The Everlasting ManChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The Everlasting Man
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Catholic Church -- Apologetic works; Christianity and other religions; Religion
I will take one example to serve for an introduction to the story of
man. It illustrates what I mean by saying that a certain childish
directness is needed to see the truth about the childhood of the world.
It illustrates what I mean by saying that a mixture of popular science
and journalistic jargon has confused the facts about the first things,
so that we cannot see which of them really comes first. It illustrates,
though only in one convenient illustration, all that I mean by the
necessity of seeing the sharp differences that give its shape to
history, instead of being submerged in all these generalisations about
slowness and sameness. For we do indeed require, in Mr. Wells’s phrase,
an outline of history. But we may venture to say, in Mr. Mantalini’s
phrase, that this evolutionary history has no outline or is a demd
outline. But, above all, it illustrates what I mean by saying that the
more we really look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one.
To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with
numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems
to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a
private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in
psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can
understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or
treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of
the film as ‘rough stuff.’ I have never happened to come upon the
evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or
prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained
elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even
considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or
authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down
before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an
almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to
insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I
repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude,
the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been
a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than
the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the
hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or
shindy. The cave-man may have been no better than the cave-bear; but the
child she-bear, so famous in hymnology, is not trained with any such
bias for spinsterhood. In short, these details of the domestic life of
the cave puzzle me upon either the evolutionary or the static
hypothesis; and in any case I should like to look into the evidence for
them; but unfortunately I have never been able to find it. But the
curious thing is this: that while ten thousand tongues of more or less
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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