Why on earth not? Are superstition and speculation absent from wild hunters as we know them to-day? Would they be absent from us if we turned to wild hunting again? Why should they be?
The only answer is that common sense and plain fact must not be admitted, because they would interfere with a preconceived theory that religion was an illusion coming late in the human story. The palæolithic hunter must be free from the taint of religion. The religious illusion must come far on in the development in order that it may be associated at its origin with ritual murder and known savage customs. Yet the same writer is perpetually telling us that religious ideas are of bestial origin and came from the brutal cruelty to females and young of an aged monkey-like fellow myriads of years before the palæolithic hunters existed.
There is here a complete lack of consecutive thought. Religion began long before men were men, says Mr. Wells; yet there is no trace of it when men first were men! And then again (in a separate and contradictory proposition) religion began, very late, with the neolithic culture.
But indeed in his necessity for forcing facts to fit theory he makes a hash of palæolithic man from beginning to end. We have seen in how extraordinary a fashion he stretches fact to fit theory in the matter of palæolithic burial. Let us see now how he stretches it to fit theory in the matter of palæolithic art.
Mr. Wells says, on page 53, of the men who made the cave drawings (palæolithic men), that they “drew with increasing skill as the centuries passed.” He says that because he thinks they ought to have done so according to all the Darwinian dogma of slow, minute, mechanical evolution. The plain fact is that they did not. Their painting followed a cycle precisely like that which the painting of higher cultures has followed: it sprang suddenly, or very rapidly, into existence as a vivid, intense realization of the thing drawn. It sank into mere convention and then disappeared.
The more I look into Mr. Wells’s book, the more I find this characteristic straining of facts to meet a mythological doctrine and neglect of facts (or, to be more charitable, ignorance of facts) which might upset theory.
Thus, I find, on page 47, “with regard to the cave drawings there is scarcely anything we can suppose to be a religious or mystical symbol at all,” and he argues throughout this page that the cave drawings had no religious signification.
There are only two possible explanations of so strange a remark. One is that Mr. Wells knew the evidence and suppressed it. The other is the much more probable one, that his reading is too slight for him to be acquainted even with the main lines of the evidence.
We can prove that the latter, more charitable, explanation is the true one. That the cave drawings were religious in character everybody now knows—except, apparently, Mr. Wells—from two discovered characters. First, a large proportion of them are in the very depths and recesses of dark passages—sometimes deliberately obstructed—where they could have had no utilitarian or merely artistic object. But apart from this we have, secondly, the famous Phallic Dance, at Cogul, which is conclusively ritual, in garment and circle and all else.
I have a further right to conclude that Mr. Wells was simply ignorant of the evidence, and not merely shirking it, from his confused writing upon details not religious. Upon page 55 he writes, concerning the palæolithic men of the cave drawings, this sentence, “It is doubtful if they knew of the bow.”