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 practise 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
scrap-heaps 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 part 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
antediluvian, 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 practise
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 to-day. 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 embroidering, 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 worth while 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 themselves; but we do know that 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 prehistoric 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 reindeers 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
guesswork 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 Marvellous 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 any one 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 cornfields 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 had 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 something
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 anything 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 of
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 symbolical 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 as 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 for ever 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 that 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 some time 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 ourselves. 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 forms 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 it transformed was not in the
least different, except in being turned upside-down.