er that the true tide and force of all the facts flows
the other way. Let us take cases. Many a sensible modern man
must have abandoned Christianity under the pressure of three such
converging convictions as these: first, that men, with their shape,
structure, and sexuality, are, after all, very much like beasts,
a mere variety of the animal kingdom; second, that primeval religion
arose in ignorance and fear; third, that priests have blighted societies
with bitterness and gloom. Those three anti-Christian arguments
are very different; but they are all quite logical 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 civilization; but that very truth
only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. 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 o