The Everlasting Man

his book needs a preliminary note that its scope be not misunderstood.

2 The view suggested is historical rather than theological, and does not

3 deal directly with a religious change which has been the chief event of

4 my own life; and about which I am already writing a more purely

5 controversial volume. It is impossible, I hope, for any Catholic to

6 write any book on any subject, above all this subject, without showing

7 that he is a Catholic; but this study is not specially concerned with

8 the differences between a Catholic and a Protestant. Much of it is

9 devoted to many sorts of Pagans rather than any sort of Christians; and

10 its thesis is that those who say that Christ stands side by side with

11 similar myths, and his religion side by side with similar religions, are

12 only repeating a very stale formula contradicted by a very striking

13 fact. To suggest this I have not needed to go much beyond matters known

14 to us all; I make no claim to learning; and have to depend for some

15 things, as has rather become the fashion, on those who are more learned.

16 As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of

17 history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the

18 courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and

19 varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted

20 the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts

21 which the specialists provide.

INTRODUCTION

4 THE PLAN OF THIS BOOK

5 There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.

6 The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same

7 place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote. It

8 is, however, a relief to turn from that topic to another story that I

9 never wrote. Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I

10 have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it,

11 so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same

12 truth. I conceived it as a romance of those vast valleys with sloping

13 sides, like those along which the ancient White Horses of Wessex are

14 scrawled along the flanks of the hills. It concerned some boy whose farm

15 or cottage stood on such a slope, and who went on his travels to find

16 something, such as the effigy and grave of some giant; and when he was

17 far enough from home he looked back and saw that his own farm and

18 kitchen-garden, shining flat on the hill-side like the colours and

19 quarterings of a shield, were but parts of some such gigantic figure, on

20 which he had always lived, but which was too large and too close to be

21 seen. That, I think, is a true picture of the progress of any real

22 independent intelligence to-day; and that is the point of this book.

23 The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to

24 being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a

25 particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are

26 not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense

27 of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has

28 taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. Thus

29 they make current an anti-clerical cant as a sort of small-talk. They

30 will complain of parsons dressing like parsons; as if we should be any

31 more free if all the police who shadowed or collared us were

32 plain-clothes detectives. Or they will complain that a sermon cannot be

33 interrupted, and call a pulpit a coward’s castle; though they do not

34 call an editor’s office a coward’s castle. It would be unjust both to

35 journalists and priests; but it would be much truer of journalists. The

36 clergyman appears in person and could easily be kicked as he came out of

37 church; the journalist conceals even his name so that nobody can kick

38 him. They write wild and pointless articles and letters in the press

39 about why the churches are empty, without even going there to find out

40 if they are empty, or which of them are empty. Their suggestions are

41 more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate in a three-act farce,

42 and move us to comfort him after the manner of the curate in the Bab

43 Ballads; ‘Your mind is not so blank as that of Hopley Porter.’ So we may

44 truly say to the very feeblest cleric: ‘Your mind is not so blank as

45 that of Indignant Layman or Plain Man or Man in the Street, or any of

46 your critics in the newspapers; for they have not the most shadowy

47 notion of what they want themselves, let alone of what you ought to give

48 them.’ They will suddenly turn round and revile the Church for not

49 having prevented the War, which they themselves did not want to prevent;

50 and which nobody had ever professed to be able to prevent, except some

51 of that very school of progressive and cosmopolitan sceptics who are the

52 chief enemies of the Church. It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world

53 that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that

54 world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the

55 advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was

56 discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was

57 discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather

58 that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her

59 children do not sin, but because they do. But that marks their mood

60 about the whole religious tradition: they are in a state of reaction

61 against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father’s land;

62 and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it

63 and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate

64 state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see

65 neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get

66 out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians

67 and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere

68 is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism.

69 They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of

70 the faith.

71 Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love

72 it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the

73 contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a

74 Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.

75 The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the

76 ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic,

77 entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the

78 beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not

79 what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not

80 judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as

81 he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the

82 Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and

83 judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great

84 St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church

85 there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his

86 followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the

87 Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be

88 far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen,

89 than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by

90 iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-headed

91 cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic

92 cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head-dresses of

93 mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like

94 serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer-book as

95 fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika.

96 Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical

97 critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their

98 anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and

99 hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be

100 better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another

101 continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare

102 indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling

103 at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a

104 pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go

105 inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere

106 reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the

107 imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In

108 other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to

109 Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.

110 But with this we come to the final and vital point. I shall try to show

111 in these pages that when we *do* make this imaginative effort to see the

112 whole thing from the outside, we find that it really looks like what is

113 traditionally said about it inside. It is exactly when the boy gets far

114 enough off to see the giant that he sees that he really is a giant. It

115 is exactly when we do at last see the Christian Church afar under those

116 clear and level eastern skies that we see that it is really the Church

117 of Christ. To put it shortly, the moment we are really impartial about

118 it we know why people are partial to it. But this second proposition

119 requires more serious discussion; and I shall here set myself to discuss

120 it.

121 As soon as I had clearly in my mind this conception of something solid

122 in the solitary and unique character of the divine story, it struck me

123 that there was exactly the same strange and yet solid character in the

124 human story that had led up to it; because that human story also had a

125 root that was divine. I mean that just as the Church seems to grow more

126 remarkable when it is fairly compared with the common religious life of

127 mankind, so mankind itself seems to grow more remarkable when we compare

128 it with the common life of nature. And I have noticed that most modern

129 history is driven to something like sophistry, first to soften the sharp

130 transition from animals to men, and then to soften the sharp transition

131 from heathens to Christians. Now the more we really read in a realistic

132 spirit of those two transitions the sharper we shall find them to be. It

133 is because the critics are *not* detached that they do not see this

134 detachment; it is because they are not looking at things in a dry light

135 that they cannot see the difference between black and white. It is

136 because they are in a particular mood of reaction and revolt that they

137 have a motive for making out that all the white is dirty grey and the

138 black not so black as it is painted. I do not say there are not human

139 excuses for their revolt; I do not say it is not in some ways

140 sympathetic; what I say is that it is not in any way scientific. An

141 iconoclast may be indignant; an iconoclast may be justly indignant; but

142 an iconoclast is not impartial. And it is stark hypocrisy to pretend

143 that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and

144 professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why

145 should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world

146 is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a

147 divine hope? I do not pretend to be impartial in the sense that the

148 final act of faith fixes a man’s mind because it satisfies his mind. But

149 I do profess to be a great deal more impartial than they are; in the

150 sense that I can tell the story fairly, with some sort of imaginative

151 justice to all sides; and they cannot. I do profess to be impartial in

152 the sense that I should be ashamed to talk such nonsense about the Lama

153 of Thibet as they do about the Pope of Rome, or to have as little

154 sympathy with Julian the Apostate as they have with the Society of

155 Jesus. They are not impartial; they never by any chance hold the

156 historical scales even; and above all they are never impartial upon this

157 point of evolution and transition. They suggest everywhere the grey

158 gradations of twilight, because they believe it is the twilight of the

159 gods. I propose to maintain that whether or no it is the twilight of

160 gods, it is not the daylight of men.

161 I maintain that when brought out into the daylight, these two things

162 look altogether strange and unique; and that it is only in the false

163 twilight of an imaginary period of transition that they can be made to

164 look in the least like anything else. The first of these is the creature

165 called man, and the second is the man called Christ. I have therefore

166 divided this book into two parts: the former being a sketch of the main

167 adventure of the human race in so far as it remained heathen; and the

168 second a summary of the real difference that was made by it becoming

169 Christian. Both motives necessitate a certain method, a method which is

170 not very easy to manage, and perhaps even less easy to define or defend.

171 In order to strike, in the only sane or possible sense, the note of

172 impartiality, it is necessary to touch the nerve of novelty. I mean that

173 in one sense we see things fairly when we see them first. That, I may

174 remark in passing, is why children generally have very little difficulty

175 about the dogmas of the Church. But the Church, being a highly practical

176 thing for working and fighting, is necessarily a thing for men and not

177 merely for children. There must be in it for working purposes a great

178 deal of tradition, of familiarity, and even of routine. So long as its

179 fundamentals are sincerely felt, this may even be the saner condition.

180 But when its fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to

181 recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and

182 objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least

183 to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only

184 by seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long as

185 familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when

186 familiarity breeds contempt. For in connection with things so great as

187 are here considered, whatever our view of them, contempt must be a

188 mistake. Indeed contempt must be an illusion. We must invoke the most

189 wild and soaring sort of imagination; the imagination that can see what

190 is there.

191 The only way to suggest the point is by an example of something, indeed

192 of almost anything, that has been considered beautiful or wonderful.

193 George Wyndham once told me that he had seen one of the first aeroplanes

194 rise for the first time, and it was very wonderful; but not so wonderful

195 as a horse allowing a man to ride on him. Somebody else has said that a

196 fine man on a fine horse is the noblest bodily object in the world. Now,

197 so long as people feel this in the right way, all is well. The first and

198 best way of appreciating it is to come of people with a tradition of

199 treating animals properly; of men in the right relation to horses. A boy

200 who remembers his father who rode a horse, who rode it well and treated

201 it well, will know that the relation can be satisfactory and will be

202 satisfied. He will be all the more indignant at the ill-treatment of

203 horses because he knows how they ought to be treated; but he will see

204 nothing but what is normal in a man riding on a horse. He will not

205 listen to the great modern philosopher who explains to him that the

206 horse ought to be riding on the man. He will not pursue the pessimist

207 fancy of Swift and say that men must be despised as monkeys, and horses

208 worshipped as gods. And horse and man together making an image that is

209 to him human and civilised, it will be easy, as it were, to lift horse

210 and man together into something heroic or symbolical; like a vision of

211 St. George in the clouds. The fable of the winged horse will not be

212 wholly unnatural to him: and he will know why Ariosto set many a

213 Christian hero in such an airy saddle, and made him the rider of the

214 sky. For the horse has really been lifted up along with the man in the

215 wildest fashion in the very word we use when we speak of ‘chivalry.’ The

216 very name of the horse has been given to the highest mood and moment of

217 the man; so that we might almost say that the handsomest compliment to a

218 man is to call him a horse.

219 But if a man has got into a mood in which he is *not* able to feel this

220 sort of wonder, then his cure must begin right at the other end. We must

221 now suppose that he has drifted into a dull mood, in which somebody

222 sitting on a horse means no more than somebody sitting on a chair. The

223 wonder of which Wyndham spoke, the beauty that made the thing seem an

224 equestrian statue, the meaning of the more chivalric horseman, may have

225 become to him merely a convention and a bore. Perhaps they have been

226 merely a fashion; perhaps they have gone out of fashion; perhaps they

227 have been talked about too much or talked about in the wrong way;

228 perhaps it was then difficult to care for horses without the horrible

229 risk of being horsy. Anyhow, he has got into a condition when he cares

230 no more for a horse than for a towel-horse. His grandfather’s charge at

231 Balaclava seems to him as dull and dusty as the album containing such

232 family portraits. Such a person has not really become enlightened about

233 the album; on the contrary, he has only become blind with the dust. But

234 when he has reached *that* degree of blindness, he will not be able to

235 look at a horse or a horseman at all until he has seen the whole thing

236 as a thing entirely unfamiliar and almost unearthly.

237 Out of some dark forest under some ancient dawn there must come towards

238 us, with lumbering yet dancing motions, one of the very queerest of the

239 prehistoric creatures. We must see for the first time the strangely

240 small head set on a neck not only longer but thicker than itself, as the

241 face of a gargoyle is thrust out upon a gutter-spout, the one

242 disproportionate crest of hair running along the ridge of that heavy

243 neck like a beard in the wrong place; the feet, each like a solid club

244 of horn, alone amid the feet of so many cattle; so that the true fear is

245 to be found in showing not the cloven but the uncloven hoof. Nor is it

246 mere verbal fancy to see him thus as a unique monster; for in a sense a

247 monster means what is unique, and he is really unique. But the point is

248 that when we thus see him as the first man saw him, we begin once more

249 to have some imaginative sense of what it meant when the first man rode

250 him. In such a dream he may seem ugly, but he does not seem

251 unimpressive; and certainly that two-legged dwarf who could get on top

252 of him will not seem unimpressive. By a longer and more erratic road we

253 shall come back to the same marvel of the man and the horse; and the

254 marvel will be, if possible, even more marvellous. We shall have again a

255 glimpse of St. George; the more glorious because St. George is not

256 riding on the horse, but rather riding on the dragon.

257 In this example, which I have taken merely because it is an example, it

258 will be noted that I do not say that the nightmare seen by the first man

259 of the forest is either more true or more wonderful than the normal mare

260 of the stable seen by the civilised person who can appreciate what is

261 normal. Of the two extremes, I think on the whole that the traditional

262 grasp of truth is the better. But I say that the truth is found at one

263 or other of these two extremes, and is lost in the intermediate

264 condition of mere fatigue and forgetfulness of tradition. In other

265 words, I say it is better to see a horse as a monster than to see it

266 only as a slow substitute for a motor-car. If we have got into *that*

267 state of mind about a horse as something stale, it is far better to be

268 frightened of a horse because it is a good deal too fresh.

269 Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the

270 monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my

271 opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my

272 philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature

273 will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and

274 will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get

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

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

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

278 not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the *really*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

290 to the central and civilised philosophy, including this road through

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

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

293 horses and are mighty hunters before the Lord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

304 substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious

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

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

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

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

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

310 perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying

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

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

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

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

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

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

317 with the opposite imaginative intention, and turn the Twelve Apostles

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

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

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

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

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

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

324 a Christian story. But I do propose to strike wherever possible this

325 note of what is new and strange, and for that reason the style even on

326 so serious a subject may sometimes be deliberately grotesque and

327 fanciful. I do desire to help the reader to see Christendom from the

328 outside in the sense of seeing it as a whole, against the background of

329 other historic things; just as I desire him to see humanity as a whole

330 against the background of natural things. And I say that in both cases,

331 when seen thus, they stand out from their background like supernatural

332 things. They do not fade into the rest with the colours of

333 impressionism; they stand out from the rest with the colours of

334 heraldry; as vivid as a red cross on a white shield or a black lion on a

335 ground of gold. So stands the Red Clay against the green field of

336 nature, or the White Christ against the red clay of his race.

337 But in order to see them clearly we have to see them as a whole. We have

338 to see how they developed as well as how they began; for the most

339 incredible part of the story is that things which began thus should have

340 developed thus. Any one who chooses to indulge in mere imagination can

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

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

343 evolutionary equality; but any one facing what did happen must face an

344 exception and a prodigy. If there was ever a moment when man was only an

345 animal, we can if we choose make a fancy picture of his career

346 transferred to some other animal. An entertaining fantasia might be made

347 in which elephants built in elephantine architecture, with towers and

348 turrets like tusks and trunks, cities beyond the scale of any colossus.

349 A pleasant fable might be conceived in which a cow had developed a

350 costume, and put on four boots and two pairs of trousers. We could

351 imagine a Supermonkey more marvellous than any Superman, a quadrumanous

352 creature carving and painting with his hands and cooking and

353 carpentering with his feet. But if we are considering what did happen,

354 we shall certainly decide that man has distanced everything else with a

355 distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that of

356 the still thunderbolt of the light. And in the same fashion, while we

357 can if we choose see the Church amid a mob of Mithraic or Manichean

358 superstitions squabbling and killing each other at the end of the

359 Empire, while we can if we choose imagine the Church killed in the

360 struggle and some other chance cult taking its place, we shall be the

361 more surprised (and possibly puzzled) if we meet it two thousand years

362 afterwards rushing through the ages as the winged thunderbolt of thought

363 and everlasting enthusiasm; a thing without rival or resemblance; and

364 still as new as it is old.

PART I

7 ON THE CREATURE CALLED MAN

CHAPTER I

10 THE MAN IN THE CAVE

11 Far away in some strange constellation in skies infinitely remote, there

12 is a small star, which astronomers may some day discover. At least I

13 could never observe in the faces or demeanour of most astronomers or men

14 of science any evidence that they had discovered it; though as a matter

15 of fact they were walking about on it all the time. It is a star that

16 brings forth out of itself very strange plants and very strange animals;

17 and none stranger than the men of science. That at least is the way in

18 which I should begin a history of the world if I had to follow the

19 scientific custom of beginning with an account of the astronomical

20 universe. I should try to see even this earth from the outside, not by

21 the hackneyed insistence of its relative position to the sun, but by

22 some imaginative effort to conceive its remote position for the

23 dehumanised spectator. Only I do not believe in being dehumanised in

24 order to study humanity. I do not believe in dwelling upon the distances

25 that are supposed to dwarf the world; I think there is even something a

26 trifle vulgar about this idea of trying to rebuke spirit by size. And as

27 the first idea is not feasible, that of making the earth a strange

28 planet so as to make it significant, I will not stoop to the other trick

29 of making it a small planet in order to make it insignificant. I would

30 rather insist that we do not even know that it is a planet at all, in

31 the sense in which we know that it is a place; and a very extraordinary

32 place too. That is the note which I wish to strike from the first, if

33 not in the astronomical, then in some more familiar fashion.

34 One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a

35 comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of

36 the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more

37 interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant

38 Allen. And I remember that the editor objected to my remark on the

39 ground that it was blasphemous; which naturally amused me not a little.

40 For the joke of it was, of course, that it never occurred to him to

41 notice the title of the book itself, which really was blasphemous; for

42 it was, when translated into English, ‘I will show you how this

43 nonsensical notion that there is a God grew up among men.’ My remark was

44 strictly pious and proper; confessing the divine purpose even in its

45 most seemingly dark or meaningless manifestations. In that hour I

46 learned many things, including the fact that there is something purely

47 acoustic in much of that agnostic sort of reverence. The editor had not

48 seen the point, because in the title of the book the long word came at

49 the beginning and the short word at the end; whereas in my comment the

50 short word came at the beginning and gave him a sort of shock. I have

51 noticed that if you put a word like God into the same sentence with a

52 word like dog, these abrupt and angular words affect people like

53 pistol-shots. Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God

54 does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of

55 the too subtle theologians. But so long as you begin with a long word

56 like evolution the rest will roll harmlessly past; very probably the

57 editor had not read the whole of the title, for it is rather a long

58 title and he was rather a busy man.

59 But this little incident has always lingered in my mind as a sort of

60 parable. Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution,

61 and with a rather wordy exposition of evolution, for much the same

62 reason that operated in this case. There is something slow and soothing

63 and gradual about the word and even about the idea. As a matter of fact,

64 it is not, touching these primary things, a very practical word or a

65 very profitable idea. Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into

66 something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how

67 something could turn into something else. It is really far more logical

68 to start by saying ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ even

69 if you only mean ‘In the beginning some unthinkable power began some

70 unthinkable process.’ For God is by its nature a name of mystery, and

71 nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any

72 more than he could create one. But evolution really is mistaken for

73 explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the

74 impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many

75 of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read the *Origin of

76 Species*.

77 But this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent of a

78 slope, is a great part of the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as

79 an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An

80 event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible

81 because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in

82 a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one.

83 The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the

84 wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little

85 more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly

86 tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and

87 uncanny. The medieval wizard may have flown through the air from the top

88 of a tower; but to see an old gentleman walking through the air, in a

89 leisurely and lounging manner, would still seem to call for some

90 explanation. Yet there runs through all the rationalistic treatment of

91 history this curious and confused idea that difficulty is avoided, or

92 even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere delay or on something

93 dilatory in the processes of things. There will be something to be said

94 upon particular examples elsewhere; the question here is the false

95 atmosphere of facility and ease given by the mere suggestion of going

96 slow; the sort of comfort that might be given to a nervous old woman

97 travelling for the first time in a motor-car.

98 Mr. H. G. Wells has confessed to being a prophet; and in this matter he

99 was a prophet at his own expense. It is curious that his first

100 fairy-tale was a complete answer to his last book of history. The Time

101 Machine destroyed in advance all comfortable conclusions founded on the

102 mere relativity of time. In that sublime nightmare the hero saw trees

103 shoot up like green rockets, and vegetation spread visibly like a green

104 conflagration, or the sun shoot across the sky from east to west with

105 the swiftness of a meteor. Yet in his sense these things were quite as

106 natural when they went swiftly; and in our sense they are quite as

107 supernatural when they go slowly. The ultimate question is why they go

108 at all; and anybody who really understands that question will know that

109 it always has been and always will be a religious question; or at any

110 rate a philosophical or metaphysical question. And most certainly he

111 will not think the question answered by some substitution of gradual for

112 abrupt change; or, in other words, by a merely relative question of the

113 same story being spun out or rattled rapidly through, as can be done

114 with any story at a cinema by turning a handle.

115 Now what is needed for these problems of primitive existence is

116 something more like a primitive spirit. In calling up this vision of the

117 first things, I would ask the reader to make with me a sort of

118 experiment in simplicity. And by simplicity I do not mean stupidity, but

119 rather the sort of clarity that sees things like life rather than words

120 like evolution. For this purpose it would really be better to turn the

121 handle of the Time Machine a little more quickly and see the grass

122 growing and the trees springing up into the sky, if that experiment

123 could contract and concentrate and make vivid the upshot of the whole

124 affair. What we know, in a sense in which we know nothing else, is that

125 the trees and the grass did grow and that a number of other

126 extraordinary things do in fact happen; that queer creatures support

127 themselves in the empty air by beating it with fans of various fantastic

128 shapes; that other queer creatures steer themselves about alive under a

129 load of mighty waters; that other queer creatures walk about on four

130 legs, and that the queerest creature of all walks about on two. These

131 are things and not theories; and compared with them evolution and the

132 atom and even the solar system are merely theories. The matter here is

133 one of history and not of philosophy; so that it need only be noted that

134 no philosopher denies that a mystery still attaches to the two great

135 transitions: the origin of the universe itself and the origin of the

136 principle of life itself. Most philosophers have the enlightenment to

137 add that a third mystery attaches to the origin of man himself. In other

138 words, a third bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable

139 when there came into the world what we call reason and what we call

140 will. Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution. That he

141 has a backbone or other parts upon a similar pattern to birds and fishes

142 is an obvious fact, whatever be the meaning of the fact. But if we

143 attempt to regard him, as it were, as a quadruped standing on his hind

144 legs, we shall find what follows far more fantastic and subversive than

145 if he were standing on his head.

146 I will take one example to serve for an introduction to the story of

147 man. It illustrates what I mean by saying that a certain childish

148 directness is needed to see the truth about the childhood of the world.

149 It illustrates what I mean by saying that a mixture of popular science

150 and journalistic jargon has confused the facts about the first things,

151 so that we cannot see which of them really comes first. It illustrates,

152 though only in one convenient illustration, all that I mean by the

153 necessity of seeing the sharp differences that give its shape to

154 history, instead of being submerged in all these generalisations about

155 slowness and sameness. For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells’s phrase,

156 an outline of history. But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini’s

157 phrase, that this evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd

158 outline. But, above all, it illustrates what I mean by saying that the

159 more we really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.

160 To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with

161 numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems

162 to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a

163 private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in

164 psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can

165 understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or

166 treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of

167 the film as ‘rough stuff.’ I have never happened to come upon the

168 evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or

169 prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained

170 elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even

171 considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or

172 authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down

173 before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an

174 almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to

175 insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I

176 repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude,

177 the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been

178 a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than

179 the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the

180 hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or

181 shindy. The cave-man may have been no better than the cave-bear; but the

182 child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained with any such

183 bias for spinsterhood. In short, these details of the domestic life of

184 the cave puzzle me upon either the evolutionary or the static

185 hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for

186 them; but unfortunately I have never been able to find it. But the

187 curious thing is this: that while ten thousand tongues of more or less

188 scientific or literary gossip seemed to be talking at once about this

189 unfortunate fellow, under the title of the cave-man, the one connection

190 in which it is really relevant and sensible to talk about him as the

191 cave-man has been comparatively neglected. People have used this loose

192 term in twenty loose ways; but they have never even looked at their own

193 term for what could really be learned from it.

194 In fact, people have been interested in everything about the cave-man

195 except what he did in the cave. Now there does happen to be some real

196 evidence of what he did in the cave. It is little enough, like all the

197 prehistoric evidence, but it is concerned with the real cave-man and his

198 cave and not the literary cave-man and his club. And it will be valuable

199 to our sense of reality to consider quite simply what that real evidence

200 is, and not to go beyond it. What was found in the cave was not the

201 club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had

202 knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard’s Chamber filled with

203 the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls

204 all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs. It was something quite

205 unconnected, one way or the other, with all the modern phrases and

206 philosophical implications and literary rumours which confuse the whole

207 question for us. And if we wish to see as it really is this authentic

208 glimpse of the morning of the world, it will be far better to conceive

209 even the story of its discovery as some such legend of the land of

210 morning. It would be far better to tell the tale of what was really

211 found as simply as the tale of heroes finding the Golden Fleece or the

212 Gardens of the Hesperides, if we could so escape from a fog of

213 controversial theories into the clear colours and clean-cut outlines of

214 such a dawn. The old epic poets at least knew how to tell a story,

215 possibly a tall story but never a twisted story, never a story tortured

216 out of its own shape to fit theories and philosophies invented centuries

217 afterwards. It would be well if modern investigators could describe

218 their discoveries in the bald narrative style of the earliest

219 travellers, and without any of these long allusive words that are full

220 of irrelevant implication and suggestion. Then we might realise exactly

221 what we do know about the cave-man, or at any rate about the cave.

222 A priest and a boy entered some time ago a hollow in the hills and

223 passed into a sort of subterranean tunnel that led into a labyrinth of

224 such sealed and secret corridors of rock. They crawled through cracks

225 that seemed almost impassable, they crept through tunnels that might

226 have been made for moles, they dropped into holes as hopeless as wells,

227 they seemed to be burying themselves alive seven times over beyond the

228 hope of resurrection. This is but the commonplace of all such courageous

229 exploration; but what is needed here is some one who shall put such

230 stories in the primary light, in which they are not commonplace. There

231 is, for instance, something strangely symbolic in the accident that the

232 first intruders into that sunken world were a priest and a boy, the

233 types of the antiquity and of the youth of the world. But here I am

234 even more concerned with the symbolism of the boy than with that of the

235 priest. Nobody who remembers boyhood needs to be told what it might be

236 to a boy to enter like Peter Pan under a roof of the roots of all the

237 trees and go deeper and deeper, till he reach what William Morris called

238 the very roots of the mountains. Suppose somebody, with that simple and

239 unspoilt realism that is a part of innocence, to pursue that journey to

240 its end, not for the sake of what he could deduce or demonstrate in some

241 dusty magazine controversy, but simply for the sake of what he could

242 see. What he did see at last was a cavern so far from the light of day

243 that it might have been the legendary Domdaniel cavern that was under

244 the floor of the sea. This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated

245 after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and

246 sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they

247 followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of

248 ages, the movement and the gesture of a man’s hand. They were drawings

249 or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a

250 man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed

251 that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man

252 who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no

253 artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They

254 showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit

255 that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the

256 draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his

257 head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough

258 in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set

259 themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty

260 other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a

261 certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it

262 would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of

263 naturalist who is really natural.

264 Now it is needless to note, except in passing, that there is nothing

265 whatever in the atmosphere of that cave to suggest the bleak and

266 pessimistic atmosphere of that journalistic cave of the winds, that

267 blows and bellows about us with countless echoes concerning the

268 cave-man. So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces

269 of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is

270 certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction

271 invoked in popular science. When novelists and educationists and

272 psychologists of all sorts talk about the cave-man, they never conceive

273 him in connection with anything that is really in the cave. When the

274 realist of the sex novel writes, ‘Red sparks danced in Dagmar

275 Doubledick’s brain; he felt the spirit of the cave-man rising within

276 him,’ the novelist’s readers would be very much disappointed if Dagmar

277 only went off and drew large pictures of cows on the drawing-room wall.

278 When the psychoanalyst writes to a patient, ‘The submerged instincts of

279 the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,’

280 he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colours; or to make

281 conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze.

282 Yet we do know for a fact that the cave-man did these mild and innocent

283 things; and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did

284 any of the violent and ferocious things. In other words, the cave-man as

285 commonly presented to us is simply a myth or rather a muddle; for a myth

286 has at least an imaginative outline of truth. The whole of the current

287 way of talking is simply a confusion and a misunderstanding, founded on

288 no sort of scientific evidence and valued only as an excuse for a very

289 modern mood of anarchy. If any gentleman wants to knock a woman about,

290 he can surely be a cad without taking away the character of the

291 cave-man, about whom we know next to nothing except what we can gather

292 from a few harmless and pleasing pictures on a wall.

293 But this is not the point about the pictures or the particular moral

294 here to be drawn from them. That moral is something much larger and

295 simpler, so large and simple that when it is first stated it will sound

296 childish. And indeed it is in the highest sense childish; and that is

297 why I have in this apologue in some sense seen it through the eyes of a

298 child. It is the biggest of all the facts really facing the boy in the

299 cavern; and is perhaps too big to be seen. If the boy was one of the

300 flock of the priest, it may be presumed that he had been trained in a

301 certain quality of common sense; that common sense that often comes to

302 us in the form of tradition. In that case he would simply recognise the

303 primitive man’s work as the work of a man, interesting but in no way

304 incredible in being primitive. He would see what was there to see; and

305 he would not be tempted into seeing what was not there, by any

306 evolutionary excitement or fashionable speculation. If he had heard of

307 such things he would admit, of course, that the speculations might be

308 true and were not incompatible with the facts that were true. The artist

309 may have had another side to his character besides that which he has

310 alone left on record in his works of art. The primitive man may have

311 taken a pleasure in beating women as well as in drawing animals; all we

312 can say is that the drawings record the one but not the other. It may be

313 true that when the cave-man’s finished jumping on his mother, or his

314 wife as the case may be, he loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling,

315 and also to watch the deer as they come down to drink at the brook.

316 These things are not impossible, but they are irrelevant. The common

317 sense of the child could confine itself to learning from the facts what

318 the facts have to teach; and the pictures in the cave are very nearly

319 all the facts there are. So far as that evidence goes, the child would

320 be justified in assuming that a man had represented animals with rock

321 and red ochre for the same reason as he himself was in the habit of

322 trying to represent animals with charcoal and red chalk. The man had

323 drawn a stag just as the child had drawn a horse; because it was fun.

324 The man had drawn a stag with his head turned as the child had drawn a

325 pig with his eyes shut; because it was difficult. The child and the man,

326 being both human, would be united by the brotherhood of men; and the

327 brotherhood of men is even nobler when it bridges the abyss of ages than

328 when it bridges only the chasm of class. But anyhow he would see no

329 evidence of the cave-man of crude evolutionism; because there is none to

330 be seen. If somebody told him that the pictures had all been drawn by

331 St. Francis of Assisi out of pure and saintly love of animals, there

332 would be nothing in the cave to contradict it.

333 Indeed I once knew a lady who half-humorously suggested that the cave

334 was a crèche, in which the babies were put to be specially safe, and

335 that coloured animals were drawn on the walls to amuse them; very much

336 as diagrams of elephants and giraffes adorn a modern infant school. And

337 though this was but a jest, it does draw attention to some of the other

338 assumptions that we make only too readily. The pictures do not prove

339 even that the cave-men lived in caves, any more than the discovery of a

340 wine-cellar in Balham (long after that suburb had been destroyed by

341 human or divine wrath) would prove that the Victorian middle classes

342 lived entirely underground. The cave might have had a special purpose

343 like the cellar; it might have been a religious shrine or a refuge in

344 war or the meeting-place of a secret society or all sorts of things. But

345 it is quite true that its artistic decoration has much more of the

346 atmosphere of a nursery than of any of these nightmares of anarchical

347 fury and fear. I have conceived a child as standing in the cave; and it

348 is easy to conceive any child, modern or immeasurably remote, as making

349 a living gesture as if to pat the painted beasts upon the wall. In that

350 gesture there is a foreshadowing, as we shall see later, of another

351 cavern and another child.

352 But suppose the boy had not been taught by a priest but by a professor,

353 by one of the professors who simplify the relation of men and beasts to

354 a mere evolutionary variation. Suppose the boy saw himself, with the

355 same simplicity and sincerity, as a mere Mowgli running with the pack of

356 nature and roughly indistinguishable from the rest save by a relative

357 and recent variation. What would be for him the simplest lesson of that

358 strange stone picture-book? After all, it would come back to this; that

359 he had dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn a picture

360 of a reindeer. But he would dig a good deal deeper before he found a

361 place where a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man. That sounds like a

362 truism, but in this connection it is really a very tremendous truth. He

363 might descend to depths unthinkable, he might sink into sunken

364 continents as strange as remote stars, he might find himself in the

365 inside of the world as far from men as the other side of the moon; he

366 might see in those cold chasms or colossal terraces of stone, traced in

367 the faint hieroglyphic of the fossil, the ruins of lost dynasties of

368 biological life, rather like the ruins of successive creations and

369 separate universes than the stages in the story of one. He would find

370 the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions outside all our

371 common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching life

372 with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle;

373 growing a forest of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and

374 the finger. But nowhere would he find one finger that had traced one

375 significant line upon the sand; nowhere one claw that had even begun to

376 scratch the faint suggestion of a form. To all appearance, the thing

377 would be as unthinkable in all those countless cosmic variations of

378 forgotten aeons as it would be in the beasts and birds before our eyes.

379 The child would no more expect to see it than to see the cat scratch on

380 the wall a vindictive caricature of the dog. The childish common sense

381 would keep the most evolutionary child from expecting to see anything

382 like that; yet in the traces of the rude and recently evolved ancestors

383 of humanity he would have seen exactly that. It must surely strike him

384 as strange that men so remote from him should be so near, and that

385 beasts so near to him should be so remote. To his simplicity it must

386 seem at least odd that he could not find any trace of the beginning of

387 any arts among any animals. That is the simplest lesson to learn in the

388 cavern of the coloured pictures; only it is too simple to be learnt. It

389 is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not

390 in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to

391 say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey, and that it

392 sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a

393 picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared;

394 and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.

395 That is the sort of simple truth with which a story of the beginnings

396 ought really to begin. The evolutionist stands staring in the painted

397 cavern at the things that are too large to be seen and too simple to be

398 understood. He tries to deduce all sorts of other indirect and doubtful

399 things from the details of the pictures, because he cannot see the

400 primary significance of the whole; thin and theoretical deductions about

401 the absence of religion or the presence of superstition; about tribal

402 government and hunting and human sacrifice and heaven knows what. In the

403 next chapter I shall try to trace in a little more detail the much

404 disputed question about these prehistoric origins of human ideas and

405 especially of the religious idea. Here I am only taking this one case of

406 the cave as a sort of symbol of the simpler sort of truth with which the

407 story ought to start. When all is said, the main fact that the record of

408 the reindeer men attests, along with all other records, is that the

409 reindeer man could draw and the reindeer could not. If the reindeer man

410 was as much an animal as the reindeer, it was all the more extraordinary

411 that he could do what all other animals could not. If he was an ordinary

412 product of biological growth, like any other beast or bird, then it is

413 all the more extraordinary that he was not in the least like any other

414 beast or bird. He seems rather more supernatural as a natural product

415 than as a supernatural one.

416 But I have begun this story in the cave, like the cave of the

417 speculations of Plato, because it is a sort of model of the mistake of

418 merely evolutionary introductions and prefaces. It is useless to begin

419 by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of

420 development and degree. For in a plain matter like the pictures there is

421 in fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not

422 begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a

423 reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not

424 draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his

425 best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was

426 not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can

427 say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative

428 shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we

429 cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate

430 from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with

431 man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. How he came there, or

432 indeed how anything else came there, is a thing for theologians and

433 philosophers and scientists and not for historians. But an excellent

434 test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of

435 art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because

436 he was a creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be

437 made in any other image but the image of man. But the truth is so true

438 that, even in the absence of any religious belief, it must be assumed in

439 the form of some moral or metaphysical principle. In the next chapter we

440 shall see how this principle applies to all the historical hypotheses

441 and evolutionary ethics now in fashion; to the origins of tribal

442 government or mythological belief. But the clearest and most convenient

443 example to start with is this popular one of what the cave-man really

444 did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared

445 in the cavernous night of nature; a mind that is like a mirror. It is

446 like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a

447 mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like shining

448 shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the

449 only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble each

450 other in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in

451 various ways; just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round

452 like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror. But the mirror

453 is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man

454 is the measure of all things; man is the image of God. These are the

455 only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it

456 for the open road.

457 It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for all what

458 is meant by saying that man is at once the exception to everything and

459 the mirror and the measure of all things. But to see man as he is, it is

460 necessary once more to keep close to that simplicity that can clear

461 itself of accumulated clouds of sophistry. The simplest truth about man

462 is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a

463 stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external

464 appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere

465 growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair

466 disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own

467 instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers

468 and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called

469 clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind

470 has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone

471 among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called

472 laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of

473 the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he

474 feels the need of averting his thoughts from the root realities of his

475 own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher

476 possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these

477 things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they

478 remain in the same sense unique. This is realised by the whole popular

479 instinct called religion, until disturbed by pedants, especially the

480 laborious pedants of the Simple Life. The most sophistical of all

481 sophists are Gymnosophists.

482 It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common

483 sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is

484 not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins

485 against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is

486 the principle of all reality. It is reached by stretching a point, by

487 making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain light and shade,

488 by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower things which may happen

489 to be similar. The solid thing standing in the sunlight, the thing we

490 can walk round and see from all sides, is quite different. It is also

491 quite extraordinary; and the more sides we see of it the more

492 extraordinary it seems. It is emphatically not a thing that follows or

493 flows naturally from anything else. If we imagine that an inhuman or

494 impersonal intelligence could have felt from the first the general

495 nature of the non-human world sufficiently to see that things would

496 evolve in whatever way they did evolve, there would have been nothing

497 whatever in all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such an

498 unnatural novelty. To such a mind, man would most certainly not have

499 seemed something like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer

500 pasture; or one swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under

501 a strange sky. It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the

502 same dimension. We might as truly say that it would not be in the same

503 universe. It would be more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows

504 suddenly jump over the moon or one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings

505 in a flash and fly. It would not be a question of the cattle finding

506 their own grazing-ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds,

507 not a question of one swallow making a summer but of his making a

508 summer-house. For the very fact that birds do build nests is one of

509 those similarities that sharpen the startling difference. The very fact

510 that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any

511 farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind; it proves it

512 more completely than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at

513 all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic

514 school, indifferent to all but the mind within. But when he builds as he

515 does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with satisfaction, then we

516 know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him

517 and us, like the window on which a bird will beat in vain. But suppose

518 our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds begin to build as men build.

519 Suppose in an incredibly short space of time there were seven styles of

520 architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully selected

521 forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic,

522 but turned to broad foliage and black mud when he sought in a darker

523 mood to call up the heavy columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest

524 indeed one of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Suppose the bird made

525 little clay statues of birds celebrated in letters or politics and stuck

526 them up in front of the nest. Suppose that one bird out of a thousand

527 birds began to do one of the thousand things that man had already done

528 even in the morning of the world; and we can be quite certain that the

529 onlooker would not regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of

530 the other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed;

531 possibly as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That bird would

532 tell the augurs, not of something that would happen, but of something

533 that had happened. That something would be the appearance of a mind with

534 a new dimension of depth; a mind like that of man. If there be no God,

535 no other mind could conceivably have foreseen it.

536 Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence that *this*

537 thing was evolved at all. There is not a particle of proof that *this*

538 transition came slowly, or even that it came naturally. In a strictly

539 scientific sense, we simply know nothing whatever about how it grew, or

540 whether it grew, or what it is. There may be a broken trail of stones

541 and bones faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is

542 nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind.

543 It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity

544 of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a

545 transaction outside time. It has therefore nothing to do with history in

546 the ordinary sense. The historian must take it or something like it for

547 granted; it is not his business as a historian to explain it. But if he

548 cannot explain it as a historian, he will not explain it as a biologist.

549 In neither case is there any disgrace to him in accepting it without

550 explaining it; for it is a reality, and history and biology deal with

551 realities. He is quite justified in calmly confronting the pig with

552 wings and the cow that jumped over the moon, merely because they have

553 happened. He can reasonably accept man as a freak, because he accepts

554 man as a fact. He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy and

555 disconnected world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy and

556 disconnected thing. For reality is a thing in which we can all repose,

557 even if it hardly seems related to anything else. The thing is there;

558 and that is enough for most of us. But if we do indeed want to know how

559 it can conceivably have come there, if we do indeed wish to see it

560 related realistically to other things, if we do insist on seeing it

561 evolved before our very eyes from an environment nearer to its own

562 nature, then assuredly it is to very different things that we must go.

563 We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple dreams if

564 we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster. We shall

565 have discovered very different causes before he becomes a creature of

566 causation; and invoked other authority to turn him into something

567 reasonable, or even into anything probable. That way lies all that is at

568 once awful and familiar and forgotten, with dreadful faces thronged and

569 fiery arms. We can accept man as a fact, if we are content with an

570 unexplained fact. We can accept him as an animal, if we can live with a

571 fabulous animal. But if we must needs have sequence and necessity, then

572 indeed we must provide a prelude and crescendo of mounting miracles,

573 that ushered in with unthinkable thunders in all the seven heavens of

574 another order, a man may be an ordinary thing.

CHAPTER II

13 PROFESSORS AND PREHISTORIC MEN

14 Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly

15 been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds by

16 incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most

17 natural discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But

18 it cannot experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the

19 first men make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction

20 of an aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps

21 of metal in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link

22 evolving in his own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his

23 calculations, the aeroplane will correct it by crashing to the ground.

24 But if he has made a mistake about the arboreal habitat of his ancestor,

25 he cannot see his arboreal ancestor falling off the tree. He cannot keep

26 a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard and watch him to see whether he

27 does really practise cannibalism or carry off his mate on the principles

28 of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe of primitive men like a

29 pack of hounds and notice how far they are influenced by the herd

30 instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a particular way, he

31 can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but if he finds

32 a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot

33 multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones. In dealing with a

34 past that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and

35 not by experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even

36 evidential. Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being

37 constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space

38 in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming

39 conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so

40 fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It

41 talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were

42 something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole

43 scrap-heaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the

44 prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and

45 triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of

46 origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.

47 We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department it

48 would be truer to talk of the impatience of science. Owing to the

49 difficulty above described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry.

50 We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called

51 fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts. The most

52 empirical anthropologist is here as limited as an antiquary. He can only

53 cling to a fragment of the past and has no way of increasing it for the

54 future. He can only clutch his fragment of fact, almost as the primitive

55 man clutched his fragment of flint. And indeed he does deal with it in

56 much the same way and for much the same reason. It is his tool and his

57 only tool. It is his weapon and his only weapon. He often wields it with

58 a fanaticism far in excess of anything shown by men of science when they

59 can collect more facts from experience and even add new facts by

60 experiment. Sometimes the professor with his bone becomes almost as

61 dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a

62 theory from it, proving that mankind is going to the dogs—or that it

63 came from them.

64 For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and

65 watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an

66 evolution being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most

67 of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough

68 anyhow. He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and

69 deduces the most marvellous things from it. He found in Java a part of a

70 skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere

71 near it he found an upright thigh-bone, and in the same scattered

72 fashion some teeth that were not human. If they all form part of one

73 creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be

74 almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to

75 produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last

76 details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an

77 ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of

78 Pitt or Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him

79 like the portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A

80 detailed drawing was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very

81 hairs of his head were all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its

82 carefully lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that

83 this was the portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment

84 of a cranium. In the same way people talked about him as if he were an

85 individual whose influence and character were familiar to us all. I have

86 just read a story in a magazine about Java, and how modern white

87 inhabitants of that island are prevailed on to misbehave themselves by

88 the personal influence of poor old Pithecanthropus. That the modern

89 inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves I can very readily believe; but

90 I do not imagine that they need any encouragement from the discovery of

91 a few highly doubtful bones. Anyhow, those bones are far too few and

92 fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that does

93 in reason and in reality lie between man and his bestial ancestors, if

94 they were his ancestors. On the assumption of that evolutionary

95 connection (a connection which I am not in the least concerned to deny),

96 the really arresting and remarkable fact is the comparative absence of

97 any such remains recording that connection at that point. The sincerity

98 of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came to use such a

99 term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too

100 strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen

101 into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They

102 talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if

103 one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative

104 or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a *non-sequitur* or

105 dining with an undistributed middle.

106 In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain religious

107 and historical problems, I shall waste no further space on these

108 speculations on the nature of man before he became man. His body may

109 have been evolved from the brutes; but we know nothing of any such

110 transition that throws the smallest light upon his soul as it has shown

111 itself in history. Unfortunately the same school of writers pursue the

112 same style of reasoning when they come to the first real evidence about

113 the first real men. Strictly speaking of course we know nothing about

114 prehistoric man, for the simple reason that he was prehistoric. The

115 history of prehistoric man is a very obvious contradiction in terms. It

116 is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists are allowed to

117 indulge. If a parson had casually observed that the Flood was

118 antediluvian, it is possible that he might be a little chaffed about his

119 logic. If a bishop were to say that Adam was Preadamite, we might think

120 it a little odd. But we are not supposed to notice such verbal trifles

121 when sceptical historians talk of the part of history that is

122 prehistoric. The truth is that they are using the terms historic and

123 prehistoric without any clear test or definition in their minds. What

124 they mean is that there are traces of human lives before the beginning

125 of human stories; and in that sense we do at least know that humanity

126 was before history.

127 Human civilisation is older than human records. That is the sane way of

128 stating our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples

129 of its other arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any

130 writing that we can read. But it is certain that the primitive arts were

131 arts; and it is in every way probable that the primitive civilisations

132 were civilisations. The man left a picture of the reindeer, but he did

133 not leave a narrative of how he hunted the reindeer; and therefore what

134 we say of him is hypothesis and not history. But the art he did practise

135 was quite artistic; his drawing was quite intelligent, and there is no

136 reason to doubt that his story of the hunt would be quite intelligent,

137 only if it exists it is not intelligible. In short, the prehistoric

138 period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the barbaric

139 or bestial period. It does not mean the time before civilisation or the

140 time before arts and crafts. It simply means the time before any

141 connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed make all the

142 practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness; but it is

143 perfectly possible that there were all sorts of forgotten forms of

144 civilisation, as well as all sorts of forgotten forms of barbarism. And

145 in any case everything indicated that many of these forgotten or

146 half-forgotten social stages were much more civilised and much less

147 barbaric than is vulgarly imagined to-day. But even about these

148 unwritten histories of humanity, when humanity was quite certainly

149 human, we can only conjecture with the greatest doubt and caution. And

150 unfortunately doubt and caution are the last things commonly encouraged

151 by the loose evolutionism of current culture. For that culture is full

152 of curiosity; and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony of

153 agnosticism. It was in the Darwinian age that the word first became

154 known and the thing first became impossible.

155 It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered

156 by impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men

157 have hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are

158 without support. The other day a scientific summary of the state of a

159 prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words ‘They wore no

160 clothes.’ Not one reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself

161 how we should come to know whether clothes had once been worn by people

162 of whom everything has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It

163 was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone

164 hatchet. It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an

165 everlasting pair of trousers of the same substance as the everlasting

166 rock. But to persons of a less sanguine temperament it will be

167 immediately apparent that people might wear simple garments, or even

168 highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more traces of them than

169 these people have left. The plaiting of rushes and grasses, for

170 instance, might have become more and more elaborate without in the least

171 becoming more eternal. One civilisation might specialise in things that

172 happened to be perishable, like weaving and embroidering, and not in

173 things that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and

174 sculpture. There have been plenty of examples of such specialist

175 societies. A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory

176 machinery might as fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with

177 no other substance; and announce the discovery that the proprietor and

178 manager of the factory undoubtedly walked about naked—or possibly wore

179 iron hats and trousers.

180 It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear clothes any

181 more than they did weave rushes; but merely that we have not enough

182 evidence to know whether they did or not. But it may be worth while to

183 look back for a moment at some of the very few things that we do know

184 and that they did do. If we consider them, we shall certainly not find

185 them inconsistent with such ideas as dress and decoration. We do not

186 know whether they decorated themselves; but we do know that they

187 decorated other things. We do not know whether they had embroideries,

188 and if they had, the embroideries could not be expected to have

189 remained. But we do know that they did have pictures; and the pictures

190 have remained. And there remains with them, as already suggested, the

191 testimony to something that is absolute and unique; that belongs to man

192 and to nothing else except man; that is a difference of kind and not a

193 difference of degree. A monkey does not draw clumsily and a man

194 cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of representation and a man

195 carry it to perfection. A monkey does not do it at all; he does not

196 begin to do it at all; he does not begin to begin to do it at all. A

197 line of some kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin.

198 Another distinguished writer, again, in commenting on the cave-drawings

199 attributed to the neolithic men of the reindeer period, said that none

200 of their pictures appeared to have any religious purpose; and he seemed

201 almost to infer that they had no religion. I can hardly imagine a

202 thinner thread of argument than this which reconstructs the very inmost

203 moods of the prehistoric mind from the fact that somebody who has

204 scrawled a few sketches on a rock, from what motive we do not know, for

205 what purpose we do not know, acting under what customs or conventions we

206 do not know, may possibly have found it easier to draw reindeers than to

207 draw religion. He may have drawn it because it was his religious symbol.

208 He may have drawn it because it was not his religious symbol. He may

209 have drawn anything except his religious symbol. He may have drawn his

210 real religious symbol somewhere else; or it may have been deliberately

211 destroyed when it was drawn. He may have done or not done half a million

212 things; but in any case it is an amazing leap of logic to infer that he

213 had no religious symbol, or even to infer from his having no religious

214 symbol that he had no religion. Now this particular case happens to

215 illustrate the insecurity of these guesses very clearly. For a little

216 while afterwards, people discovered not only paintings but sculptures of

217 animals in the caves. Some of these were said to be damaged with dints

218 or holes supposed to be the marks of arrows; and the damaged images were

219 conjectured to be the remains of some magic rite of killing the beasts

220 in effigy; while the undamaged images were explained in connection with

221 another magic rite invoking fertility upon the herds. Here again there

222 is something faintly humorous about the scientific habit of having it

223 both ways. If the image is damaged it proves one superstition and if it

224 is undamaged it proves another. Here again there is a rather reckless

225 jumping to conclusions; it has hardly occurred to the speculators that a

226 crowd of hunters imprisoned in winter in a cave might conceivably have

227 aimed at a mark for fun, as a sort of primitive parlour game. But in any

228 case, if it was done out of superstition, what has become of the thesis

229 that it had nothing to do with religion? The truth is that all this

230 guesswork has nothing to do with anything. It is not half such a good

231 parlour game as shooting arrows at a carved reindeer, for it is shooting

232 them into the air.

233 Such speculators rather tend to forget, for instance, that men in the

234 modern world also sometimes make marks in caves. When a crowd of

235 trippers is conducted through the labyrinth of the Marvellous Grotto or

236 the Magic Stalactite Cavern, it has been observed that hieroglyphics

237 spring into sight where they have passed; initials and inscriptions

238 which the learned refuse to refer to any remote date. But the time will

239 come when these inscriptions will really be of remote date. And if the

240 professors of the future are anything like the professors of the

241 present, they will be able to deduce a vast number of very vivid and

242 interesting things from these cave-writings of the twentieth century. If

243 I know anything about the breed, and if they have not fallen away from

244 the full-blooded confidence of their fathers, they will be able to

245 discover the most fascinating facts about us from the initials left in

246 the Magic Grotto by ’Arry and ’Arriet, possibly in the form of two

247 intertwined A’s. From this alone they will know (1) That as the letters

248 are rudely chipped with a blunt pocket-knife, the twentieth century

249 possessed no delicate graving-tools and was unacquainted with the art of

250 sculpture. (2) That as the letters are capital letters, our civilisation

251 never evolved any small letters or anything like a running hand. (3)

252 That because initial consonants stand together in an unpronounceable

253 fashion, our language was possibly akin to Welsh or more probably of the

254 early Semitic type that ignored vowels. (4) That as the initials of

255 ’Arry and ’Arriet do not in any special fashion profess to be religious

256 symbols, our civilisation possessed no religion. Perhaps the last is

257 about the nearest to the truth; for a civilisation that had religion

258 would have a little more reason.

259 It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow and

260 evolutionary manner; and even that it grew not from one cause, but from

261 a combination that might be called a coincidence. Generally speaking,

262 the three chief elements in the combination are, first, the fear of the

263 chief of the tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists on calling, with regrettable

264 familiarity, the Old Man), second, the phenomena of dreams, and third,

265 the sacrificial associations of the harvest and the resurrection

266 symbolised in the growing corn. I may remark in passing that it seems to

267 me very doubtful psychology to refer one living and single spirit to

268 three dead and disconnected causes, if they were merely dead and

269 disconnected causes. Suppose Mr. Wells, in one of his fascinating novels

270 of the future, were to tell us that there would arise among men a new

271 and as yet nameless passion, of which men will dream as they dream of

272 first love, for which they will die as they die for a flag and a

273 fatherland. I think we should be a little puzzled if he told us that

274 this singular sentiment would be a combination of the habit of smoking

275 Woodbines, the increase of the income tax and the pleasure of a motorist

276 in exceeding the speed limit. We could not easily imagine this, because

277 we could not imagine any connection between the three or any common

278 feeling that could include them all. Nor could any one imagine any

279 connection between corn and dreams and an old chief with a spear, unless

280 there was already a common feeling to include them all. But if there was

281 such a common feeling it could only be the religious feeling; and these

282 things could not be the beginnings of a religious feeling that existed

283 already. I think anybody’s common sense will tell him that it is far

284 more likely that this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already; and

285 that in the light of it dreams and kings and cornfields could appear

286 mystical then, as they can appear mystical now.

287 For the plain truth is that all this is a trick of making things seem

288 distant and dehumanised, merely by pretending not to understand things

289 that we do understand. It is like saying that prehistoric men had an

290 ugly and uncouth habit of opening their mouths wide at intervals and

291 stuffing strange substances into them, as if we had never heard of

292 eating. It is like saying that the terrible Troglodytes of the Stone Age

293 lifted alternate legs in rotation, as if we had never heard of walking.

294 If it were meant to touch the mystical nerve and awaken us to the

295 wonder of walking and eating, it might be a legitimate fancy. As it is

296 here intended to kill the mystical nerve and deaden us to the wonder of

297 religion, it is irrational rubbish. It pretends to find something

298 incomprehensible in the feelings that we all comprehend. Who does *not*

299 find dreams mysterious, and feel that they lie on the dark borderland of

300 being? Who does *not* feel the death and resurrection of the growing

301 things of the earth as something near to the secret of the universe? Who

302 does *not* understand that there must always be the savour of something

303 sacred about authority and the solidarity that is the soul of the tribe?

304 If there be any anthropologist who really finds these things remote and

305 impossible to realise, we can say nothing of that scientific gentleman

306 except that he has not got so large and enlightened a mind as a

307 primitive man. To me it seems obvious that nothing but a spiritual

308 sentiment already active could have clothed these separate and diverse

309 things with sanctity. To say that religion came *from* reverencing a

310 chief or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly elaborate cart

311 before a really primitive horse. It is like saying that the impulse to

312 draw pictures came from the contemplation of the pictures of reindeers

313 in the cave. In other words, it is explaining painting by saying that it

314 arose out of the work of painters; or accounting for art by saying that

315 it arose out of art. It is even more like saying that the thing we call

316 poetry arose as the result of certain customs; such as that of an ode

317 being officially composed to celebrate the advent of spring; or that of

318 a young man rising at a regular hour to listen to the skylark and then

319 writing his report on a piece of paper. It is quite true that young men

320 often become poets in the spring; and it is quite true that when once

321 there are poets, no mortal power can restrain them from writing about

322 the skylark. But the poems did not exist before the poets. The poetry

323 did not arise out of the poetic forms. In other words, it is hardly an

324 adequate explanation of how a thing appeared for the first time to say

325 it existed already. Similarly, we cannot say that religion arose out of

326 the religious forms, because that is only another way of saying that it

327 only arose when it existed already. It needed a certain sort of mind to

328 see that there was anything mystical about the dreams or the dead, as it

329 needed a particular sort of mind to see that there was anything poetical

330 about the skylark or the spring. That mind was presumably what we call

331 the human mind, very much as it exists to this day; for mystics still

332 meditate upon death and dreams as poets still write about spring and

333 skylarks. But there is not the faintest hint to suggest that anything

334 short of the human mind we know feels any of these mystical associations

335 at all. A cow in a field seems to derive no lyrical impulse or

336 instruction from her unrivalled opportunities for listening to the

337 skylark. And similarly there is no reason to suppose that live sheep

338 will ever begin to use dead sheep as the basis of a system of elaborate

339 ancestor-worship. It is true that in the spring a young quadruped’s

340 fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of springs

341 has ever led it to turn however lightly to thoughts of literature. And

342 in the same way, while it is true that a dog has dreams, while most

343 other quadrupeds do not seem even to have that, we have waited a long

344 time for the dog to develop his dreams into an elaborate system of

345 religious ceremonial. We have waited so long that we have really ceased

346 to expect it; and we no more look to see a dog apply his dreams to

347 ecclesiastical construction than to see him examine his dreams by the

348 rules of psycho-analysis. It is obvious, in short, that for some reason

349 or other these natural experiences, and even natural excitements, never

350 do pass the line that separates them from creative expression like art

351 and religion, in any creature except man. They never do, they never

352 have, and it is now to all appearance very improbable that they ever

353 will. It is not impossible, in the sense of self-contradictory, that we

354 should see cows fasting from grass every Friday or going on their knees

355 as in the old legend about Christmas Eve. It is not in that sense

356 impossible that cows should contemplate death until they can lift up a

357 sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow died of. It is not

358 in that sense impossible that they should express their hopes of a

359 heavenly career in a symbolical dance, in honour of the cow that jumped

360 over the moon. It may be that the dog will at last have laid in a

361 sufficient store of dreams to enable him to build a temple to Cerberus

362 as a sort of canine trinity. It may be that his dreams have already

363 begun to turn into visions capable of verbal expression, in some

364 revelation about the Dog Star as the spiritual home for lost dogs. These

365 things are logically possible, in the sense that it is logically

366 difficult to prove the universal negative which we call an

367 impossibility. But all that instinct for the probable, which we call

368 common sense, must long ago have told us that the animals are not to all

369 appearance evolving in that sense; and that, to say the least, we are

370 not likely to have any personal evidence of their passing from the

371 animal experience to the human experiments. But spring and death and

372 even dreams, considered merely as experiences, are their experiences as

373 much as ours. The only possible conclusion is that these experiences,

374 considered as experiences, do not generate anything like a religious

375 sense in any mind except a mind like ours. We come back to the fact of a

376 certain kind of mind as already alive and alone. It was unique and it

377 could make creeds as it could make cave-drawings. The materials for

378 religion had lain there for countless ages like the materials for

379 everything else; but the power of religion was in the mind. Man could

380 already see in these things the riddles and hints and hopes that he

381 still sees in them. He could not only dream but dream about dreams. He

382 could not only see the dead but see the shadow of death; and was

383 possessed with that mysterious mystification that for ever finds death

384 incredible.

385 It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when he

386 unmistakably appears as man. We cannot affirm this or anything else

387 about the alleged animal originally connecting man and the brutes. But

388 that is only because he is not an animal but an allegation. We cannot be

389 certain that Pithecanthropus ever worshipped, because we cannot be

390 certain that he ever lived. He is only a vision called up to fill the

391 void that does in fact yawn between the first creatures who were

392 certainly men and any other creatures that are certainly apes or other

393 animals. A few very doubtful fragments are scraped together to suggest

394 such an intermediate creature because it is required by a certain

395 philosophy; but nobody supposes that these are sufficient to establish

396 anything philosophical even in support of that philosophy. A scrap of

397 skull found in Java cannot establish anything about religion or about

398 the absence of religion. If there ever was any such ape-man, he may have

399 exhibited as much ritual in religion as a man or as much simplicity in

400 religion as an ape. He may have been a mythologist or he may have been a

401 myth. It might be interesting to inquire whether this mystical quality

402 appeared in a transition from the ape to the man, if there were really

403 any types of the transition to inquire about. In other words, the

404 missing link might or might not be mystical if he were not missing. But

405 compared with the evidence we have of real human beings, we have no

406 evidence that he was a human being or a half-human being or a being at

407 all. Even the most extreme evolutionists do not attempt to deduce any

408 evolutionary views about the origin of religion from *him*. Even in

409 trying to prove that religion grew slowly from rude or irrational

410 sources, they begin their proof with the first men who were men. But

411 their own proof only proves that the men who were already men were

412 already mystics. They used the rude and irrational elements as only men

413 and mystics can use them. We come back once more to the simple truth;

414 that at some time too early for these critics to trace, a transition had

415 occurred to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness;

416 and man became a living soul.

417 Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those

418 who are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away.

419 Subconsciously they feel that it looks less formidable when thus

420 lengthened out into a gradual and almost invisible process. But in fact

421 this perspective entirely falsifies the reality of experience. They

422 bring together two things that are totally different, the stray hints of

423 evolutionary origins and the solid and self-evident block of humanity,

424 and try to shift their standpoint till they see them in a single

425 foreshortened line. But it is an optical illusion. Men do not in fact

426 stand related to monkeys or missing links in any such chain as that in

427 which men stand related to men. There may have been intermediate

428 creatures whose faint traces can be found here and there in the huge

429 gap. Of these beings, if they ever existed, it may be true that they

430 were things very unlike men or men very unlike ourselves. But of

431 prehistoric men, such as those called the cave-men or the reindeer men,

432 it is not true in any sense whatever. Prehistoric men of that sort were

433 things exactly like men and men exceedingly like ourselves. They only

434 happened to be men about whom we do not know much, for the simple reason

435 that they have left no records or chronicles; but all that we do know

436 about them makes them just as human and ordinary as men in a medieval

437 manor or a Greek city.

438 Looking from our human standpoint up the long perspective of humanity,

439 we simply recognise this thing as human. If we had to recognise it as

440 animal, we should have had to recognise it as abnormal. If we chose to

441 look through the other end of the telescope, as I have done more than

442 once in these speculations, if we chose to project the human figure

443 forward out of an unhuman world, we could only say that one of the

444 animals had obviously gone mad. But seeing the thing from the right end,

445 or rather from the inside, we know it is sanity; and we know that these

446 primitive men were sane. We hail a certain human freemasonry wherever we

447 see it, in savages, in foreigners or in historical characters. For

448 instance, all we can infer from primitive legend, and all we know of

449 barbaric life, supports a certain moral and even mystical idea of which

450 the commonest symbol is clothes. For clothes are very literally

451 vestments, and man wears them because he is a priest. It is true that

452 even as an animal he is here different from the animals. Nakedness is

453 not nature to him; it is not his life but rather his death; even in the

454 vulgar sense of his death of cold. But clothes are worn for dignity or

455 decency or decoration where they are not in any way wanted for warmth.

456 It would sometimes appear that they are valued for ornament before they

457 are valued for use. It would almost always appear that they are felt to

458 have some connection with decorum. Conventions of this sort vary a great

459 deal with various times and places; and there are some who cannot get

460 over this reflection, and for whom it seems a sufficient argument for

461 letting all conventions slide. They never tire of repeating, with simple

462 wonder, that dress is different in the Cannibal Islands and in Camden

463 Town; they cannot get any further and throw up the whole idea of decency

464 in despair. They might as well say that because there have been hats of

465 a good many different shapes, and some rather eccentric shapes,

466 therefore hats do not matter or do not exist. They would probably add

467 that there is no such thing as sunstroke or going bald. Men have felt

468 everywhere that certain forms were necessary to fence off and protect

469 certain private things from contempt or coarse misunderstanding; and the

470 keeping of those forms, whatever they were, made for dignity and mutual

471 respect. The fact that they mostly refer, more or less remotely, to the

472 relations of the sexes illustrates the two facts that must be put at the

473 very beginning of the record of the race. The first is the fact that

474 original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in history

475 it is a thing rooted in the origins. Whatever else men have believed,

476 they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind.

477 This sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no

478 clothes, just as it has made it impossible to be natural and have no

479 laws. But above all it is to be found in that other fact, which is the

480 father and mother of all laws as it is itself founded on a father and

481 mother: the thing that is before all thrones and even all commonwealths.

482 That fact is the family. Here again we must keep the enormous

483 proportions of a normal thing clear of various modifications and degrees

484 and doubts more or less reasonable, like clouds clinging about a

485 mountain. It may be that what we call the family had to fight its way

486 from or through various anarchies and aberrations; but it certainly

487 survived them and is quite as likely as not to have also preceded them.

488 As we shall see in the case of communism and nomadism, more formless

489 things could and did lie on the flank of societies that had taken a

490 fixed form; but there is nothing to show that the form did not exist

491 before the formlessness. What is vital is that form is more important

492 than formlessness; and that the material called mankind has taken this

493 form. For instance, of the rules revolving round sex, which were

494 recently mentioned, none is more curious than the savage custom commonly

495 called the *couvade*. That seems like a law out of topsyturvydom; by

496 which the father is treated as if he were the mother. In any case it

497 clearly involves the mystical sense of sex; but many have maintained

498 that it is really a symbolic act by which the father accepts the

499 responsibility of fatherhood. In that case that grotesque antic is

500 really a very solemn act; for it is the foundation of all we call the

501 family and all we know as human society. Some groping in these dark

502 beginnings have said that mankind was once under a matriarchy; I suppose

503 that under a matriarchy it would not be called mankind but womankind.

504 But others have conjectured that what is called matriarchy was simply

505 moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remained fixed because all the

506 fathers were fugitive and irresponsible. Then came the moment when the

507 man decided to guard and guide what he had created. So he became the

508 head of the family, not as a bully with a big club to beat women with,

509 but rather as a respectable person trying to be a responsible person.

510 Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even have been the first

511 family act, and it would still be true that man then for the first time

512 acted like a man, and therefore for the first time became fully a man.

513 But it might quite as well be true that the matriarchy or moral anarchy,

514 or whatever we call it, was only one of the hundred social dissolutions

515 or barbaric backslidings which may have occurred at intervals in

516 prehistoric as they certainly did in historic times. A symbol like the

517 *couvade*, if it was really such a symbol, may have commemorated the

518 suppression of a heresy rather than the first rise of a religion. We

519 cannot conclude with any certainty about these things, except in their

520 big results in the building of mankind, but we can say in what style the

521 bulk of it and the best of it is built. We can say that the family is

522 the unit of the state; that it is the cell that makes up the formation.

523 Round the family do indeed gather the sanctities that separate men from

524 ants and bees. Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall

525 of that city; property is but the family farm; honour is but the family

526 flag. In the practical proportions of human history, we come back to

527 that fundamental of the father and the mother and the child. It has been

528 said already that if this story cannot start with religious assumptions,

529 it must none the less start with some moral or metaphysical assumptions,

530 or no sense can be made of the story of man. And this is a very good

531 instance of that alternative necessity. If we are not of those who begin

532 by invoking a divine Trinity, we must none the less invoke a human

533 Trinity; and see that triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the

534 world. For the highest event in history to which all history looks

535 forward and leads up, is only something that is at once the reversal and

536 the renewal of that triangle. Or rather it is the one triangle

537 superimposed so as to intersect the other, making a sacred pentacle of

538 which, in a mightier sense than that of the magicians, the fiends are

539 afraid. The old Trinity was of father and mother and child, and is

540 called the human family. The new is of child and mother and father, and

541 has the name of the Holy Family. It is in no way altered except in being

542 entirely reversed; just as the world which it transformed was not in the

543 least different, except in being turned upside-down.

CHAPTER III

16 THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILISATION

17 The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been like a man

18 watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn

19 breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks. But that dawn is

20 breaking behind the black bulk of great cities long builded and lost for

21 us in the original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in

22 which even the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees;

23 in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size of the man;

24 with tombs like mountains of man set four-square and pointing to the

25 stars; with winged and bearded bulls standing and staring enormous at

26 the gates of temples; standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake

27 the world. The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilised.

28 Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old. And among other more

29 important things, it reveals the folly of most of the generalisations

30 about the previous and unknown period when it was really young. The two

31 first human societies of which we have any reliable and detailed record

32 are Babylon and Egypt. It so happens that these two vast and splendid

33 achievements of the genius of the ancients bear witness against two of

34 the commonest and crudest assumptions of the culture of the moderns. If

35 we want to get rid of half the nonsense about nomads and cave-men and

36 the old man of the forest, we need only look steadily at the two solid

37 and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.

38 Of course most of these speculators who are talking about primitive men

39 are thinking about modern savages. They prove their progressive

40 evolution by assuming that a great part of the human race has not

41 progressed or evolved; or even changed in any way at all. I do not agree

42 with their theory of change; nor do I agree with their dogma of things

43 unchangeable. I may not believe that civilised man has had so rapid and

44 recent a progress; but I cannot quite understand why uncivilised man

45 should be so mystically immortal and immutable. A somewhat simpler mode

46 of thought and speech seems to me to be needed throughout this inquiry.

47 Modern savages cannot be exactly like primitive man, because they are

48 not primitive. Modern savages are not ancient because they are modern.

49 Something has happened to their race as much as to ours, during the

50 thousands of years of our existence and endurance on the earth. They

51 have had some experiences, and have presumably acted on them if not

52 profited by them, like the rest of us. They have had some environment,

53 and even some change of environment, and have presumably adapted

54 themselves to it in a proper and decorous evolutionary manner. This

55 would be true even if the experiences were mild or the environment

56 dreary; for there is an effect in mere time when it takes the moral form

57 of monotony. But it has appeared to a good many intelligent and

58 well-informed people quite as probable that the experience of the

59 savages has been that of a decline from civilisation. Most of those who

60 criticise this view do not seem to have any very clear notion of what a

61 decline from civilisation would be like. Heaven help them, it is likely

62 enough that they will soon find out. They seem to be content if cave-men

63 and cannibal islanders have some things in common, such as certain

64 particular implements. But it is obvious on the face of it that any

65 peoples reduced for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in

66 common. If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows; but

67 we should not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made

68 bows and arrows. It is said that the Russians in their great retreat

69 were so short of armament that they fought with clubs cut in the wood.

70 But a professor of the future would err in supposing that the Russian

71 Army of 1916 was a naked Scythian tribe that had never been out of the

72 wood. It is like saying that a man in his second childhood must exactly

73 copy his first. A baby is bald like an old man; but it would be an error

74 for one ignorant of infancy to infer that the baby had a long white

75 beard. Both a baby and an old man walk with difficulty; but he who shall

76 expect the old gentleman to lie on his back, and kick joyfully instead,

77 will be disappointed.

78 It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must

79 have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of

80 it. There were almost certainly some things, there were probably many

81 things, in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary. An

82 example of the way in which this distinction works, and an example

83 essential to our argument here, is that of the nature and origin of

84 government. I have already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man,

85 with whom he appears to be on such intimate terms. If we considered the

86 cold facts of prehistoric evidence for this portrait of the prehistoric

87 chief of the tribe, we could only excuse it by saying that its brilliant

88 and versatile author simply forgot for a moment that he was supposed to

89 be writing a history, and dreamed he was writing one of his own very

90 wonderful and imaginative romances. At least I cannot imagine how he can

91 possibly know that the prehistoric ruler was called the Old Man or that

92 court etiquette requires it to be spelt with capital letters. He says of

93 the same potentate, ‘No one was allowed to touch his spear or to sit in

94 his seat.’ I have difficulty in believing that anybody has dug up a

95 prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label, ‘Visitors are Requested not

96 to Touch,’ or a complete throne with the inscription, ‘Reserved for the

97 Old Man.’ But it may be presumed that the writer, who can hardly be

98 supposed to be merely making up things out of his own head, was merely

99 taking for granted this very dubious parallel between the prehistoric

100 and the decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes the

101 chief is called the Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or

102 sit on his seat. It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with

103 superstitious and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those

104 cases, for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a

105 grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical.

106 It may have been, of course, for it may have been anything or even

107 nothing; it may not have existed at all. But the despotism in certain

108 dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does not prove that

109 the first men were ruled despotically. It does not even suggest it; it

110 does not even begin to hint at it. If there is one fact we really can

111 prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can

112 be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end

113 of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be

114 defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the

115 citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly

116 been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single

117 sentinel to watch the city while they sleep. It is also true that they

118 sometimes needed him for some sudden and militant act of reform; it is

119 equally true that he often took advantage of being the strong man armed

120 to be a tyrant like some of the Sultans of the East. But I cannot see

121 why the Sultan should have appeared any earlier in history than many

122 other human figures. On the contrary, the strong man armed obviously

123 depends upon the superiority of his armour; and armament of that sort

124 comes with more complex civilisation. One man may kill twenty with a

125 machine-gun; it is obviously less likely that he could do it with a

126 piece of flint. As for the current cant about the strongest man ruling

127 by force and fear, it is simply a nursery fairy-tale about a giant with

128 a hundred hands. Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in

129 any society, ancient or modern. Undoubtedly they might *admire*, in a

130 romantic and poetical sense, the man who was really the strongest; but

131 that is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral and even

132 mystical as the admiration for the purest or the wisest. But the spirit

133 that endures the mere cruelties and caprices of an established despot is

134 the spirit of an ancient and settled and probably stiffened society, not

135 the spirit of a new one. As his name implies, the Old Man is the ruler

136 of an old humanity.

137 It is far more probable that a primitive society was something like a

138 pure democracy. To this day the comparatively simple agricultural

139 communities are by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing

140 which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilisation.

141 Any one who likes may state it by saying that democracy is the foe of

142 civilisation. But he must remember that some of us really prefer

143 democracy to civilisation, in the sense of preferring democracy to

144 complexity. Anyhow, peasants tilling patches of their own land in a

145 rough equality, and meeting to vote directly under a village tree, are

146 the most truly self-governing of men. It is surely as likely as not that

147 such a simple idea was found in the first condition of even simpler men.

148 Indeed the despotic vision is exaggerated, even if we do not regard the

149 men as men. Even on an evolutionary assumption of the most materialistic

150 sort, there is really no reason why men should not have had at least as

151 much camaraderie as rats or rooks. Leadership of some sort they

152 doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals; but leadership implies no

153 such irrational servility as that attributed to the superstitious

154 subjects of the Old Man. There was doubtless somebody corresponding, to

155 use Tennyson’s expression, to the many-wintered crow that leads the

156 clanging rookery home. But I fancy that if that venerable fowl began to

157 act after the fashion of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia, it

158 would become a very clanging rookery and the many-wintered crow would

159 not see many more winters. It may be remarked, in this connection, but

160 even among animals it would seem that something else is respected more

161 than bestial violence, if it be only the familiarity which in men is

162 called tradition or the experience which in men is called wisdom. I do

163 not know if crows really follow the oldest crow, but if they do they are

164 certainly not following the strongest crow. And I do know, in the human

165 case, that if some ritual of seniority keeps savages reverencing

166 somebody called the Old Man, then at least they have not our own servile

167 sentimental weakness for worshipping the Strong Man.

168 It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive art and

169 religion and everything else, is very imperfectly known or rather

170 guessed at; but that it is at least as good a guess to suggest that it

171 was as popular as a Balkan or Pyrenean village as that it was as

172 capricious and secret as a Turkish divan. Both the mountain democracy

173 and the oriental palace are modern in the sense that they are still

174 there, or are some sort of growth of history; but of the two the palace

175 has much more the look of being an accumulation and a corruption, the

176 village much more the look of being a really unchanged and primitive

177 thing. But my suggestions at this point do not go beyond expressing a

178 wholesome doubt about the current assumption. I think it interesting,

179 for instance, that liberal institutions have been traced even by

180 moderns back to barbarian or undeveloped states, when it happened to be

181 convenient for the support of some race or nation or philosophy. So the

182 Socialists profess that their ideal of communal property existed in very

183 early times. So the Jews are proud of the Jubilees or juster

184 redistributions under their ancient law. So the Teutonists boasted of

185 tracing parliaments and juries and various popular things among the

186 Germanic tribes of the North. So the Celtophiles and those testifying to

187 the wrongs of Ireland have pleaded the more equal justice of the clan

188 system, to which the Irish chiefs bore witness before Strongbow. The

189 strength of the case varies in the different cases; but as there is some

190 case for all of them, I suspect there is some case for the general

191 proposition that popular institutions of some sort were by no means

192 uncommon in early and simple societies. Each of these separate schools

193 were making the admission to prove a particular modern thesis; but taken

194 together they suggest a more ancient and general truth, that there was

195 something more in prehistoric councils than ferocity and fear. Each of

196 these separate theorists had his own axe to grind, but he was willing to

197 use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest that the stone axe might have

198 been as republican as the guillotine.

199 But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in

200 progress. In one sense it is a true paradox that there was history

201 before history. But it is not the irrational paradox implied in

202 prehistoric history; for it is a history we do not know. Very probably

203 it was exceedingly like the history we do know, except in the one detail

204 that we do not know it. It is thus the very opposite of the pretentious

205 prehistoric history, which professes to trace everything in a consistent

206 course from the amoeba to the anthropoid and from the anthropoid to the

207 agnostic. So far from being a question of our knowing all about queer

208 creatures very different from ourselves, they were very probably people

209 very like ourselves, except that we know nothing about them. In other

210 words, our most ancient records only reach back to a time when humanity

211 had long been human, and even long been civilised. The most ancient

212 records we have not only mention but take for granted things like kings

213 and priests and princes and assemblies of the people; they describe

214 communities that are roughly recognisable as communities in our own

215 sense. Some of them are despotic; but we cannot tell that they have

216 always been despotic. Some of them may be already decadent, and nearly

217 all are mentioned as if they were old. We do not know what really

218 happened in the world before those records; but the little we do know

219 would leave us anything but astonished if we learnt that it was very

220 much like what happens in this world now. There would be nothing

221 inconsistent or confounding about the discovery that those unknown ages

222 were full of republics collapsing under monarchies and rising again as

223 republics, empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing

224 colonies, kingdoms combining again into world-states and breaking up

225 again into small nationalities, classes selling themselves into slavery

226 and marching out once more into liberty; all that procession of humanity

227 which may or may not be a progress but is most assuredly a romance. But

228 the first chapters of the romance have been torn out of the book; and we

229 shall never read them.

230 It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and social

231 stability. According to the real records available, barbarism and

232 civilisation were not successive stages in the progress of the world.

233 They were conditions that existed side by side, as they still exist side

234 by side. There were civilisations then as there are civilisations now;

235 there are savages now as there were savages then. It is suggested that

236 all men passed through a nomadic stage; but it is certain that there are

237 some who have never passed out of it, and it seems not unlikely that

238 there were some who never passed into it. It is probable that from very

239 primitive times the static tiller of the soil and the wandering shepherd

240 were two distinct types of men; and the chronological rearrangement of

241 them is but a mark of that mania for progressive stages that has largely

242 falsified history. It is suggested that there was a communist stage, in

243 which private property was everywhere unknown, a whole humanity living

244 on the negation of property; but the evidences of this negation are

245 themselves rather negative. Redistributions of property, jubilees, and

246 agrarian laws occur at various intervals and in various forms; but that

247 humanity inevitably passed through a communist stage seems as doubtful

248 as the parallel proposition that humanity will inevitably return to it.

249 It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest plans for the

250 future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary

251 seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. There is an

252 amusing parallel example in the case of what is called feminism. In

253 spite of all the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage by capture and

254 the cave-man beating the cave-woman with a club, it may be noted that as

255 soon as feminism became a fashionable cry, it was insisted that human

256 civilisation in its first stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it was

257 the cave-woman who carried the club. Anyhow all these ideas are little

258 better than guesses; and they have a curious way of following the

259 fortune of modern theories and fads. In any case they are not history in

260 the sense of record; and we may repeat that when it comes to record, the

261 broad truth is that barbarism and civilisation have always dwelt side by

262 side in the world, the civilisation sometimes spreading to absorb the

263 barbarians, sometimes decaying into relative barbarism, and in almost

264 all cases possessing in a more finished form certain ideas and

265 institutions which the barbarians possess in a ruder form; such as

266 government or social authority, the arts and especially the decorative

267 arts, mysteries and taboos of various kinds especially surrounding the

268 matter of sex, and some form of that fundamental thing which is the

269 chief concern of this inquiry: the thing that we call religion.

270 Now Egypt and Babylon, those two primeval monsters, might in this matter

271 have been specially provided as models. They might almost be called

272 working models to show how these modern theories do not work. The two

273 great truths we know about these two great cultures happen to contradict

274 flatly the two current fallacies which have just been considered. The

275 story of Egypt might have been invented to point the moral that man does

276 not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very

277 often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it

278 because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing,

279 because he is exhausted. And the story of Babylon might have been

280 invented to point the moral that man need not be a nomad or a communist

281 before he becomes a peasant or a citizen; and that such cultures are not

282 always in successive stages but often in contemporary states. Even

283 touching these great civilisations with which our written history

284 begins, there is a temptation of course to be too ingenious or too

285 cocksure. We can read the bricks of Babylon in a very different sense

286 from that in which we guess about the Cup and Ring stones; and we do

287 definitely know what is meant by the animals in the Egyptian

288 hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animals in the neolithic cave.

289 But even here the admirable archeologists who have deciphered line after

290 line of miles of hieroglyphics may be tempted to read too much between

291 the lines; even the real authority on Babylon may forget how fragmentary

292 is his hard-won knowledge; may forget that Babylon has only heaved half

293 a brick at him, though half a brick is better than no cuneiform. But

294 some truths, historic and not prehistoric, dogmatic and not

295 evolutionary, facts and not fancies, do indeed emerge from Egypt and

296 Babylon; and these two truths are among them.

297 Egypt is a green ribbon along the river edging the dark red desolation

298 of the desert. It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity, that it is

299 created by the mysterious bounty and almost sinister benevolence of the

300 Nile. When we first hear of Egyptians they are living as in a string of

301 river-side villages, in small and separate but co-operative communities

302 along the bank of the Nile. Where the river branched into the broad

303 Delta there was traditionally the beginning of a somewhat different

304 district or people; but this need not complicate the main truth. These

305 more or less independent though interdependent peoples were considerably

306 civilised already. They had a sort of heraldry; that is, decorative art

307 used for symbolic and social purposes; each sailing the Nile under its

308 own ensign representing some bird or animal. Heraldry involves two

309 things of enormous importance to normal humanity; the combination of the

310 two making that noble thing called co-operation; on which rest all

311 peasantries and peoples that are free. The art of heraldry means

312 independence; an image chosen by the imagination to express the

313 individuality. The science of heraldry means interdependence; an

314 agreement between different bodies to recognise different images; a

315 science of imagery. We have here therefore exactly that compromise of

316 co-operation between free families or groups which is the most normal

317 mode of life for humanity and is particularly apparent wherever men own

318 their own land and live on it. With the very mention of the images of

319 bird and beast the student of mythology will murmur the word ‘totem’

320 almost in his sleep. But to my mind much of the trouble arises from his

321 habit of saying such words as if in his sleep. Throughout this rough

322 outline I have made a necessarily inadequate attempt to keep on the

323 inside rather than the outside of such things; to consider them where

324 possible in terms of thought and not merely in terms of terminology.

325 There is very little value in talking about totems unless we have some

326 feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem. Granted that they

327 had totems and we have no totems; was it because they had more fear of

328 animals or more familiarity with animals? Did a man whose totem was a

329 wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a man running away from a were-wolf?

330 Did he feel like Uncle Remus about Brer Wolf or like St. Francis about

331 his brother the wolf, or like Mowgli about his brothers the wolves? Was

332 a totem a thing like the British lion or a thing like the British

333 bulldog? Was the worship of a totem like the feeling of niggers about

334 Mumbo Jumbo, or of children about Jumbo? I have never read any book of

335 folk-lore, however learned, that gave me any light upon this question,

336 which I think by far the most important one. I will confine myself to

337 repeating that the earliest Egyptian communities had a common

338 understanding about the images that stood for their individual states;

339 and that this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense that

340 it is already there at the beginning of history. But as history unfolds

341 itself, this question of communication is clearly the main question of

342 these riverside communities. With the need of communication comes the

343 need of a common government and the growing greatness and spreading

344 shadow of the king. The other binding force besides the king, and

345 perhaps older than the king, is the priesthood; and the priesthood has

346 presumably even more to do with these ritual symbols and signals by

347 which men can communicate. And here in Egypt arose probably the primary

348 and certainly the typical invention to which we owe all history, and the

349 whole difference between the historic and the prehistoric: the

350 archetypal script, the art of writing.

351 The popular pictures of these primeval empires are not half so popular

352 as they might be. There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated

353 gloom, more than the normal and even healthy sadness of heathen men. It

354 is part of the same sort of secret pessimism that loves to make

355 primitive man a crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is

356 fear. It comes of course from the fact that men are moved most by their

357 religion; especially when it is irreligion. For them anything primary

358 and elemental must be evil. But it is the curious consequence that while

359 we have been deluged with the wildest experiments in primitive romance,

360 they have all missed the real romance of being primitive. They have

361 described scenes that are wholly imaginary, in which the men of the

362 Stone Age are men of stone like walking statues; in which the Assyrians

363 or Egyptians are as stiff or as painted as their own most archaic art.

364 But none of these makers of imaginary scenes have tried to imagine what

365 it must really have been like to see those things as fresh which we see

366 as familiar. They have not seen a man discovering fire like a child

367 discovering fireworks. They have not seen a man playing with the

368 wonderful invention called the wheel, like a boy playing at putting up a

369 wireless station. They have never put the spirit of youth into their

370 descriptions of the youth of the world. It follows that amid all their

371 primitive or prehistoric fancies there are no jokes. There are not even

372 practical jokes, in connection with the practical inventions. And this

373 is very sharply defined in the particular case of hieroglyphics; for

374 there seems to be serious indication that the whole high human art of

375 scripture or writing began with a joke.

376 There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun

377 with a pun. The king or the priests or some responsible persons, wishing

378 to send a message up the river in that inconveniently long and narrow

379 territory, hit on the idea of sending it in picture-writing, like that

380 of the Red Indian. Like most people who have written picture-writing for

381 fun, he found the words did not always fit. But when the word for taxes

382 sounded rather like the word for pig, he boldly put down a pig as a bad

383 pun and chanced it. So a modern hieroglyphist might represent ‘at once’

384 by unscrupulously drawing a hat followed by a series of upright

385 numerals. It was good enough for the Pharaohs and ought to be good

386 enough for him. But it must have been great fun to write or even to read

387 these messages, when writing and reading were really a new thing. And if

388 people must write romances about ancient Egypt (and it seems that

389 neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold them from the habit),

390 I suggest that scenes like this would really remind us that the ancient

391 Egyptians were human beings. I suggest that somebody should describe the

392 scene of the great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of them

393 roaring with laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal

394 puns grew more and more wild and indefensible. There might be another

395 scene of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher; the

396 guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular thrill of a

397 detective story. That is how primitive romance and primitive history

398 really ought to be written. For whatever was the quality of the

399 religious or moral life of remote times, and it was probably much more

400 human than is conventionally supposed, the scientific interest of such a

401 time must have been intense. Words must have been more wonderful than

402 wireless telegraphy; and experiments with common things a series of

403 electric shocks. We are still waiting for somebody to write a lively

404 story of primitive life. The point is in some sense a parenthesis here;

405 but it is connected with the general matter of political development, by

406 the institution which is most active in these first and most fascinating

407 of all the fairy-tales of science.

408 It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests. Modern

409 writers like Mr. Wells cannot be accused of any weakness of sympathy

410 with a pontifical hierarchy; but they agree at least in recognising what

411 pagan priesthoods did for the arts and sciences. Among the more ignorant

412 of the enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests

413 had obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a

414 debate that I was resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient

415 priest probably resisted the discovery of wheels. I pointed out, in

416 reply, that it was far more likely that the ancient priest made the

417 discovery of the wheels. It is overwhelmingly probable that the ancient

418 priest had a great deal to do with the discovery of the art of writing.

419 It is obvious enough in the fact that the very word hieroglyphic is akin

420 to the word hierarchy. The religion of these priests was apparently a

421 more or less tangled polytheism of a type that is more particularly

422 described elsewhere. It passed through a period when it co-operated with

423 the king, another period when it was temporarily destroyed by the king,

424 who happened to be a prince with a private theism of his own, and a

425 third period when it practically destroyed the king and ruled in his

426 stead. But the world has to thank it for many things which it considers

427 common and necessary; and the creators of those common things ought

428 really to have a place among the heroes of humanity. If we were at rest

429 in a real paganism, instead of being restless in a rather irrational

430 reaction from Christianity, we might pay some sort of pagan honour to

431 these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of the

432 man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who

433 first tamed a horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices,

434 there would be more sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with

435 cockney statues of stale politicians and philanthropists. But one of

436 the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it

437 came, no pagan in our civilisation has been able to be really human.

438 The point is here, however, that the Egyptian government, whether

439 pontifical or royal, found it more and more necessary to establish

440 communication; and there always went with communication a certain

441 element of coercion. It is not necessarily an indefensible thing that

442 the State grew more despotic as it grew more civilised; it is arguable

443 that it had to grow more despotic in order to grow more civilised. That

444 is the argument for autocracy in every age; and the interest lies in

445 seeing it illustrated in the earliest age. But it is emphatically not

446 true that it was most despotic in the earliest age and grew more liberal

447 in a later age; the practical process of history is exactly the reverse.

448 It is not true that the tribe began in the extreme of terror of the Old

449 Man and his seat and spear; it is probable, at least in Egypt, that the

450 Old Man was rather a New Man armed to attack new conditions. His spear

451 grew longer and longer and his throne rose higher and higher, as Egypt

452 rose into a complex and complete civilisation. That is what I mean by

453 saying that the history of the Egyptian territory is in this the history

454 of the earth; and directly denies the vulgar assumption that terrorism

455 can only come at the beginning and cannot come at the end. We do not

456 know what was the very first condition of the more or less feudal

457 amalgam of landowners, peasants, and slaves in the little commonwealths

458 beside the Nile; but it may have been a peasantry of an even more

459 popular sort. What we do know is that it was by experience and education

460 that little commonwealths lose their liberty; that absolute sovereignty

461 is something not merely ancient but rather relatively modern; and it is

462 at the end of the path called progress that men return to the king.

463 Egypt exhibits, in that brief record of its remotest beginnings, the

464 primary problem of liberty and civilisation. It is the fact that men

465 actually lose variety by complexity. We have not solved the problem

466 properly any more than they did; but it vulgarises the human dignity of

467 the problem itself to suggest that even tyranny has no motive save in

468 tribal terror. And just as the Egyptian example refutes the fallacy

469 about despotism and civilisation, so does the Babylonian example refute

470 the fallacy about civilisation and barbarism. Babylon also we first hear

471 of when it is already civilised; for the simple reason that we cannot

472 hear of anything until it is educated enough to talk. It talks to us in

473 what is called cuneiform; that strange and stiff triangular symbolism

474 that contrasts with the picturesque alphabet of Egypt. However

475 relatively rigid Egyptian art may be, there is always something

476 different from the Babylonian spirit which was too rigid to have any

477 art. There is always a living grace in the lines of the lotus and

478 something of rapidity as well as rigidity in the movement of the arrows

479 and the birds. Perhaps there is something of the restrained but living

480 curve of the river, which makes us in talking of the serpent of old Nile

481 almost think of the Nile as a serpent. Babylon was a civilisation of

482 diagrams rather than of drawings. Mr. W. B. Yeats, who has a historical

483 imagination to match his mythological imagination (and indeed the former

484 is impossible without the latter), wrote truly of the men who watched

485 the stars ‘from their pedantic Babylon.’ The cuneiform was cut upon

486 bricks, of which all their architecture was built up; the bricks were of

487 baked mud, and perhaps the material had something in it forbidding the

488 sense of form to develop in sculpture or relief. Theirs was a static but

489 a scientific civilisation, far advanced in the machinery of life and in

490 some ways highly modern. It is said that they had much of the modern

491 cult of the higher spinsterhood and recognised an official class of

492 independent working women. There is perhaps something in that mighty

493 stronghold of hardened mud that suggests the utilitarian activity of a

494 huge hive. But though it was huge it was human; we see many of the same

495 social problems as in ancient Egypt or modern England; and whatever its

496 evils this also was one of the earliest masterpieces of man. It stood,

497 of course, in the triangle formed by the almost legendary rivers of

498 Tigris and Euphrates, and the vast agriculture of its empire, on which

499 its towns depended, was perfected by a highly scientific system of

500 canals. It had by tradition a high intellectual life, though rather

501 philosophic than artistic; and there preside over its primal foundation

502 those figures who have come to stand for the star-gazing wisdom of

503 antiquity; the teachers of Abraham; the Chaldees.

504 Against this solid society, as against some vast bare wall of brick,

505 there surged age after age the nameless armies of the Nomads. They came

506 out of the deserts where the nomadic life had been lived from the

507 beginning and where it is still lived to-day. It is needless to dwell on

508 the nature of that life; it was obvious enough and even easy enough to

509 follow a herd or a flock which generally found its own grazing-ground

510 and to live on the milk or meat it provided. Nor is there any reason to

511 doubt that this habit of life could give almost every human thing except

512 a home. Many such shepherds or herdsmen may have talked in the earliest

513 times of all the truths and enigmas of the Book of Job; and of these

514 were Abraham and his children, who have given to the modern world for an

515 endless enigma the almost monomaniac monotheism of the Jews. But they

516 were a wild people without comprehension of complex social organisation;

517 and a spirit like the wind within them made them wage war on it again

518 and again. The history of Babylonia is largely the history of its

519 defence against the desert hordes; who came on at intervals of a century

520 or two and generally retreated as they came. Some say that an admixture

521 of nomad invasion built at Nineveh the arrogant kingdom of the

522 Assyrians, who carved great monsters upon their temples, bearded bulls

523 with wings like cherubim, and who sent forth many military conquerors

524 who stamped the world as if with such colossal hooves. Assyria was an

525 imperial interlude; but it was an interlude. The main story of all that

526 land is the war between the wandering peoples and the state that was

527 truly static. Presumably in prehistoric times, and certainly in historic

528 times, those wanderers went westward to waste whatever they could find.

529 The last time they came they found Babylon vanished; but that was in

530 historic times and the name of their leader was Mahomet.

531 Now it is worth while to pause upon that story because, as has been

532 suggested, it directly contradicts the impression still current that

533 nomadism is merely a prehistoric thing and social settlement a

534 comparatively recent thing. There is nothing to show that the

535 Babylonians had ever wandered; there is very little to show that the

536 tribes of the desert ever settled down. Indeed it is probable that this

537 notion of a nomadic stage followed by a static stage has already been

538 abandoned by the sincere and genuine scholars to whose researches we all

539 owe so much. But I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine

540 scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been

541 prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations, and which has

542 made fashionable a false notion of the whole history of humanity. It is

543 the whole vague notion that a monkey evolved into a man and in the same

544 way a barbarian evolved into a civilised man, and therefore at every

545 stage we have to look back to barbarism and forward to civilisation.

546 Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense entirely in the air. It

547 is an atmosphere in which men live rather than a thesis which they

548 defend. Men in that mood are more easily answered by objects than by

549 theories; and it will be well if any one tempted to make that

550 assumption, in some trivial turn of talk or writing, can be checked for

551 a moment by shutting his eyes and seeing for an instant, vast and

552 vaguely crowded, like a populous precipice, the wonder of the Babylonian

553 wall.

554 One fact does certainly fall across us like its shadow. Our glimpses of

555 both these early empires show that the first domestic relation had been

556 complicated by something which was less human, but was often regarded as

557 equally domestic. The dark giant called Slavery had been called up like

558 a genii and was labouring on gigantic works of brick and stone. Here

559 again we must not too easily assume that what was backward was barbaric;

560 in the matter of manumission the earlier servitude seems in some ways

561 more liberal than the later; perhaps more liberal than the servitude of

562 the future. To insure food for humanity by forcing part of it to work

563 was after all a very human expedient; which is why it will probably be

564 tried again. But in one sense there is a significance in the old

565 slavery. It stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity before

566 Christ; something to be assumed from first to last. It is the

567 insignificance of the individual before the State. It was as true of the

568 most democratic City State in Hellas as of any despotism in Babylon. It

569 is one of the signs of this spirit that a whole class of individuals

570 could be insignificant or even invisible. It must be normal because it

571 was needed for what would now be called ‘social service.’ Somebody said,

572 ‘The Man is nothing and the Work is all,’ meaning it for a breezy

573 Carlylean commonplace. It was the sinister motto of the heathen Servile

574 State. In that sense there is truth in the traditional vision of vast

575 pillars and pyramids going up under those everlasting skies for ever, by

576 the labour of numberless and nameless men, toiling like ants and dying

577 like flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands.

578 But there are two other reasons for beginning with the two fixed points

579 of Egypt and Babylon. For one thing they are fixed in tradition as the

580 types of antiquity; and history without tradition is dead. Babylon is

581 still the burden of a nursery rhyme, and Egypt (with its enormous

582 population of princesses awaiting reincarnation) is still the topic of

583 an unnecessary number of novels. But a tradition is generally a truth;

584 so long as the tradition is sufficiently popular; even if it is almost

585 vulgar. And there is a significance in this Babylonian and Egyptian

586 element in nursery rhymes and novels; even the newspapers, normally so

587 much behind the times, have already got as far as the reign of

588 Tutankhamen. The first reason is full of the common sense of popular

589 legend; it is the simple fact that we do know more of these traditional

590 things than of other contemporary things; and that we always did. All

591 travellers from Herodotus to Lord Carnarvon follow this route.

592 Scientific speculations of to-day do indeed spread out a map of the

593 whole primitive world, with streams of racial emigration or admixture

594 marked in dotted lines everywhere; over spaces which the unscientific

595 medieval map-maker would have been content to call ‘terra incognita,’ if

596 he did not fill the inviting blank with a picture of a dragon, to

597 indicate the probable reception given to pilgrims. But these

598 speculations are only speculations at the best; and at the worst the

599 dotted lines can be far more fabulous than the dragon.

600 There is unfortunately one fallacy here into which it is very easy for

601 men to fall, even those who are most intelligent and perhaps especially

602 those who are most imaginative. It is the fallacy of supposing that

603 because an idea is greater in the sense of larger, therefore it is

604 greater in the sense of more fundamental and fixed and certain. If a man

605 lives alone in a straw hut in the middle of Thibet, he may be told that

606 he is living in the Chinese Empire; and the Chinese Empire is certainly

607 a splendid and spacious and impressive thing. Or alternatively he may be

608 told that he is living in the British Empire, and be duly impressed. But

609 the curious thing is that in certain mental states he can feel much more

610 certain about the Chinese Empire that he cannot see than about the straw

611 hut that he can see. He has some strange magical juggle in his mind, by

612 which his argument begins with the empire though his experience begins

613 with the hut. Sometimes he goes mad and appears to be proving that a

614 straw hut cannot exist in the domains of the Dragon Throne; that it is

615 impossible for such a civilisation as he enjoys to contain such a hovel

616 as he inhabits. But his insanity arises from the intellectual slip of

617 supposing that because China is a large and all-embracing hypothesis,

618 therefore it is something more than a hypothesis. Now modern people are

619 perpetually arguing in this way; and they extend it to things much less

620 real and certain than the Chinese Empire. They seem to forget, for

621 instance, that a man is not even certain of the Solar System as he is

622 certain of the South Downs. The Solar System is a deduction, and

623 doubtless a true deduction; but the point is that it is a very vast and

624 far-reaching deduction, and therefore he forgets that it is a deduction

625 at all and treats it as a first principle. He *might* discover that the

626 whole calculation is a miscalculation; and the sun and stars and street

627 lamps would look exactly the same. But he has forgotten that it is a

628 calculation, and is almost ready to contradict the sun if it does not

629 fit into the Solar System. If this is a fallacy even in the case of

630 facts pretty well ascertained, such as the Solar System and the Chinese

631 Empire, it is an even more devastating fallacy in connection with

632 theories and other things that are not really ascertained at all. Thus

633 history, especially prehistoric history, has a horrible habit of

634 beginning with certain generalisations about races. I will not describe

635 the disorder and misery this inversion has produced in modern politics.

636 Because the race is vaguely supposed to have produced the nation, men

637 talk as if the nation were something vaguer than the race. Because they

638 have themselves invented a reason to explain a result, they almost deny

639 the result in order to justify the reason. They first treat a Celt as an

640 axiom and then treat an Irishman as an inference. And then they are

641 surprised that a great fighting, roaring Irishman is angry at being

642 treated as an inference. They cannot see that the Irish are Irish

643 whether or no they are Celtic, whether or no there ever were any Celts.

644 And what misleads them once more is the *size* of the theory; the sense

645 that the fancy is bigger than the fact. A great scattered Celtic race is

646 supposed to contain the Irish, so of course the Irish must depend for

647 their very existence upon it. The same confusion, of course, has

648 eliminated the English and the Germans by swamping them in the Teutonic

649 race; and some tried to prove from the races being at one that the

650 nations could not be at war. But I only give these vulgar and hackneyed

651 examples in passing, as more familiar examples of the fallacy; the

652 matter at issue here is not its application to these modern things but

653 rather to the most ancient things. But the more remote and unrecorded

654 was the racial problem, the more fixed was this curious inverted

655 certainty in the Victorian man of science. To this day it gives a man of

656 those scientific traditions the same sort of shock to question these

657 things, which were only the last inferences when he turned them into

658 first principles. He is still more certain that he is an Aryan even than

659 that he is an Anglo-Saxon, just as he is more certain that he is an

660 Anglo-Saxon than that he is an Englishman. He has never really

661 discovered that he is a European. But he has never doubted that he is an

662 Indo-European. These Victorian theories have shifted a great deal in

663 their shape and scope; but this habit of a rapid hardening of a

664 hypothesis into a theory, and of a theory into an assumption, has hardly

665 yet gone out of fashion. People cannot easily get rid of the mental

666 confusion of feeling that the foundations of history must surely be

667 secure; that the first steps must be safe; that the biggest

668 generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction may seem to

669 them a paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the large

670 thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is

671 evident and enormous.

672 Every race on the face of the earth has been the subject of these

673 speculations, and it is impossible even to suggest an outline of the

674 subject. But if we take the European race alone, its history, or rather

675 its prehistory, has undergone many retrospective revolutions in the

676 short period of my own lifetime. It used to be called the Caucasian

677 race; and I read in childhood an account of its collision with the

678 Mongolian race; it was written by Bret Harte and opened with the query,

679 ‘Or is the Caucasian played out?’ Apparently the Caucasian was played

680 out, for in a very short time he had been turned into the Indo-European

681 man; sometimes, I regret to say, proudly presented as the Indo-Germanic

682 man. It seems that the Hindu and the German have similar words for

683 mother or father; there were other similarities between Sanskrit and

684 various Western tongues; and with that all superficial differences

685 between a Hindu and a German seemed suddenly to disappear. Generally

686 this composite person was more conveniently described as the Aryan, and

687 the really important point was that he had marched westward out of those

688 high lands of India where fragments of his language could still be

689 found. When I read this as a child, I had the fancy that after all the

690 Aryan need not have marched westward and left his language behind him;

691 he might also have marched eastward and taken his language with him. If

692 I were to read it now, I should content myself with confessing my

693 ignorance of the whole matter. But as a matter of fact I have great

694 difficulty in reading it now, because it is not being written now. It

695 looks as if the Aryan is also played out. Anyhow he has not merely

696 changed his name but changed his address; his starting-place and his

697 route of travel. One new theory maintains that our race did not come to

698 its present home from the East but from the South. Some say the

699 Europeans did not come from Asia but from Africa. Some have even had the

700 wild idea that the Europeans came from Europe; or rather that they never

701 left it.

702 Then there is a certain amount of evidence of a more or less prehistoric

703 pressure from the North, such as that which seems to have brought the

704 Greeks to inherit the Cretan culture and so often brought the Gauls over

705 the hills into the fields of Italy. But I merely mention this example of

706 European ethnology to point out that the learned have pretty well boxed

707 the compass by this time; and that I, who am not one of the learned,

708 cannot pretend for a moment to decide where such doctors disagree. But I

709 can use my own common sense, and I sometimes fancy that theirs is a

710 little rusty from want of use. The first act of common sense is to

711 recognise the difference between a cloud and a mountain. And I will

712 affirm that nobody knows any of these things, in the sense that we all

713 know of the existence of the Pyramids of Egypt.

714 The truth, it may be repeated, is that what we really see, as distinct

715 from what we may reasonably guess, in this earliest phase of history is

716 darkness covering the earth and great darkness the peoples, with a light

717 or two gleaming here and there on chance patches of humanity; and that

718 two of these flames do burn upon two of these tall primeval towns; upon

719 the high terraces of Babylon and the huge pyramids of the Nile. There

720 are indeed other ancient lights, or lights that may be conjectured to be

721 very ancient, in very remote parts of that vast wilderness of night.

722 Far away to the East there is a high civilisation of vast antiquity in

723 China; there are the remains of civilisations in Mexico and South

724 America and other places, some of them apparently so high in

725 civilisation as to have reached the most refined forms of devil-worship.

726 But the difference lies in the element of tradition; the tradition of

727 these lost cultures has been broken off, and though the tradition of

728 China still lives, it is doubtful whether we know anything about it.

729 Moreover, a man trying to measure the Chinese antiquity has to use

730 Chinese traditions of measurement; and he has a strange sensation of

731 having passed into another world under other laws of time and space.

732 Time is telescoped outwards, and centuries assume the slow and stiff

733 movement of aeons; the white man trying to see it as the yellow man

734 sees, feels as if his head were turning round and wonders wildly whether

735 it is growing a pigtail. Anyhow he cannot take in a scientific sense

736 that queer perspective that leads up to the primeval pagoda of the first

737 of the Sons of Heaven. He is in the real antipodes; the only true

738 alternative world to Christendom; and he is after a fashion walking

739 upside down. I have spoken of the medieval map-maker and his dragon; but

740 what medieval traveller, however much interested in monsters, would

741 expect to find a country where a dragon is a benevolent and amiable

742 being? Of the more serious side of Chinese tradition something will be

743 said in another connection; but here I am only talking of tradition and

744 the test of antiquity. And I only mention China as an antiquity that is

745 not for us reached by a bridge of tradition; and Babylon and Egypt as

746 antiquities that are. Herodotus is a human being, in a sense in which a

747 Chinaman in a billycock hat, sitting opposite to us in a London

748 tea-shop, is hardly human. We feel as if we knew what David and Isaiah

749 felt like, in a way in which we never were quite certain what Li Hung

750 Chang felt like. The very sins that snatched away Helen or Bathsheba

751 have passed into a proverb of private human weakness, of pathos and even

752 of pardon. The very virtues of the Chinaman have about them something

753 terrifying. This is the difference made by the destruction or

754 preservation of a continuous historical inheritance; as from ancient

755 Egypt to modern Europe. But when we ask what was that world that we

756 inherit, and why those particular people and places seem to belong to

757 it, we are led to the central fact of civilised history.

758 That centre was the Mediterranean; which was not so much a piece of

759 water as a world. But it was a world with something of the character of

760 such a water; for it became more and more a place of unification in

761 which the streams of strange and very diverse cultures met. The Nile and

762 the Tiber alike flow into the Mediterranean; so did the Egyptian and the

763 Etrurian alike contribute to a Mediterranean civilisation. The glamour

764 of the great sea spread indeed very far inland, and the unity was felt

765 among the Arabs alone in the deserts and the Gauls beyond the northern

766 hills. But the gradual building up of a common culture running round all

767 the coasts of this inner sea is the main business of antiquity. As will

768 be seen, it was sometimes a bad business as well as a good business. In

769 that *orbis terrarum* or circle of lands there were the extremes of evil

770 and of piety, there were contrasted races and still more contrasted

771 religions. It was the scene of an endless struggle between Asia and

772 Europe from the flight of the Persian ships at Salamis to the flight of

773 the Turkish ships at Lepanto. It was the scene, as will be more

774 especially suggested later, of a supreme spiritual struggle between the

775 two types of paganism, confronting each other in the Latin and the

776 Phoenician cities; in the Roman forum and the Punic mart. It was the

777 world of war and peace, the world of good and evil, the world of all

778 that matters most; with all respect to the Aztecs and the Mongols of

779 the Far East, they did not matter as the Mediterranean tradition

780 mattered and still matters. Between it and the Far East there were, of

781 course, interesting cults and conquests of various kinds, more or less

782 in touch with it, and in proportion as they were so intelligible also to

783 us. The Persians came riding in to make an end of Babylon; and we are

784 told in a Greek story how these barbarians learned to draw the bow and

785 tell the truth. Alexander the great Greek marched with his Macedonians

786 into the sunrise, and brought back strange birds coloured like the

787 sunrise clouds and strange flowers and jewels from the gardens and

788 treasuries of nameless kings. Islam went eastward into that world and

789 made it partly imaginable to us; precisely because Islam itself was born

790 in that circle of lands that fringed our own ancient and ancestral sea.

791 In the Middle Ages the empire of the Moguls increased its majesty

792 without losing its mystery; the Tartars conquered China and the Chinese

793 apparently took very little notice of them. All these things are

794 interesting in themselves; but it is impossible to shift the centre of

795 gravity to the inland spaces of Asia from the inland sea of Europe. When

796 all is said, if there were nothing in the world but what was said and

797 done and written and built in the lands lying round the Mediterranean,

798 it would still be in all the most vital and valuable things the world in

799 which we live. When that southern culture spread to the north-west it

800 produced many very wonderful things; of which doubtless we ourselves are

801 the most wonderful. When it spread thence to colonies and new countries,

802 it was still the same culture so long as it was culture at all. But

803 round that little sea like a lake were the things themselves, apart from

804 all extensions and echoes and commentaries on the things; the Republic

805 and the Church; the Bible and the heroic epics; Islam and Israel and the

806 memories of the lost empires; Aristotle and the measure of all things.

807 It is because the first light upon *this* world is really light, the

808 daylight in which we are still walking to-day, and not merely the

809 doubtful visitation of strange stars, that I have begun here with noting

810 where that light first falls on the towered cities of the eastern

811 Mediterranean.

812 But though Babylon and Egypt have thus a sort of first claim, in the

813 very fact of being familiar and traditional, fascinating riddles to us

814 but also fascinating riddles to our fathers, we must not imagine that

815 they were the only old civilisations on the southern sea; or that all

816 the civilisation was merely Sumerian or Semitic or Coptic, still less

817 merely Asiatic or African. Real research is more and more exalting the

818 ancient civilisation of Europe and especially of what we may still

819 vaguely call the Greeks. It must be understood in the sense that there

820 were Greeks before the Greeks, as in so many of their mythologies there

821 were gods before the gods. The island of Crete was the centre of the

822 civilisation now called Minoan, after the Minos who lingered in ancient

823 legend and whose labyrinth was actually discovered by modern archeology.

824 This elaborate European society, with its harbours and its drainage and

825 its domestic machinery, seems to have gone down before some invasion of

826 its northern neighbours, who made or inherited the Hellas we know in

827 history. But that earlier period did not pass till it had given to the

828 world gifts so great that the world has ever since been striving in vain

829 to repay them, if only by plagiarism.

830 Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a

831 town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or

832 hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy,

833 and the name will never perish from the earth. A poet who may have been

834 a beggar and a balladmonger, who may have been unable to read and write,

835 and was described by tradition as blind, composed a poem about the

836 Greeks going to war with this town to recover the most beautiful woman

837 in the world. That the most beautiful woman in the world lived in that

838 one little town sounds like a legend; that the most beautiful poem in

839 the world was written by somebody who knew of nothing larger than such

840 little towns is a historical fact. It is said that the poem came at the

841 end of the period; that the primitive culture brought it forth in its

842 decay; in which case one would like to have seen that culture in its

843 prime. But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might

844 very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well

845 as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely

846 mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man

847 left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

848 But in this one great human revelation of antiquity there is another

849 element of great historical importance; which has hardly I think been

850 given its proper place in history. The poet has so conceived the poem

851 that his sympathies apparently, and those of his reader certainly, are

852 on the side of the vanquished rather than of the victor. And this is a

853 sentiment which increases in the poetical tradition even as the poetical

854 origin itself recedes. Achilles had some status as a sort of demigod in

855 pagan times; but he disappears altogether in later times. But Hector

856 grows greater as the ages pass; and it is his name that is the name of a

857 Knight of the Round Table and his sword that legend puts into the hand

858 of Roland, laying about him with the weapon of the defeated Hector in

859 the last ruin and splendour of his own defeat. The name anticipates all

860 the defeats through which our race and religion were to pass; that

861 survival of a hundred defeats that is its triumph.

862 The tale of the end of Troy shall have no ending; for it is lifted up

863 for ever into living echoes, immortal as our hopelessness and our hope.

864 Troy standing was a small thing that may have stood nameless for ages.

865 But Troy falling has been caught up in a flame and suspended in an

866 immortal instant of annihilation; and because it was destroyed with fire

867 the fire shall never be destroyed. And as with the city so with the

868 hero; traced in archaic lines in that primeval twilight is found the

869 first figure of the Knight. There is a prophetic coincidence in his

870 title; we have spoken of the word chivalry and how it seems to mingle

871 the horseman with the horse. It is almost anticipated ages before in the

872 thunder of the Homeric hexameter, and that long leaping word with which

873 the Iliad ends. It is that very unity for which we can find no name but

874 the holy centaur of chivalry. But there are other reasons for giving in

875 this glimpse of antiquity the flame upon the sacred town. The sanctity

876 of such towns ran like a fire round the coasts and islands of the

877 northern Mediterranean; the high-fenced hamlet for which heroes died.

878 From the smallness of the city came the greatness of the citizen. Hellas

879 with her hundred statues produced nothing statelier than that walking

880 statue; the ideal of the self-commanding man. Hellas of the hundred

881 statues was one legend and literature; and all that labyrinth of little

882 walled nations resounded with the lament of Troy.

883 A later legend, an afterthought but not an accident, said that

884 stragglers from Troy founded a republic on the Italian shore. It was

885 true in spirit that republican virtue had such a root. A mystery of

886 honour, that was not born of Babylon or the Egyptian pride, there shone

887 like the shield of Hector, defying Asia and Africa; till the light of a

888 new day was loosened, with the rushing of the eagles and the coming of

889 the name; the name that came like a thunderclap, when the world woke to

890 Rome.

CHAPTER IV

19 GOD AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION

20 I was once escorted over the Roman foundations of an ancient British

21 city by a professor, who said something that seems to me a satire on a

22 good many other professors. Possibly the professor saw the joke, though

23 he maintained an iron gravity, and may or may not have realised that it

24 was a joke against a great deal of what is called comparative religion.

25 I pointed out a sculpture of the head of the sun with the usual halo of

26 rays, but with the difference that the face in the disc, instead of

27 being boyish like Apollo, was bearded like Neptune or Jupiter. ‘Yes,’ he

28 said with a certain delicate exactitude, ‘that is supposed to represent

29 the local god Sul. The best authorities identify Sul with Minerva; but

30 this has been held to show that the identification is not complete.’

31 That is what we call a powerful understatement. The modern world is

32 madder than any satires on it; long ago Mr. Belloc made his burlesque

33 don say that a bust of Ariadne had been proved by modern research to be

34 a Silenus. But that is not better than the real appearance of Minerva as

35 the Bearded Woman of Mr. Barnum. Only both of them are very like many

36 identifications by ‘the best authorities’ on comparative religion; and

37 when Catholic creeds are identified with various wild myths, I do not

38 laugh or curse or misbehave myself; I confine myself decorously to

39 saying that the identification is not complete.

40 In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly

41 applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped

42 corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Even in the days of my youth I

43 remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and

44 dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal

45 contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred

46 million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing

47 the substance.

48 But there is another entity, more or less definable and much more

49 imaginable than the many-headed and monstrous idol of mankind. And it

50 has a much better right to be called, in a reasonable sense, the

51 religion of humanity. Man is not indeed the idol; but man is almost

52 everywhere the idolator. And these multitudinous idolatries of mankind

53 have something about them in many ways more human and sympathetic than

54 modern metaphysical abstractions. If an Asiatic god has three heads and

55 seven arms, there is at least in it an idea of material incarnation

56 bringing an unknown power nearer to us and not farther away. But if our

57 friends Brown, Jones, and Robinson, when out for a Sunday walk, were

58 transformed and amalgamated into an Asiatic idol before our eyes, they

59 would surely seem farther away. If the arms of Brown and the legs of

60 Robinson waved from the same composite body, they would seem to be

61 waving something of a sad farewell. If the heads of all three gentlemen

62 appeared smiling on the same neck, we should hesitate even by what name

63 to address our new and somewhat abnormal friend. In the many-headed and

64 many-handed Oriental idol there is a certain sense of mysteries becoming

65 at least partly intelligible; of formless forces of nature taking some

66 dark but material form, but though this may be true of the multiform god

67 it is not so of the multiform man. The human beings become less human by

68 becoming less separate; we might say less human in being less lonely.

69 The human beings become less intelligible as they become less isolated;

70 we might say with strict truth that the closer they are to us the

71 farther they are away. An Ethical Hymn-book of this humanitarian sort of

72 religion was carefully selected and expurgated on the principle of

73 preserving anything human and eliminating anything divine. One

74 consequence was that a hymn appeared in the amended form of ‘Nearer

75 Mankind to Thee, Nearer to Thee.’ It always suggested to me the

76 sensations of a strap-hanger during a crush on the Tube. But it is

77 strange and wonderful how far away the souls of men can seem, when their

78 bodies are so near as all that.

79 The human unity with which I deal here is not to be confounded with this

80 modern industrial monotony and herding, which is rather a congestion

81 than a communion. It is a thing to which human groups left to

82 themselves, and even human individuals left to themselves, have

83 everywhere tended by an instinct that may truly be called human. Like

84 all healthy human things, it has varied very much within the limits of a

85 general character; for that is characteristic of everything belonging to

86 that ancient land of liberty that lies before and around the servile

87 industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its products are all

88 of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the same seal and

89 drink the same bad whisky, that a man at the North Pole and another at

90 the South might recognise the same optimistic label on the same dubious

91 tinned salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every

92 valley and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any

93 wine once reminding us of whisky; and cheeses can change from county to

94 county without forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese. When

95 I am speaking of this thing, therefore, I am speaking of something that

96 doubtless includes very wide differences; nevertheless I will here

97 maintain that it is one thing. I will maintain that most of the modern

98 botheration comes from not realising that it is really one thing. I will

99 advance the thesis that before all talk about comparative religion and

100 the separate religious founders of the world, the first essential is to

101 recognise this thing as a whole, as a thing almost native and normal to

102 the great fellowship that we call mankind. This thing is Paganism; and I

103 propose to show in these pages that it is the one real rival to the

104 Church of Christ.

105 Comparative religion is very comparative indeed. That is, it is so much

106 a matter of degree and distance and difference that it is only

107 comparatively successful when it tries to compare. When we come to look

108 at it closely we find it comparing things that are really quite

109 incomparable. We are accustomed to see a table or catalogue of the

110 world’s great religions in parallel columns, until we fancy they are

111 really parallel. We are accustomed to see the names of the great

112 religious founders all in a row: Christ; Mahomet; Buddha; Confucius. But

113 in truth this is only a trick; another of these optical illusions by

114 which any objects may be put into a particular relation by shifting to a

115 particular point of sight. Those religions and religious founders, or

116 rather those whom we choose to lump together as religions and religious

117 founders, do not really show any common character. The illusion is

118 partly produced by Islam coming immediately after Christianity in the

119 list; as Islam did come after Christianity and was largely an imitation

120 of Christianity. But the other eastern religions, or what we call

121 religions, not only do not resemble the Church but do not resemble each

122 other. When we come to Confucianism at the end of the list, we come to

123 something in a totally different world of thought. To compare the

124 Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an

125 English squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a

126 hundred-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a civilisation but it is

127 not a religion.

128 In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most

129 popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel. It

130 is not easy, therefore, to expose the fallacy by which a false

131 classification is created to swamp a unique thing, when it really is a

132 unique thing. As there is nowhere else exactly the same fact, so there

133 is nowhere else exactly the same fallacy. But I will take the nearest

134 thing I can find to such a solitary social phenomenon, in order to show

135 how it is thus swamped and assimilated. I imagine most of us would agree

136 that there is something unusual and unique about the position of the

137 Jews. There is nothing that is quite in the same sense an international

138 nation; an ancient culture scattered in different countries but still

139 distinct and indestructible. Now this business is like an attempt to

140 make a list of nomadic nations in order to soften the strange solitude

141 of the Jew. It would be easy enough to do it, by the same process of

142 putting a plausible approximation first, and then tailing off into

143 totally different things thrown in somehow to make up the list. Thus in

144 the new list of nomadic nations the Jews would be followed by the

145 Gypsies; who at least are really nomadic if they are not really

146 national. Then the professor of the new science of Comparative Nomadics

147 could pass easily on to something different; even if it was very

148 different. He could remark on the wandering adventure of the English who

149 had scattered their colonies over so many seas; and call *them* nomads.

150 It is quite true that a great many Englishmen seem to be strangely

151 restless in England. It is quite true that not all of them have left

152 their country for their country’s good. The moment we mention the

153 wandering empire of the English, we must add the strange exiled empire

154 of the Irish. For it is a curious fact, to be noted in our imperial

155 literature, that the same ubiquity and unrest which is a proof of

156 English enterprise and triumph is a proof of Irish futility and failure.

157 Then the professor of Nomadism would look round thoughtfully and

158 remember that there was great talk recently of German waiters, German

159 barbers, German clerks, Germans naturalising themselves in England and

160 the United States and the South American republics. The Germans would go

161 down as the fifth nomadic race; the words Wanderlust and Folk-Wandering

162 would come in very useful here. For there really have been historians

163 who explained the Crusades by suggesting that the Germans were found

164 wandering (as the police say) in what happened to be the neighbourhood

165 of Palestine. Then the professor, feeling he was now near the end, would

166 make a last leap in desperation. He would recall the fact that the

167 French Army has captured nearly every capital in Europe, that it marched

168 across countless conquered lands under Charlemagne or Napoleon; and

169 *that* would be wanderlust, and *that* would be the note of a nomadic

170 race. Thus he would have his six nomadic nations all compact and

171 complete, and would feel that the Jew was no longer a sort of mysterious

172 and even mystical exception. But people with more common sense would

173 probably realise that he had only extended nomadism by extending the

174 meaning of nomadism; and that he had extended that until it really had

175 no meaning at all. It is quite true that the French soldier has made

176 some of the finest marches in all military history. But it is equally

177 true, and far more self-evident, that if the French peasant is not a

178 rooted reality there is no such thing as a rooted reality in the world;

179 or in other words, if he is a nomad there is nobody who is not a nomad.

180 Now that is the sort of trick that has been tried in the case of

181 comparative religion and the world’s religious founders all standing

182 respectably in a row. It seeks to classify Jesus as the other would

183 classify Jews, by inventing a new class for the purpose and filling up

184 the rest of it with stop-gaps and second-rate copies. I do not mean that

185 these other things are not often great things in their own real

186 character and class. Confucianism and Buddhism are great things, but it

187 is not true to call them Churches; just as the French and English are

188 great peoples, but it is nonsense to call them nomads. There are some

189 points of resemblance between Christendom and its imitation in Islam;

190 for that matter there are some points of resemblance between Jews and

191 Gypsies. But after that the lists are made up of anything that comes to

192 hand; of anything that can be put in the same catalogue without being in

193 the same category.

194 In this sketch of religious history, with all decent deference to men

195 much more learned than myself, I propose to cut across and disregard

196 this modern method of classification, which I feel sure has falsified

197 the facts of history. I shall here submit an alternative classification

198 of religion or religions, which I believe would be found to cover all

199 the facts and, what is quite as important here, all the fancies. Instead

200 of dividing religion geographically, and as it were vertically, into

201 Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and so on, I would divide it

202 psychologically and in some sense horizontally; into the strata of

203 spiritual elements and influences that could sometimes exist in the same

204 country, or even in the same man. Putting the Church apart for the

205 moment, I should be disposed to divide the natural religion of the mass

206 of mankind under such headings as these: God; the Gods; the Demons; the

207 Philosophers. I believe some such classification will help us to sort

208 out the spiritual experiences of men much more successfully than the

209 conventional business of comparing religions; and that many famous

210 figures will naturally fall into their place in this way who are only

211 forced into their place in the other. As I shall make use of these

212 titles or terms more than once in narrative and allusion, it will be

213 well to define at this stage for what I mean them to stand. And I will

214 begin with the first, the simplest and the most sublime, in this

215 chapter.

216 In considering the elements of pagan humanity, we must begin by an

217 attempt to describe the indescribable. Many get over the difficulty of

218 describing it by the expedient of denying it, or at least ignoring it;

219 but the whole point of it is that it was something that was never quite

220 eliminated even when it was ignored. They are obsessed by their

221 evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or

222 something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seed comes

223 from a tree, or from something larger than itself. Now there is very

224 good ground for guessing that religion did not originally come from some

225 detail that was forgotten because it was too small to be traced. Much

226 more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large

227 to be managed. There is very good reason to suppose that many people did

228 begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all;

229 and afterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a

230 sort of secret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of which

231 the folk-lore students are so fond, is admittedly often found to support

232 such a view. Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense

233 in which anthropologists use the word, the Australian aborigines for

234 instance, are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone. A

235 missionary was preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists, who had

236 told him all their polytheistic tales, and telling them in return of the

237 existence of the one good God who is a spirit and judges men by

238 spiritual standards. And there was a sudden buzz of excitement among

239 these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was letting out a secret,

240 and they cried to each other, ‘Atahocan! He is speaking of Atahocan!’

241 Probably it was a point of politeness and even decency among those

242 polytheists not to speak of Atahocan. The name is not perhaps so much

243 adapted as some of our own to direct and solemn religious exhortation;

244 but many other social forces are always covering up and confusing such

245 simple ideas. Possibly the old god stood for an old morality found

246 irksome in more expansive moments; possibly intercourse with demons was

247 more fashionable among the best people, as in the modern fashion of

248 Spiritualism. Anyhow, there are any number of similar examples. They all

249 testify to the unmistakable psychology of a thing taken for granted, as

250 distinct from a thing talked about. There is a striking example in a

251 tale taken down word for word from a Red Indian in California, which

252 starts out with hearty legendary and literary relish: ‘The sun is the

253 father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The moon is his

254 wife and the stars are their children’; and so on through a most

255 ingenious and complicated story, in the middle of which is a sudden

256 parenthesis saying that sun and moon have to do something because ‘It is

257 ordered that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.’

258 That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God. He is

259 something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a habit

260 possibly not peculiar to pagans. Sometimes the higher deity is

261 remembered in the higher moral grades and is a sort of mystery. But

262 always, it has been truly said, the savage is talkative about his

263 mythology and taciturn about his religion. The Australian savages,

264 indeed, exhibit a topsyturvydom such as the ancients might have thought

265 truly worthy of the antipodes. The savage who thinks nothing of tossing

266 off such a trifle as a tale of the sun and moon being the halves of a

267 baby chopped in two, or dropping into small-talk about a colossal cosmic

268 cow milked to make the rain, merely in order to be sociable, will then

269 retire to secret caverns sealed against women and white men, temples of

270 terrible initiation where to the thunder of the bull-roarer and the

271 dripping of sacrificial blood, the priest whispers the final secrets

272 known only to the initiate: that honesty is the best policy, that a

273 little kindness does nobody any harm, that all men are brothers and that

274 there is but one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible

275 and invisible.

276 In other words, we have here the curiosity of religious history that the

277 savage seems to be parading all the most repulsive and impossible parts

278 of his belief and concealing all the most sensible and creditable parts.

279 But the explanation is that they are not in that sense parts of his

280 belief; or at least not parts of the same sort of belief. The myths are

281 merely tall stories, though as tall as the sky, the waterspout, or the

282 tropic rain. The mysteries are true stories, and are taken secretly that

283 they may be taken seriously. Indeed it is only too easy to forget that

284 there is a thrill in theism. A novel in which a number of separate

285 characters all turned out to be the same character would certainly be a

286 sensational novel. It is so with the idea that sun and tree and river

287 are the disguises of one god and not of many. Alas, we also find it only

288 too easy to take Atahocan for granted. But whether he is allowed to fade

289 into a truism or preserved as a sensation by being preserved as a

290 secret, it is clear that he is always either an old truism or an old

291 tradition. There is nothing to show that he is an improved product of

292 the mere mythology and everything to show that he preceded it. He is

293 worshipped by the simplest tribes with no trace of ghosts or

294 grave-offerings, or any of the complications in which Herbert Spencer

295 and Grant Allen sought the origin of the simplest of all ideas. Whatever

296 else there was, there was never any such thing as the Evolution of the

297 Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten,

298 was even explained away; but it was never evolved. There are not a few

299 indications of this change in other places. It is implied, for

300 instance, in the fact that even polytheism seems often the combination

301 of several monotheisms. A god will gain only a minor seat on Mount

302 Olympus, when he had owned earth and heaven and all the stars while he

303 lived in his own little valley. Like many a small nation melting in a

304 great empire, he gives up local universality only to come under

305 universal limitation. The very name of Pan suggests that he became a god

306 of the wood when he had been a god of the world. The very name of

307 Jupiter is almost a pagan translation of the words ‘Our Father which art

308 in heaven.’ As with the Great Father symbolised by the sky, so with the

309 Great Mother whom we still call Mother Earth. Demeter and Ceres and

310 Cybele often seem to be almost incapable of taking over the whole

311 business of godhood, so that men should need no other gods. It seems

312 reasonably probable that a good many men did have no other gods but one

313 of these, worshipped as the author of all.

314 Over some of the most immense and populous tracts of the world, such as

315 China, it would seem that the simpler idea of the Great Father has never

316 been very much complicated with rival cults, though it may have in some

317 sense ceased to be a cult itself. The best authorities seem to think

318 that though Confucianism is in one sense agnosticism, it does not

319 directly contradict the old theism, precisely because it has become a

320 rather vague theism. It is one in which God is called Heaven, as in the

321 case of polite persons tempted to swear in drawing-rooms. But Heaven is

322 still overhead, even if it is very far overhead. We have all the

323 impression of a simple truth that has receded, until it was remote

324 without ceasing to be true. And this phrase alone would bring us back to

325 the same idea even in the pagan mythology of the West. There is surely

326 something of this very notion of the withdrawal of some higher power in

327 all those mysterious and very imaginative myths about the separation of

328 earth and sky. In a hundred forms we are told that heaven and earth were

329 once lovers, or were once at one, when some upstart thing, often some

330 undutiful child, thrust them apart; and the world was built on an abyss;

331 upon a division and a parting. One of its grossest versions was given by

332 Greek civilisation in the myth of Uranus and Saturn. One of its most

333 charming versions was that of some savage people, who say that a little

334 pepper-plant grew taller and taller and lifted the whole sky like a lid;

335 a beautiful barbaric vision of daybreak for some of our painters who

336 love that tropical twilight. Of myths, and the highly mythical

337 explanations which the moderns offer of myths, something will be said in

338 another section; for I cannot but think that most mythology is on

339 another and more superficial plane. But in this primeval vision of the

340 rending of one world into two there is surely something more of ultimate

341 ideas. As to what it means, a man will learn far more about it by lying

342 on his back in a field, and merely looking at the sky, than by reading

343 all the libraries even of the most learned and valuable folk-lore. He

344 will know what is meant by saying that the sky ought to be nearer to us

345 than it is, that perhaps it was once nearer than it is, that it is not a

346 thing merely alien and abysmal but in some fashion sundered from us and

347 saying farewell. There will creep across his mind the curious suggestion

348 that after all, perhaps, the myth-maker was not merely a moon-calf or

349 village idiot thinking he could cut up the clouds like a cake, but had

350 in him something more than it is fashionable to attribute to the

351 Troglodyte; that it is just possible that Thomas Hood was not talking

352 like a Troglodyte when he said that, as time went on, the tree-tops only

353 told him he was further off from heaven than when he was a boy. But

354 anyhow the legend of Uranus the Lord of Heaven dethroned by Saturn the

355 Time Spirit would mean something to the author of that poem. And it

356 would mean, among other things, this banishment of the first

357 fatherhood. There is the idea of God in the very notion that there were

358 gods before the gods. There is an idea of greater simplicity in all the

359 allusions to that more ancient order. The suggestion is supported by the

360 process of propagation we see in historic times. Gods and demigods and

361 heroes breed like herrings before our very eyes, and suggest of

362 themselves that the family may have had one founder; mythology grows

363 more and more complicated, and the very complication suggests that at

364 the beginning it was more simple. Even on the external evidence, of the

365 sort called scientific, there is therefore a very good case for the

366 suggestion that man began with monotheism before it developed or

367 degenerated into polytheism. But I am concerned rather with an internal

368 than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth

369 is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something of which it is

370 the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to

371 translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.

372 I suspect an immense implication behind all polytheism and paganism. I

373 suspect we have only a hint of it here and there in these savage creeds

374 or Greek origins. It is not exactly what we mean by the presence of God;

375 in a sense it might more truly be called the absence of God. But absence

376 does not mean non-existence; and a man drinking the toast of absent

377 friends does not mean that from his life all friendship is absent. It is

378 a void but it is not a negation; it is something as positive as an empty

379 chair. It would be an exaggeration to say that the pagan saw higher than

380 Olympus an empty throne. It would be nearer the truth to take the

381 gigantic imagery of the Old Testament, in which the prophet saw God from

382 behind; it was as if some immeasurable presence had turned its back on

383 the world. Yet the meaning will again be missed if it is supposed to be

384 anything so conscious and vivid as the monotheism of Moses and his

385 people. I do not mean that the pagan peoples were in the least

386 overpowered by this idea merely because it is overpowering. On the

387 contrary, it was so large that they all carried it lightly, as we all

388 carry the load of the sky. Gazing at some detail like a bird or a cloud,

389 we can all ignore its awful blue background; we can neglect the sky; and

390 precisely because it bears down upon us with an annihilating force, it

391 is felt as nothing. A thing of this kind can only be an impression and a

392 rather subtle impression; but to me it is a very strong impression made

393 by pagan literature and religion. I repeat that in our special

394 sacramental sense there is, of course, the absence of the presence of

395 God. But there is in a very real sense the presence of the absence of

396 God. We feel it in the unfathomable sadness of pagan poetry; for I doubt

397 if there was ever in all the marvellous manhood of antiquity a man who

398 was happy as St. Francis was happy. We feel it in the legend of a Golden

399 Age and again in the vague implication that the gods themselves are

400 ultimately related to something else, even when that Unknown God has

401 faded into a Fate. Above all we feel it in those immortal moments when

402 the pagan literature seems to return to a more innocent antiquity and

403 speak with a more direct voice, so that no word is worthy of it except

404 our own monotheistic monosyllable. We cannot say anything but ‘God’ in a

405 sentence like that of Socrates bidding farewell to his judges: ‘I go to

406 die and you remain to live; and God alone knows which of us goes the

407 better way.’ We can use no other word even for the best moments of

408 Marcus Aurelius: ‘Can they say dear city of Cecrops, and canst thou not

409 say dear city of God?’ We can use no other word in that mighty line in

410 which Virgil spoke to all who suffer with the veritable cry of a

411 Christian before Christ, in the untranslatable: ‘O passi graviora dabit

412 deus his quoque finem.’

413 In short, there is a feeling that there is something higher than the

414 gods; but because it is higher it is also further away. Not yet could

415 even Virgil have read the riddle and the paradox of that other divinity,

416 who is both higher and nearer. For them what was truly divine was very

417 distant, so distant that they dismissed it more and more from their

418 minds. It had less and less to do with the mere mythology of which I

419 shall write later. Yet even in this there was a sort of tacit admission

420 of its intangible purity, when we consider what most of the mythology is

421 like. As the Jews would not degrade it by images, so the Greeks did not

422 degrade it even by imaginations. When the gods were more and more

423 remembered only by pranks and profligacies, it was relatively a movement

424 of reverence. It was an act of piety to forget God. In other words,

425 there is something in the whole tone of the time suggesting that men had

426 accepted a lower level, and still were half conscious that it was a

427 lower level. It is hard to find words for these things; yet the one

428 really just word stands ready. These men were conscious of the Fall, if

429 they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of all heathen

430 humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they

431 forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at

432 the back of all pagan sentiment. There is such a thing as the momentary

433 power to remember that we forget. And the most ignorant of humanity know

434 by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven. But it

435 remains true that even for these men there were moments, like the

436 memories of childhood, when they heard themselves talking with a simpler

437 language; there were moments when the Roman, like Virgil in the line

438 already quoted, cut his way with a sword-stroke of song out of the

439 tangle of the mythologies; the motley mob of gods and goddesses sank

440 suddenly out of sight and the Sky-Father was alone in the sky.

441 This latter example is very relevant to the next step in the process. A

442 white light as of a lost morning still lingers on the figure of Jupiter,

443 of Pan, or of the elder Apollo; and it may well be, as already noted,

444 that each was once a divinity as solitary as Jehovah or Allah. They lost

445 this lonely universality by a process it is here very necessary to note;

446 a process of amalgamation very like what was afterwards called

447 syncretism. The whole pagan world set itself to build a Pantheon. They

448 admitted more and more gods, gods not only of the Greeks but of the

449 barbarians; gods not only of Europe but of Asia and Africa. The more the

450 merrier, though some of the Asian and African ones were not very merry.

451 They admitted them to equal thrones with their own; sometimes they

452 identified them with their own. They may have regarded it as an

453 enrichment of their religious life; but it meant the final loss of all

454 that we now call religion. It meant that ancient light of simplicity,

455 that had a single source like the sun, finally fades away in a dazzle of

456 conflicting lights and colours. God is really sacrificed to the gods; in

457 a very literal sense of the flippant phrase, they have been too many for

458 him.

459 Polytheism, therefore, was really a sort of pool; in the sense of the

460 pagans having consented to the pooling of their pagan religions. And

461 this point is very important in many controversies ancient and modern.

462 It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of

463 the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought

464 themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the

465 gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming

466 down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of

467 the woods. But exactly what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest

468 idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole

469 world one. And the converse is also true. Doubtless those more

470 antiquated men of antiquity who clung to their solitary statues and

471 their single sacred names were regarded as superstitious savages

472 benighted and left behind. But these superstitious savages were

473 preserving something that is much more like the cosmic power as

474 conceived by philosophy, or even as conceived by science. This paradox

475 by which the rude reactionary was a sort of prophetic progressive has

476 one consequence very much to the point. In a purely historical sense,

477 and apart from any other controversies in the same connection, it throws

478 a light, a single and a steady light, that shines from the beginning on

479 a little and lonely people. In this paradox, as in some riddle of

480 religion of which the answer was sealed up for centuries, lies the

481 mission and the meaning of the Jews.

482 It is true in this sense, humanly speaking, that the world owes God to

483 the Jews. It owes that truth to much that is blamed in the Jews,

484 possibly to much that is blameable in the Jews. We have already noted

485 the nomadic position of the Jews amid the other pastoral peoples upon

486 the fringe of the Babylonian Empire, and something of that strange

487 erratic course of theirs blazed across the dark territory of extreme

488 antiquity, as they passed from the seat of Abraham and the shepherd

489 princes into Egypt and doubled back into the Palestinian hills and held

490 them against the Philistines from Crete and fell into captivity in

491 Babylon; and yet again returned to their mountain city by the Zionist

492 policy of the Persian conquerors; and so continued that amazing romance

493 of restlessness of which we have not yet seen the end. But through all

494 their wanderings, and especially through all their early wanderings,

495 they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle,

496 that held perhaps a featureless symbol and certainly an invisible god.

497 We may say that one most essential feature was that it was featureless.

498 Much as we may prefer that creative liberty which the Christian culture

499 has declared and by which it has eclipsed even the arts of antiquity, we

500 must not underrate the determining importance at the time of the Hebrew

501 inhibition of images. It is a typical example of one of those

502 limitations that did in fact preserve and perpetuate enlargement, like a

503 wall built round a wide open space. The God who could not have a statue

504 remained a spirit. Nor would his statue in any case have had the

505 disarming dignity and grace of the Greek statues then or the Christian

506 statues afterwards. He was living in a land of monsters. We shall have

507 occasion to consider more fully what those monsters were, Moloch and

508 Dagon and Tanit the terrible goddess. If the deity of Israel had ever

509 had an image, he would have had a phallic image. By merely giving him a

510 body they would have brought in all the worst elements of mythology; all

511 the polygamy of polytheism; the vision of the harem in heaven. This

512 point about the refusal of art is the first example of the limitations

513 which are often adversely criticised, only because the critics

514 themselves are limited. But an even stronger case can be found in the

515 other criticism offered by the same critics. It is often said with a

516 sneer that the God of Israel was only a God of Battles, ‘a mere barbaric

517 Lord of Hosts’ pitted in rivalry against other gods only as their

518 envious foe. Well it is for the world that he was a God of Battles. Well

519 it is for us that he was to all the rest only a rival and a foe. In the

520 ordinary way, it would have been only too easy for them to have achieved

521 the desolate disaster of conceiving him as a friend. It would have been

522 only too easy for them to have seen him stretching out his hands in love

523 and reconciliation, embracing Baal and kissing the painted face of

524 Astarte, feasting in fellowship with the gods; the last god to sell his

525 crown of stars for the Soma of the Indian pantheon or the nectar of

526 Olympus or the mead of Valhalla. It would have been easy enough for his

527 worshippers to follow the enlightened course of Syncretism and the

528 pooling of all the pagan traditions. It is obvious indeed that his

529 followers were always sliding down this easy slope; and it required the

530 almost demoniac energy of certain inspired demagogues, who testified to

531 the divine unity in words that are still like winds of inspiration and

532 ruin. The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that

533 contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a

534 real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of

535 Israel. As it was, while the whole world melted into this mass of

536 confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow,

537 precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the

538 primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal.

539 He was as narrow as the universe.

540 In a word, there was a popular pagan god called Jupiter-Ammon. There was

541 never a god called Jehovah-Ammon. There was never a god called

542 Jehovah-Jupiter. If there had been, there would certainly have been

543 another called Jehovah-Moloch. Long before the liberal and enlightened

544 amalgamators had got so far afield as Jupiter, the image of the Lord of

545 Hosts would have been deformed out of all suggestion of a monotheistic

546 maker and ruler and would have become an idol far worse than any savage

547 fetish; for he might have been as civilised as the gods of Tyre and

548 Carthage. What that civilisation meant we shall consider more fully in

549 the chapter that follows; when we note how the power of demons nearly

550 destroyed Europe and even the heathen health of the world. But the

551 world’s destiny would have been distorted still more fatally if

552 monotheism had failed in the Mosaic tradition. I hope in a subsequent

553 section to show that I am not without sympathy with all that health in

554 the heathen world that made its fairy-tales and its fanciful romances

555 of religion. But I hope also to show that these were bound to fail in

556 the long run; and the world would have been lost if it had been unable

557 to return to that great original simplicity of a single authority in all

558 things. That we do preserve something of that primary simplicity, that

559 poets and philosophers can still indeed in some sense say an Universal

560 Prayer, that we live in a large and serene world under a sky that

561 stretches paternally over all the peoples of the earth, that philosophy

562 and philanthropy are truisms in a religion of reasonable men, all that

563 we do most truly owe, under heaven, to a secretive and restless nomadic

564 people; who bestowed on men the supreme and serene blessing of a jealous

565 God.

566 The unique possession was not available or accessible to the pagan

567 world, because it was also the possession of a jealous people. The Jews

568 were unpopular, partly because of this narrowness already noted in the

569 Roman world, partly perhaps because they had already fallen into that

570 habit of merely handling things for exchange instead of working to make

571 them with their hands. It was partly also because polytheism had become

572 a sort of jungle in which solitary monotheism could be lost; but it is

573 strange to realise how completely it really was lost. Apart from more

574 disputed matters, there were things in the tradition of Israel which

575 belong to all humanity now, and might have belonged to all humanity

576 then. They had one of the colossal corner-stones of the world: the Book

577 of Job. It obviously stands over against the Iliad and the Greek

578 tragedies; and even more than they it was an early meeting and parting

579 of poetry and philosophy in the morning of the world. It is a solemn and

580 uplifting sight to see those two eternal fools, the optimist and the

581 pessimist, destroyed in the dawn of time. And the philosophy really

582 perfects the pagan tragic irony, precisely because it is more

583 monotheistic and therefore more mystical. Indeed the Book of Job

584 avowedly only answers mystery with mystery. Job is comforted with

585 riddles; but he is comforted. Herein is indeed a type, in the sense of

586 a prophecy, of things speaking with authority. For when he who doubts

587 can only say, ‘I do not understand,’ it is true that he who knows can

588 only reply or repeat, ‘You do not understand.’ And under that rebuke

589 there is always a sudden hope in the heart; and the sense of something

590 that would be worth understanding. But this mighty monotheistic poem

591 remained unremarked by the whole world of antiquity, which was thronged

592 with polytheistic poetry. It is a sign of the way in which the Jews

593 stood apart and kept their tradition unshaken and unshared, that they

594 should have kept a thing like the Book of Job out of the whole

595 intellectual world of antiquity. It is as if the Egyptians had modestly

596 concealed the Great Pyramid. But there were other reasons for a

597 cross-purpose and an impasse, characteristic of the whole of the end of

598 paganism. After all, the tradition of Israel had only got hold of one

599 half of the truth, even if we use the popular paradox and call it the

600 bigger half. I shall try to sketch in the next chapter that love of

601 locality and of personality that ran through mythology; here it need

602 only be said that there was a truth in it that could not be left out,

603 though it were a lighter and less essential truth. The sorrow of Job had

604 to be joined with the sorrow of Hector; and while the former was the

605 sorrow of the universe the latter was the sorrow of the city; for Hector

606 could only stand pointing to heaven as the pillar of holy Troy. When God

607 speaks out of the whirlwind He may well speak in the wilderness. But the

608 monotheism of the nomad was not enough for all that varied civilisation

609 of fields and fences and walled cities and temples and towns; and the

610 turn of these things also was to come, when the two could be combined in

611 a more definite and domestic religion. Here and there in all that pagan

612 crowd could be found a philosopher whose thoughts ran on pure theism;

613 but he never had, or supposed that he had, the power to change the

614 customs of the whole populace. Nor is it easy even in such philosophies

615 to find a true definition of this deep business of the relation of

616 polytheism and theism. Perhaps the nearest we can come to striking the

617 note, or giving the thing a name, is in something far away from all that

618 civilisation and more remote from Rome than the isolation of Israel. It

619 is in a saying I once heard from some Hindu tradition; that gods as well

620 as men are only the dreams of Brahma; and will perish when Brahma wakes.

621 There is indeed in such an image something of the soul of Asia which is

622 less sane than the soul of Christendom. We should call it despair, even

623 if they would call it peace. This note of nihilism can be considered

624 later in a fuller comparison between Asia and Europe. It is enough to

625 say here that there is more of disillusion in that idea of a divine

626 awakening than is implied for us in the passage from mythology to

627 religion. But the symbol is very subtle and exact in one respect; that

628 it does suggest the disproportion and even disruption between the very

629 ideas of mythology and religion; the chasm between the two categories.

630 It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no

631 comparison between God and the gods. There is no more comparison than

632 there is between a man and the men who walk about in his dreams. Under

633 the next heading some attempt will be made to indicate the twilight of

634 that dream in which the gods walk about like men. But if any one fancies

635 the contrast of monotheism and polytheism is only a matter of some

636 people having one god and others a few more, for him it will be far

637 nearer the truth to plunge into the elephantine extravagance of Brahmin

638 cosmology; that he may feel a shudder going through the veil of things,

639 the many-handed creators, and the throned and haloed animals and all the

640 network of entangled stars and rulers of the night, as the awful eyes of

641 Brahma open like dawn upon the death of all.

CHAPTER V

22 MAN AND MYTHOLOGIES

23 What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be called the

24 Day-Dreams. To compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams can

25 come true. To compare them to travellers’ tales is not to deny that they

26 may be true tales, or at least truthful tales. In truth they are the

27 sort of tales the traveller tells to himself. All this mythological

28 business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely

29 forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a

30 work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticise

31 it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by

32 the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never

33 heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are

34 allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not

35 submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but

36 we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated

37 as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are

38 not appreciated at all. When the professor is told by the barbarian that

39 once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the

40 learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true,

41 he is no judge of such things at all. When he is assured, on the best

42 Red Indian authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and

43 stars in a box, unless he claps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a

44 child would at such a charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter.

45 This test is not nonsensical; primitive children and barbaric children

46 do laugh and kick like other children; and we must have a certain

47 simplicity to repicture the childhood of the world. When Hiawatha was

48 told by his nurse that a warrior threw his grandmother up to the moon,

49 he laughed like any English child told by his nurse that a cow jumped

50 over the moon. The child sees the joke as well as most men, and better

51 than some scientific men. But the ultimate test even of the fantastic is

52 the appropriateness of the inappropriate. And the test must appear

53 merely arbitrary because it is merely artistic. If any student tells me

54 that the infant Hiawatha only laughed out of respect for the tribal

55 custom of sacrificing the aged to economical housekeeping, I say he did

56 not. If any scholar tells me that the cow jumped over the moon only

57 because a heifer was sacrificed to Diana, I answer that it did not. It

58 happened because it is obviously the right thing for a cow to jump over

59 the moon. Mythology is a lost art, one of the few arts that really are

60 lost; but it is an art. The horned moon and the horned mooncalf make a

61 harmonious and almost a quiet pattern. And throwing your grandmother

62 into the sky is not good behaviour; but it is perfectly good taste.

63 Thus scientists seldom understand, as artists understand, that one

64 branch of the beautiful is the ugly. They seldom allow for the

65 legitimate liberty of the grotesque. And they will dismiss a savage myth

66 as merely coarse and clumsy and an evidence of degradation, because it

67 has not all the beauty of the herald Mercury new lighted on a

68 heaven-kissing hill; when it really has the beauty of the Mock Turtle of

69 the Mad Hatter. It is the supreme proof of a man being prosaic that he

70 always insists on poetry being poetical. Sometimes the humour is in the

71 very subject as well as the style of the fable. The Australian

72 aborigines, regarded as the rudest of savages, have a story about a

73 giant frog who had swallowed the sea and all the waters of the world;

74 and who was only forced to spill them by being made to laugh. All the

75 animals with all their antics passed before him and, like Queen

76 Victoria, he was not amused. He collapsed at last before an eel who

77 stood delicately balanced on the tip of its tail, doubtless with a

78 rather desperate dignity. Any amount of fine fantastic literature might

79 be made out of that fable. There is philosophy in that vision of the dry

80 world before the beatific Deluge of laughter. There is imagination in

81 the mountainous monster erupting like an aqueous volcano; there is

82 plenty of fun in the thought of his goggling visage as the pelican or

83 the penguin passed by. Anyhow the frog laughed; but the folk-lore

84 student remains grave.

85 Moreover, even where the fables are inferior as art, they cannot be

86 properly judged by science; still less properly judged as science. Some

87 myths are very crude and queer like the early drawings of children; but

88 the child is trying to draw. It is none the less an error to treat his

89 drawing as if it were a diagram, or intended to be a diagram. The

90 student cannot make a scientific statement about the savage, because the

91 savage is not making a scientific statement about the world. He is

92 saying something quite different; what might be called the gossip of the

93 gods. We may say, if we like, that it is believed before there is time

94 to examine it. It would be truer to say it is accepted before there is

95 time to believe it.

96 I confess I doubt the whole theory of the dissemination of myths or (as

97 it commonly is) of one myth. It is true that something in our nature and

98 conditions makes many stories similar; but each of them may be original.

99 One man does not borrow the story from the other man, though he may tell

100 it from the same motive as the other man. It would be easy to apply the

101 whole argument about legend to literature; and turn it into a vulgar

102 monomania of plagiarism. I would undertake to trace a notion like that

103 of the Golden Bough through individual modern novels as easily as

104 through communal and antiquated myths. I would undertake to find

105 something like a bunch of flowers figuring again and again from the

106 fatal bouquet of Becky Sharpe to the spray of roses sent by the Princess

107 of Ruritania. But though these flowers may spring from the same soil, it

108 is not the same faded flower that is flung from hand to hand. Those

109 flowers are always fresh.

110 The true origin of all the myths has been discovered much too often.

111 There are too many keys to mythology, as there are too many cryptograms

112 in Shakespeare. Everything is phallic; everything is totemistic;

113 everything is seed-time and harvest; everything is ghosts and

114 grave-offerings; everything is the golden bough of sacrifice; everything

115 is the sun and moon; everything is everything. Every folk-lore student

116 who knew a little more than his own monomania, every man of wider

117 reading and critical culture like Andrew Lang, has practically confessed

118 that the bewilderment of these things left his brain spinning. Yet the

119 whole trouble comes from a man trying to look at these stories from the

120 outside, as if they were scientific objects. He has only to look at them

121 from the inside, and ask himself how he would begin a story. A story may

122 start with anything and go anywhere. It may start with a bird without

123 the bird being a totem; it may start with the sun without being a solar

124 myth. It is said there are only ten plots in the world; and there will

125 certainly be common and recurrent elements. Set ten thousand children

126 talking at once, and telling tarradiddles about what they did in the

127 wood; and it will not be hard to find parallels suggesting sun-worship

128 or animal-worship. Some of the stories may be pretty and some silly and

129 some perhaps dirty; but they can only be judged as stories. In the

130 modern dialect, they can only be judged aesthetically. It is strange

131 that aesthetics, or mere feeling, which is now allowed to usurp where

132 it has no rights at all, to wreck reason with pragmatism and morals with

133 anarchy, is apparently not allowed to give a purely aesthetic judgment

134 on what is obviously a purely aesthetic question. We may be fanciful

135 about everything except fairy-tales.

136 Now the first fact is that the most simple people have the most subtle

137 ideas. Everybody ought to know that, for everybody has been a child.

138 Ignorant as a child is, he knows more than he can say and feels not only

139 atmospheres but fine shades. And in this matter there are several fine

140 shades. Nobody understands it who has not had what can only be called

141 the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the

142 beautiful things he sees; his hunger for secrets and his anger at any

143 tower or tree escaping with its tale untold. He feels that nothing is

144 perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious beauty

145 of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue. One need only

146 be a very minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until

147 it spoke like a titan or a dryad. It is often said that pagan mythology

148 was a personification of the powers of nature. The phrase is true in a

149 sense, but it is very unsatisfactory; because it implies that the forces

150 are abstractions and the personification is artificial. Myths are not

151 allegories. Natural powers are not in this case abstractions. It is not

152 as if there were a God of Gravitation. There may be a genius of the

153 waterfall; but not of mere falling, even less than of mere water. The

154 impersonation is not of something impersonal. The point is that the

155 personality perfects the water with significance. Father Christmas is

156 not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called

157 snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is

158 something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the

159 evergreens; so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The

160 test therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean

161 imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call

162 subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel,

163 consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths;

164 that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other

165 words, the natural mystic does know that there is something *there*;

166 something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that

167 the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort

168 of incantation that can call it up.

169 Now we do not comprehend this process in ourselves, far less in our most

170 remote fellow-creatures. And the danger of these things being classified

171 is that they may seem to be comprehended. A really fine work of

172 folk-lore, like *The Golden Bough*, will leave too many readers with the

173 idea, for instance, that this or that story of a giant’s or wizard’s

174 heart in a casket or a cave only ‘means’ some stupid and static

175 superstition called ‘the external soul.’ But we do not know what these

176 things mean, simply because we do not know what we ourselves mean when

177 we are moved by them. Suppose somebody in a story says ‘Pluck this

178 flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea,’ we do not

179 know why something stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is

180 impossible seems also inevitable. Suppose we read ‘And in the hour when

181 the king extinguished the candle his ships were wrecked far away on the

182 coast of the Hebrides.’ We do not know why the imagination has accepted

183 that image before the reason can reject it; or why such correspondences

184 seem really to correspond to something in the soul. Very deep things in

185 our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small,

186 some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond

187 our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances,

188 and many more emotions past finding out, are in an idea like that of the

189 external soul. The power even in the myths of savages is like the power

190 in the metaphors of poets. The soul of such a metaphor is often very

191 emphatically an external soul. The best critics have remarked that in

192 the best poets the simile is often a picture that seems quite separate

193 from the text. It is as irrelevant as the remote castle to the flower or

194 the Hebridean coast to the candle. Shelley compares the skylark to a

195 young woman in a turret, to a rose embedded in thick foliage, to a

196 series of things that seem to be about as unlike a skylark in the sky as

197 anything we can imagine. I suppose the most potent piece of pure magic

198 in English literature is the much-quoted passage in Keats’s

199 *Nightingale* about the casements opening on the perilous foam. And

200 nobody notices that the image seems to come from nowhere; that it

201 appears abruptly after some almost equally irrelevant remarks about

202 Ruth; and that it has nothing in the world to do with the subject of the

203 poem. If there is one place in the world where nobody could reasonably

204 expect to find a nightingale, it is on a window-sill at the seaside. But

205 it is only in the same sense that nobody would expect to find a giant’s

206 heart in a casket under the sea. Now, it would be very dangerous to

207 classify the metaphors of the poets. When Shelley says that the cloud

208 will rise ‘like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,’ it

209 would be quite possible to call the first a case of the coarse primitive

210 birth-myth and the second a survival of the ghost-worship which became

211 ancestor-worship. But it is the wrong way of dealing with a cloud; and

212 is liable to leave the learned in the condition of Polonius, only too

213 ready to think it like a weasel, or very like a whale.

214 Two facts follow from this psychology of day-dreams, which must be kept

215 in mind throughout their development in mythologies and even religions.

216 First, these imaginative impressions are often strictly local. So far

217 from being abstractions turned into allegories, they are often images

218 almost concentrated into idols. The poet feels the mystery of a

219 particular forest; not of the science of afforestation or the department

220 of woods and forests. He worships the peak of a particular mountain, not

221 the abstract idea of altitude. So we find the god is not merely water

222 but often one special river; he may be the sea because the sea is single

223 like a stream; the river that runs round the world. Ultimately doubtless

224 many deities are enlarged into elements; but they are something more

225 than omnipresent. Apollo does not merely dwell wherever the sun shines;

226 his home is on the rock of Delphi. Diana is great enough to be in three

227 places at once, earth and heaven and hell, but greater is Diana of the

228 Ephesians. This localised feeling has its lowest form in the mere fetish

229 or talisman, such as millionaires put on their motor-cars. But it can

230 also harden into something like a high and serious religion, where it is

231 connected with high and serious duties; into the gods of the city or

232 even the gods of the hearth.

233 The second consequence is this: that in these pagan cults there is every

234 shade of sincerity—and insincerity. In what sense exactly did an

235 Athenian really think he had to sacrifice to Pallas Athene? What scholar

236 is really certain of the answer? In what sense did Dr. Johnson really

237 think that he had to touch all the posts in the street or that he had to

238 collect orange-peel? In what sense does a child really think that he

239 ought to step on every alternate paving-stone? Two things are at least

240 fairly clear. First, in simpler and less self-conscious times these

241 forms could become more solid without really becoming more serious.

242 Day-dreams could be acted in broad daylight, with more liberty of

243 artistic expression; but still perhaps with something of the light step

244 of the somnambulist. Wrap Dr. Johnson in an antique mantle, crown him

245 (by his kind permission) with a garland, and he will move in state under

246 those ancient skies of morning; touching a series of sacred posts

247 carved with the heads of the strange terminal gods, that stand at the

248 limits of the land and of the life of man. Make the child free of the

249 marbles and mosaics of some classic temple, to play on a whole floor

250 inlaid with squares of black and white; and he will willingly make this

251 fulfilment of his idle and drifting day-dream the clear field for a

252 grave and graceful dance. But the posts and the paving-stones are little

253 more and little less real than they are under modern limits. They are

254 not really much more serious for being taken seriously. They have the

255 sort of sincerity that they always had; the sincerity of art as a symbol

256 that expresses very real spiritualities under the surface of life. But

257 they are only sincere in the same sense as art; not sincere in the same

258 sense as morality. The eccentric’s collection of orange-peel may turn to

259 oranges in a Mediterranean festival or to golden apples in a

260 Mediterranean myth. But they are never on the same plane with the

261 difference between giving the orange to a blind beggar and carefully

262 placing the orange-peel so that the beggar may fall and break his leg.

263 Between these two things there is a difference of kind and not of

264 degree. The child does not think it wrong to step on the paving-stone as

265 he thinks it wrong to step on the dog’s tail. And it is very certain

266 that whatever jest or sentiment or fancy first set Johnson touching the

267 wooden posts, he never touched wood with any of the feeling with which

268 he stretched out his hands to the timber of that terrible tree, which

269 was the death of God and the life of man.

270 As already noted, this does not mean that there was no reality or even

271 no religious sentiment in such a mood. As a matter of fact the Catholic

272 Church has taken over with uproarious success the whole of this popular

273 business of giving people local legends and lighter ceremonial

274 movements. In so far as all this sort of paganism was innocent and in

275 touch with nature, there is no reason why it should not be patronised by

276 patron saints as much as by pagan gods. And in any case there are

277 degrees of seriousness in the most natural make-believe. There is all

278 the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which

279 often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really

280 frightening ourselves until we will walk a mile rather than pass a house

281 we have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact

282 that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real

283 spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to

284 stir the deep things of the soul. We all understand that and the pagans

285 understood it. The point is that paganism did not really stir the soul

286 except with these doubts and fancies; with the consequence that we

287 to-day can have little beyond doubts and fancies about paganism. All the

288 best critics agree that all the greatest poets, in pagan Hellas for

289 example, had an attitude towards their gods which is quite queer and

290 puzzling to men in the Christian era. There seems to be an admitted

291 conflict between the god and the man; but everybody seems to be doubtful

292 about which is the hero and which is the villain. This doubt does not

293 merely apply to a doubter like Euripides in the Bacchae; it applies to a

294 moderate conservative like Sophocles in the Antigone; or even to a

295 regular Tory and reactionary like Aristophanes in the Frogs. Sometimes

296 it would seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence,

297 only they had nobody to revere. But the point of the puzzle is this:

298 that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole

299 thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of

300 architecture for a castle in the clouds.

301 This is the mighty and branching tree called mythology which ramifies

302 round the whole world, whose remote branches under separate skies bear

303 like coloured birds the costly idols of Asia and the half-baked fetishes

304 of Africa and the fairy kings and princesses of the folk-tales of the

305 forests, and buried amid vines and olives the Lares of the Latins, and

306 carried on the clouds of Olympus the buoyant supremacy of the gods of

307 Greece. These are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has

308 no sympathy with men. But he who has most sympathy with myths will most

309 fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense

310 that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of the

311 needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain

312 things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and

313 formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar, they do not

314 provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say ‘I believe in

315 Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,’ etc., as he stands up and says ‘I believe

316 in God the Father Almighty’ and the rest of the Apostles’ Creed. Many

317 believed in some and not in others, or more in some and less in others,

318 or only in a very vague poetical sense in any. There was no moment when

319 they were all collected into an orthodox order which men would fight and

320 be tortured to keep intact. Still less did anybody ever say in that

321 fashion: ‘I believe in Odin and Thor and Freya,’ for outside Olympus

322 even the Olympian order grows cloudy and chaotic. It seems clear to me

323 that Thor was not a god at all but a hero. Nothing resembling a religion

324 would picture anybody resembling a god as groping like a pigmy in a

325 great cavern, that turned out to be the glove of a giant. That is the

326 glorious ignorance called adventure. Thor may have been a great

327 adventurer; but to call him a god is like trying to compare Jehovah with

328 Jack and the Beanstalk. Odin seems to have been a real barbarian chief,

329 possibly of the Dark Ages after Christianity. Polytheism fades away at

330 its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing

331 like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy

332 the need to cry out on some uplifted name or some noble memory in

333 moments that are themselves noble and uplifted; such as the birth of a

334 child or the saving of a city. But the name was so used by many to whom

335 it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially

336 satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of

337 surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring

338 out wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of

339 sacrifice. It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage to

340 the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast our

341 dubious pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land. This deep truth

342 of the danger of insolence, or being too big for our boots, runs through

343 all the great Greek tragedies and makes them great. But it runs side by

344 side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the real nature of the

345 gods to be propitiated. Where that gesture of surrender is most

346 magnificent, as among the great Greeks, there is really much more idea

347 that the man will be the better for losing the ox than that the god will

348 be the better for getting it. It is said that in its grosser forms there

349 are often actions grotesquely suggestive of the god really eating the

350 sacrifice. But this fact is falsified by the error that I put first in

351 this note on mythology. It is misunderstanding the psychology of

352 day-dreams. A child pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will

353 do a crude and material thing, like leaving a piece of cake for him. A

354 poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like bringing to the

355 god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of *seriousness* in both

356 acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude

357 fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the

358 pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes

359 like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses

360 and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown

361 god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break

362 in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had

363 ignorantly worshipped.

364 The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an

365 attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in

366 its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to the

367 view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even

368 in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an

369 afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a

370 few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise

371 them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality

372 the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle

373 till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk

374 as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and

375 religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that

376 ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been

377 any such union of the priests and the philosophers. Mythology, then,

378 sought God through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty,

379 in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque

380 ugliness. But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its own

381 triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can understand. It

382 remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand

383 extravagances, through every crude cosmic pantomime of a pig eating the

384 moon or the world being cut out of a cow, through all the dizzy

385 convolutions and mystic malformations of Asiatic art, through all the

386 stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, through

387 every kind of cracked mirror of mad art that seemed to deform the world

388 and displace the sky, it remained true to something about which there

389 can be no argument; something that makes it possible for some artist of

390 some school to stand suddenly still before that particular deformity and

391 say, ‘My dream has come true.’ Therefore do we all in fact feel that

392 pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are

393 wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what

394 is meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a

395 pessimist or progressive person explains what it means. Therefore we all

396 know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this

397 sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only

398 because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems. Imagination has its own

399 laws and triumphs; and a tremendous power began to clothe its images,

400 whether images in the mind or in the mud, whether in the bamboo of the

401 South Sea Islands or the marble of the mountains of Hellas. But there

402 was always a trouble in the triumph, which in these pages I have tried

403 to analyse in vain; but perhaps I might in conclusion state it thus.

404 The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even

405 natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be

406 stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and

407 beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller

408 when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship

409 would stunt and even maim him for ever. Henceforth being merely secular

410 would be a servitude and an inhibition. If man cannot pray he is gagged;

411 if he cannot kneel he is in irons. We therefore feel throughout the

412 whole of paganism a curious double feeling of trust and distrust. When

413 the man makes the gesture of salutation and of sacrifice, when he pours

414 out the libation or lifts up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy

415 and a virile thing. He knows he is doing one of the things for which a

416 man was made. His imaginative experiment is therefore justified. But

417 precisely because it began with imagination, there is to the end

418 something of mockery in it, and especially in the object of it. This

419 mockery, in the more intense moments of the intellect, becomes the

420 almost intolerable irony of Greek tragedy. There seems a disproportion

421 between the priest and the altar or between the altar and the god. The

422 priest seems more solemn and almost more sacred than the god. All the

423 order of the temple is solid and sane and satisfactory to certain parts

424 of our nature; except the very centre of it, which seems strangely

425 mutable and dubious, like a dancing flame. It is the first thought round

426 which the whole has been built; and the first thought is still a fancy

427 and almost a frivolity. In that strange place of meeting, the man seems

428 more statuesque than the statue. He himself can stand for ever in the

429 noble and natural attitude of the statue of the Praying Boy. But

430 whatever name be written on the pedestal, whether Zeus or Ammon or

431 Apollo, the god whom he worships is Proteus.

432 The Praying Boy may be said to express a need rather than to satisfy a

433 need. It is by a normal and necessary action that his hands are lifted;

434 but it is no less a parable that his hands are empty. About the nature

435 of that need there will be more to say; but at this point it may be said

436 that perhaps after all this true instinct, that prayer and sacrifice are

437 a liberty and an enlargement, refers back to that vast and

438 half-forgotten conception of universal fatherhood, which we have already

439 seen everywhere fading from the morning sky. This is true; and yet it is

440 not all the truth. There remains an indestructible instinct, in the poet

441 as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localising

442 his god. It is something in the soul of poetry if not of piety. And the

443 greatest of poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us

444 the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger

445 language, a local habitation and a name. No poet is merely a pantheist;

446 those who are counted most pantheistic, like Shelley, start with some

447 local and particular image as the pagans did. After all, Shelley wrote

448 of the skylark because it was a skylark. You could not issue an imperial

449 or international translation of it for use in South Africa, in which it

450 was changed to an ostrich. So the mythological imagination moves as it

451 were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In

452 a word, mythology is a *search*; it is something that combines a

453 recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity

454 in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and

455 mysterious levity about all the places found. So far could the lonely

456 imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely reason. Nowhere

457 along this road did the two ever travel together.

458 That is where all these things differed from religion in the reality in

459 which these different dimensions met or a sort of solid. They differed

460 from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were. A

461 picture may look like a landscape; it may look in every detail exactly

462 like a landscape. The only detail in which it differs is that it is not

463 a landscape. The difference is only that which divides a portrait of

464 Queen Elizabeth from Queen Elizabeth. Only in this mythical and mystical

465 world the portrait could exist before the person; and the portrait was

466 therefore more vague and doubtful. But anybody who has felt and fed on

467 the atmosphere of these myths will know what I mean when I say that in

468 one sense they did not really profess to be realities. The pagans had

469 dreams about realities; and they would have been the first to admit, in

470 their own words, that some came through the gate of ivory and others

471 through the gate of horn. The dreams do indeed tend to be very vivid

472 dreams when they touch on those tender or tragic things, which can

473 really make a sleeper awaken with the sense that his heart has been

474 broken in his sleep. They tend continually to hover over certain

475 passionate themes of meeting and parting, of a life that ends in death

476 or a death that is the beginning of life. Demeter wanders over a

477 stricken world looking for a stolen child; Isis stretches out her arms

478 over the earth in vain to gather the limbs of Osiris; and there is

479 lamentation upon the hills for Atys and through the woods for Adonis.

480 There mingles with all such mourning the mystical and profound sense

481 that death can be a deliverer and an appeasement; that such death gives

482 us a divine blood for a renovating river and that all good is found in

483 gathering the broken body of the god. We may truly call these

484 foreshadowings; so long as we remember that foreshadowings are shadows.

485 And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that

486 is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces

487 shape but not texture. These things were something *like* the real

488 thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were

489 different. Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is

490 not a dog; and it is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man.

491 Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being; nobody really thought of

492 Demeter as a historical character; nobody thought of Adonis as the

493 founder of a Church. There was no idea that any one of them had changed

494 the world; but rather that their recurrent death and life bore the sad

495 and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the world. Not one of them

496 was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of the sun and

497 moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean the

498 shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue. In certain

499 sacrificial and communal aspects they naturally suggest what sort of a

500 god might satisfy men; but they do not profess to be satisfied. Any one

501 who says they do is a bad judge of poetry.

502 Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism than

503 with Christianity. Those who call these cults ‘religions,’ and ‘compare’

504 them with the certitude and challenge of the Church have much less

505 appreciation than we have of what made heathenism human, or of why

506 classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

507 It is no very human tenderness for the hungry to prove that hunger is

508 the same as food. It is no very genial understanding of youth to argue

509 that hope destroys the need for happiness. And it is utterly unreal to

510 argue that these images in the mind, admired entirely in the abstract,

511 were even in the same world with a living man and a living polity that

512 were worshipped because they were concrete. We might as well say that a

513 boy playing at robbers is the same as a man in his first day in the

514 trenches; or that a boy’s first fancies about ‘the not impossible she’

515 are the same as the sacrament of marriage. They are fundamentally

516 different exactly where they are superficially similar; we might almost

517 say they are not the same even when they are the same. They are only

518 different because one is real and the other is not. I do not mean merely

519 that I myself believe that one is true and the other is not. I mean that

520 one was never meant to be true in the same sense as the other. The sense

521 in which it was meant to be true I have tried to suggest vaguely here,

522 but it is undoubtedly very subtle and almost indescribable. It is so

523 subtle that the students who profess to put it up as a rival to our

524 religion miss the whole meaning and purport of their own study. We know

525 better than the scholars, even those of us who are no scholars, what was

526 in that hollow cry that went forth over the dead Adonis and why the

527 Great Mother had a daughter wedded to death. We have entered more deeply

528 than they into the Eleusinian Mysteries and have passed a higher grade,

529 where gate within gate guarded the wisdom of Orpheus. We know the

530 meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the

531 perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet

532 saying, ‘These things are.’ It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist

533 crying, ‘Why cannot these things be?’

CHAPTER VI

25 THE DEMONS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS

26 I have dwelt at some little length on this imaginative sort of paganism,

27 which has crowded the world with temples and is everywhere the parent of

28 popular festivity. For the central history of civilisation, as I see it,

29 consists of two further stages before the final stage of Christendom.

30 The first was the struggle between this paganism and something less

31 worthy than itself, and the second the process by which it grew in

32 itself less worthy. In this very varied and often very vague polytheism

33 there was a weakness of original sin. Pagan gods were depicted as

34 tossing men like dice; and indeed they are loaded dice. About sex

35 especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born

36 mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity. This

37 disproportion dragged down the winged fancies; and filled the end of

38 paganism with a mere filth and litter of spawning gods. But the first

39 point to realise is that this sort of paganism had an early collision

40 with another sort of paganism; and that the issue of that essentially

41 spiritual struggle really determined the history of the world. In order

42 to understand it we must pass to a review of the other kind of paganism.

43 It can be considered much more briefly; indeed, there is a very real

44 sense in which the less that is said about it the better. If we have

45 called the first sort of mythology the day-dream, we might very well

46 call the second sort of mythology the nightmare.

47 Superstition recurs in all ages, and especially in rationalistic ages. I

48 remember defending the religious tradition against a whole

49 luncheon-table of distinguished agnostics; and before the end of our

50 conversation every one of them had procured from his pocket, or

51 exhibited on his watch-chain, some charm or talisman from which he

52 admitted that he was never separated. I was the only person present who

53 had neglected to provide himself with a fetish. Superstition recurs in a

54 rationalist age because it rests on something which, if not identical

55 with rationalism, is not unconnected with scepticism. It is at least

56 very closely connected with agnosticism. It rests on something that is

57 really a very human and intelligible sentiment, like the local

58 invocations of the *numen* in popular paganism. But it is an agnostic

59 sentiment, for it rests on two feelings: first that we do not really

60 know the laws of the universe; and second that they may be very

61 different from all that we call reason. Such men realise the real truth

62 that enormous things do often turn upon tiny things. When a whisper

63 comes, from tradition or what not, that one particular tiny thing is the

64 key or clue, something deep and not altogether senseless in human nature

65 tells them that it is not unlikely. This feeling exists in both the

66 forms of paganism here under consideration. But when we come to the

67 second form of it, we find it transformed and filled with another and

68 more terrible spirit.

69 In dealing with the lighter thing called mythology, I have said little

70 about the most disputable aspect of it; the extent to which such

71 invocation of the spirits of the sea or the elements can indeed call

72 spirits from the vasty deep; or rather (as the Shakespearean scoffer put

73 it) whether the spirits come when they are called. I believe that I am

74 right in thinking that this problem, practical as it sounds, did not

75 play a dominant part in the poetical business of mythology. But I think

76 it even more obvious, on the evidence, that things of that sort have

77 sometimes appeared, even if they were only appearances. But when we

78 come to the world of superstition, in a more subtle sense, there is a

79 shade of difference; a deepening and a darkening shade. Doubtless most

80 popular superstition is as frivolous as any popular mythology. Men do

81 not believe as a dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt at them for

82 walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the not

83 very laborious exercise of walking round it. There is no more in it than

84 what I have already adumbrated; a sort of airy agnosticism about the

85 possibilities of so strange a world. But there is another sort of

86 superstition that does definitely look for results; what might be called

87 a realistic superstition. And with that the question of whether spirits

88 do answer or do appear becomes much more serious. As I have said, it

89 seems to me pretty certain that they sometimes do; but about that there

90 is a distinction that has been the beginning of much evil in the world.

91 Whether it be because the Fall has really brought men nearer to less

92 desirable neighbours in the spiritual world, or whether it is merely

93 that the mood of men eager or greedy finds it easier to imagine evil, I

94 believe that the black magic of witchcraft has been much more practical

95 and much less poetical than the white magic of mythology. I fancy the

96 garden of the witch has been kept much more carefully than the woodland

97 of the nymph. I fancy the evil field has even been more fruitful than

98 the good. To start with, some impulse, perhaps a sort of desperate

99 impulse, drove men to the darker powers when dealing with practical

100 problems. There was a sort of secret and perverse feeling that the

101 darker powers would really do things; that they had no nonsense about

102 them. And indeed that popular phrase exactly expresses the point. The

103 gods of mere mythology had a great deal of nonsense about them. They had

104 a great deal of good nonsense about them; in the happy and hilarious

105 sense in which we talk of the nonsense of Jabberwocky or the Land where

106 the Jumblies live. But the man consulting a demon felt as many a man

107 has felt in consulting a detective, especially a private detective: that

108 it was dirty work but the work would really be done. A man did not

109 exactly go into the wood to meet a nymph; he rather went with the hope

110 of meeting a nymph. It was an adventure rather than an assignation. But

111 the devil really kept his appointments and even in one sense kept his

112 promises; even if a man sometimes wished afterwards, like Macbeth, that

113 he had broken them.

114 In the accounts given us of many rude or savage races we gather that the

115 cult of demons often came after the cult of deities, and even after the

116 cult of one single and supreme deity. It may be suspected that in almost

117 all such places the higher deity is felt to be too far off for appeal in

118 certain petty matters, and men invoke the spirits because they are in a

119 more literal sense familiar spirits. But with the idea of employing the

120 demons who get things done, a new idea appears more worthy of the

121 demons. It may indeed be truly described as the idea of being worthy of

122 the demons; of making oneself fit for their fastidious and exacting

123 society. Superstition of the lighter sort toys with the idea that some

124 trifle, some small gesture such as throwing the salt, may touch the

125 hidden spring that works the mysterious machinery of the world. And

126 there is after all something in the idea of such an Open Sesame. But

127 with the appeal to lower spirits comes the horrible notion that the

128 gesture must not only be very small but very low; that it must be a

129 monkey trick of an utterly ugly and unworthy sort. Sooner or later a man

130 deliberately sets himself to do the most disgusting thing he can think

131 of. It is felt that the extreme of evil will extort a sort of attention

132 or answer from the evil powers under the surface of the world. This is

133 the meaning of most of the cannibalism in the world. For most

134 cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is

135 artificial and even artistic; a sort of art for art’s sake. Men do not

136 do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary,

137 because they do think it horrible. They wish, in the most literal sense,

138 to sup on horrors. That is why it is often found that rude races like

139 the Australian natives are not cannibals; while much more refined and

140 intelligent races, like the New Zealand Maories, occasionally are. They

141 are refined and intelligent enough to indulge sometimes in a

142 self-conscious diabolism. But if we could understand their minds, or

143 even really understand their language, we should probably find that they

144 were not acting as ignorant, that is as innocent cannibals. They are not

145 doing it because they do not think it wrong, but precisely because they

146 do think it wrong. They are acting like a Parisian decadent at a Black

147 Mass. But the Black Mass has to hide underground from the presence of

148 the real Mass. In other words, the demons have really been in hiding

149 since the coming of Christ on earth. The cannibalism of the higher

150 barbarians is in hiding from the civilisation of the white man. But

151 before Christendom, and especially outside Europe, this was not always

152 so. In the ancient world the demons often wandered abroad like dragons.

153 They could be positively and publicly enthroned as gods. Their enormous

154 images could be set up in public temples in the centre of populous

155 cities. And all over the world the traces can be found of this striking

156 and solid fact, so curiously overlooked by the moderns who speak of all

157 such evil as primitive and early in evolution, that as a matter of fact

158 some of the very highest civilisations of the world were the very places

159 where the horns of Satan were exalted, not only to the stars but in the

160 face of the sun.

161 Take for example the Aztecs and American Indians of the ancient empires

162 of Mexico and Peru. They were at least as elaborate as Egypt or China

163 and only less lively than that central civilisation which is our own.

164 But those who criticise that central civilisation (which is always their

165 own civilisation) have a curious habit of not merely doing their

166 legitimate duty in condemning its crimes, but of going out of their way

167 to idealise its victims. They always assume that before the advent of

168 Europe there was nothing anywhere but Eden. And Swinburne, in that

169 spirited chorus of the nations in ‘Songs before Sunrise,’ used an

170 expression about Spain in her South American conquests which always

171 struck me as very strange. He said something about ‘her sins and sons

172 through sinless lands dispersed,’ and how they ‘made accursed the name

173 of man and thrice accursed the name of God.’ It may be reasonable enough

174 that he should say the Spaniards were sinful, but why in the world

175 should he say that the South Americans were sinless? Why should he have

176 supposed that continent to be exclusively populated by archangels or

177 saints perfect in heaven? It would be a strong thing to say of the most

178 respectable neighbourhood; but when we come to think of what we really

179 do know of that society the remark is rather funny. We know that the

180 sinless priests of this sinless people worshipped sinless gods, who

181 accepted as the nectar and ambrosia of their sunny paradise nothing but

182 incessant human sacrifice accompanied by horrible torments. We may note

183 also in the mythology of this American civilisation that element of

184 reversal or violence against instinct of which Dante wrote; which runs

185 backwards everywhere through the unnatural religion of the demons. It is

186 notable not only in ethics but in aesthetics. A South American idol was

187 made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as

188 possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards

189 against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a

190 sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red

191 timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a

192 cracked mirror.

193 In any case it is clear enough that the painted and gilded civilisation

194 of tropical America systematically indulged in human sacrifice. It is by

195 no means clear, so far as I know, that the Eskimos ever indulged in

196 human sacrifice. They were not civilised enough. They were too closely

197 imprisoned by the white winter and the endless dark. Chill penury

198 repressed their noble rage and froze the genial current of the soul. It

199 was in brighter days and broader daylight that the noble rage is found

200 unmistakably raging. It was in richer and more instructed lands that the

201 genial current flowed on the altars, to be drunk by great gods wearing

202 goggling and grinning masks and called on in terror or torment by long

203 cacophonous names that sound like laughter in hell. A warmer climate and

204 a more scientific cultivation were needed to bring forth these blooms;

205 to draw up towards the sun the large leaves and flamboyant blossoms that

206 gave their gold and crimson and purple to that garden, which Swinburne

207 compares to the Hesperides. There was at least no doubt about the

208 dragon.

209 I do not raise in this connection the special controversy about Spain

210 and Mexico; but I may remark in passing that it resembles exactly the

211 question that must in some sense be raised afterwards about Rome and

212 Carthage. In both cases there has been a queer habit among the English

213 of always siding against the Europeans, and representing the rival

214 civilisation, in Swinburne’s phrase, as sinless; when its sins were

215 obviously crying or rather screaming to heaven. For Carthage also was a

216 high civilisation, indeed a much more highly civilised civilisation. And

217 Carthage also founded that civilisation on a religion of fear, sending

218 up everywhere the smoke of human sacrifice. Now it is very right to

219 rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards

220 and ideals. But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the

221 other races and religions that professed the very opposite standards and

222 ideals. There is a very real sense in which the Christian is worse than

223 the heathen, the Spaniard worse than the Red Indian, or even the Roman

224 potentially worse than the Carthaginian. But there is only one sense in

225 which he is worse; and that is not in being positively worse. The

226 Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better.

227 This inverted imagination produces things of which it is better not to

228 speak. Some of them indeed might almost be named without being known;

229 for they are of that extreme evil which seems innocent to the innocent.

230 They are too inhuman even to be indecent. But without dwelling much

231 longer in these dark corners, it may be noted as not irrelevant here

232 that certain anti-human antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of

233 black magic. There may be suspected as running through it everywhere,

234 for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would

235 understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they

236 remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was

237 preventing the birth of children. The Hebrew prophets were perpetually

238 protesting against the Hebrew race relapsing into an idolatry that

239 involved such a war upon children; and it is probable enough that this

240 abominable apostasy from the God of Israel has occasionally appeared in

241 Israel since, in the form of what is called ritual murder; not of course

242 by any representative of the religion of Judaism, but by individual and

243 irresponsible diabolists who did happen to be Jews. This sense that the

244 forces of evil especially threaten childhood is found again in the

245 enormous popularity of the Child Martyr of the Middle Ages. Chaucer did

246 but give another version of a very national English legend, when he

247 conceived the wickedest of all possible witches as the dark alien woman

248 watching behind her high lattice and hearing, like the babble of a brook

249 down the stony street, the singing of little St. Hugh.

250 Anyhow the part of such speculations that concerns this story centred

251 especially round that eastern end of the Mediterranean where the nomads

252 had turned gradually into traders and had begun to trade with the whole

253 world. Indeed in the sense of trade and travel and colonial extension,

254 it already had something like an empire of the whole world. Its purple

255 dye, the emblem of its rich pomp and luxury, had steeped the wares which

256 were sold far away amid the last crags of Cornwall and the sails that

257 entered the silence of tropic seas amid all the mystery of Africa. It

258 might be said truly to have painted the map purple. It was already a

259 world-wide success, when the princes of Tyre would hardly have troubled

260 to notice that one of their princesses had condescended to marry the

261 chief of some tribe called Judah; when the merchants of its African

262 outpost would only have curled their bearded and Semitic lips with a

263 slight smile at the mention of a village called Rome. And indeed no two

264 things could have seemed more distant from each other, not only in space

265 but in spirit, than the monotheism of the Palestinian tribe and the very

266 virtues of the small Italian republic. There was but one thing between

267 them; and the thing which divided them has united them. Very various and

268 incompatible were the things that could be loved by the consuls of Rome

269 and the prophets of Israel; but they were at one in what they hated. It

270 is very easy in both cases to represent that hatred as something merely

271 hateful. It is easy enough to make a merely harsh and inhuman figure

272 either of Elijah raving above the slaughter of Carmel or Cato thundering

273 against the amnesty of Africa. These men had their limitations and their

274 local passions; but this criticism of them is unimaginative and

275 therefore unreal. It leaves out something, something immense and

276 intermediate, facing east and west and calling up this passion in its

277 eastern and western enemies; and that something is the first subject of

278 this chapter.

279 The civilisation that centred in Tyre and Sidon was above all things

280 practical. It has left little in the way of art and nothing in the way

281 of poetry. But it prided itself upon being very efficient; and it

282 followed in its philosophy and religion that strange and sometimes

283 secret train of thought which we have already noted in those who look

284 for immediate effects. There is always in such a mentality an idea that

285 there is a short cut to the secret of all success; something that would

286 shock the world by this sort of shameless thoroughness. They believed,

287 in the appropriate modern phrase, in people who delivered the goods. In

288 their dealings with their god Moloch, they themselves were always

289 careful to deliver the goods. It was an interesting transaction, upon

290 which we shall have to touch more than once in the rest of the

291 narrative; it is enough to say here that it involved the theory I have

292 suggested about a certain attitude towards children. This was what

293 called up against it in simultaneous fury the servant of one God in

294 Palestine and the guardians of all the household gods in Rome. This is

295 what challenged two things naturally so much divided by every sort of

296 distance and disunion, whose union was to save the world.

297 I have called the fourth and final division of the spiritual elements

298 into which I should divide heathen humanity by the name of The

299 Philosophers. I confess that it covers in my mind much that would

300 generally be classified otherwise; and that what are here called

301 philosophies are very often called religions. I believe however that my

302 own description will be found to be much the more realistic and not the

303 less respectful. But we must first take philosophy in its purest and

304 clearest form that we may trace its normal outline; and that is to be

305 found in the world of the purest and clearest outlines, that culture of

306 the Mediterranean of which we have been considering the mythologies and

307 idolatries in the last two chapters.

308 Polytheism, or that aspect of paganism, was never to the pagan what

309 Catholicism is to the Catholic. It was never a view of the universe

310 satisfying all sides of life; a complete and complex truth with

311 something to say about everything. It was only a satisfaction of one

312 side of the soul of man, even if we call it the religious side; and I

313 think it is truer to call it the imaginative side. But this it did

314 satisfy; in the end it satisfied it to satiety. All that world was a

315 tissue of interwoven tales and cults, and there ran in and out of it, as

316 we have already seen, that black thread among its more blameless

317 colours: the darker paganism that was really diabolism. But we all know

318 that this did not mean that all pagan men thought of nothing but pagan

319 gods. Precisely because mythology only satisfied one mood, they turned

320 in other moods to something totally different. But it is very important

321 to realise that it was totally different. It was too different to be

322 inconsistent. It was so alien that it did not clash. While a mob of

323 people were pouring on a public holiday to the feast of Adonis or the

324 games in honour of Apollo, this or that man would prefer to stop at home

325 and think out a little theory about the nature of things. Sometimes his

326 hobby would even take the form of thinking about the nature of God; or

327 even in that sense about the nature of the gods. But he very seldom

328 thought of pitting his nature of the gods against the gods of nature.

329 It is necessary to insist on this abstraction in the first student of

330 abstractions. He was not so much antagonistic as absent-minded. His

331 hobby might be the universe; but at first the hobby was as private as if

332 it had been numismatics or playing draughts. And even when his wisdom

333 came to be a public possession, and almost a political institution, it

334 was very seldom on the same plane as the popular and religious

335 institutions. Aristotle, with his colossal common sense, was perhaps the

336 greatest of all philosophers; certainly the most practical of all

337 philosophers. But Aristotle would no more have set up the Absolute side

338 by side with the Apollo of Delphi, as a similar or rival religion, than

339 Archimedes would have thought of setting up the Lever as a sort of idol

340 or fetish to be substituted for the Palladium of the city. Or we might

341 as well imagine Euclid building an altar to an isosceles triangle, or

342 offering sacrifices to the square on the hypotenuse. The one man

343 meditated on metaphysics as the other man did on mathematics; for the

344 love of truth or for curiosity or for the fun of the thing. But that

345 sort of fun never seems to have interfered very much with the other sort

346 of fun; the fun of dancing or singing to celebrate some rascally romance

347 about Zeus becoming a bull or a swan. It is perhaps the proof of a

348 certain superficiality and even insincerity about the popular

349 polytheism, that men could be philosophers and even sceptics without

350 disturbing it. These thinkers could move the foundations of the world

351 without altering even the outline of that coloured cloud that hung above

352 it in the air.

353 For the thinkers did move the foundations of the world; even when a

354 curious compromise seemed to prevent them from moving the foundations of

355 the city. The two great philosophers of antiquity do indeed appear to us

356 as defenders of sane and even of sacred ideas; their maxims often read

357 like the answers to sceptical questions too completely answered to be

358 always recorded. Aristotle annihilated a hundred anarchists and

359 nature-worshipping cranks by the fundamental statement that man is a

360 political animal. Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism,

361 as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally

362 fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men

363 exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist

364 as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered where

365 they conflict with the ideas. He had something of the social sentiment

366 that we call Fabian in his ideal of fitting the citizen to the city,

367 like an imaginary head to an ideal hat; and great and glorious as he

368 remains, he has been the father of all faddists. Aristotle anticipated

369 more fully the sacramental sanity that was to combine the body and the

370 soul of things; for he considered the nature of men as well as the

371 nature of morals, and looked to the eyes as well as to the light. But

372 though these great men were in that sense constructive and conservative,

373 they belonged to a world where thought was free to the point of being

374 fanciful. Many other great intellects did indeed follow them, some

375 exalting an abstract vision of virtue, others following more

376 rationalistically the necessity of the human pursuit of happiness. The

377 former had the name of Stoics; and their name has passed into a proverb

378 for what is indeed one of the main moral ideals of mankind: that of

379 strengthening the mind itself until it is of a texture to resist

380 calamity or even pain. But it is admitted that a great number of the

381 philosophers degenerated into what we still call sophists. They became a

382 sort of professional sceptics who went about asking uncomfortable

383 questions, and were handsomely paid for making themselves a nuisance to

384 normal people. It was perhaps an accidental resemblance to such

385 questioning quacks that was responsible for the unpopularity of the

386 great Socrates; whose death might seem to contradict the suggestion of

387 the permanent truce between the philosophers and the gods. But Socrates

388 did not die as a monotheist who denounced polytheism; certainly not as a

389 prophet who denounced idols. It is clear to any one reading between the

390 lines that there was some notion, right or wrong, of a purely personal

391 influence affecting morals and perhaps politics. The general compromise

392 remained; whether it was that the Greeks thought their myths a joke or

393 that they thought their theories a joke. There was never any collision

394 in which one really destroyed the other, and there was never any

395 combination in which one was really reconciled with the other. They

396 certainly did not work together; if anything the philosopher was a

397 rival of the priest. But both seemed to have accepted a sort of

398 separation of functions and remained parts of the same social system.

399 Another important tradition descends from Pythagoras; who is significant

400 because he stands nearest to the Oriental mystics who must be considered

401 in their turn. He taught a sort of mysticism of mathematics, that number

402 is the ultimate reality; but he also seems to have taught the

403 transmigration of souls like the Brahmins; and to have left to his

404 followers certain traditional tricks of vegetarianism and water-drinking

405 very common among the eastern sages, especially those who figure in

406 fashionable drawing-rooms, like those of the later Roman Empire. But in

407 passing to eastern sages, and the somewhat different atmosphere of the

408 East, we may approach a rather important truth by another path.

409 One of the great philosophers said that it would be well if philosophers

410 were kings, or kings were philosophers. He spoke as of something too

411 good to be true; but, as a matter of fact, it not unfrequently was true.

412 A certain type, perhaps too little noticed in history, may really be

413 called the royal philosopher. To begin with, apart from actual royalty,

414 it did occasionally become possible for the sage, though he was not what

415 we call a religious founder, to be something like a political founder.

416 And the great example of this, one of the very greatest in the world,

417 will with the very thought of it carry us thousands of miles across the

418 vast spaces of Asia to that very wonderful and in some ways that very

419 wise world of ideas and institutions, which we dismiss somewhat cheaply

420 when we talk of China. Men have served many very strange gods; and

421 trusted themselves loyally to many ideals and even idols. China is a

422 society that has really chosen to believe in intellect. It has taken

423 intellect seriously; and it may be that it stands alone in the world.

424 From a very early age it faced the dilemma of the king and the

425 philosopher by actually appointing a philosopher to advise the king. It

426 made a public institution out of a private individual, who had nothing

427 in the world to do but to be intellectual. It had and has, of course,

428 many other things on the same pattern. It creates all ranks and

429 privileges by public examination; it has nothing that we call an

430 aristocracy; it is a democracy dominated by an intelligentsia. But the

431 point here is that it had philosophers to advise kings; and one of those

432 philosophers must have been a great philosopher and a great statesman.

433 Confucius was not a religious founder or even a religious teacher;

434 possibly not even a religious man. He was not an atheist; he was

435 apparently what we call an agnostic. But the really vital point is that

436 it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his religion at all. It is like

437 talking of theology as the first thing in the story of how Rowland Hill

438 established the postal system or Baden Powell organised the Boy Scouts.

439 Confucius was not there to bring a message from heaven to humanity, but

440 to organise China; and he must have organised it exceedingly well. It

441 follows that he dealt much with morals; but he bound them up strictly

442 with manners. The peculiarity of his scheme, and of his country, in

443 which it contrasts with its great pendant the system of Christendom, is

444 that he insisted on perpetuating an external life with all its forms,

445 that outward continuity might preserve internal peace. Any one who knows

446 how much habit has to do with health, of mind as well as body, will see

447 the truth in his idea. But he will also see that the ancestor-worship

448 and the reverence for the Sacred Emperor were habits and not creeds. It

449 is unfair to the great Confucius to say he was a religious founder. It

450 is even unfair to him to say he was not a religious founder. It is as

451 unfair as going out of one’s way to say that Jeremy Bentham was not a

452 Christian martyr.

453 But there is a class of most interesting cases in which philosophers

454 were kings, and not merely the friends of kings. The combination is not

455 accidental. It has a great deal to do with this rather elusive question

456 of the function of the philosopher. It contains in it some hint of why

457 philosophy and mythology seldom came to an open rupture. It was not only

458 because there was something a little frivolous about the mythology. It

459 was also because there was something a little supercilious about the

460 philosopher. He despised the myths, but he also despised the mob; and

461 thought they suited each other. The pagan philosopher was seldom a man

462 of the people, at any rate in spirit; he was seldom a democrat and often

463 a bitter critic of democracy. He had about him an air of aristocratic

464 and humane leisure; and his part was most easily played by men who

465 happened to be in such a position. It was very easy and natural for a

466 prince or a prominent person to play at being as philosophical as

467 Hamlet, or Theseus in the *Midsummer Night’s Dream*. And from very early

468 ages we find ourselves in the presence of these princely intellectuals.

469 In fact, we find one of them in the very first recorded ages of the

470 world; sitting on that primeval throne that looked over ancient Egypt.

471 The most intense interest of the incident of Akhenaten, commonly called

472 the Heretic Pharaoh, lies in the fact that he was the one example, at

473 any rate before Christian times, of one of these royal philosophers who

474 set himself to fight popular mythology in the name of private

475 philosophy. Most of them assumed the attitude of Marcus Aurelius, who is

476 in many ways the model of this sort of monarch and sage. Marcus Aurelius

477 has been blamed for tolerating the pagan amphitheatre or the Christian

478 martyrdoms. But it was characteristic; for this sort of man really

479 thought of popular religion just as he thought of popular circuses. Of

480 him Professor Phillimore has profoundly said ‘a great and good man—and

481 he knew it.’ The Heretic Pharaoh had a philosophy more earnest and

482 perhaps more humble. For there is a corollary to the conception of being

483 too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the

484 fighting. Anyhow, the Egyptian prince was simple enough to take his own

485 philosophy seriously, and alone among such intellectual princes he

486 affected a sort of *coup d’état*; hurling down the high gods of Egypt

487 with one imperial gesture and lifting up for all men, like a blazing

488 mirror of monotheistic truth, the disc of the universal sun. He had

489 other interesting ideas often to be found in such idealists. In the

490 sense in which we speak of a Little Englander he was a Little Egypter.

491 In art he was a realist because he was an idealist; for realism is more

492 impossible than any other ideal. But after all there falls on him

493 something of the shadow of Marcus Aurelius; stalked by the shadow of

494 Professor Phillimore. What is the matter with this noble sort of prince

495 is that he has nowhere quite escaped being something of a prig.

496 Priggishness is so pungent a smell that it clings amid the faded spices

497 even to an Egyptian mummy. What was the matter with the Heretic Pharaoh,

498 as with a good many other heretics, was that he probably never paused to

499 ask himself whether there was *anything* in the popular beliefs and

500 tales of people less educated than himself. And, as already suggested,

501 there was something in them. There was a real human hunger in all that

502 element of feature and locality, that procession of deities like

503 enormous pet animals, in that unwearied watching at certain haunted

504 spots, in all the mazy wandering of mythology. Nature may not have the

505 name of Isis; Isis may not be really looking for Osiris. But it is true

506 that Nature is really looking for something. Nature is always looking

507 for the supernatural. Something much more definite was to satisfy that

508 need; but a dignified monarch with a disc of the sun did not satisfy it.

509 The royal experiment failed amid a roaring reaction of popular

510 superstitions, in which the priests rose on the shoulders of the people

511 and ascended the throne of the kings.

512 The next great example I shall take of the princely sage is Gautama, the

513 great Lord Buddha. I know he is not generally classed merely with the

514 philosophers; but I am more and more convinced, from all information

515 that reaches me, that this is the real interpretation of his immense

516 importance. He was by far the greatest and the best of these

517 intellectuals born in the purple. His reaction was perhaps the noblest

518 and most sincere of all the resultant actions of that combination of

519 thinkers and of thrones. For his reaction was renunciation. Marcus

520 Aurelius was content to say, with a refined irony, that even in a palace