CHAPTER I

THE EVERLASTING MAN

THE

EVERLASTING MAN

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDON

Made and Printed in Great Britain

T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD., Printers, Edinburgh

PREFATORY 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.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION: THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK 3

_PART I_

ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN

CHAP.

I. THE MAN IN THE CAVE 19

II. PROFESSORS AND PREHISTORIC MEN 39

III. THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILISATION 58

IV. GOD AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION 89

V. MAN AND MYTHOLOGIES 111

VI. THE DEMONS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS 129

VII. THE WAR OF THE GODS AND DEMONS 154

VIII. THE END OF THE WORLD 171

_PART II_

ON THE MAN CALLED CHRIST

CHAP.

I. THE GOD IN THE CAVE 191

II. THE RIDDLES OF THE GOSPEL 211

III. THE STRANGEST STORY IN THE WORLD 227

IV. THE WITNESS OF THE HERETICS 245

V. THE ESCAPE FROM PAGANISM 267

VI. THE FIVE DEATHS OF THE FAITH 288

CONCLUSION: THE SUMMARY OF THIS BOOK 302

APPENDIX I.: ON PREHISTORIC MAN 313

APPENDIX II.: ON AUTHORITY AND ACCURACY 315

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 real

independent intelligence to-day; 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 an 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 journalists. 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 cannot 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 judgments; 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-headed

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 of ‘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 sane vision, he can only get

it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a

strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as

seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and

not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the _really_

detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to,

and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In

other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is

that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how

queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him.

In short, it is the purpose of this introduction to maintain this

thesis: that it is exactly when we do regard man as an animal that we

know he is not an animal. It is precisely when we do try to picture him

as a sort of horse on its hind legs that we suddenly realise that he

must be something as miraculous as the winged horse that towered up into

the clouds of heaven. All roads lead to Rome, all ways lead round again

to the central and civilised philosophy, including this road through

elfland and topsyturvydom. But it may be that it is better never to have

left the land of a reasonable tradition, where men ride lightly upon

horses and are mighty hunters before the Lord.

So also in the specially Christian case we have to react against the

heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid,

because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that

familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the

supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call

him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed

nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of

Chinese pottery instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic

paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity

of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of

substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious

exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an

invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the

Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons

and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly.

We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which

perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying

imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom,

which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know; we

believe every common Indian conjurer who chooses to come to us and talk

in the same style. If Christianity were only a new oriental fashion, it

would never be reproached with being an old and oriental faith. I do not

propose in this book to follow the alleged example of St. Francis Xavier

with the opposite imaginative intention, and turn the Twelve Apostles

into Mandarins; not so much to make them look like natives as to make

them look like foreigners. I do not propose to work what I believe would

be a completely successful practical joke; that of telling the whole

story of the Gospel and the whole history of the Church in a setting of

pagodas and pigtails; and noting with malignant humour how much it was

admired as a heathen story in the very quarters where it is condemned as

a Christian story. But I do propose 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. Any one who chooses to indulge in mere imagination can

imagine that other things might have happened or other entities evolved.

Any one thinking of what might have happened may conceive a sort of

evolutionary equality; but any one 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

CHAPTER 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 had 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 a 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 comment 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 a 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 has 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 romances of the

hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or

shindy. The cave-man may have been no better than 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 evolutionary 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 some time 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 the 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 psychoanalyst 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 crèche, 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 a 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 cannot 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 a 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 thoughts 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 something

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 proof 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 stones

and bones 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 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.