THE EVERLASTING MAN
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sin,—It seems that Mr. Alan Porter in reviewing at some length Mr. Cliesterton's The Beerkisting Man has athipted a not unusual method of selecting points from the work under review as convenient stages in a personal thesis. The occasion has apparently afforded Mr. Potter an opportunity for the expression of a religious belief involving a hostile attitude to the evolutionary theories of Darwinians. In writing thus, Mr. Porter makes certain statements so astonishing in the twentieth century that I feel they should not pass without question.
Firstly : one point of scientific accuracy. Mr. Porter says : " To this day we can tell from a skeleton, a single fragment of bone, whether it belonged to man or to ape : to this day we have discovered no intermediate species, not the slightest trace of a debatable form." In face of that it is well to recall the uncertainty that existed, and still exists, over the roof of a skull, two molar teeth and a thighbone found by Professor Dubois in a river deposit of either late Pliocene or early Pleistocene age at Trinil in Java. Some, amongst them the discoverer, allege them to be those of a very low type of man, others those of a gibbon similar to the gibbons which now inhabit the country. Mr. Porter continues " Darwinians pre-suppose a connexion, and yet the connexion never gives a sign of having existed." Though all are conscious of an immense gulf between man and the ape, yet it is fair to acknowledge that some signs of a bridge from the man side are beginning to appear. All the skulls discovered (mostly subsequent to Darwin) of man in remote ages are nearer in structure to the skull of the ape than is that of modern man. What is remarkable about the Piltdown skull (beginning of the Pleistocene period) is that the structure of the jaw is something between that of a chimpanzee and man, though of course nearer to man. The skull of the Australian aborigines with its prominent superciliary ridges and receding frontal bone might well be the later stages of development from the ape to civilized man.
As an example of the " utmost stupidity of heresy," Mi. Porter cites the assertion " that religion has evolved from superstition." We have yet to learn that it has not. Lord Avebury in his Origin of Civilisation presents a wealth of evidence to show that religion rarely exists among the natives of uncivilized countries. Fear of evil spirits exists which we would all call superstition ; but no beneficent deity is acknowledged, which is to us an essential of religion ; and therein, Lord Avebury suggests, lies the difference between superstition and religion. But how, it may be asked, is belief in an evil spirit any more superstition than the belief in a good spirit ? How is one superstition and the other
religion ? Is the existence of one on any firmer founda- tions than the existence of the -other ?
And so from this hostility to fearless and logical science Mr. Porter resolves his conception of the Deity : " If anyone has forgotten that man is the image of God, he cannot refresh his memory better than by reading The-Everlasting Man." We of the twentieth century (I speak essentially of the spirit of the age) as soon as we began to think for ourselves never knew it to forget it. The whole notion is the Hellenic elaboration of a Hebrew myth. But we discover later that it is not in the Christian genie that Mr. Porter means it but rather in the sense of Shelley's variety of pantheiim. " So God is man. But that truth, that paradox and apocalypse of Christianity, is rejected. God is an abstract man." All else is created from that as the fons et origo, the smaller from the greater. God has no existence apart from man. Go& is mankind. Hence a theology as beautiful and irrational as Comte's. But what of the origin and evolution of man ? If -man and God are identical surely that negatives all real evolution. From whence came this Divinity on earth then ?
And to ask, as Mr. Porter suggests the future writer on evolution should ask, " What is it that has been evolving ? " further than man as we commonly know him, is like asking what is the universe as we gaze at the starlit sky.—I am,
[Mr. Alan Porter writes :—" Java Man walked erect and had the faculty of speech. So much is claimed for him on the evidence of the rootof a skull, two molar teeth and a thighbone. It was disingenuous of Mr. Whittick, by the way, not to give him his accepted name. But this is a matter of great indiffer- ence. It might well be that scientists lit upon a bone of which they could not say whether it was man's or ape's. Nevertheless it seems to me indubitable that it would be either one or the other. What came fresh upon earth with man was the ability to reflect the universe, to know the distinction between self and not-self ; in short he has always been the only microcosm and image of God. 'That ego of man has not changed or evolved ; nor could it be evolved from any animal form. The process of man's own evolution is roughly this— he has been learning to mediate his passions through his self- consciousness into values ; in simple terms, he has been seeking the Kingdom. His difference from animals was always absolute. But I am more concerned by Mr. Whittick's denial of my orthodoxy. If there proves to be anything in what I wrote inconsistent with the Athanasian Creed, then shall humbly and thoroughly recant. But it was disingenuous of Mr. Whittick to represent my opinions by a passage in which I was expounding the errors of Mithraism. I do not hold, and did not state, that God is an abstract man. I do not hold, and did not state, that God is mankind. I hold and state that Christ is the Word and that Christ was man. I see, therefore, that in Christ man is the measure of the universe."—En. Spectator.]
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