But though this lack of scientific habit in Mr. Wells is woeful enough and very misleading, a defect of infinitely greater importance is his incapacity for dealing with the fundamental questions of our nature and destiny which are alone of real moment. He seems to be aware of some clash between the materialist assumptions of his narrow world and another much more majestic philosophy, much more comprehensive; but he does not know what that opposing philosophy is. It is evident throughout all his work that he has not even consulted an elementary treatise on Catholic philosophy. Sometimes he seems to think that Catholicism is a jumble of irrational tenets like those of the old Bible Christians, for whose descendants he is writing and whom alone he really understands. There are other times when he brings in the name of the Catholic Church in a fashion which betrays his hatred of it, but clearly in ignorance of what the doctrines and nature of the Catholic Church may be. He is like a man who, hearing a piece of Mozart, complains angrily of the noise it makes, but has never heard of the theory and emotion of music. He suffers, therefore, as do much the greater part of his readers, from two forms of ignorance, very fatal to a proper handling of our chief human problems. First, he is ignorant of the fact that he and they are working not on common sense accepted by all men, but on a highly particular philosophical theory (called once the Epicurean, but to-day the Materialist, Theory) which may be accepted or denied, but which can no more be taken for granted as universally admitted than can the Catholic Faith itself. He thinks he is only dealing with ascertained fact, whereas he is really acting on a religion; and as that religion is false, it compels him to force facts to fit it. This is the very mark of the provincial mind. It mistakes its local superstition for the very nature of things. It is from this inability to define their own first principles, from this conception that they are dealing with ascertained physical truth alone, that people of this kind are at once debarred from understanding their superiors and from reasoning clearly upon their own postulates. Secondly, he is ignorant of the Catholic philosophy which he instinctively opposes. He does not know what it is that he is combating, nor what a crushing advantage of scope and examination it has over the insufficient and parochial experience lying behind his own work. He approaches the Catholic Church as a man who has only done a little suburban gardening might approach a fifty-acre field—with a spade.