THE PLAGUE OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE
T is sad to think that, whereas truth is difficult enough
to grasp with our imperfect human faculties, even when
the effort is sincere and the circumstances favourable,
there prevail in our midst almost innumerable agencies for
disseminating falsehood. I am not referring now to the
daily or weekly press, for if a person believes anything on
the sole authority of a party journal his zeal for truth can­
not be called very strong. I refer to the perversion of
§
history, on which non-Catholic youth· in this country is
1
trained and of which this review has said much in the past,1
and especially to the perversion of science, spread abroad
by a multitude of atheistic text-books, still following the
Darwinian tradition. Mr. Wells’s Outline of History is an
excellent type of the former, and Professor Thomson’^ Out­
line of Science, though a fairer book, must yet be classed
amongst the latter. Accordingly part of our duty as Catho­
i
lics is to bear witness to the truth, in one or other of these
departments, to the best of our ability, or at least to bear
witness against what is false.
“ Slowly but surely the idea of evolution is undermining
the foundations of orthodox Christian theology.” These are
the words with which an eminent freethinker, Mr. E. G. A.
Holmes, to whose free (and incorrect) thought about Chris­
tianity we had occasion to call attention in this Review a
dozen years ago,* opens an article in a recent Hibbert
Journal. I do not propose to discuss that article, which
shows indeed that Mr. Holmes has no more understanding
of Christianity now than he had then, nor to point out in
detail the puerility of his arguments against the funda­
mental laws of thought, no step of which discussion could
he rationally take without implicitly calling on their aid.
We merely wish to emphasize again that the supposed quar­
rel between religion and science, herein insisted on, can only
be maintained by gross and persistent misrepresentation of

I

I

* See, lor instance, ” The Lie in English History," Tub Month, Jan. 1919:
“ To Reconstruct the Past," by Dont J. B. Ryan, O.S.B., Jan. 1910.
* See "The Ideas of a Chief Inspector of Schools,” by the Rev. S. F.
Smith, S.J., The Month, Nov. 1911.

Si

THE PLAGUE OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

527

what religion stands for and what are the achievements of
science. The notion that Christian theology is afraid of
the “idea of evolution” shows the obscurantism in which
your modernist dwells. This particular assailant is of course
unaware that St. Gregory of Nyssa in the East and St.
I Augustine of Hippo in the West, relying solely on the
i Biblical record, held an evolutionary theory in regard to
the origin of species far more thorough than that of Dar­
win, whilst St. Thomas and the Scholastics found no diffi­
culty even in the evolution of life from non-living matter.
It was, in fact, the growth of the scientific spirit in the
Church, the fuller investigation and clearer understanding
of the laws of Nature, brought about in many cases by
ecclesiastics, that gradually made her later theologians
chary of such sweeping hypotheses. It is the free-thinker
now who has become credulous, who allows his desires to
damage his capacity for truth, who goes beyond what evi­
dence warrants, who cultivates apriorism and préjudice. It
is a strange nemesis on the rationalist abuse of human reason
that its votaries should thus fall into superstition and sink
to forgery' and falsehood, whilst the Church, miscalled the
foe of learning, remains almost the sole refuge of correct,
self-consistent thought. And if there is one idea more than
another familiar to that Church, it is the idea of evolution, for
she alone teaches the existence of the Absolute, without which
the contingent could not evolve. If we read his misty meta­
physics aright, Mr. Holmes conceives the Absolute as itself
a result or process of evolution, God, he suggests, instead of
being” may be “becoming,” as if “becoming” were notitself
in the category of “being,” and as if there could be an inter­
mediate stage between existence as such and non-existence.
Having so disposed of the Law of Contradiction, he proceeds
to reject revelation as well as reason, and imagines that the
idea of God is a work of human minds, which are still en­
gaged in elaborating and modifying their own creation. He
does not know that, so far from Christian theology being
embedded in “ à static conception of the universe ”—to use
his curious phrase—it teaches that God is not only Absolute
Being but pure Activity, that the Divine energy is so im­
mense as to find necessary expression in the ineffable wonder
of the Trinity, that the essence of creaturehood is mutability
and change, that, though God is necessarily changeless,
being infinitely perfect, man’s thought about God is always
growing in richness and variety. There is a good deal, in

Γ
I.

?
Si·
'J·t.

o

&

æf
g

-Μ

jg

i
k

κ

r?
**■*
l i
ί

528

THE PLAGUE OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

fact, that Mr. Holmes does not know about Christian theo­
logy, and Catholic doctrine, and his ignorance will not be
dissipated by a casual search amongst theological textbooks.
But the notion which he expresses is, after all, prevalent
enough, owing to the determinedly atheistic attitude adopted
by modern scientific teaching. Apart from the writings of
avowed materialists of the school of Haeckel, there is a
lamentable fear and disuse, in the scientific writings of our
day, of knowledge derived from relevation. The giants
of science a generation or two ago were bolder or more
honest; Lord Kelvin, Professor Stewart, Professor Tait, Sir
W. Siemens, Sir J. Herschel, Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, A. R.
Wallace, etc.—these men had no hesitation in proclaiming
in their scientific books the necessary existence of a First
Cause. “No system of the Universe,” said Sir J. W. Daw­
son, “can dispense with a First Cause, eternal and selfexistent; and the First Cause must necessarily be the living
God, whose will is the ultimate force and the origin of
natural law.”1 By far the greater proportion of eminent
scientific men in the past have believed inr revelation and
not a few have proclaimed their belief, but it is becoming
increasingly rare to find modem scientific writers acknow­
ledging that source of information. It is true that the
sciences of observation are not concerned with ultimate
causes, still less with religious philosophy, yet surely
the knowledge wherewith God has supplemented the
researches of reason should be employed or kept in mind,
when hypotheses are framed to account for observed facts.
The materialists have set an unfortunate fashion in this
matter, and although their doctrine is all but abandoned,
few have had the courage to shake off their literary methods.
The recently published Outline of Science, as we have
suggested, which is an endeavour to make the “ general
reader” aware of the present state of knowledge in every
department of scientific research, is a great offender in this
way. It assumes that before Darwin and Spencer the idea
of evolution was comparatively unknown, whereas the human
mind necessarily investigates causes and in no branch of
study has its historical development ever been neglected.
The old lawyers went back to Roman law; the physicians,
alchemists, astronomers, were all acquainted with what their
predecessors had achieved ; even theology had its positive
* Modern Idea of Evolution (1890), p. 241;

|

I
1
I
j
J
j
j
1
j
i
•
j

Î
!
!

THE PLAGUE OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

529

side, and the gradual unfolding of the deposit of revelation was recognized from the first. Evolution in its wider
aspect simply means a process of growth, an idea always
familiar to mankind.
What the great physical scientists
did was to apply that familiar notion to the organic
world, and to endeavour to account for existing species by
tracing their ancestry. “The Doctrine of Evolution,’’ says
the Outline of Science, with the air of announcing a disoovery, “ states the fact that the present is the child of the
past and the parent of the future.’’ Who in the world ever
denied that truism? But it is another thing to assume as
an established fact that the Author of Nature never inter­
vened directly or indirectly in the history of His creation
to introduce new forces, and to assist or modify develop­
ment. The whole of the materialistic treatment of the sub-------ject is vitiated by the assumption that there is no Creator
and no Designer, that the alleged development of the vast
organic world from a few simple elements is the outcome
of blind impulses and self-established laws. Hence the
Outline of Science and other popular works are full of dis­
honesty, the dice are loaded against any hypothesis save the
materialistic one, difficulties enormous and insurmountable
are ignored or discounted, and the evidence, especially in
support of the animal origin of man, is flagrantly and im­
pudently “cooked.” The hopeless inadequacy of Darwin’s
theory of Natural Selection to account for development of
species has been demonstrated times out of mind, histori­
cally, mathematically, philosophically. It has ceased to be,
with the learned, even an hypothesis. Yet the Outline of
Science solemnly restates the old discredited process—Varia­
tion, Hereditary Transmission, the Struggle for Existence—
as if its adequacy had never been challenged, as if blind
chance, given time, could effect what human intelligence,
working with all the inherited skill of the ages, has never
been able to accomplish—the creation of a real and per­
manent new species. All the “genealogies,” animal or
vegetable, so plentifully supplied by writers of this class,
are literally figments of the brain, or rather of the imagina­
tion. There is no support for the Evolution of Species in
fossil Botany: the record of the rocks tells us nothing cer­
tain about the development of the horse or any other animaL
There can be no objection to these fancies being put for­
ward as what they are—conjectures based upon .a few slight
vol. cxu.
11

530

THE PLAGUE OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

indications which may just as well be interpreted otherwise.
But again and again these ideas are stated as facts. Some
consciousness of the dishonesty of this proceeding seems to
have been awakened in a writer in the Outline. After stat­
ing (p. 274) that “it is quite illegitimate to infer from our
dubiety in regard to the factors of evolution any hesitation
as to the fact ”—here, we notice, Darwinism is actually ad­
vanced from the sphere of hypothesis into that of reality—
he goes on to say:
Our frankness in admitting difficulties [he nowhere fairly
states, or resolutely faces them] and relative ignorance in regard
to the variations and selections that led from certain Dinosaurs
to Birds cannot be used by any fair-minded enquirer as an ar­
gument against the idea of evolution. For how else could birds
have arisenl (Italics ours.)
The idea of special creation is apparently ruled abso­
lutely out of court by this fair-minded Darwinian. No
wonder that Mr. Holmes, wishing to recommend the idea
of Evolution, is first of all at pains to destroy the trustworthiness of reason. Even Mr. A. R. Wallace, devoted
Darwinian though he was, declared that at least thrice in the
process of development a new force must have intervened
to accomplish what no natural forces could effect, viz., the
production of life, the production of sensation or conscious­
ness, the production of reason. Why do Darwinians ignore
Wallace, one inventor of the theory of natural selection, and
pin their faith upon the other? Of course, palaeontology in
any case can only exhibit the material structural varieties of
things, but even here there is a complete absence of grada­
tion. There is progress in complexity of organization from
epoch to epoch, but, on the other hand, each displays its
particular forms quite abruptly and in relative perfection.
One feels in reading evolutionary treatises that the facts are
being explained (and sometimes explained away) to fit the
theory, not that the theory has been drawn from the facts.
The truth is, the rationalists, in their hurry to get rid of
Creation and Design, have eagerly seized upon an hypo­
thesis which, however superficially plausible, is essentially
inadequate as an explanation of the genesis of species, and
they do not see how they can retreat without discredit.
Such methods, practised now through several generalions and perpetuated in text-books and museum-exhibits,

'j

?

!

1
|

THE PLdGUE OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

531

naturally provoke irritation amongst those who reverence
Truth and respect Reason. Hence we are not surprised that,
on the other side, there is a certain tone of acrimony and a
certain violence of argument employed in dealing with the
materialists. It would seem that the United States, always
-, prolific in strange types, produces a larger crop of atheistic
; evolutionists than grows in the effete soil of Europe. Conse­
quent!}' we find there a corresponding output of vigorous
hard-hitting literature devoted to the cause of sanity andl
truth. The opposition is excited, not so much by the
theory of Evolution properly understood and supported,
which, as we know, has many Catholic advocates, but by
the unwarrantable extension of the theory to explain the
origin of the human race. The dogmatic, violence of the
supporters of the simian relationship of man has provoked
such a reaction that Mr. W. J. Bryan and others have pro­
jected a law to prevent the teaching of Darwinism in the
schools of America. Certainly a Darwinism which destroys
the notion of free-will and moral responsibility, and which
thus strikes at the roots of civilization, might well be for­
bidden by law. And the practical atheism under the guise
of Science, which flourishes in our Universities and in those
f of the States, is as real a menace to social well-being as
the crude Marxianism and class-war taught in the Com­
munistic “ Red-Schools. ”
However, the follies and pretences of pseudo-science are
best met by vigorous and persistent exposure. A volume,
to which we have had occasion to allude more than once—
Mr. A, McCann’s God—or Gorilla *·—admirably fulfils this
necessary rôle. Its immediate occasion was the display, in
the New York Museum of Natural History, of several cases
containing supposed illustrations of the' evolution of man.
In these cases, models of all the much-debated skeletal
fragments of palaeolithic man are “ reconstructed ” and
arranged chronologically to suggest his descent from some
ancestor from whom have also descended the race of apes.
This exhibit/ as it stands, and the accompanying guide-

I
I
j
J

1 The Devin-Adair Co., New York, 1922.
_.......
* Our own museum at South Kensington is not altogether guiltless in the
same regard : it contains the same fragments or models of them, as it un­
doubtedly should, but in the " reconstructions ” and in the hand-book that
describes the fossil remains there is the continuous suggestion 1) that the
particular fragment represents a ''type," and 2) that it shows more ape like
features the older it is. Some of these fanciful yet purposive •'reconstructions"
are represented in thé Outline of Science. See The Month, Oct. 1922, "Science
or—Art?”

532

■

1.1

THE PLAGUE OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

book, as much by what they assert as by what they ignore
or conceal, form a constructive falsehood, devoted to bolster­
ing up an unproven if not an exploded theory ; accordingly,
starting with this palmary instance of its deceptive methods,
Mr. McCann proceeds to examine the whole field of athe­
istic evolution and to show how it prostitutes the fair name
of Science, and grievously misleads those that trust in it.
Aided by a large series of admirable illustrations, Mr.
McCann proceeds on his savagely-facetious way, using a
bludgeon where the late Editor of this periodical wielded
a rapier,1 and probably finding the weapon more effective
on the heads with which he deals. He is not fighting science,
but that masquerade of science which manipulates, exag­
gerates and suppresses facts in order to establish some
favourite theory. At the same time, though his attack is
on the whole sound and well-sustained, he sometimes over­
looks points in favour of his adversaries. For instance, in
dating these various prehistoric human remains scientific
men rely a great deal upon the “ cultural ” evidence of the
strata which contains them and upon the fossil remains of
other animals whose range of existence is otherwise known.
Although the union of the chimpanzee mandible with the
human brain-pan in the case of the Piltdown skull is quite
unwarranted, the remains can be proved early Pleistocene
from the flints and other implements found with them. How­
ever, his book remains a convincing demonstration, not of
the falseness of the evolutionary theory, which as a whole has
been neither proved nor disproved, although the process sug­
gested by Darwin has been found inadequate, but of the
subterfuges and dishonesty of the materialists, and it should
be found alongside Professor Windle’s Church and Science
in every Catholic library. For the endeavour to persuade
men that they are evolved from brutes is radically inspired
by the desire to get them free from the moral law and respon­
sibility to a Creator. It is an endeavour which has long ago
failed, as all would recognizè if it were not for the con­
spiracy against the truth engineered by the pseudo-scientists.
The result of their efforts has been declared once for all
by Professor Virchow, a non-Catholic scientist of repute,
who says: “Every positive advance which we have made
in that study [prehistoric anthropology] has removed us
* See Essays In Un-Natnral History, by Father John Gerard, noir unhappily
out of print in collected form. (C.T.S.)

1I
THE PLAGUE OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE
533
ί further than before from any proof of evolution to be found
I there. Man has not descended from the ape nor has any
< ape-man ever existed.’’1
I
Amongst the facts that have discredited Darwinism and
i which on that account Darwinians rather ignore, the exI pertinents of Abbot Mendel take first rank. They were pubj lished a few years after the publication of the Origin of
j Species, but the Abbot lacked advertisement, and his revolu­
tionary discoveries were not really made public till 1900.
They did not profess, as Darwin’s theory did, to account for
! the emergence of new species, but they established facts
which show the uselessness of Natural Selection. Mendel
demonstrated that the cause of variations is something in­
trinsic, some property of the germ-cell which alternately acts
and ceases to act according to a definite law. It leaves
us with the old mystery—what determines the fixity of
species, how did these very definite laws become inherent
in living matter? True science is humble and confesses2
ignorance. False science pridefully tries to hide ignorance
under a cloud of words. But the mystery remains as a
constant spur to human curiosity.
Apart from the need of refuting the attempt to connect
man with the brute, on the sole grounds of resemblance in
bodily structure, the study of prehistoric times is one of
great importance for our apologists. That the physical
nature of the crown of creation should be, as it were, the'
basic idea on which the Creator has elaborated such a vast
number of variations,is not surprising. But whilst resemblance
can never be a proof of relationship, still, the doctrine of the
Fall, taught by revelation, prepares us to find primitive man
in a degraded condition. And so we always need, actively,
and consciously, to bring the impressions which we receive
from the Genesis narrative into accord with the established
facts of palaeontology, or else we shall run the risk of adopt­
ing views not warranted by revelation. The first notion to
get rid of is that foisted upon the Christian mind by the
Biblical chronology of the Protestant Archbishop Ussher.
Mr. Edmond Holmes; in his ignorance of the Catholic faith’,
imagines that we are bound to hold that the parents of the
human race existed at the utmost some six thousand years
ago.2 That is demonstrably incorrect. Catholic chronolo* Address at Weisbaden Congress of Naturalists.
• January Hibbert Journal, p. 243·

534

THE PLAGUE OF PSEUDO-SCIENCE

gists know that Genesis gives no certain data. Even the
cautious and conservative Abbé Vigouroux, in his Diction­
naire de la Bible, sets down its chronology thus:
Creation
...
Deluge
.
.
.
Abraham leaves Ur .

.
.
.

.
.
?
.
.
?
2138 B.c.

So there may be gaps in the patriarchal record long
enough to allow for physical degeneration, as well as for
the moral corruption of which we read. Moreover, Arch­
bishop Sheehan1 significantly reminds us that, whilst we are
bound to believe that the present human race are all
descended from Adam and Eve, the Church has never con­
demned the opinion that a race of men lived on the earth,
but became extinct before the creation of Adam. The
Catholic apologist, as we have often pointed out, should be
at great pains to ascertain the exact limits of revelation in
regard to human origins and primitive history, for it is in
that direction that the rationalist finds it easiest to advance
to the attack. There is room for a detailed and popular
*' harmony ” between the Book of Nature and the Bible which
only those well acquainted with both should attempt. Such
a reconciliation would at once satisfy the intellectual de­
mands of the Catholic and provide him with a needed de­
fence of the Faith. For the rationalist is most effectually
discomfited when he finds that there are no real grounds
of conflict between Church teaching and the assured results
of scientific research.
THÉ EDITOR.

Note. It must not be implied from the foregoing that there is any real
dearth of Catholic literature on subjects involving the reconciliation of
revelation and science, but only that it is not available enough either
for the young in their formative years or for the Catholic. “ man
(or woman) in the street.” The information that is contained in such
books as that under review, Father Husslein’s “ Evolution and
Social Progress,” Professor Windle’s “The Church and Science,”
“Moses and the Law,” edited by Father Lattey, Father Gerard’s
"Old Riddle” and "Essays in Un-Natural History," Canon de
Dorlodot’s “ Darwinism," Dr. P. L. Mills’s “ Creation versus Evolu­
tion,” and a host of articles in the great Catholic Encyclopedia, needs
digesting and simplifying for youthful consumption, and, for popular
use, should be presented in a carefully thought-out series of C.T.S.
pamphlets. False and misleading doctrines are already propagated
in attractive form: truth should be elaborated with at least equal care.
1 Apologetici and Christian Doctrine, Part II., p. 56.

SOME PHYSICAL PHENOMENA OF
MYSTICISM
INCENDIUM AMORIS.

;

HAT emotional ardours of a more intense type art
often attended by an actual rise of bodily tempera­
ture may be regarded as a fact of everyday experi­
ence. There is nothing therefore particularly astonishing
in the statements' which we so often encounter in the lives
of the great mystics, to the effect that when some transport
of love took possession of their souls their countenances be­
came inflamed, that they could hardly endure the clothing
which seemed to stifle them, and that in the coldest of winter
weather they threw open doors and windows, panting for
air and half unconsciously seeking the same kind of relief
as our Lord has indicated in His parable of Dives and
Lazarus. Let us begin by taking a few well-known exam­
ples. In Father Goldie’s Story of St. Stanislaus Kostka we
read:
St. Francis de Sales’in his book on the Love of God, says,
“ Stanislaus was so violently assailed by the love of Our Saviour
as often to faint and to suffer spasms in consequence, and he
was obliged to apply cloths dipped in cold water to his breast
in order to temper the violence of the love he felt.” One day
he was found by his Superior walking alone at night time in the
little garden which the Novitiate then possessed, when a very
bitter cold wind was blowing, and on being asked by the Father
Rector what he was doing there, he replied with all simplicity
• and straightforwardness, “ I am burning, I am burning,” as he
felt his heart still on fire with the love of God, although his
prayer was over. Stephen Augusti bore witness to the fact that
the Socius to the Master of Novices, Father Lelius Sanguigni,
had often to bathe his chest to temper the scorching heat.1
Similarly in the case of St. Mary Magdalen de’ Pazzi, who
was born in 1566, two years before St. Stanislaus died, we
are told how her transports of love transformed her out­
ward appearance, “for her face,” says her biographer and
confessor, Father Cepari, " losing in a moment the paleness
which had been produced by her penances and austere re« The Story of St. Stanislaus Kostka, pp. 136—137 (ed. 1893). This is based
upon the details furnished in the Analecta Bollandiana, c. xiii., pp. 143-5· "

i-

I