The Everlasting Man

There are three great mysteries that still remain and that no philosopher can deny: the origins of the universe, the origins of life, and the origins of the human being. Wrapped up in these mysteries are “numberless allusions to a popular character called a Cave-Man” (35). This man in the cave is most well-known for his ability to create artwork on the walls of caves, and no other records remain of who or what this individual happened to be, or do, or think.

The drawings on the cave walls, however, are evidence enough that this being was a human person. And, as human nature is the same now as it ever was, the existence of this artwork is enough to demonstrate that even before there existed historical records, there existed rational, civilized men and women. Based on this evidence alone the author insists that “man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here” (49). Artwork is uniquely human, and thus human beings are not purely natural creatures like other animals.

Human beings make progress in a way that no other animal does. Take the bird, for example—the “very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind” (56). There is something wholly singular about the human creature, a fact that needs to be apprehended and acknowledged at the outset of this investigation.

History cannot be judged in the same mode as an empirical science, as it cannot be experimented upon: “In dealing with a past that has almost entirely perished, [the historian] can only go by evidence and not by experiment” (62). One of the difficulties of this field is that “Human civilisation is older than human records” (68), and thus the popular narrative of how humanity evolved is colored by biases and preconceived notions of what early human beings were like.

The very earliest human records offer no evidence that early human beings were savage, cruel, or barbaric. Even the paintings in the caves tell us very little, since cannot tell why they were created or what they mean. We cannot even infer that the earliest human beings lived in these caves—perhaps they were simply places of leisure or happenstance.

Another popular narrative is that religion slowly grew out of some “coincidence” (76); the author argues that it is much more rather that human beings have always had a religious feeling within the very deepest parts of themselves, sometimes only accessible in dreams, for “[w]ho does not find dreams mysterious, and feel that they lie on the dark borderland of being?” (79).

Chesterton concludes:

Prehistoric men [were] exactly like men and men exceedingly like ourselves. They only happened to be men about whom we do not know much, for the simple reason that they have left no records or chronicles; but all that we do know about them makes them just as human and ordinary as men in a medieval manor or a Greek city (87).

The ordinariness of human beings throughout every age of human history is fundamental to our understanding of human nature and to our understanding of what it means to be a human. As natural as humanity might be, it is actually wholly unlike the rest of the animal kingdom.

The ancient civilizations of Egypt and Babylon attest to the fact that even the oldest societies for which we have extensive records were quite advanced. Civilization as we think of it is thus remarkably unremarkable—assumptions to the contrary are nonsense. Wells and those who agree with him also accuse earlier societies of despotism, but this is absurd: “If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism [is] very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic” (101). Tyranny is often evidence of a civilized and highly decadent society, and the success of a despot is often due simply to an apathetic culture.

In fact, “our most ancient records only reach back to a time when humanity had long been human, and even long been civilized” (107), and there is no record of there being a time when humanity was anything but. Hypotheses might be made, but they are baseless assumptions. Cultures deemed barbaric and violent have always existed, this is true, but always alongside and concurrently with other civilizations that would be considered cultured, advanced, and progressive.

This book hopes to overturn the “vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations, and which has made fashionable a false notion of the whole history of humanity” (128). History of primitive times and peoples often simply caricatures them to the point of absurdity.

The Christian church is a singular institution and cannot be compared with other religions, which offer no parallel to the claims made by Christianity. After the advent of Christianity, the alternatives are only pale imitations.

Paganism shows that religion did not develop slowly over time, but rather gradually diminished: “religion did not originally come from some detail that was forgotten, because it was too small to be traced. Much more probably it was an idea that was abandoned because it was too large to be managed” (162-63). This makes sense because religion is so grand and transcendent that it necessarily shrinks over time as human beings grow apathetic. This explains why some ancient Aboriginal belief systems held to a strict monotheism long before any shift to polytheism.

The feeling that there is a higher power is intrinsic to humans. Ancient Judaism, in many ways, was the guardian of this sentiment through the vast ages that span the ancient world, and “the world’s destiny would have been distorted still more fatally if monotheism had failed in the Mosaic tradition” (183). A system that claims to worship the source of all existence as God is better than any system that claims to worship one (or more) among many gods. The difference between monotheism and polytheism is not just “some people having one god and others a few more” (188)—rather, it is the difference between the truth and a convoluted cosmology.