ical and
legitimate; and they all converge. The only objection to them (I
discover) is that they are all untrue. If you leave off looking at books
about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if
you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the
farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man
is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his
divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is,
in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so
insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands
is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having
hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or
the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of
barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build
colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint
even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many
camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees
have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilisation; but
that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilisation. Who
ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants?
Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of
old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural
explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the
only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are
tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic,
either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason
for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is
exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

It would be the same if I examined the second of the three chance
rationalist arguments; the argument that all that we call divine began
in some darkness and terror. When I did attempt to examine the
foundations of this modern idea I simply found that there were none.
Science knows nothing whatever about pre-historic man; for the excellent
reason that he is pre-historic. A few professors choose to conjecture
that such things as human sacrifice were once innocent and general and
that they gradually dwind