When I first read that sentence, I was so staggered I could hardly believe that I had read it right.
I have already confessed to a native inaccuracy in detail. I often have to read a thing several times to be certain I have not missed anything. I often skip a modifying phrase or word. I went carefully over several pages to make certain that I had not overlooked any qualifying term. But no. There was the thing in black and white.
It was the more extraordinary because here before me, in Mr. Wells’s own book, were reproductions of these cave paintings with the bow and arrow appearing all over them!
We have the clear statement that later palæolithic men—who knew not the bow nor domestic animals nor tillage—were succeeded by another culture which knew all these things, and that can only mean the neolithic culture. Yet, after saying this, Mr. Wells remembers, or is told, that, after all there were palæolithic men who used the bow and made pictures of it. So he devotes a section to them, contradicting what he has just said. It is as though a man wishing to deny the Red Indians were to say “They did not know the horse, but were succeeded by a new culture of white men who did.” But having said that (and allowed his publisher to illustrate the remark with a picture of a Red Indian on horseback!) were to add a supplementary chapter saying, “By the way, before they disappeared they did get the horse.”
Mr. Wells would not have written thus if he had not been driven by the necessity of denying facts which did not fit in with his theology.
What is the point of saying that the cave painters, who made their drawings so often under conditions obviously religious, and who painted an unmistakable religious ceremonial dance, had “as yet no religion”? What is the motive producing so absurd a saying as that later palæolithic men did not know the bow and arrow which they painted so clearly, and then, as an afterthought, bringing in palæolithic men who did know the bow and arrow? What is the driving force which makes a man write—in the teeth of the evidence—that this art arose very gradually from rude beginnings and progressed—instead of declining (as, in fact, it did)?
What is the point of saying that Neanderthal man may have spoken (may have spoken! A man who made instruments, lit fires and buried his dead!)? Or why add that he had “nothing we should call language”? (On which point neither Mr. Wells nor any other man has the least information and which on the face of it is wildly improbable.)
The answer is that you have to imagine facts without evidence, you have also to distort facts, you have also to suppress them if you are to present to your readers a childishly simple scheme of regular and, above all, slow “progress.”
You must make Early Man last as long as possible and be as base as possible. If the facts will not fit in with that very slow process of development, which was felt (stupidly enough!) to make a Creator less necessary, so much the worse for the facts. Such very slow advance, unconscious, of imperceptible degrees—mechanical—such prolonged bestiality in true man, was dogma with all cultured people thirty or forty years ago. It is still dogma with Mr. Wells. Being dogma, and dogma divorced from reason, the facts must give way to it.
Or turn to the origins of Sacrifice. We come at the outset on the very true remark that the killing of a man is a very violent and striking act. But immediately after we find the quite false remark that such ritual murder would be “naturally” associated with any propitiatory offer. Mr. Wells at once proceeds to postulate this horrible perversion as a universal human action and a precursor of all religion. He has no basis for that at all. It is made up, not indeed by him, but by the older men whom he copies—the writers who were authorities half a lifetime ago, notably Frazer.