The Whig historian and his Liberal counterpart attempt to find some intelligibility or meaning in history. The rejection of the Catholic ethos robs the Whig of the one steady, continuous influence that has always operated in the West through the ages. The Whig cannot, for example, see the rise of liberty as something caused by the Faith, as an _effect_ of an institution already in existence. His dilemma consists in seeing a genuine growth in liberty; his rejection of the Catholic tradition forces him to one of two alternatives: either liberty is purely fortuitous and has no over-all historical cause, and history is thereby totally unintelligible; or liberty is the effect of something not actually in existence, but which is conceived as though it were. From the latter issues the Liberal-Whig mythology of “progress,” “evolution,” “human perfectibility,” and so on. What these historians seem incapable of understanding is that these formulas stand for nothing but tissues of imagery, existing in the minds of men who view historical situations after the fact. In no sense did “progress” ever cause anything historical, for the simple reason that “progress” _has no being_ of its own. Yet the Liberals treat these constructs as though they were physical laws operative in the extramental order. Belloc had more than a lively grip on this fallacy, and he fingered it for the imaginative trick it is, in his controversy with H. G. Wells. When Mr. Wells concludes this passage by saying “I strut to no such personal beatitude,” and then goes on to say, “the life to which I belong uses me and will go on beyond me, and I am content,” he does two unintelligent things. First of all, he mixes up the real with the imaginary ... and next he falls into the very common error of confused intellects—the personification of abstract ideas. “The life to which we belong uses us” is a meaningless phrase. 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.[39] Wells was not alone in this personification of the abstract. He was only a popularizer of a tendency that is ever at work in all historical theory that commences by minimizing the religious causality operative in the West. The Whig substituted for the Catholic tradition an over-all finality which he called “progress.” The idealist historian and the _Weltanschauung_ historian add to the Whig denial the negation of the personal will. All the historian is left to work with are impersonal forces, either physical or logical. He falls into the old error of laying his eggs in a basket that does not exist.