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Title: The Everlasting Man
Author: G.K. Chesterton
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Title:      The Everlasting Man
Author:     G.K. Chesterton





Prefatory Note
Introduction: The Plan of This Book

PART I:  ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN

    I The Man in the Cave
   II Professors and Prehistoric Men
  III The Antiquity of Civilisation
   IV God and Comparative Religion
    V Man and Mythologies
   VI Demons and Philosophers
  VII The War of the Gods and Demons
 VIII The End of the World

PART II:  ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST

    I The God in the Cave
   II The Riddles of the Gospel
  III The Strangest Story in the World
   IV The Witness of the Heretics
    V The Escape from Paganism
   VI The Five Deaths of the Faith

CONCLUSION:  THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK

Appendix I.  On Prehistoric Man
Appendix II. On Authority and Accuracy


* * *

PREPATORY NOTE

This book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood
The view suggested is historical rather than theological,
and does not deal directly with a religious change which has been
the chief event of my own life; and about which I am already
writing a more purely controversial volume.  It is impossible,
I hope, for any Catholic to write any book on any subject,
above all this subject, without showing that he is a Catholic;
but this study is not specially concerned with the differences
between a Catholic and a Protestant.  Much of it is devoted
to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians;
and its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side
by side with similar myths, and his religion side by side
with similar religions, are only repeating a very stale formula
contradicted by a very striking fact.  To suggest this I
have not needed to go much beyond matters known to us all;
I make no claim to learning; and have to depend for some things,
as has rather become the fashion, on those who are more learned.
As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view
of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate
him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried
through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work;
but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur
to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.

* * *

INTRODUCTION

THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.
The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back
to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story
I once wrote.  It is, however, a relief to turn from that topic
to another story that I never wrote.  Like every book I
never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.
It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use
it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth.
I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping sides,
like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are
scrawled along the flanks of the hills.  It concerned some boy whose
farm or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels
to find something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant;
and when he was far enough from home he looked back and saw that
his own farm and kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hill-side
like the colours and quarterings of a shield, were but parts
of some such gigantic figure, on which he had always lived,
but which was too large and too close to be seen.  That, I think,
is a true picture of the progress of any really independent
intelligence today; and that is the point of this book.

The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best
thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really
outside it.  And a particular point of it is that the popular
critics of Christianity are not really outside it.
They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term.
They are doubtful in their very doubts.  Their criticism has
taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling.
Thus they make current and anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk.
They will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we
should be any more free if all the police who shadowed or collared
us were plain clothes detectives.  Or they will complain that a
sermon cannot be interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward's castle;
though they do not call an editor's office a coward's castle.
It would be unjust both to journalists and priests; but it
would be much truer of journalist.  The clergyman appears
in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of church;
the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick him.
They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press
about why the churches are empty, without even going there
to find out if they are empty, or which of them are empty.
Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most
insipid curate in a three-act farce, and move us to comfort him
after the manner of the curate in the Bab Ballads; 'Your mind
is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.'  So we may truly
say to the very feeblest cleric:  'Your mind is not so blank
as that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man in the Street,
or any of your critics in the newspapers; for they have
not the most shadowy notion of what they want themselves.
Let alone of what you ought to give them.'  They will suddenly
turn round and revile the Church for not having prevented
the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent;
and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent,
except some of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan
sceptics who are the chief enemies of the Church.  It was
the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying
the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was,
or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent
of universal war.  As for the general view that the Church
was discredited by the War--they might as well say that the Ark
was discredited by the Flood.  When the world goes wrong,
it proves rather that the Church is right.  The Church is justified,
not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they
are in a state of reaction against it.  It is well with the boy
when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when
he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole.
But these people have got into an intermediate state,
have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can
see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind.
They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy.
They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being
Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere
of a reaction:  sulks, perversity, petty criticism.
They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost
the light of the faith.

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to
love it.  But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it.
It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge
of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be
something more like a Confucian.  The worst judge of all is the man
now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian
turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in
the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning,
blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what,
and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.
He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would;
he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism.  He cannot
by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles
away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially
as a Chinese pagoda.  It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier,
who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there
as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because
his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of
representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes
of Chinamen.  But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen,
and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as
featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts;
or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys.
It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult;
the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses
of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks
twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession;
to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel
and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika.  Then at least we
should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics
seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits.
Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere
of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape.
Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing
as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet.
It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes
than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops.
It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda
than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either
to go inside and help or to go outside and forget.
For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession,
I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving
the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen.  In other words, I recommend
these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints
as if they were Pagan sages.

But with this we come to the final and vital point I shall try
to show in these pages that when we do make this imaginative
effort to see the whole thing from the outside, we find that it
really looks like what is traditionally said about it inside.
It is exactly when the boy gets far enough off to see the giant
that he sees that he really is a giant.  It is exactly when we
do at last see the Christian Church afar under those clear
and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church
of Christ.  To put it shortly, the moment we are really
impartial about it, we know why people are partial to it.
But this second proposition requires more serious discussion;
and I shall here set myself to discuss it.

As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something
solid in the solitary and unique character of the divine story,
it struck me that there was exactly the same strange and yet
solid character in the human story that had led up to it;
because that human story also had a root that was divine.
I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more remarkable
when it is fairly compared with the common religious life
of mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable
when we compare it with the common life of nature.
And I have noticed that most modern history is driven to something
like sophistry, first to soften the sharp transition from animals
to men, and then to soften the sharp transition from heathens
to Christians.  Now the more we really read in a realistic spirit
of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be.
It is because the critics are not detached that they do not see
this detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry
light that they cannot see the difference between black and white.
It is because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt
that they have a motive for making out that all the white
is dirty grey and the black not so black as it is painted.
I do not say there are not human excuses for their revolt; I do not
say it is not in some ways sympathetic; what I say is that it is not
in any way scientific.  An iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast
may be justly indignant; but an iconoclast is not impartial.
And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher
critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative
religion are in the least impartial.  Why should they be impartial,
what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about
whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope?
I do not pretend to be impartial in the sense that the final
act of faith fixes a man's mind because it satisfies his mind.
But I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are;
in the sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some
sort of imaginative justice to all sides; and they cannot.
I do profess to be impartial in the sense that I should be ashamed
to talk such nonsense about the Lama of Thibet as they do about the Pope
of Rome, or to have as little sympathy with Julian the Apostate
as they have with the Society of Jesus.  They are not impartial;
they never by any chance hold the historical scales even;
and above all they are never impartial upon this point of evolution
and transition.  They suggest everywhere the grey gradations
of twilight, because they believe it is the twilight of the gods.
I propose to maintain that whether or no it is the twilight of gods,
it is not the daylight of men.

I maintain that when brought out into the daylight these two
things look altogether strange and unique; and that it is only
in the false twilight of an imaginary period of transition
that they can be made to look in the least like anything else.
The first of these is the creature called man and the second
is the man called Christ.  I have therefore divided this
book into two parts:  the former being a sketch of the main
adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen;
and the second a summary of the real difference that was made by it
becoming Christian.  Both motives necessitate a certain method,
a method which is not very easy to manage, and perhaps even less
easy to define or defend.

In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note
of impartiality, it is necessary to touch the nerve of novelty.
I mean that in one sense we see things fairly when we see them first.
That, I may remark in passing, is why children generally have very
little difficulty about the dogmas of the Church.  But the Church,
being a highly practical thing for working and fighting,
is necessarily a thing for men and not merely for children.
There must be in it for working purposes a great deal of tradition,
of familiarity, and even of routine.  So long as its fundamentals
are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner condition.
But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must
try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt
realism and objectivity of innocence.  Or if we cannot do that,
we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom
and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural.
Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection
had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contempt.
For in connection with things so great as are here considered,
whatever our view of them, contempt must be a mistake.
Indeed contempt must be an illusion.  We must invoke the most wild
and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination that can see
what is there.

The only way to suggest the point is by an example of something,
indeed of almost anything, that has been considered beautiful
or wonderful.  George Wyndham once told me that he had seen
one of the first aeroplanes rise for the first time and it
was very wonderful but not so wonderful as a horse allowing
a man to ride on him.  Somebody else has said that a fine man
on a fine horse is the noblest bodily object in the world.
Now, so long as people feel this in the right way, all is well.
The first and best way of appreciating it is to come of people
with a tradition of treating animals properly; of men in the right
relation to horses.  A boy who remembers his father who rode
a horse, who rode it well and treated it well, will know
that the relation can be satisfactory and will be satisfied.
He will be all the more indignant at the ill-treatment of horses
because he knows how they ought to be treated; but he will
see nothing but what is normal in a man riding on a horse.
He will not listen to the great modern philosopher who explains
to him that the horse ought to be riding on the man.
He will not pursue the pessimist fancy of Swift and say that men
must be despised as monkeys and horses worshipped as gods.
And horse and man together making an image that is to him
human and civilised, it will be easy, as it were, to lift
horse and man together into something heroic or symbolical;
like a vision of St. George in the clouds.  The fable
of the winged horse will not be wholly unnatural to him:
and he will know why Ariosto set many a Christian hero
in such an airy saddle, and made him the rider of the sky.
For the horse has really been lifted up along with the man in the
wildest fashion in the very word we use when we speak 'chivalry.'
The very name of the horse has been given to the highest
mood and moment of the man; so that we might almost say that
the handsomest compliment to a man is to call him a horse.

But if a man has got into a mood in which he is not able to feel this
sort of wonder, then his cure must begin right at the other end.
We must now suppose that he has drifted into a dull mood,
in which somebody sitting on a horse means no more than somebody
sitting on a chair.  The wonder of which Wyndham spoke,
the beauty that made the thing seem an equestrian statue,
the meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have become
to him merely a convention and a bore.  Perhaps they have been
merely a fashion; perhaps they have gone out of fashion;
perhaps they have been talked about too much or talked about in
the wrong way; perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses
without the horrible risk of being horsy.  Anyhow, he has got
into a condition when he cares no more for a horse than for a
towel-horse. His grandfather's charge at Balaclava seems to him
as dull and dusty as the album containing such family portraits.
Such a person has not really become enlightened about the album;
on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust.
But when he has reached that degree of blindness, he will
not be able to look at a horse or a horseman at all until
he has seen the whole thing as a thing entirely unfamiliar
and almost unearthly.

Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there
must come towards us, with lumbering yet dancing motions,
one of the very queerest of the prehistoric creatures.
We must see for the first time the strangely small head set on a neck
not only longer but thicker than itself, as the face of a gargoyle
is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one disproportionate crest
of hair running along the ridge of that heavy neck like a beard
in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club of horn,
alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear is
to be found in showing, not the cloven, but the uncloven hoof.
Nor is it mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster;
for in a sense a monster means what is unique, and he is really unique.
But the point is that when we thus see him as the first man saw him,
we begin once more to have some imaginative sense of what it meant
when the first man rode him.  In such a dream he may seem ugly,
but he does not seem unimpressive; and certainly that two-legged
dwarf who could get on top of him will not seem unimpressive.
By a longer and more erratic road we shall come back to the same
marvel of the man and the horse; and the marvel will be, if possible,
even more marvellous.  We shall have again a glimpse of St. George;
the more glorious because St. George is not riding on the horse,
but rather riding on the dragon.

In this example, which I have taken merely because it is
an example, it will be noted that I do not say that the nightmare
seen by the first man of the forest is either more true
or more wonderful than the normal mare of the stable seen
by the civilised person who can appreciate what is normal.
Of the two extremes, I think on the whole that the traditional grasp
of truth is the better.  But I say that the truth is found at one
or other of these two extremes, and is lost in the intermediate
condition of mere fatigue and forgetfulness of tradition.
In other words, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster
than to see it only as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we
have got into that state of mind about a horse as something stale,
it is far better to be frightened of a horse because it is
a good deal too fresh.

Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so
it is with the monster that is called a man.
Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always
to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy.
He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will
feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view,
and will be satisfied.  But if he has lost the pose to strike
wherever possible this note of what is new and strange,
and for that reason the style even on so serious a subject
may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and fanciful.
I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the outside
in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background
of other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity
as a whole against the background of natural things.
And I say that in both cases, when seen thus, they stand
out from their background like supernatural things.
They do not fade into the rest with the colours of impressionism;
they stand out from the rest with the colours of heraldry; as vivid
as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on a ground of gold.
So stands the Red Clay against the green field of nature,
or the White Christ against the red clay of his race.

But in order to see them clearly we have to see them as a whole.
We have to see how they developed as well as how they began;
for the most incredible part of the story is that
things which began thus should have developed thus.
Anyone who chooses to indulge in mere imagination can imagine
that other things might have happened or other entities evolved.
Anyone thinking of what might have happened may conceive a sort
of evolutionary equality; but anyone facing what did happen must
face an exception and a prodigy.  If there was ever a moment
when man was only an animal, we can if we choose make a fancy
picture of his career transferred to some other animal.
An entertaining fantasia might be made in which elephants
built in elephantine architecture, with towers and turrets
like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus.
A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed
a costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers.
We could imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman,
a quadrumanous creature carving and painting with his hands and
cooking and carpentering with his feet.  But if we are considering
what did happen, we shall certainly decide that man has distanced
everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical spaces
and a speed like that of the still thunderbolt of the light.
And in the same fashion, while we can if we choose see the Church
amid a mob of Mithraic or Manichean superstitions squabbling
and killing each other at the end of the Empire, while we can
if we choose imagine the Church killed in the struggle and some
other chance cult taking its place, we shall be the more surprised
(and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years afterwards
rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought
and everlasting enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance;
and still as new as it is old.

* * *

PART I

On the Creature Called Man


* * *

I

THE MAN IN THE CAVE

Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote,
there is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover.
At least I could never observe in the faces or demeanour of most
astronomers or men of science any evidence that they have discovered it;
though as a matter of fact they were walking about on it all the time.
It is a star that brings forth out of itself very strange plants
and very strange animals; and none stranger than the men of science.
That at least is the way in which I should begin a history of
the world, if I had to follow the scientific custom of beginning
with an account of the astronomical universe.  I should try to see
even this earth from the outside, not by the hackneyed insistence
of its relative position to the sun, but by some imaginative effort
to conceive its remote position for the dehumanised spectator.
Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in order to study humanity.
I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances that are supposed
to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a trifle
vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size.
And as the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange
planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop to the other
trick of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant.
I would rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet
at all, in the sense in which we know that it is a place;
and a very extraordinary place too.  That is the note which I wish
to strike from the first, if not in the astronomical, then in some
more familiar fashion.

One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures,
concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book
about the Evolution of the Idea of God.  I happened to remark
that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book
about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen.  And I remember
that the editor objected to my remark on the ground that it
was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little.
For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him
to notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous;
for it was, when translated into English, 'I will show you how
this nonsensical notion that there is God grew up among men.'
My remark was strictly pious and proper confessing the divine purpose
even in its most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations.
In that hour I learned many things, including the fact that there is
something purely acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence.
The editor had not seen the point, because in the title of the book
the long word came at the beginning and the short word at the end;
whereas in my comments the short word came at the beginning
and gave him a sort of shock.  I have noticed that if you put
a word like God into the same sentence with a word like dog,
these abrupt and angular words affect people like pistol-shots.
Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does
not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations
of the too subtle theologians.  But so long as you begin with
a long word like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past;
very probably the editor had not read the whole of the title,
for it is rather a long title and he was rather a busy man.

But this little incident has always lingered in my mind
as a sort of parable.  Most modern histories of mankind begin
with the word evolution, and with a rather wordy exposition
of evolution, for much the same reason that operated in this case.
There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and
even about the idea.  As a matter of fact, it is not, touching these
primary things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea.
Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something.
Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something
could turn into something else.  It is really far more logical
to start by saying 'In the beginning God created heaven and earth'
even if you only mean 'In the beginning some unthinkable power
began some unthinkable process.'  For God is by its nature a name
of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine
how a world was created any more than he could create one.
But evolution really is mistaken for explanation.
It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression
that they do understand it and everything else; just as many
of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read
the Origin of Species.

But this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent
of a slope, is a great part of the illusion.  It is an illogicality
as well as an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with
the question.  An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible
or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves.
For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle
would be just as incredible as a swift one.  The Greek witch
may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand.
But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking
a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four
trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing.
It might be rather more creepy and uncanny.  The medieval
wizard may have flown through the air from the top of a tower;
but to see an old gentleman walking through the air, in a leisurely
and lounging manner, would still seem to call for some explanation.
Yet there runs through all the rationalistic treatment
of history this curious and confused idea that difficulty
is avoided, or even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere
delay or on something dilatory in the processes of things.
There will be something to be said upon particular
examples elsewhere; the question here is the false atmosphere
of facility and ease given by the mere suggestion of going slow;
the sort of comfort that might be given to a nervous old woman
travelling for the first time in a motor-car.

Mr. H. G. Wells has confessed to being a prophet; and in this matter
he was a prophet at his own expense.  It is curious that his first
fairy-tale was a complete answer to his last book of history.
The Time Machine destroyed in advance all comfortable conclusions
founded on the mere relativity of time.  In that sublime nightmare
the hero saw trees shoot up like green rockets, and vegetation
spread visibly like a green conflagration, or the sun shoot
across the sky from east to west with the swiftness of a meteor.
Yet in his sense these things were quite as natural when they
went swiftly; and in our sense they are quite as supernatural
when they go slowly.  The ultimate question is why they go at all;
and anybody who really understands that question will know
that it always has been and always will be a religious question;
or at any rate a philosophical or metaphysical question.
And most certainly he will not think the question answered
by some substitution of gradual for abrupt change; or, in other
words by a merely relative question of the same story being spun
out or rattled rapidly through, as can be done with any story
at a cinema by turning a handle.

Now what is needed for these problems of primitive
existence is something more like a primitive spirit.
In calling up this vision of the first things, I would ask
the reader to make with me a sort of experiment in simplicity.
And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but rather the sort of
clarity that sees things like life rather than words like evolution.
For this purpose it would really be better to turn the handle
of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass growing
and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment could
contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole affair.
What we know, in a sense in which we know nothing else, is that the
trees and the grass did grow and that number of other extraordinary
things do in fact happen; that queer creatures support themselves
in the empty air by beating it with fans of various fantastic shapes;
that other queer creatures steer themselves about alive under a load
of mighty waters; that other queer creatures walk about on four legs,
and that the queerest creature of all walks about on two.
These are things and not theories; and compared with them evolution
and the atom and even the solar system are merely theories.
The matter here is one of history and not of philosophy so that it
need only be noted that no philosopher denies that a mystery
still attaches to the two great transitions:  the origin of the
universe itself and the origin of the principle of life itself.
Most philosophers have the enlightenment to add that a third mystery
attaches to the origin of man himself.  In other words, a third
bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable when there
came into the world what we call reason and what we call will.
Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.
That he has a backbone or other parts upon a similar pattern to birds
and fishes is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of the fact.
But if we attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing
on his hind legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic
and subversive than if he were standing on his head.

I will take one example to serve for an introduction to the story of man.
It illustrates what I mean by saying that a certain childish directness
is needed to see the truth about the childhood of the world.
It illustrates what I mean by saying that a mixture of popular
science and journalistic jargon have confused the facts about the
first things, so that we cannot see which of them really comes first.
It illustrates, though only in one convenient illustration,
all that I mean by the necessity of seeing the sharp differences
that give its shape to history, instead of being submerged
in all these generalisations about slowness and sameness.
For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells's phrase, an outline of history.
But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini's phrase, that this
evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd outline.
But, above all, it illustrates what I mean by saying that the more we
really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.

To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with
numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He
seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character
but as a private character.  His psychology is seriously taken
into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine.
So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was
knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is,
I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.'
I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea;
and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric
divorce-reports it is founded.  Nor, as I have explained elsewhere,
have I ever been able to see the probability of it,
even considered a priori.  We are always told without any
explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club
and knocked the woman down before he carried her off.
But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid
modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist
on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off.
And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male
was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined.
The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason
why he should have been more brutal than the brutes.
And the loves of the giraffes and the river romance of the hippopotami
are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy.
The cave-man may have been no better that the cave-bear;
but the child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained
with any such bias for spinsterhood.  In short these details
of the domestic life of the cave puzzle me upon either
the revolutionary or the static hypothesis; and in any case I
should like to look into the evidence for them, but unfortunately I
have never been able to find it.  But the curious thing is this:
that while ten thousand tongues of more or less scientific
or literary gossip seemed to be talking at once about this
unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man, the one
connection in which it is really relevant and sensible to talk
about him as the cave-man has been comparatively neglected.
People have used this loose term in twenty loose ways, but they
have never even looked at their own term for what could really
be learned from it.

In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man
except what he did in the cave.  Now there does happen to be some
real evidence of what he did in the cave.  It is little enough,
like all the prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real
cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club.
And it will be valuable to our sense of reality to consider quite
simply what that real evidence is, and not to go beyond it.
What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory
club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head.
The cave was not a Bluebeard's Chamber filled with the skeletons
of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged
in rows and all cracked like eggs.  It was something quite unconnected,
one way or the other, with all the modern phrases and philosophical
implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole question
for us.  And if we wish to see as it really is this authentic glimpse
of the morning of the world, it will be far better to conceive even
the story of its discovery as some such legend of the land of morning.
It would be far better to tell the tale of what was really found as
simply as the tale of heroes finding the Golden Fleece or the Gardens
of the Hesperides, if we could so escape from a fog of controversial
theories into the clear colours and clean-cut outlines of such a dawn.
The old epic poets at least knew how to tell a story, possibly a tall
story but never a twisted story, never a story tortured out of its own
shape to fit theories and philosophies invented centuries afterwards.
It would be well if modern investigators could describe their
discoveries in the bald narrative style of the earliest travellers,
and without any of these long allusive words that are full of irrelevant
implication and suggestion.  Then we might realise exactly what we
do know about the cave-man, or at any rate about the cave.

A priest and a boy entered sometime ago a hollow in the hills
and passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into
a labyrinth of such sealed and secret corridors of rock.
They crawled through cracks that seemed almost impassable,
they crept through tunnels that might have been made for moles,
they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells, they seemed to be burying
themselves alive seven times over beyond the hope of resurrection.
This is but the commonplace of all such courageous exploration;
but what is needed here is some one who shall put such stories
in the primary light, in which they are not commonplace.
There is, for instance, something strangely symbolic
in the accident that the first intruders into that sunken
world were a priest and a boy, the types of the antiquity
and of youth of the world.  But here I am even more concerned
with the symbolism of the boy than with that of the priest.
Nobody who remembers boyhood needs to be told what it might
be to a boy to enter like Peter Pan under a roof of the roots
of all the trees and go deeper and deeper, till he reach
what William Morris called the very roots of the mountains.
Suppose somebody, with that simple and unspoilt realism that
is a part of innocence, to pursue that journey to its end,
not for the sake of what he could deduce or demonstrate in some
dusty magazine controversy, but simply for the sake of what
he could see.  What he did see at last was a cavern so far
from the light of day that it might have been the legendary
Domdaniel cavern, that was under the floor of the sea.
This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its
long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large
and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths;
and when they followed the lines of them they recognised,
across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture
of a man's hand.  They were drawings or paintings of animals;
and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist.
Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of
the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has
ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no
artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist.
They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist,
the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things;
as where the draughtsman had represented the action
of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses
towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse.
But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves
something of a task in rendering it truly.  In this and twenty
other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals
with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure.
In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist
but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.

Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing
whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak
and pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds,
that blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning
the cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted
at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite
human and even humane.  It is certainly not the ideal of an
inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science.
When novelists and educationists and psychologists of all sorts
talk about the cave-man, they never conceive him in connection with
anything that is really in the cave.  When the realist of the sex
novel writes, 'Red sparks danced in Dagmar Doubledick's brain;
he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within him,' the novelist's
readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar only went
off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall.
When the psycho-analyst writes to a patient, 'The submerged instincts
of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,'
he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make
conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze.
Yet we do know for a fact that the cave man did these mild and
innocent things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence
that he did any of the violent and ferocious things.  In other words
the cave-man as commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather
a muddle; for a myth has at least an imaginative outline of truth.
The whole of the current way of talking is simply a confusion
and a misunderstanding, founded on no sort of scientific evidence
and valued only as an excuse for a very modern mood of anarchy.
If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about, he can surely be a cad
without taking away the character of the cave-man, about whom we
know next to nothing except what we can gather from a few harmless
and pleasing pictures on a wall.

But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular
moral here to be drawn from them.  That moral is something
much larger and simpler, so large and simple that when it
is first stated it will sound childish.  And indeed it is
in the highest sense childish; and that is why I have in this
apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a child.
It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy
in the cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen.
If the boy was one of the flock of the priest, it may be presumed
that he had been trained in a certain quality of common sense;
that common sense that often comes to us in the form of tradition.
In that case he would simply recognise the primitive man's work
as the work of a man, interesting but in no way incredible
in being primitive.  He would see what was there to see;
and he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there,
by any evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation.
If he had heard of such things he would admit, of course,
that the speculations might be true and were not incompatible
with the facts that were true.  The artist may have had another
side to his character besides that which he has alone left on
record in his works of art.  The primitive man may have taken
a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals;
all we can say is that the drawings record the one but not
the other.  It may be true that when the cave-man's finished
jumping on his mother, or his wife as the case may be,
he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling, and also to
watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook.
These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant.
The common sense of the child could confine itself to learning
from the facts what the facts have to teach; and the pictures
in the cave are very nearly all the facts there are.
So far as that evidence goes, the child would be justified
in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock and
red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit
of trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk.
The man had drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse;
because it was fun.  The man had drawn a stag with his head
turned as the child had drawn a pig with his eyes shut;
because it was difficult.  The child and the man,
being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men;
and the brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges
the abyss of ages than when it bridges only the chasm of class.
But anyhow he would see no evidence of the cave man
of crude evolutionism; because there is none to be seen.
If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by
St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals,
there would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.

Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave
was a creche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe,
and that coloured animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them;
very much as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern
infant school.  And though this was but a jest, it does draw attention
to some of the other assumptions that we make only too readily.
The pictures do not prove even that the cave-men lived in caves,
any more than the discovery of a wine-cellar in Balham (long after
that suburb had been destroyed by human or divine wrath) would prove
that the Victorian middle classes lived entirely underground.
The cave might have had a special purpose like the cellar; it might
have been a religious shrine or a refuge in war or the meeting place
of a secret society or all sorts of things.  But it is quite true
that its artistic decoration has much more of the atmosphere of a
nursery than of any of these nightmares of anarchical fury and fear.
I have conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it is easy
to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making
a living gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall.
In that gesture there is a foreshadowing, as we shall see later,
of another cavern and another child.

But suppose the boy had not been taught by a priest but by a professor,
by one of the professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts
to a mere evolutionary variation.  Suppose the boy saw himself,
with the same simplicity and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli running
with the pack of nature and roughly indistinguishable from the rest
save by a relative and recent variation.  What would be for him
the simplest lesson of that strange stone picture-book? After all,
it would come back to this; that he had dug very deep and found
the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer.
But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a place where a
reindeer had drawn a picture of a man.  That sounds like a truism,
but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth.
He might descend to depths unthinkable, he might sink into sunken
continents as strange as remote stars, he might find himself in
the inside of the world as far from men as the other side of the moon;
he might see in those cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone,
traced in the faint hieroglyphic of the fossil, the ruins of lost
dynasties of biological life, rather like the ruins of successive
creations and separate universes than the stages in the story of one.
He would find the trail of monsters blindly developing in
directions outside all our common imagery of fish and bird;
groping and grasping and touching life with every extravagant
elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; growing a forest
of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the finger.
But nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one significant
line upon the sand; nowhere one claw that had even begun to scratch
the faint suggestion of a form.  To all appearance, the thing
would be as unthinkable in all those countless cosmic variations
of forgotten aeons as it would be in the beasts and birds before
our eyes The child would no more expect to see it than to see
the cat scratch on the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog.
The childish common sense would keep the most evolutionary child from
expecting to see anything like that; yet in the traces of the rude and
recently evolved ancestors of humanity he would have seen exactly that.
It must surely strike him as strange that men so remote from him
should be so near, and that beasts so near to him should be so remote.
To his simplicity it must seem at least odd that he could not find
any trace of the beginning of any arts among any animals.  That is
the simplest lesson to learn in the cavern of the coloured pictures;
only it is too simple to be learnt.  It is the simple truth that man
does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof
of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most
primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke
to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man.
Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique.
Art is the signature of man.

That is the sort of simple truth with which a story of the beginnings
ought really to begin.  The evolutionist stands staring in the
painted cavern at the things that are too large to be seen and too
simple to be understood.  He tries to deduce all sorts of other
indirect and doubtful things from the details of the pictures,
because he can not see the primary significance of the whole;
thin and theoretical deductions about the absence of religion
or the presence of superstition; about tribal government
and hunting and human sacrifice and heaven knows what.
In the next chapter I shall try to trace in a little more
detail the much disputed question about these prehistoric
origins of human ideas and especially of the religious idea.
Here I am only taking this one case of the cave as a sort of symbol
of the simpler sort of truth with which the story ought to start.
When all is said, the main fact that the record of the reindeer
men attests, along with all other records, is that the reindeer
man could draw and the reindeer could not.  If the reindeer
man was as much an animal as the reindeer, it was all the more
extraordinary that he could do what all other animals could not.
If he was an ordinary product of biological growth, like any
other beast or bird, then it is all the more extraordinary
that he was not in the least like any other beast or bird.
He seems rather more supernatural as a natural product than
as a supernatural one.

But I have begun this story in the cave, like the cave
of the speculations of Plato, because it is a sort of model
of the mistake of merely evolutionary introductions and prefaces.
It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow
and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree.
For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in fact
not a trace of any such development or degree.  Monkeys did
not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did
not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well.
The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits;
the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early
bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist
and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this
notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape
is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we
cannot even talk about it without treating man as something
separate from nature.  In other words, every sane sort of history
must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone.
How he came there, or indeed how anything else came there,
is a thing for theologians and philosophers and scientists
and not for historians.  But an excellent test case of this
isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of art.
This creature was truly different from all other creatures;
because he was a creator as well as a creature.
Nothing in that sense could be made in any other image
but the image of man.  But the truth is so true that,
even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be
assumed in the form of some moral or metaphysical principle.
In the next chapter we shall see how this principle applies to all
the historical hypotheses and evolutionary ethics now in fashion;
to the origins of tribal government or mythological belief.
But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is
this popular one of what the cave-man really did in his cave.
It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared in
the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror.
It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection.
It is like a mirror because in it alone all the other shapes
can be seen like shining shadows in a vision.  Above all,
it is like a mirror because it is the only thing of its kind.
Other things may resemble it or resemble each other in various ways;
other things may excel it or excel each other in various ways;
just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round
like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror.
But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all.
Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things;
man is the image of God These are the only real lessons to be
learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road.

It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for
all what is meant by saying that man is at once the exception
to everything and the mirror and the measure of all things.
But to see man as he is, it is necessary once more to keep close to that
simplicity that can clear itself of accumulated clouds of sophistry.
The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being;
almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth.  In all sobriety,
he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien
habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one.
He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage.
He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts.
He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind
of cripple.  He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes;
he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture.
His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations.
Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness
called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in
the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself.
Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from
the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the
presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame.
Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them
as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique.
This is realised by the whole popular instinct called religion,
until disturbed by pedants, especially the laborious pedants of the
Simple Life.  The most sophistical of all sophists are gymnosophists.

It is not natural to see man as a natural product.  It is not common
sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore.
It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal.  It is not sane.
It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion
which is the principle of all reality.  It is reached by stretching
a point, by making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain
light and shade, by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower
things which may happen to be similar.  The solid thing standing
in the sunlight, the thing we can walk round and see from all sides,
is quite different.  It is also quite extraordinary, and the more sides
we see of it the more extraordinary it seems.  It is emphatically
not a thing that follows or flows naturally from anything else.
If we imagine that an inhuman or impersonal intelligence could
have felt from the first the general nature of the non-human world
sufficiently to see that things would evolve in whatever way they
did evolve, there would have been nothing whatever in all that
natural world to prepare such a mind for such an unnatural novelty.
To such a mind, man would most certainly not have seemed something
like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer pasture, or one
swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under a strange sky.
It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the same dimension.
We might as truly say that it would not be in the same universe.
It would be more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly
jump over the moon or one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings
in a flash and fly.  It would not be a question of the cattle finding
their own grazing ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds,
not a question of one swallow making a summer but of his making
a summer house.  For the very fact that birds do build nests is
one of those similarities that sharpen the startling difference.
The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot
get any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind;
it proves it more completely than if he built nothing at all.
If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the
Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within.
But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud
with satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible veil
like a pane of glass between him and us, like the window on which a bird
will beat in vain.  But suppose our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds
begin to build as men build.  Suppose in an incredibly short space
of time there were seven styles of architecture for one style of nest.
Suppose the bird carefully selected forked twigs and pointed leaves
to express the piercing piety of Gothic, but turned to broad foliage
and black mud when he sought in a darker mood to call up the heavy
columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest indeed one of the hanging
gardens of Babylon.  Suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds
celebrated in letters or politics and stuck them up in front of the nest.
Suppose that one bird out of a thousand birds began to do one of
the thousand things that man had already done even in the morning
of the world; and we can be quite certain that the onlooker would not
regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of the other birds;
he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed; possibly as a bird
of ill-omen, certainly as an omen.  That bird would tell the augurs,
not of something that would happen, but of some thing that had happened.
That something would be the appearance of a mind with a new dimension
of depth; a mind like that of man.  If there be no God, no other mind
could conceivably have foreseen it.

Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence
that this thing was evolved at all.  There is not a particle
of roof that this transition came slowly, or even that it
came naturally.  In a strictly scientific sense, we simply
know nothing whatever about how it grew, or whether it grew,
or what it is.  There may be a broken trail of stone and bone
faintly suggesting the development of the human body.
There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development
of this human mind.  It was not and it was; we know not in what
instant or in what infinity of years.  Something happened;
and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time.
It has therefore nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense.
The historian must take it or something like it for granted;
it is not his business as a historian to explain it.
But if he cannot explain it as a historian, he will not explain
it as a biologist.  In neither case is there any disgrace to him
in accepting it without explaining it; for it is a reality,
and history and biology deal with realities.  He is quite
justified in calmly confronting the pig with wings and the cow
that jumped over the moon, merely because they have happened.
He can reasonably accept man as a freak, because he accepts
man as a fact.  He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy and
disconnected world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy
and disconnected thing.  For reality is a thing in which we can
all repose, even if it hardly seems related to anything else.
The thing is there; and that is enough for most of us.
But if we do indeed want to know how it can conceivably have
come there, if we do indeed wish to see it related realistically
to other things, if we do insist on seeing it evolved before
our very eyes from an environment nearer to its own nature,
then assuredly it is to very different things that we must go.
We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple dreams,
if we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster.
We shall have discovered very different causes before he becomes
a creature of causation; and invoked other authority to turn
him into something reasonable, or even into anything probable.
That way lies all that is at once awful and familiar and forgotten,
with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms.  We can accept
man as a fact, if we are content with an unexplained fact.
We can accept him as an animal, if we can live with a fabulous animal.
But if we must needs have sequence and necessity, then indeed
we must provide a prelude and crescendo of mounting miracles,
that ushered in with unthinkable thunders in all the seven
heavens of another order, a man may be an ordinary thing.

* * *

II

PROFESSORS AND PREHISTORIC MEN

Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that
has hardly been noticed.  The science whose modern marvels
we all admire succeeds by incessantly adding to its data.
In all practical inventions, in most natural discoveries, it can
always increase evidence by experiment.  But it cannot experiment
in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men make.
An inventor can advance step by step in the construction
of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks
and scraps of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot
watch the Missing Link evolving in his own back-yard. If
he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane
will correct it by crashing to the ground.  But if he has
made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor,
he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree.
He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch
him to see whether he does really practice cannibalism or carry
off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture.
He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a pack of hounds
and notice how far they are influenced by the herd instinct.
If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he can get
other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds
a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill,
he cannot multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones.
In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished,
he can only go by evidence and not by experiment.
And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential.
Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve,
being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies
off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything.
But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be
formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific
mind that it cannot resist talking like this.  It talks about
the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something
like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole
scrapheaps of scraps of metal.  The trouble with the professor
of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap.  The marvellous
and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes.
The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.

We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department
it would be truer to talk of the impatience of science.  Owing to the
difficulty above described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry.
We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be
called fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts.
The most empirical anthropologist is here as limited as an antiquary.
He can only cling to a fragment of the past and has no way of
increasing it for the future He can only clutch his fragment of fact,
almost as the primitive man clutched his fragment of flint.  And indeed
he does deal with it in much the same way and for much the same reason.
It is his tool and his only tool.  It is his weapon and his only weapon.
He often wields it with a fanaticism far in excess of anything shown
by men of science when they can collect more facts from experience
and even add new facts by experiment.  Sometimes the professor
with his bone becomes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone.
And the dog at least does not deduce a theory from it, proving that
mankind is going to the dogs--or that it came from them.

For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey
and watching it evolve into a man.  Experimental evidence of such
an evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say
(as most of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution
is likely enough anyhow.  He produces his little bone, or little
collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous things from it.
He found in Java a piece of a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller
than the human.  Somewhere near it he found an upright thigh-bone
and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human.
If they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful,
our conception of the creature would be almost equally doubtful.
But the effect on popular science was to produce a complete and even
complex figure, finished down to the last details of hair and habits.
He was given a name as if he were an ordinary historical character.
People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon.
Popular histories published portraits of him like the portraits of Charles
the First and George the Fourth.  A detailed drawing was reproduced,
carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were all
numbered No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face
and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait
of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium.
In the same way people talked about him as if he were an individual
whose influence and character were familiar to us all.
I have just read a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white
inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves
by the personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus.  That the modern
inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe;
but I do not imagine that they need any encouragement from
the discovery of a few highly doubtful bones.  Anyhow, those bones
are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole
of the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between
man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors.
On the assumption of that evolutionary connection (a connection
which I am not in the least concerned to deny), the really arresting
and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of any such remains
recording that connection at that point.  The sincerity of Darwin
really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a term
as the Missing Link.  But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too
strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen
into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image.
They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link;
as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap
in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with
a non-sequitur or dining with an undistributed middle.

In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain
religious and historical problems, I shall waste no further space
on these speculations on the nature of man before he became man.
His body may have been evolved from the brutes; but we know nothing
of any such transition that throws the smallest light upon his
soul as it has shown itself in history.  Unfortunately the same
school of writers pursue the same style of reasoning when they
come to the first real evidence about the first real men.
Strictly speaking of course we know nothing about prehistoric man,
for the simple reason that he was prehistoric.  The history
of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms.
It is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists
are allowed to indulge.  If a parson had casually observed
that the Flood was ante-diluvian, it is possible that he might
be a little chaffed about his logic.  If a bishop were to say
that Adam was Preadamite, we might think it a little odd.
But we are not supposed to notice such verbal trifles when sceptical
historians talk of the part of history that is prehistoric.
The truth is that they are using the terms historic and
prehistoric without any clear test or definition in their minds.
What they mean is that there are traces of human lives before
the beginning of human stories; and in that sense we do at least
know that humanity was before history.

Human civilisation is older than human records.  That is
the sane way of stating our relations to these remote things.
Humanity has left examples of its other arts earlier than the art
of writing; or at least of any writing that we can read.
But it is certain that the primitive arts were arts;
and it is in every way probable that the primitive civilisations
were civilisations.  The man left a picture of the reindeer,
but he did not leave a narrative of how he hunted the reindeer;
and therefore what we say of him is hypothesis and not history.
But the art he did practice was quite artistic; his drawing was quite
intelligent and there is no reason to doubt that his story of the hunt
would be quite intelligent, only if it exists it is not intelligible.
In short, the prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period,
in the sense of the barbaric or bestial period.  It does not mean
the time before civilisation or the time before arts and crafts.
It simply means the time before any connected narratives that we
can read.  This does indeed make all the practical difference
between remembrance and forgetfulness; but it is perfectly possible
that there were all sorts of forgotten forms of civilisation,
as well as all sorts of forgotten forms of barbarism.
And in any case everything indicated that many of these forgotten
or half-forgotten social stages were much more civilised
and much less barbaric than is vulgarly imagined today.
But even about these unwritten histories of humanity, when humanity
was quite certainly human, we can only conjecture with the greatest
doubt and caution.  And unfortunately doubt and caution are
the last things commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism
of current culture.  For that culture is full of curiosity;
and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony of agnosticism.
It was in the Darwinian age that the word first became known
and the thing first became impossible.

It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is
simply covered by impudence.  Statements are made so plainly
and positively that men have hardly the moral courage
to pause upon them and find that they are without support.
The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric
tribe began confidently with the words 'They wore no clothes.'
Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself
how we should come to know whether clothes had once been
worn by people of whom everything has perished except a few
chips of bone and stone.  It was doubtless hoped that we
should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet.
It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an everlasting
pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting rock.
But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be
immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments,
or even highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more
traces of them than these people have left.  The plaiting
of rushes and grasses, for instance, might have become more
and more elaborate without in the least becoming more eternal.
One civilisation might specialise in things that happened
to be perishable, like weaving and embroidery, and not in things
that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and sculpture.
There have been plenty of examples of such specialist societies.
A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory machinery
might as fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with no
other substance; and announce the discovery that the proprietor
and manager of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked--
or possibly wore iron hats and trousers.

It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear
clothes any more than they did weave rushes; but merely that we
have not enough evidence to know whether they did or not.
But it may be worthwhile to look back for a moment at some
of the very few things that we do know and that they did do.
If we consider them, we shall certainly not find them
inconsistent with such ideas as dress and decoration.
We do not know whether they decorated other things.
We do not know whether they had embroideries, and if they
had the embroideries could not be expected to have remained.
But we do know that they did have pictures; and the pictures
have remained.  And there remains with them, as already suggested,
the testimony to something that is absolute and unique;
that belongs to man and to nothing else except man;
that is a difference of kind and not a difference of degree.
A monkey does not draw clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does
not begin the art of representation and a man carry it to perfection.
A monkey does not do it at all; he does not begin to do it at all;
he does not begin to begin to do it at all.  A line of some kind
is crossed before the first faint line can begin.

Another distinguished writer, again, in commenting on the cave
drawings attributed to the neolithic men of the reindeer period,
said that none of their pictures appeared to have any religious purpose;
and he seemed almost to infer that they had no religion.
I can hardly imagine a thinner thread of argument than this which
reconstructs the very inmost moods of the pre-historic mind from
the fact that somebody who has scrawled a few sketches on a rock,
from what motive we do not know, for what purpose we do not know,
acting under what customs or conventions we do not know, may possibly
have found it easier to draw reindeer than to draw religion.
He may have drawn it because it was his religious symbol.
He may have drawn it because it was not his religious symbol.
He may have drawn anything except his religious symbol.
He may have drawn his real religious symbol somewhere else;
or it may have been deliberately destroyed when it was drawn.
He may have done or not done half a million things; but in any
case it is an amazing leap of logic to infer that he had no
religious symbol, or even to infer from his having no religious
symbol that he had no religion.  Now this particular case happens
to illustrate the insecurity of these guesses very clearly.
For a little while afterwards, people discovered not
only paintings but sculptures of animals in the caves.
Some of these were said to be damaged with dints or holes supposed
to be the marks of arrows; and the damaged images were conjectured
to be the remains of some magic rite of killing the beasts in effigy;
while the undamaged images were explained in connection
with another magic rite invoking fertility upon the herds.
Here again there is something faintly humorous about the scientific
habit of having it both ways.  If the image is damaged it proves
one superstition and if it is undamaged it proves another.
Here again there is a rather reckless jumping to conclusions;
it has hardly occurred to the speculators that a crowd of hunters
imprisoned in winter in a cave might conceivably have aimed
at a mark for fun, as a sort of primitive parlour game.
But in any case, if it was done out of superstition, what has
become of the thesis that it had nothing to do with religion?
The truth is that all this guess work has nothing to do with anything.
It is not half such a good parlour game as shooting arrows at
a carved reindeer, for it is shooting them into the air.

Such speculators rather tend to forget, for instance, that men
in the modern world also sometimes make marks in caves.
When a crowd of trippers is conducted through the labyrinth
of the Marvelous Grotto or the Magic Stalactite Cavern, it has
been observed that hieroglyphics spring into sight where they
have passed; initials and inscriptions which the learned refuse
to refer to any remote date.  But the time will come when these
inscriptions will really be of remote date.  And if the professors
of the future are anything like the professors of the present,
they will be able to deduce a vast number of very vivid and interesting
things from these cave-writings of the twentieth century.
If I know anything about the breed, and if they have not fallen
away from the full-blooded confidence of their fathers,
they will be able to discover the most fascinating facts about us
from the initials left in the Magic Grotto by 'Arry and 'Arriet,
possibly in the form of two intertwined A's. From this alone
they will know (1) That as the letters are rudely chipped with a
blunt pocket knife, the twentieth century possessed no delicate
graving-tools and was unacquainted with the art of sculpture.
(2) That as the letters are capital letters, our civilisation
never evolved any small letters or anything like a running hand.
(3) That because initial consonants stand together in an
unpronounceable fashion, our language was possibly akin to Welsh
or more probably of the early Semitic type that ignored vowels.
(4) That as the initials of 'Arry and 'Arriet do not in any special
fashion profess to be religious symbols, our civilisation possessed
no religion.  Perhaps the last is about the nearest to the truth;
for a civilisation that had religion would have a little more reason.

It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow
and evolutionary manner; and even that it grew not from one cause;
but from a combination that might be called a coincidence.
Generally speaking, the three chief elements in the combination are,
first, the fear of the chief of the tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists
on calling, with regrettable familiarity, the Old Man), second,
the phenomena of dreams, and third, the sacrificial associations
of the harvest and the resurrection symbolised in the growing corn.
I may remark in passing that it seems to me very doubtful
psychology to refer one living and single spirit to three dead and
disconnected causes, if they were merely dead and disconnected causes.
Suppose Mr. Wells, in one of his fascinating novels of the future,
were to tell us that there would arise among men a new and as yet
nameless passion, of which men will dream as they dream of first love,
for which they will die as they die for a flag and a fatherland.
I think we should be a little puzzled if he told us that this
singular sentiment would be a combination of the habit of
smoking Woodbines, the increase of the income tax and the pleasure
of a motorist in exceeding the speed limit.  We could not easily
imagine this, because we could not imagine any connection between
the three or any common feeling that could include them all.
Nor could anyone imagine any connection between corn and dreams
and an old chief with a spear, unless there was already a common
feeling to include them all.  But if there was such a common feeling
it could only be the religious feeling; and these things could
not be the beginnings of a religious feeling that existed already.
I think anybody's common sense will tell him that it is far more
likely that this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already;
and that in the light of it dreams and kings and corn-fields could
appear mystical then, as they can appear mystical now.

For the plain truth is that all this is a trick of making
things seem distant and dehumanised, merely by pretending
not to understand things that we do understand.
It is like saying that prehistoric men had an ugly and uncouth
habit of opening their mouths wide at intervals and stuffing
strange substances into them, as if we had never heard of eating.
It is like saying that the terrible Troglodytes of the Stone Age
lifted alternate legs in rotation, as if we never heard of walking.
If it were meant to touch the mystical nerve and awaken us to
the wonder of walking and eating, it might be a legitimate fancy.
As it is here intended to kill the mystical nerve and deaden
us to the wonder of religion, it is irrational rubbish.
It pretends to find some thing incomprehensible in the feelings
that we all comprehend.  Who does not find dreams mysterious,
and feel that they lie on the dark borderland of being?
Who does not feel the death and resurrection of the growing things
of the earth as something near to the secret of the universe?
Who does not understand that there must always be the savour
of something sacred about authority and the solidarity that
is the soul of the tribe?  If there be any anthropologist
who really finds these things remote and impossible to realise,
we can say nothing of that scientific gentleman except that he has
not got so large and enlightened a mind as a primitive man.
To me it seems obvious that nothing but a spiritual sentiment
already active could have clothed these separate and diverse things
with sanctity.  To say that religion came from reverencing a chief
or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart
before a really primitive horse.  It is like saying that the impulse
to draw pictures came from the contemplation of the pictures
of reindeers in the cave.  In other words, it is explaining
painting by saying that it arose out of the work of painters;
or accounting for art by saying that it arose out of art.
It is even more like saying that the thing we call poetry
arose as the result of certain customs; such as that of an ode
being officially composed to celebrate the advent of spring;
or that of a young man rising at a regular hour to listen
to the skylark and then writing his report on a piece of paper.
It is quite true that young men often become poets in the spring;
and it is quite true that when once there are poets,
no mortal power can restrain them from writing about
the skylark But the poems did not exist before the poets.
The poetry did not arise out of the poetic forms.  In other words,
it is hardly an adequate explanation of how a thing appeared
for the first time to say it existed already.  Similarly, we
cannot say that religion arose out of the religious forms,
because that is only another way of saying that it only arose
when it existed already.  It needed a certain sort of mind to see
that there was anything mystical about the dreams or the dead,
as it needed a particular sort of mind to see that there
was any thing poetical about the skylark or the spring.
That mind was presumably what we call the human mind, very much
as it exists to this day; for mystics still meditate upon death
and dreams as poets still write about spring and skylarks.
But there is not the faintest hint to suggest that anything
short of the human mind we know feels any of these mystical
associations at all.  A cow in a field seems to derive no
lyrical impulse or instruction from her unrivalled opportunities
for listening to the skylark.  And similarly there is no reason
to suppose that live sheep will ever begin to use dead sheep
as the basis of a system of elaborate ancestor-worship. It is
true that in the spring a young quadruped's fancy may lightly
turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of springs has ever
led it to turn however lightly to thoughts of literature.
And in the same way, while it is true that a dog has dreams,
while most other quadrupeds do not seem even to have that,
we have waited a long time for the dog to develop his
dreams into an elaborate system or religious ceremonial.
We have waited so long that we have really ceased to expect it;
and we no more look to see a dog apply his dreams to ecclesiastical
construction than to see him examine his dreams by the rules
of psycho-analysis. It is obvious, in short, that for some reason
or other these natural experiences, and even natural excitements,
never do pass the line that separates them from creative
expression like art and religion, in any creature except man.
They never do, they never have, and it is now to all appearance
very improbable that they ever will.  It is not impossible,
in the sense of self-contradictory, that we should see cows fasting
from grass every Friday or going on their knees as in the old
legend about Christmas Eve.  It is not in that sense impossible
that cows should contemplate death until they can lift up
a sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow died of.
It is not in that sense impossible that they should express
their hopes of a heavenly career in a symbolic dance, in honour
of the cow that jumped over the moon.  It may be that the dog
will at last have laid in a sufficient store of dreams to enable
him to build a temple to Cerberus as a sort of canine trinity.
It may be that his dreams have already begun to turn into
visions capable of verbal expression, in some revelation about
the Dog Star as the spiritual home for lost dogs.  These things
are logically possible, in the sense that it is logically difficult
to prove the universal negative which we call an impossibility.
But all that instinct for the probable, which we call common sense,
must long ago have told us that the animals are not to all
appearance evolving in that sense; and that, to say the least,
we are not likely to have any personal evidence of their
passing from the animal experience to the human experiments.
But spring and death and even dreams, considered merely
as experiences, are their experiences as much as ours.
The only possible conclusion is that these experiences,
considered as experiences, do not generate anything like
a religious sense in any mind except a mind like ours.
We come back to the fact of a certain kind of mind that was already
alive and alone.  It was unique and it could make creeds as it
could make cave-drawings. The materials for religion had lain
there for countless ages like the materials for everything else;
but the power of religion was in the mind.  Man could already see
in these things the riddles and hints and hopes that he still
sees in them.  He could not only dream but dream about dreams.
He could not only see the dead but see the shadow of death;
and was possessed with that mysterious mystification that forever
finds death incredible.

It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when
he unmistakably appears as man.  We cannot affirm this or anything else
about the alleged animal originally connecting man and the brutes.
But that is only because he is not an animal but an allegation.
We cannot be certain the Pithecanthropus ever worshipped,
because we cannot be certain that he ever lived.
He is only a vision called up to fill the void that does in fact
yawn between the first creatures who were certainly men and any
other creatures that are certainly apes or other animals.
A few very doubtful fragments are scraped together to suggest such an
intermediate creature because it is required by a certain philosophy;
but nobody supposes that these are sufficient to establish
anything philosophical even in support of that philosophy.
A scrap of skull found in Java cannot establish anything
about religion or about the absence of religion.  If there ever
was any such ape-man, he may have exhibited as much ritual in
religion as a man or as much simplicity in religion as an ape.
He may have been a mythologist or he may have been a myth.
It might be interesting to inquire whether this mystical quality
appeared in a transition from the ape to the man, if there
were really any types of the transition to inquire about.
In other words, the missing link might or might not be mystical
if he were not missing.  But compared with the evidence we
have of real human beings, we have no evidence that he was
a human being or a half-human being or a being at all.
Even the most extreme evolutionists do not attempt to deduce
any evolutionary views about the origin of religion from him.
Even in trying to prove that religion grew slowly from rude
or irrational sources, they begin their proof with the first men
who were men.  But their own proof only proves that the men
who were already men were already mystics.  They used the rude
and irrational elements as only men and mystics can use them.
We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime
too early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred
to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness;
and man became a living soul.

Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those
who are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away.
Subconsciously they feel that it looks less formidable when thus
lengthened out into a gradual and almost invisible process.  But in
fact this perspective entirely falsifies the reality of experience.
They bring together two things that are totally different, the stray
hints of evolutionary origins and the solid and self-evident block
of humanity, and try to shift their standpoint till they see them
in a single foreshortened line.  But it is an optical illusion.
Men do not in fact stand related to monkeys or missing links
in any such chain as that in which men stand related to men.
There may have been intermediate creatures whose faint traces
can be found here and there in the huge gap.  Of these beings,
if they ever existed, it may be true that they were things very
unlike men or men very unlike ourselves.  But of prehistoric men,
such as those called the cave-men or the reindeer men, it is not
true in any sense whatever.  Prehistoric men of that sort were
things exactly like men and men exceedingly like our selves.
They only happened to be men about whom we do not know much,
for the simple reason that they have left no records or chronicles;
but all that we do know about them makes them just as human
and ordinary as men in a medieval manor or a Greek city.

Looking from our human standpoint up the long perspective of humanity,
we simply recognise this thing as human.  If we had to recognise
it as animal we should have had to recognise it as abnormal.
If we chose to look through the other end of the telescope,
as I have done more than once in these speculations, if we chose
to project the human figure forward out of an unhuman world,
we could only say that one of the animals had obviously gone mad.
But seeing the thing from the right end, or rather from the inside,
we know it is sanity; and we know that these primitive men were sane.
We hail a certain human freemasonry wherever we see it,
in savages, in foreigners or in historical characters.
For instance, all we can infer from primitive legend,
and all we know of barbaric life, supports a certain moral
and even mystical idea of which the commonest symbol is clothes.
For clothes are very literally vestments and man wears them
because he is a priest.  It is true that even as an animal he is
here different from the animals.  Nakedness is not nature to him;
it is not his life but rather his death; even in the vulgar sense
of his death of cold.  But clothes are worn for dignity or decency
or decoration where they are not in any way wanted for warmth.
It would sometimes appear that they are valued for ornament
before they are valued for use.  It would almost always appear
that they are felt to have some connection with decorum.
Conventions of this sort vary a great deal with various times and places;
and there are some who cannot get over this reflection, and for whom
it seems a sufficient argument for letting all conventions slide.
They never tire of repeating, with simple wonder, that dress is
different in the Cannibal Islands and in Camden Town; they cannot
get any further and throw up the whole idea of decency in despair.
They might as well say that because there have been hats of a
good many different shapes, and some rather eccentric shapes,
therefore hats do not matter or do not exist.  They would probably
add that there is no such thing as sunstroke or going bald.
Men have felt everywhere that certain norms were necessary
to fence off and protect certain private things from contempt
or coarse misunderstanding; and the keeping of those forms,
whatever they were, made for dignity and mutual respect.
The fact that they mostly refer, more or less remotely,
to the relations of the sexes illustrates the two facts that
must be put at the very beginning of the record of the race.
The first is the fact that original sin is really original.
Not merely in theology but in history it is a thing rooted
in the origins.  Whatever else men have believed, they have all
believed that there is something the matter with mankind This sense
of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes,
just as it has made it impossible to be natural and have no laws.
But above all it is to be found in that other fact, which is the father
and mother of all laws as it is itself founded on a father and mother;
the thing that is before all thrones and even all commonwealths.

That fact is the family.  Here again we must keep the enormous
proportions of a normal thing clear of various modifications
and degrees and doubts more or less reasonable, like clouds
clinging about a mountain.  It may be that what we call
the family had to fight its way from or through various
anarchies and aberrations; but it certainly survived them
and is quite as likely as not to have also preceded them.
As we shall see in the case of communism and nomadism,
more formless things could and did lie on the flank of
societies that had taken a fixed form; but there is nothing
to show that the form did not exist before the formlessness.
What is vital is that form is more important than formlessness;
and that the material called mankind has taken this form.
For instance, of the rules revolving round sex, which were recently
mentioned, none is more curious than the savage custom commonly
called the couvade.  That seems like a law out of topsyturvydom;
by which the father is treated as if he were the mother.
In any case it clearly involves the mystical sense of sex;
but many have maintained that it is really a symbolic act
by which the father accepts the responsibility of fatherhood.
In that case that grotesque antic is really a very solemn act;
for it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we know
as human society.  Some groping in these dark beginnings have said
that mankind was once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under
a matriarchy it would not be called mankind but womankind.
But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy
was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained
fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible.
Then came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide
what he had created.  So he became the head of the family,
not as a bully with a big club to beat women with, but rather
as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person.
Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been
the first family act, and it would still be true that man then
for the first time acted like a man, and therefore for the first
time became fully a man.  But it might quite as well be true
that the matriarchy or moral anarchy, or whatever we call it,
was only one of the hundred social dissolutions or barbaric
backslidings which may have occurred at intervals in prehistoric
as they certainly did in historic times.  A symbol like the couvade,
if it was really such a symbol, may have commemorated the
suppression of a heresy rather than the first rise of a religion.
We cannot conclude with any certainty about these things,
except in their big results in the building of mankind, but we can
say in what style the bulk of it and the best of it is built.
We can say that the family is the unit of the state; that it is
the cell that makes up the formation.  Round the family do indeed
gather the sanctities that separate men from ants and bees.
Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall of that city;
property is but the family farm; honour is but the family flag.
In the practical proportions of human history, we come back
to that fundamental of the father and the mother and the child.
It has been said already that if this story cannot start with
religious assumptions, it must none the less start with some moral or
metaphysical assumptions, or no sense can be made of the story of man.
And this is a very good instance of that alternative necessity.
If we are not of those who begin by invoking a divine Trinity,
we must none the less invoke a human Trinity; and see that
triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the world.
For the highest event in history, to which all history looks
forward and leads up, is only something that is at once
the reversal and the renewal of that triangle.  Or rather it
is the one triangle superimposed so as to intersect the other,
making a sacred pentacle of which, in a mightier sense than
that of the magicians, the fiends are afraid.  The old Trinity
was of father and mother and child and is called the human family.
The new is of child and mother and father and has the name
of the Holy Family.  It is in no way altered except in being
entirely reversed; just as the world which is transformed was
not in the least different, except in being turned upside-down.

* * *

III

THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILISATION

The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been
like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting
to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks.
But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great
cities long builded and lost for us in the original night;
colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even
the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees;
in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size
of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set four-square
and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls
standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples;
standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world.
The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized.
Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old.  And among other more
important things, it reveals the folly of most of the generalisations
about the previous and unknown period when it was really young.
The two first human societies of which we have any reliable
and detailed record are Babylon and Egypt.  It so happens
that these two vast and splendid achievements of the genius
of the ancients bear witness against two of the commonest
and crudest assumptions of the culture of the moderns.
If we want to get rid of half the nonsense about nomads and cave-men
and the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at
the two solid and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.

Of course most of these speculators who are talking
about primitive men are thinking about modern savages.
They prove their progressive evolution by assuming that a great part
of the human race has not progressed or evolved; or even changed
in any way at all.  I do not agree with their theory of change;
nor do I agree with their dogma of things unchangeable.
I may not believe that civilised man has had so rapid
and recent a progress; but I cannot quite understand why
uncivilised man should be so mystically immortal and immutable.
A somewhat simpler mode of thought and speech seems to me
to be needed throughout this inquiry.  Modern savages cannot
be exactly like primitive man, because they are not primitive.
Modern savages are not ancient because they are modern.
Something has happened to their race as much as to ours,
during the thousands of years of our existence and endurance on
the earth.  They have had some experiences, and have presumably
acted on them if not profited by them.  Like the rest of us.
They have had some environment, and even some change of environment,
and have presumably adapted themselves to it in a proper
and decorous evolutionary manner.  This would be true even
if the experiences were mild or the environment dreary;
for there is an effect in mere time when it takes the moral form
of monotony.  But it has appeared to a good many intelligent
and well-informed people quite as probable that the experience
of the savages has been that of a decline from civilisation.
Most of those who criticise this view do not seem to have any very
clear notion of what a decline from civilisation would be like.
Heaven help them, it is likely enough that they will soon find out.
They seem to be content if cave-men and cannibal islanders have
some things in common.  such as certain particular implements.
But it is obvious on the face of it that any peoples reduced
for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in common.
If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows;
but we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men
who made bows and arrows.  It is said that the Russians in their
great retreat were so short of armament that they fought with
clubs cut in the wood.  But a professor of the future would err
in supposing that the Russian army of 1916 was a naked Scythian
tribe that had never been out of the wood.  It is like saying
that a man in his second childhood must exactly copy his first.
A baby is bald like an old man; but it would be an error
for one ignorant of infancy to infer that the baby had a long
white beard.  Both a baby and an old man walk with difficulty;
but he who shall expect the old gentleman to lie on his back,
and kick joyfully instead, will be disappointed.

It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must
have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings
of it.  There were almost certainly some things, there were probably
many things, in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary.
An example of the way in which this distinction works, and an
example essential to our argument here, is that of the nature
and origin of government I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells
and the Old Man, with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms.
If we considered the cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this
portrait of the prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only excuse
it by saying that its brilliant and versatile author simply forgot
for a moment that he was supposed to be writing a history, and dreamed
he was writing one of his own very wonderful and imaginative romances.
At least I cannot imagine how he can possibly know that the prehistoric
ruler was called the Old Man or that court etiquette requires it
to be spelt with capital letters.  He says of the same potentate,
'No one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in his seat.'
I have difficulty in believing that anybody has dug up a prehistoric
spear with a prehistoric label, 'Visitors are Requested
not to Touch,' or a complete throne with the inscription,
'Reserved for the Old Man.'  But it may be presumed that the writer,
who can hardly be supposed to be merely making up things out
of his own head, was merely taking for granted this very dubious
parallel between the prehistoric and the decivilised man.
It may be that in certain savage tribes the chief is called the Old Man
and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit on his seat.
It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with superstitious
and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those cases,
for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical.  But there is
not a grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic
and tyrannical.  It may have been, of course, for it may have
been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all.
But the despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth
century does not prove that the first men were ruled despotically.
It does not even suggest it; it does not even begin to hint at it.
If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we
really do know, it is that despotism can be a development,
often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies
that have been highly democratic.  A despotism may almost be
defined as a tired democracy.  As fatigue falls on a community,
the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has
truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm
only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.
It is also true that they sometimes needed him for some sudden
and militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took
advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some
of the Sultans of the East.  But I cannot see why the Sultan should
have appeared any earlier in history than many other human figures.
On the contrary, the strong man armed obviously depends upon the
superiority of his armour, and armament of that sort comes with more
complex civilisation.  One man may kill twenty with a machine-gum;
it is obviously less likely that he could do it with a piece of flint.
As for the current cant about the strongest man ruling by force and fear,
it is simply a nursery fairy-tale about a giant with a hundred hands.
Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in any society,
ancient or modern.  Undoubtedly they might admire, in a romantic
and poetical sense, the man who was really the strongest;
but that is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral
and even mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest.
But the spirit that endures the mere cruelties and caprices
of an established despot is the spirit of an ancient and settled
and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one.
As his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler of an old humanity.

It is far more probable that a primitive society was something
like a pure democracy.  To this day the comparatively simple
agricultural communities are by far the purest democracies.
Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through
the complexity of civilisation.  Anyone who likes may state
it by saying that democracy is the foe of civilisation.
But he must remember that some of us really prefer democracy
to civilisation, in the sense of preferring democracy
to complexity.  Anyhow, peasants tilling patches of their own
land in a rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under
a village tree, are the most truly self-governing of men.
It is surely as likely as not that such a simple idea was found
in the first condition of even simpler men.  Indeed the despotic
vision is exaggerated, even if we do not regard the men as men.
Even on an evolutionary assumption of the most materialistic sort,
there is really no reason why men should not have had at least
as much camaraderie as rats or rooks.  Leadership of some
sort they doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals;
but leadership implies no such irrational servility as that
attributed to the superstitious subjects of the Old Man.  There was
doubtless some body corresponding, to use Tennyson's expression,
to the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home.
But I fancy that if that venerable fowl began to act after
the fashion of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia,
it would become a very clanging rookery and the many-wintered
crow would not see many more winters.  It may be remarked,
in this connection, but even among animals it would seem
that something else is respected more than bestial violence,
if it be only the familiarity which in men is called
tradition or the experience which in men is called wisdom.
I do not know if crows really follow the oldest crow, but if
they do they are certainly not following the strongest crow.
And I do know, in the human case, that if some ritual of
seniority keeps savages reverencing somebody called Old Man,
then at least they have not our own servile sentimental weakness
for worshipping the Strong Man.

It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive
art and religion and everything else, is very imperfectly known
or rather guessed at; but that it is at least as good a guess
to suggest that it was as popular as a Balkan or Pyrenean village
as that it was as capricious and secret as a Turkish divan.
Both the mountain democracy and the oriental palace are modern
in the sense that they are still there, or are some sort of growth
of history; but of the two the palace has much more the look
of being an accumulation and a corruption, the village much
more the look of being a really unchanged and primitive thing.
But my suggestions at this point do not go beyond
expressing a wholesome doubt about the current assumption.
I think it interesting, for instance, that liberal institutions
have been traced even by moderns back to barbarians
or undeveloped states, when it happened to be convenient
for the support of some race or nation or philosophy.
So the Socialists profess that their ideal of communal
property existed in very early times.  So the Jews are proud
of the Jubilees or juster redistributions under their ancient law.
So the Teutonists boasted of tracing parliaments and juries
and various popular things among the Germanic tribes of the north.
So the Celtophiles and those testifying to the wrongs of Ireland
have pleaded the more equal justice of the clan system, to which
the Irish chiefs bore witness before Strongbow.  The strength
of the case varies in the different cases; but as there
is some case for all of them, I suspect there is some case
for the general proposition that popular institutions of some
sort were by no means uncommon in early and simple societies.
Each of these separate schools were making the admission
to prove a particular modern thesis; but taken together they
suggest a more ancient and general truth, that there was
something more in prehistoric councils than ferocity and fear.
Each of these separate theorists had his own axe to grind,
but he was willing to use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest
that the stone axe might have been as republican as the guillotine.

But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in progress
In one sense it is a true paradox that there was history before history.
But it is not the irrational paradox implied in prehistoric history;
for it is a history we do not know.  Very probably it was exceedingly like
the history we do know, except in the one detail that we do not know it.
It is thus the very opposite of the pretentious prehistoric history,
which professes to trace everything in a consistent course from
the amoeba to the anthropoid and from the anthropoid to the agnostic.
So far from being a question of our knowing all about queer
creatures very different from ourselves, they were very probably
people very like ourselves, except that we know nothing about them.
In other words, our most ancient records only reach back to a time
when humanity had long been human, and even long been civilised.
The most ancient records we have not only mention but take for granted
things like kings and priests and princes and assemblies of the people;
they describe communities that are roughly recognisable as communities
in our own sense.  Some of them are despotic; but we cannot tell
that they have always been despotic.  Some of them may be already
decadent and nearly all are mentioned as if they were old.
We do not know what really happened in the world before those records;
but the little we do know would leave us anything but astonished if we
learnt that it was very much like what happens in this world now.
There would be nothing inconsistent or confounding about
the discovery that those unknown ages were full of republics
collapsing under monarchies and rising again as republics,
empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing colonies.
Kingdoms combining again into world states and breaking up again
into small nationalities, classes selling themselves into slavery
and marching out once more into liberty; all that procession of humanity
which may or may not be a progress but most assuredly a romance.
But the first chapters of the romance have been torn out of the book;
and we shall never read them.

It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and
social stability.  According to the real records available, barbarism and
civilisation were not successive states in the progress of the world.
They were conditions that existed side by side, as they still
exist side by side.  There were civilisations then as there are
civilisations now; there are savages now as there were savages then.
It is suggested that all men passed through a nomadic stage;
but it is certain that there are some who have never passed out of it,
and it seems not unlikely that there were some who never passed into it.
It is probable that from very primitive times the static tiller
of the soil and the wandering shepherd were two distinct types of men;
and the chronological rearrangement of them is but a mark of that mania
for progressive stages that has largely falsified history.  It is
suggested that there was a communist stage, in which private property was
everywhere unknown, a whole humanity living on the negation of property;
but the evidences of this negation are themselves rather negative.
Redistributions of property, jubilees, and agrarian laws,
occur at various intervals and in various forms; but that humanity
inevitably passed through a communist stage seems as doubtful as
the parallel proposition that humanity will inevitably return to it.
It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest plans for the
future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary
seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.  There is
an amusing parallel example in the case of what is called feminism.
In spite of all the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage
by capture and the cave-man beating the cave-woman with a club,
it may be noted that as soon as feminism became a fashionable cry,
it was insisted that human civilisation in its first stage had been
a matriarchy.  Apparently it was the cave-woman who carried the club.
Anyhow all these ideas are little better than guesses; they have
a curious way of following the fortune of modern theories and fads.
In any case they are not history in the sense of record; and we may
repeat that when it comes to record, the broad truth is that barbarism
and civilisation have always dwelt side by side in the world,
the civilisation sometimes spreading to absorb the barbarians,
sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost all cases
possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and institutions
which the barbarians possess in a ruder form; such as government
or social authority, the arts and especially the decorative arts,
mysteries and taboos of various kinds especially surrounding the matter
of sex, and some form of that fundamental thing which is the chief
concern of this enquiry; the thing that we call religion.

Now Egypt and Babylon, those two primeval monsters,
might in this matter have been specially provided as models.
They might almost be called working models to show how these
modern theories do not work.  The two great truths we know
about these two great cultures happen to contradict flatly
the two current fallacies which have just been considered.
The story of Egypt might have been invented to point the moral that man
does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous,
but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised.
He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much
the same thing, because he is exhausted And the story of Babylon
might have been invented to point the moral that man need not be
a nomad or a communist before he becomes a peasant or a citizen,
and that such cultures are not always in successive stages
but often in contemporary states.  Even touching these great
civilisations with which our written history begins there is
a temptation of course to be too ingenious or too cocksure.
We can read the bricks of Babylon in a very different sense
from that in which we guess about the Cup and Ring stones;
and we do definitely know what is meant by the animals in the Egyptian
hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animal in the neolithic cave.
But even here the admirable archeologists who have deciphered
line after line of miles of hieroglyphics may be tempted
to read too much between the lines; even the real authority
on Babylon may forget how fragmentary is his hard-won knowledge;
may forget that Babylon has only heaved half a brick at him,
though half a brick is better than no cuneiform.  But some truths,
historic and not prehistoric, dogmatic and not evolutionary,
facts and not fancies, do indeed emerge from Egypt and Babylon;
and these two truths are among them.

Egypt is a green ribbon along the river edging the dark red desolation
of the desert.  It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity,
that it is created by the mysterious bounty and almost sinister
benevolence of the Nile.  When we first hear of Egyptians they
are living as in a string of river-side villages, in small
and separate but co-operative communities along the bank
of the Nile.  Where the river branched into the broad Delta
there was traditionally the beginning of a somewhat different
district or people; but this need not complicate the main truth.
These more or less independent though interdependent peoples
were considerably civilised already.  They had a sort of heraldry;
that is, decorative art used for symbolic and social purposes;
each sailing the Nile under its own ensign representing some bird
or animal.  Heraldry involves two things of enormous importance
to normal humanity; the combination of the two making that noble
thing called co-operation; on which rest all peasantries and
peoples that are free.  The art of heraldry means independence;
an image chosen by the imagination to express the individuality.
The science of heraldry means interdependence; an agreement
between different bodies to recognise different images;
a science of imagery.  We have here therefore exactly that
compromise of co-operation between free families or groups which
is the most normal mode of life for humanity and is particularly
apparent wherever men own their own land and live on it.
With the very mention of the image of bird and beast the student
of mythology will murmur the word 'totem' almost in his sleep.
But to my mind much of the trouble arises from his habit of saying
such words as if in his sleep.  Throughout this rough outline I have
made a necessarily inadequate attempt to keep on the inside rather
than the outside of such things; to consider them where possible
in terms of thought and not merely in terms of terminology.
There is very little value in talking about totems unless we
have some feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem.
Granted that they had totems and we have no totems; was it because
they had more fear of animals or more familiarity with animals?
Did a man whose totem was a wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a
man running away from a were-wolf? Did he feel like Uncle Remus
about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about his brother the wolf,
or like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves?  Was a totem a thing
like the British lion or a thing like the British bull-dog? Was
the worship of a totem like the feeling of niggers about Mumbo Jumbo,
or of children about Jumbo?  I have never read any book of folk-lore,
however learned, that gave me any light upon this question,
which I think by far the most important one.  I will confine myself
to repeating that the earliest Egyptian communities had a common
understanding about the images that stood for their individual states;
and that this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense
that it is already there at the beginning of history.
But as history unfolds itself, this question of communication
is clearly the main question of these riverside communities.
With the need of communication comes the need of a common government
and the growing greatness and spreading shadow of the king.
The other binding force besides the king, and perhaps older than
the king, is the priesthood; and the priesthood has presumably
even more to do with these ritual symbols and signals by which men
can communicate.  And here in Egypt arose probably the primary
and certainly the typical invention to which we owe all history,
and the whole difference between the historic and the prehistoric:
the archetypal script, the art of writing.

The popular pictures of these primeval empires are not half
so popular as they might be.  There is shed over them
the shadow of an exaggerated gloom, more than the normal and
even healthy sadness of heathen men.  It is part of the same
sort of secret pessimism that loves to make primitive man
a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is fear.
It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most
by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.
For them anything primary and elemental must be evil.
But it is the curious consequence that while we have been
deluged with the wildest experiments in primitive romance,
they have all missed the real romance of being primitive.
They have described scenes that are wholly imaginary, in which
the men of the Stone Age are men of stone like walking statues;
in which the Assyrians or Egyptians are as stiff or as painted
as their own most archaic art.  But none of these makers of
imaginary scenes have tried to imagine what it must really have
been like to see those things as fresh which we see as familiar.
They have not seen a man discovering fire like a child
discovering fireworks.  They have not seen a man playing with
the wonderful invention called the wheel, like a boy playing
at putting up a wireless station.  They have never put the spirit
of youth into their descriptions of the youth of the world.
It follows that amid all their primitive or prehistoric fancies
there are no jokes.  There are not even practical jokes,
in connection with the practical inventions.  And this is
very sharply defined in the particular case of hieroglyphics;
for there seems to be serious indication that the whole high
human art of scripture or writing began with a joke.

There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun
with a pun.  The king or the priests or some responsible persons,
wishing to send a message up the river in that inconveniently long
and narrow territory, hit on the idea of sending it in picture writing,
like that of the Red Indian.  Like most people who have written
picture-writing for fun, he found the words did not always fit.
But when the word for taxes sounded rather like the word for pig,
he boldly put down a pig as a bad pun and chanced it.
So a modern hieroglyphist might represent 'at once' by unscrupulously
drawing a hat followed by a series of upright numerals.
It was good enough for the Pharaohs and ought to be good enough for him.
But it must have been great fun to write or even to read
these messages, when writing and reading were really a new thing.
And if people must write romances about ancient Egypt (and it
seems that neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold
them from the habit), I suggest that scenes like this would
really remind us that the ancient Egyptians were human beings.
I suggest that somebody should describe the scene of the great
monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them roaring with
laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal puns grew
more and more wild and indefensible.  There might be another scene
of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher;
the guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular
thrill of a detective story.  That is how primitive romance
and primitive history really ought to be written.  For whatever
was the quality of the religious or moral life of remote times,
and it was probably much more human than is conventionally supposed,
the scientific interest of such a time must have been intense.
Words must have been more wonderful than wireless telegraphy;
and experiments with common things a series of electric shocks.
We are still waiting for somebody to write a lively story of
primitive life.  The point is in some sense a parenthesis here;
but it is connected with the general matter of political development,
by the institution which was most active in these first and most
fascinating of all the fairy-tales of science.

It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests.
Modern writers like Mr. Wells cannot be accused of any weakness
of sympathy with a pontifical hierarchy; but they agree at l