The Quest of the Missing Link

I

A FRIEND remarked to me with great disfavor the other day that, what with the magazines bringing their aims and methods ever consciously closer to those of stark journalism, if one picks up a magazine three months old it is like picking up a week-old newspaper; one finds nothing worth reading, still less worth keeping. Reading it is like reading so much ‘dead copy.’ This is no doubt true; and perhaps the worst of it is that it induces a corresponding attitude on the part of readers. They tend to assume that all they find in a magazine was written for the moment, and if by any chance something turns up there that was not written for the moment, they tend to regard it as a mere jeu d’esprit, or as a piece of journalism that has somehow missed its mark and may therefore be passed by.

A little over two years ago there appeared in a popular magazine an article that was not written for the moment.¹ Its title was ‘Why We Do Not Behave Like Human Beings’; its author was the distinguished architect, Mr. Ralph Adams Cram. It ably and plausibly presented what is virtually a brand-new idea about the nature of man and his relation to other forms of life; and the implications of this idea are so great, so far-reaching, and so revolutionary, that if the article had been published thirty-five or forty years ago, when magazines had neither lot nor part with journalism, — when they addressed themselves more to reflective thought and less to mere sensation, — it would have raised a fine breeze from one end of the country to the other.

Things being as they are, however, this article raised no breeze. I observed with considerable astonishment that nobody took it up for rebuttal or even for discussion. In particular, our anthropologists had nothing to say about it, whereas I expected that they would have quite a little to say. My own interest in the subject was presently sharpened by a very remarkable book called Immortability, by Dr. S. D. McConnell, whose incidental findings gave solid support to Mr. Cram’s thesis. Then when the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, came along with his Revolt of the Masses, I saw that this also squinted steadily in Mr. Cram’s direction. Finally, after waiting some time to hear from my betters, I published a brief paper, suggesting that Mr. Cram’s brilliant speculation seemed to be of great practical consequence, and asking the anthropologists to take it up and let us hear about it. This was all that a poor disparaged man of letters could properly do in the premises. Not being one of this present world’s elect, he could not presume to discuss the matter himself; it was not down his street. All he could do was to exercise the right of petition.

The anthropologists, however, paid no attention to my humble overture. Perhaps I should have addressed the psychologists instead, but if so, my mistake was so clearly one of ignorance that a kindly word would have set it right. Perhaps they held it infra dig to encourage secular curiosity; yet it is hard to associate this cavalier attitude with those of them I know — with my old friends Mr. Lowie and Mr. Sapir, for example. What actually happened, I think, was that since my paper, like Mr. Cram’s, was published in a popular magazine, they regarded it as a bit of more or less playfully sensational journalism rather than as an honest inquiry; or, even more probably, that they never saw it.

II

Mr. Cram’s thesis, stated simply, is that most of us do not behave like human beings because most of us are not human beings; not only are not, but never were, and — which is most important — never shall be. The great, the overwhelming majority of us are merely the raw material out of which the occasional human being has been, and still is, produced by an evolutionary process, the exact nature of which is undetermined, but is probably catastrophic. What Dr. McConnell calls ‘the presumption that all those living creatures classed as Man on physical grounds are also Man on psychical grounds’ is simply contrary to fact. The zoölogical classification Homo sapiens is competent for physical structure and function, but no further. Not everyone who answers to Homo sapiens is a human being; in fact, the immense majority are not. Psychically, the human being is a distinct species; and Mr. Cram acutely points out that in our graduated, popular scale of speech our instinct has always led us to classify him as such.

Moreover, Mr. Cram synopsizes ten thousand years of history to the effect that the whole prodigious residue of Homo sapiens, the mass-man,² has never shown, and does not now show, any development worth speaking of in the direction set by the occasional evolutionary product; it has never brought itself a jot nearer the psychical character that differentiates the ‘human’ species, properly so called. Hence the search for what used to be known as the ‘missing link’ (the intercalary form between Homo sapiens and the anthropoids) is not properly in the province of zoölogy, as has hitherto been supposed. In Dr. McConnell’s words, its concern begins not at the point ‘which separates man from brute, but at that which separates one kind of man from the rest.’ Or, as Mr. Cram puts it, ‘the just line of demarcation should be drawn, not between Neolithic Man and the anthropoid ape, but between the . . . human being and the Neolithic mass which was, is now, and ever shall be.’

What moves me to bring this matter up again is the receipt of a letter a few days ago, enclosing a précis of some findings made by a man of science concerning the ‘missing link.’ It would be improper for me to describe them in advance of their publication, if they are to be published, which I presume is the case. There is no impropriety, however, I trust, in my remarking their complete consistency with Mr. Cram’s belief that the missing link is not actually missing at all, nor has ever been, but that it exists in vast numbers everywhere around us, and has always done so. It occurs to me now that if at last a man of science is examining the status of Homo sapiens from this point of view, a layman’s observations on the importance of his quest might be interesting, perhaps even helpful. In my former paper I said as little as possible about, this, because my object was only to ask the men of science for a discussion by which I and the rest of the unlearned might profit; and I thought it was becoming to avoid any appearance of suggesting terms for such a discussion. It now seems that this consideration no longer holds, and I may therefore remark some of the changes, not only in our thought but in our feeling, that are likely to ensue upon the verification of this doctrine of the missing link.

III

In New York last November I left my lodgings uncommonly early one morning, and saw a man salvaging odds and ends out of a garbage barrel. It made a most painful impression on me; the memory of it still persists. Half a block away I saw a dog engaged in the same occupation; it did not impress me painfully. As it happened, neither object was, in the ordinary sense, especially pitiable. The man’s clothes were as warm as mine and not much shabbier, and he did not seem weak or broken or dejected. He was not old, fairly healthy, fairly strong, fairly cheerful-looking, and I thought his general condition was pretty good; and I could say the same of the dog.

What differentiated my view of these two objects was a sense that the dog was living up to the measure of his own capacities, while the man was not. In the one case I had no sense of a comedown from a higher spiritual estate, while in the other I had. I also felt that the man had been somehow estopped from regaining this estate, and I had no such feeling towards the dog. Hence I could sentimentalize the one case, and not the other. I was governed, in short, by the presumption that the man was a human being, and the certainty that the dog was not. Such indeed, I hasten to add, may the man have been. As Mr. Cram is careful to show, the occasional human being often, in fact pretty regularly, lives and dies in poverty and neglect. It is most important to remember that no test of this kind is applicable, nor are the tests set by the conventional criteria of intelligence; the only competent test is psychical. Still, while the man I saw may have been a human being by Mr. Cram’s classification, the probabilities are so strongly the other way that this proviso may be dismissed. Well, then, if Mr. Cram is right, one’s feeling for the man would obviously change, not in strength or quality, but in kind. Abstract the sense of a human estate from which one may fall, and to which one may revert, and I would regard the man quite as I would the dog; that is, with every wish for his well-being and happiness, and every repugnance to his mistreatment or abuse, but nothing more.

Most forms of humanitarian enterprise seem to me to hang upon the belief that the evolution of humanity is progressive rather than catastrophic, that zoölogical man is also psychical man, and that he is psychically capable of indefinite improvement, provided conditions are right; and with this goes, as a kind of corollary, the belief that ‘society’ is responsible for the wrongness of conditions, and therefore responsible for the arrest of his spiritual development. Given favorable conditions, — economic security, proper food and housing, more leisure, better education, better cultural opportunities, and so on, — the ‘Neolithic mass’ which Mr. Cram says has lain spiritually inert for ten thousand years to our knowledge, and no one may say how much longer, will show itself capable of spiritual mass-development to an indefinite degree; logically, perhaps (granted the further postulate of indefinite time), to a degree as high as the highest now known.

This perfectionist doctrine is highly respectable; one might almost call it official. Many of us would say, at least officially, that they believe in it, and no doubt some of us actually do. The modern institutional church is based on it, and our leading social reformers have accepted it, apparently without question. With Henry George, for example, this belief served as his only spring of action. His crusade for economic freedom was for nothing but what he regarded as the first and indispensable condition of spiritual massprogress. It may be observed that, although we have done more with this doctrine in a practical way than has been done in any other country, the results, so far, are not convincing; but, on the other hand, it is perhaps a little early yet to measure results, and one must also allow for the effect of many and powerful countervailing influences. If it could be shown beyond doubt, however, that this belief is without foundation, that the Neolithic mass is incapable of humanizing itself under whatever conditions, I think our whole code of humanitarian practice would be revised. It would still be important that the Neolithic mass should have every chance and encouragement towards such development as its subhuman capacities indicate as possible, because, while not itself human, it is the raw material out of which the human being is occasionally produced; but any effort to encourage an impossible spiritual development would appear at once as useless.

One may observe in passing that there is perhaps some significance in the fact that just this revision appears to be taking place. I have no notion of carrying ammunition to feed Mr. Cram’s artillery, but I fancy he has already found some evidential value in the estimate that the Neolithic mass puts upon its own spiritual capacities, as shown in the rationale of the institutions it creates. There can be no doubt, I think, that Western society at large is now purely an organization of the Neolithic mass, that all its institutions reflect the ideals and aspirations of the mass, and that therefore these may be taken as showing pretty clearly what the mass thinks of itself. I can discern in them no intimation that it thinks of itself as more than zoölogically human; no intimation of man as ‘a creature of a large discourse, looking before and after,’ but rather as concerned first and last with what Saint Paul calls the ϵ̕πίγϵια — his god is his belly. The mass-organization here, as in Italy, Russia, Germany, appears to contemplate no attribute that might not be taken on mimetically from the massorganization of ants, bees, beavers, wolves, and extended in a purely quantitative fashion. The qualitative difference, or psychical ‘spread,’ between the highest and lowest forms of Homo sapiens — between Confucius, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and the Akka, the bushman, the tropical pygmy — is far greater than between these latter and the anthropoid; and there is nothing to show that the mass-organization consciously contemplates a reduction of that spread. The estimate of Homo sapiens that appears, for instance, in official Hitlerism, Bolshevism, Fascism, and the New Deal, is set forth in terms that are strictly non-psychical; one might say, in sheer terms of food, shelter, training, and amusement. In just such terms, it seems to me, might the dog I saw the other day give an account of his species, if one could but somehow dig the information out of him.

On the score of a deep sensibility, therefore, the issue raised by Mr. Cram appears to be important. As I said, there are some of us who still hold to the early-Victorian universalist doctrine that all men, even the bushman, even the Akka, are psychically differentiated as a distinct species, capable of an improved and strengthened psychical life; and this belief is the basis of our humanitarian disposition. If it be shown that this belief is illusory, the ground will be cleared between us and the accepted interpreters of the Neolithic mass, and we may give ourselves and them the benefit, whatever it amounts to, of a definite common understanding.

IV

From the point of view of politics it seems equally important that Mr. Cram’s thesis should be either verified or exploded. The doctrine of popular sovereignty, as set forth by Mr. Jefferson in the Declaration, has now pretty well covered the Western world. Mostly in form, largely in fact, the State has almost everywhere become republican. It stands, as always, an all-powerful engine for the distribution of economic advantage, and republicanism has made it the pliant organ of such segments of the Neolithic mass as can get at it, one after another, and work it for their own behoof, and for the disservice of extruded segments. The whole history of republicanism in America might be summed up as a record of violent collisions among segments of the mass, incurred in the headlong effort to get at this machine and pull its levers. During the earlier post-war period, for example, Mr. Bottles, Mr. Plugson of Undershot, Mr. Murdstone, Mr. Ralph Nickleby, and Mr. Arthur Gride managed the machine, and were, as we say, ‘getting theirs’; and now another segment has shouldered them aside, and Mr. Micawber, Mr. Quinion, Jacques Bonhomme, Couche-tout-nu, and Gougele-Bruant are by way of getting theirs.³

Surveying the upshot of all this as it appears at the moment, I think one must admit that republicanism has made rather a mess of things. Mr. Cram puts it mournfully that ‘we confront a situation so irrational and apparently hopeless of solution that there is not a scientist, a politician, an industrialist, a financier, a philosopher or a parson, who has the faintest idea how we got that way, or how we are to get out of it.’ This is as it may be. We content ourselves with observing that the record of republicanism bears witness to very little that is human in the character of the Neolithic mass. It is, in fact, a record of continuous, reciprocal, and progressive corruption between Homo sapiens and the State. The Neolithic mass corrupts the State, and in turn the State still further corrupts the Neolithic mass; and this brings about a general condition which appears to be increasingly difficult and unsatisfactory, as well as increasingly repulsive and degrading.

There are two ways of regarding this state of things, and which of the two we take depends entirely upon the answer we give to this very question whether the Neolithic mass is psychically improvable, or whether in literal truth, as Alexander Hamilton said, ‘the people is a great beast.’ For my own part, I think it is improvable, and therefore I am a republican. I admit that Mr. Cram has shaken me up frightfully, and also that all the evidence available, every scrap of it, positive and negative, looks straight his way. Yet, perhaps because I am too old a dog to learn any new tricks, I must still put myself down, at least provisionally, as a Jeffersonian and Georgite of sorts. Unless the anthropologists come out with something pretty substantial, I may in time, probably shall, go over to the opposition; but as yet I have not done so. My expectations, doubtless, run to a much more distant future than Mr. Jefferson’s or Mr. George’s, but I am still, perhaps quite irrationally, on their side.

This is in itself of no consequence; I mention it only to account for my conviction that all of us who think — or think we think — as I do should be staunch republicans. If the mass be improvable, it may be expected ultimately to work out for itself a satisfactory mode of political self-expression, and obviously the only way to that lies through a free and unlimited succession of trial and error; and when all comes to all, this is precisely what republicanism means. Therefore those who think that the mass is psychically capable of sometime getting itself somewhere are all for giving the mass its head, and taking the untoward incidental consequences as best one can. Such messes as we are now in are quite as difficult and deplorable as Mr. Cram depicts them, but they are part of the process, and we accept them philosophically as a test of faith, quite aware that in the nature of things there will be many more and far worse messes to be put up with before the millennial end is reached.

Therefore, with the great example of Socrates always before our eyes, we are strongly against any attempt to interfere with the political self-direction of the Neolithic mass, and especially chary about offering any advice to clear and aid it when it has got itself in circumstances of unusual difficulty. When Socrates was charged with being a bad citizen because he took no part in Athenian public affairs — which were in an extremely poor way just then — he replied good-humoredly that this only proved that he and his followers were the very best politicians in Athens. We do not even discountenance the peculiarly despicable type of political leadership that the mass accepts by an inveterate choice as old as the days of Moses and Aristides; for how is the mass to make progress in spiritual discernment save through a long course of intensive bilking and dragooning? In short, we are against any attempt at interference with orderly causation. Emerson calls cause and effect ‘the chancellors of God,’ and we have too wary a respect for them ever to hoodwink ourselves with the notion that an officious tampering with their sequences can possibly turn out well in the long run. Bishop Butler gave our disingenuous race a great lesson in the fundamental integrities when he said that ‘things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why, then, should we desire to be deceived?’

Hence, when Señor Ortega y Gasset declares that mass-control and massoperation of the State are at present ruinous, we quite agree with him. When we are told that a general domination by the mass is bringing Western civilization to an appalling end, we quite agree. When we are told that a recurrence of the Dark Ages is at hand, we reply that it is highly probable. When, however, in the face of these prospects, we are invited to abjure republicanism and take up with this or that anti-republican nostrum in order to avert them, we say that we cannot possibly contemplate doing anything of the kind. Joubert’s dictum of ‘force till right is ready’ is attractive, but specious. If applied ably and disinterestedly as a political emergencydoctrine, it is with a view so much beyond the mass’s power of perception that the sense of tutelage resents it and in the end nullifies it; and if applied otherwise, it merely anæsthetizes the mass’s sense of responsibility, with the result that right either is never ready or, if perchance ready, is repressed and overborne. Republicanism holds it as axiomatic that the only permanent good that can be worked out for the mass — the only good which does not indirectly cost more than it comes to — is what it works out on its own.

Sub specie œternitatis, the recurrent wreck of civilizations is an incident in the progress of the Neolithic mass towards collective self-improvement. Recurrent dark ages are the interval in which the mass’s self-preserving instinct scrabbles around, and cobbles up the beginnings of a new civilization. As Mr. Cram observes, these recurrences have taken place repeatedly; no doubt they will take place again and again until the Neolithic mass has learned how to manage something like a satisfactory collective life for itself. The mass, if human, learns in the only way human beings can learn, by experience; and these recurrences represent experience, and are to be regarded and respected accordingly.

But if the mass be not human, and therefore not psychically improvable, the case is very different. Republicanism is then preposterous in theory, and monstrously vicious in practice. A political system based on the principles of the Declaration is by hypothesis doomed to rapid degeneration and quick dissolution. The mass-man then is to be regarded, as Mr. Cram says he should be, as only the raw material out of which the occasional human being is produced, and, aside from this, as having no political value or respectability whatever. An ideal political system would take no account of him in any other capacity. He would be the political ward of a human oligarchy; not exploited, not discouraged from any enterprise lying within the purview of his faculties, but in all respects treated with exclusive reference to the occasional human product that in some uncomprehended fashion he brings forth.

Any such system as this is so obviously impracticable that the mere mention of it seems absurd. The political ascendency of the Neolithic mass is now everywhere overwhelming, it cannot be checked, nor can the preponderance of the mass be broken up. Hence, while by our first hypothesis republicanism’s distressing mess is bad enough, it is not hopeless; whereas, by our second, it is. Neither on this mess nor on those worse messes which naturally must ensue can one predicate anything but a progressive degeneration from which there is neither escape nor recovery. Republicanism is a doctrine of mass-preponderance, pure and simple; and by our second hypothesis, masspreponderance means the political extinction of the human being, and the calculated subversion of any but a purely animal instinct or intention in the conduct of public affairs.

At Athens, in Plato’s time, the Neolithic mass was in the saddle with a vengeance, as it was at Rome in the time of Marcus Aurelius; and both these worthies surveyed the scene with a sense of great despondency and helplessness. Half-lettered persons nowadays say they find an unpleasant affectation and priggishness in Marcus Aurelius’s view of his fellow-Romans, but such persons either simply do not know what sort of folk those Romans were, or else are incapable of understanding how the quality of their collective life would impress a human being. Historians tell us that their views of life and their demands on life were exactly what one sees reflected in the professedly ‘smart’ publications of the present day. With all that might be said for it, — and as much might be said for it as Juvenal says for the collective life of certain animals, — their collective life showed no trace whatever of a specifically human quality.

Plato, in his middle years, raised the question of what the human being can do with himself under such circumstances. He anticipated Alexander Hamilton in likening the Neolithic mass to a pack of wild beasts. The human being, he says, cannot make himself one of them; and if he expose himself to them, they will smell him out and destroy him; and there are not enough of him to resist them effectively. All he can do, ‘like a man sheltering himself behind a wall against a hurricane,’ is to keep out of their way, cultivate his own virtues as best he can, and wait quietly for the inevitable end.

This end came so quickly to Athens that Plato lived to see it. The story is worth a digression. Plato lived into the administration of Eubulus; he was an old man then. Now, this Eubulus stands perhaps unmatched in history as a type and pattern of the best there is in Neolithic political mass-leadership. He was one of the ablest politicians that ever lived. A most attractive public figure, his manners were charming, his temper unvarying, his smile indelible, and his bearing always showed the most pleasing admixture of informality and easy dignify. His ambitions wore the guise of public spirit, he was a first-class executive, a good financier, and a tireless worker. He was immensely popular, and his administration, which lasted something over fifteen years, was to all appearances quite successful. If the human being, or the ‘lover of virtue,’ as Plato calls him, could find no good word to say for such political leadership as this, the Athenians might have thought he was hard to suit. But for all that, the end of Eubulus’s administration was also the end of Athens.

’Live as on a mountain,’ Marcus Aurelius admonished himself sadly. Well, if the Neolithic mass be really what it appears to be when seen in the twilight of Athens and of Rome, that is about the best a human being can do.

V

If Mr. Cram’s thesis could be made to hold water, it would enforce a radical change upon one’s whole social outlook. Philosophical anarchism, with its profound belief in the essential goodness of Homo sapiens, becomes less than tenable; it becomes grotesque. The inflated ideas of Homo sapiens ‘in a state of nature,’ as put forth by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, are mere wind and confusion. Any moral quality that has been associated with the various forms of collectivism vanishes at once; and the doctrine of natural rights, proclaimed by Mr. Jefferson, is attenuated well-nigh to the disappearing-point. Human beings may conceivably be endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights as against one another; and by some slight stretching of terms the Neolithic mass may be said to have certain natural rights as against the human being; but terms will hardly stretch far enough to let us make out, on Mr. Cram’s thesis, that members and segments of the mass have any natural rights as against one another. It is interesting to observe that the massinstinct seems to attest this difficulty, for it has become a cardinal point of doctrine with the mass-interpreters that Homo sapiens has no natural rights whatever, but that all his rights are of social origin, and therefore purely provisional.

All this means that the human being may be easily reconciled to many of his present circumstances that in his former view seemed intolerably depressing. For example, when judged by the Jeffersonian estimate of man’s nature and capacities, the course of mass-education under a republican régime is about as bad as it can be, but no question it matches the mass’s estimate of its own capacities extremely well. Quite inappropriate to human attributes, it answers admirably to the mass’s attributes, as Mr. Cram describes them. Hence the human being may excuse himself from expostulating with the mass, or from trying to foist an alien ideal and alien methods upon it, since he sees that in an educational way the mass is doing very well as it is, and since he is aware also that the mass is incapable of understanding his admonitions or carrying out his suggestions, and is therefore instinctively indisposed to entertain either. Instead, he recalls the example of Socrates, and the austere words of the Santissimo Salvatore,⁴ and devotes all his energies to the humbler task of continually clearing and educating himself.

Thus, too, in a great many other directions the human being’s sense of social responsibility is similarly simplified. If he be proved a psychical alien in a Neolithic civilization, he will survey most of the aspects and social phenomena of that civilization from an alien point of view, and reconcile himself to them as lying wholly within the order of nature, and hence beyond not only his power of interference, but his right and duty of interference as well. In this frame of mind he may edify himself by sometimes observing how sound the Neolithic mass-instinct almost always is, from its characteristic short-time point of view on its own designs, and how much more competent in the premises its suggestions are than a good Jeffersonian would like to think them. For example, the massinterpreters say that war is an indispensable regulatory provision of what they call ‘human nature’; and those of us who have lived through a war have remarked the bedlamite enthusiasm with which the mass-instinct bears this view out. The Jeffersonian and Georgite regard this demonstration as sheer insanity, and if it reflected a human instinct, they would be right. But clearly, if the Neolithic mass be not human, its instinct is as sound as that of any group of anthropoids in the jungle. The onslaught of war is inexorable, it is as strictly within the order of nature as the precession of the equinoxes, and the human being regards it as the hero of Bret Harte’s story regarded the onslaught of the bulls of the Blessed Trinity.

VI

Discussing Mr. Cram’s thesis the other day, a clerical friend who knows Mr. Cram very well, and whose sense of humor is hung on a hair-trigger, said to me, ‘What a thundering joke it would be if Ralph Cram and the anthropologists should bring old John Calvin back!’ In view of Mr. Cram’s vast distaste for Calvin, in which I fully concur, it would be rather amusing if his own thesis should clear the ground for a neo-Calvinist doctrine of predestination and election. Something of the sort seems possible. It is in the realm of religion, perhaps, that the Neolithic mass gives the most downright account of itself. By all his works and ways, the mass-man gives himself out as a non-religious being; well, possibly again his instinct is sound. In the nature of things, according to Mr. Cram, that is quite what he would be. The general temper of his civilization, as Dr. McConnell observes, is especially strong, for example, against the idea of a persistence of psychical life after physical death, an idea with which religion concerns itself considerably; well, again that is quite what one would expect.

Dr. McConnell most logically suggests that the consideration of persistence should not begin where traditional theology begins it, — that is, at the point of differentiation between Homo sapiens and the anthropoids, — but at the point of differentiation between psychical Man and zoölogical Man; or, as Mr. Cram might put it, between the human being and the Neolithic raw material out of which the human being is now and then brought forth. This seems reasonable, for it is fair to presume that, if psychical man were a distinct species, this species would be the only one to have any experience of a kind of life with which the idea of persistence could at all plausibly be associated. Therefore, since no one knows, or apparently can know, what the process is by which the occasional human being is produced, it seems to me that a pretty fair case for some neo-Calvinistic theory of predestination and election might be made out.

I know nothing whatever about theology, and therefore I approach these matters of doctrine with great caution; but on looking over the Thirty-nine Articles, the only doctrinal manual I have handy at the moment, I think I see how some of the other old formulas constructed back in Cranmer’s time — nearly all of them, in fact — might have something to say for themselves. Leaving theological theory aside, however, it seems certain that the verification of Mr. Cram’s thesis would powerfully affect the current practices and applications of organized Christianity. In that case, for instance, would not the Church cease from presenting to the Neolithic mass an ideal of life that the mass must of necessity find unintelligible and directly opposed to all the testimony of its own experience? Would it not turn to the exclusive business of nourishing and improving the psychical life of the human being? — which seems, by the way, as well as I can make it out, to have been the only business it originally had. My clerical friend, of whom I spoke just now, was about starting off on a missionary enterprise at the time of our conversation, so I playfully suggested that he let the heathen rage, and devote himself instead to an extension of the monastic principle into secular life. Something like this, it seems to me, would be the sole interest of organized Christianity in the circumstances contemplated.

But I may no longer ‘occupy myself in great matters which are too high for me.’ The only points in Mr. Cram’s dissertation on which I am entitled to an opinion are his history, his logic, and his personal observations of the mass’s bearing and behavior. His history is sound, his logic is airtight, and I have made observations precisely like his. Concerning his main conclusion I can of course say nothing, except provisionally. In this way, however, I may have said enough to show how important the issue that Mr. Cram raises is to the human being, to the Neolithic mass itself, and in particular to the anthropologist, the psychologist, the political theorist, the social philosopher, and the theologian. One might pursue the hypothesis much further and in many more directions, but I have not space for that, nor probably is it necessary; imagination will carry the argument on to any desired length. Perhaps the matter will be settled by the test of experience, solvitur ambulando; I incline to the belief that it can be finally settled only in that way. Yet, as Bishop Butler said, probability is the guide of life; and the men of science, to whom the question is of considerable consequence, can, if they will, go a long way towards determining the probabilities at issue.