我們有後見之明，第一次世界大戰，德國、法國、英國，都個死約500萬人。知識份子如Wells先生的想法，只是空話。
"We fight not to destroy a nation, but a nest of evil ideas…Our business is to kill ideas. The ultimate purpose of this war is propaganda, the destruction of certain beliefs, and the creation of others."
- H. G. Wells, born in Bromley #OTD 1866. His father, a former professional cricketer, was a failing small shopkeeper. Wells struggled to afford a good education but in 1884 he won a scholarship and he was awarded a first-class degree in zoology by London University in 1890.
He was at his most effective in the 1920s, on the attack against H. G. Wells's Outline of History, in which he criticized Wells' secular bias and his belief in evolution by means of natural selection, a theory that Belloc asserted had been completely discredited. Wells remarked that "Debating Mr. Belloc is like arguing with a hailstorm". Belloc's review of Outline of History famously observed that Wells' book was a powerful and well-written volume, "up until the appearance of Man, that is, somewhere around page seven." Wells responded with a small book, Mr. Belloc Objects. [5] Not to be outdone, Belloc followed with, "Mr. Belloc Still Objects."
Outside academe, Belloc was impatient with what he considered to be axe-grinding histories, especially what he called "official history." [12] Joseph Pearce notes also Belloc's attack on the secularism of H.G. Wells's popular Outline of History:
Belloc objected to his adversary's tacitly anti-Christian stance, epitomized by the fact that Wells had devoted more space in his "history" to the Persian campaign against the Greeks than he had given to the figure of Christ.****
Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder
by Donald R. Kelley, Yale University Press (1999)
In this book, one of the world’s leading intellectual historians offers a critical survey of Western historical thought and writing from the pre-classical era to the late eighteenth century. Donald R. Kelley focuses on persistent themes and methodology, including questions of myth, national origins, chronology, language, literary forms, rhetoric, translation, historical method and criticism, theory and practice of interpretation, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and "historicism."
Kelley begins by analyzing the dual tradition established by the foundational works of Greek historiography―Herodotus’s broad cultural and antiquarian inquiry and the contrasting model of Thucydides’ contemporary political and analytical narrative. He then examines the many variations on and departures from these themes produced in writings from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian antiquity, in medieval chronicles, in national histories and revisions of history during the Renaissance and Reformation, and in the rise of erudite and enlightened history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, Kelley discusses how later historians viewed their predecessors, including both supporters and detractors of the authors in question.
The book, which is a companion volume to Kelley’s highly praised anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in interpretations of the past.
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