came about through the random touching of one living thing with another of a different sort. This is the material form of the philosophy of mechanism. It can be exemplified by many dominoes falling against one another over a period of many years and here and there forming words and phrases by their patterns, like God, or Nothingness, perhaps even, Arsenal or Celtic (two UK soccer teams). There is no design. All is random, mindless. We need not ask who set the pieces upright to begin with or arranged them close enough for them to touch when toppled, this is but a metaphor; but you get the point. Darwinism means Random mechanisms. But then it supplies a design to explain it. A theory is a design which is laid like a template against what it conceives to be a similar form or shape.

In Wells’ entry into what must be called Scientism, Belloc recognised a sort Pandora's Box, but worse — because the last thing to come out of it would not be Hope but abject ignorance. He also recognised and named people like Haeckel who would suppress scientific facts and even distort others into the great new hypotheses for base reasons — Haeckel rose on the theory of Recapitulation traced to ideas of Von Baer; but he had suppressed one of Baer’s central elements. He also fraudulently presented imaginative drawings of embryonic development as being accurate to embellish his claims. The great Vialleton of Montpellier, however, comprehensively destroyed that simplistic concept of Ontogenesis (the development of the embryo) in which such excesses could occur, and I will add Belloc’s account of that affair further on.

However, the following is the conclusion of that part of Belloc’s book addressed directly to Mr. H. G. Wells on the fallacies of Darwinism. I put it first because it has become, in my opinion, the primary problem which must be faced by today's scholars before they can agree upon the best means of restoring true science and unbiased information to our children in their school classrooms and thence to our Universities. It is the problem of a particular form of religious division (not of Religious differences as such, but concerning silly anomalies of thought and understanding which arise from a type of superstition often mistaken for the substance and purpose of Scriptural Revelation) which allows all sorts of evils to enter a community unchallenged, this is a cleft that runs right through our culture still (Sadly, it may only disappear when the civilisation dies, which it might because it is a main cause of its present degeneration!) and yet it is quite easily repaired by information. It is, as I say, a cleft dug out by ignorance.

Belloc wrote:

"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 up 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 in terms of materialism." (as Kohlbrugge, I read, has put it).

"But in order to defend their new instrument of Natural Selection, they also had to support the 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 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 bursts when it was touched by the finger of Reality."

Belloc kept Wells at the point of his sword throughout his attack on Outline of History which covered everything from the atheist conception of the nature of man to the nature of priesthood and religion. He dismissed him savagely as an historian of any scientific worth, and showed him up for the vainglorious, jealous and resentful soul he really was. But he reserved his deepest thrust against Wells for his culpable ignorance, that is for having available and in print all the necessary authorities who might have moderated and embellished such an ambitious undertaking (as Wells’s Book certainly was) but then failing to consult them.

As Belloc wrote … "Is it not strange that he should take no account of such men as (to quote at random) Bateson, Eimer, Morgan, Delage, Le Dantec, Dreisch, Dennert, Dwight, Nageli, Sachs, Korchinsky, Wolff, Carazzi, Vialleton, Diamare, and a hundred others?

"I pretend no sort of special knowledge in these affairs. I have no more than that 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."

One can only wonder what Belloc’s reaction might be to men like Oxford University's Richard Dawkins who has sustained the same inexcusable hubris despite the light of an entire century being shed upon such ignorance — and he pretending to scholarship. Or what of the entire American educational leadership which has slavishly taken its nation’s children into ideological darkness — breathtakingly in the name of real Science?
 
 

Haeckel, Wells and Belloc.

"In the course of his account of Evolution Mr. Wells repeats with complete confidence, as though it were scientific fact, the old and now worthless theory called Recapitulation. It was a theory invented by Haeckel purporting to be based on the work done by Von Baer more than 40 years earlier — though in 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, 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). … That Mr. Wells knows 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 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 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 always begins with a general form and not with a form recalling another simpler form passed through in an earlier phase of development."
 
 

Some of the greatest scientists who debunked Natural Selection in Belloc’s time whom Wells seems never to have even heard of …
 
 

Cuénot, Delage, Daniele Rosa, Kolliker, Diamiare, Carazzi (David), Bateson, Chauffard, Henslow, Hyatt, cope, Eimer, Piepers, Hartmann, De Vries, Nageli, Packard, Jaeckel, Goette, Haberlandt, Sachs, Kassovittz, Stromer, Depéret, Vogt, Morgan, Davenport, Le Dantec, Fleischmann, Driesch, Dennert, Di Barnardo, Wigand, Woolf, Schmarda, Sergi, Pfeffer, Vialleton, Conn, Osborn, Dacque …

Here are a few quotations from this rank of famous scientists:

Professor Bateson, President of the British Association in 1914 …

"We have come to the conviction that the principles of Natural Selection cannot have been the chief factor in determining species …"

Dreisch … "Natural Selection never explains at all the specifications of the animal and vegetable forms that are actually found ….for men of clear intellect Darwinism has long been dead …"

Dwight … professor of anatomy at Harvard University) … "We have now the remarkable spectacle that just when many scientific men are all agreed that there is no part 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 …"

Professor Morgan, Professor of Experimental Zoology at University of Columbia in 1919 … "Selection does not bring about transgressive variation in a general population…"

Nageli … "Animals and plants would have developed much as they did even had no struggle for existence taken place…."

Korchinsky … "Selection is in no way favourable to the origin of new forms …. The struggle for existence, and the selection that goes with it, restricts the appearance of new forms, and is in no way favourable to the production of these forms. It is an inimical factor in Evolution."

Delage … "On the question of knowing whether Natural Selection can engender new specific forms, it seems clear today that it cannot."

Wolff … "One could possibly imagine a gradual development of the adaptation between one muscle cell and one nerve ending, through selection among an infinity of chance made variations: but that such shall take place co-incidentally in time and character in hundreds of thousands of cases in one organism is inconceivable."

Rosa of Padua …"The Darwinian Theory, favourably received till of late, has lost ground more and more, and may now be said to have failed."

Carazzi in 1919 …"In conclusion we may say that the Darwinian theory has completely failed."

Dacqué …"Never yet has it been possible to refer [to a common origin] methodically and without error any two types or even large groups."

Cuénot … "It is pretty clear that we must wholly abandon the Darwinian hypothesis."
 
 

The complete case against Darwin
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