Page:The Everlasting Man.pdf/71

 PREHISTORIC MEN 39

with that mysterious mystification that forever finds death incredible.

It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when he unmistakeably appears as man. We cannot affirm this or anything else about the alleged animal originally connecting man and the brutes. But that is only because he is not an animal but an allega- tion. We cannot be certain that Pithecanthropus ever worshipped, because we cannot be certain that he ever lived. He is only a vision called up to fill the void that does in fact yawn between the first creatures who were certainly men and any other creatures that are certainly apes or other animals. A few very doubtful fragments are scraped together to suggest such an intermediate creature because it is required by a certain philosophy; but nobody supposes that these are sufficient to establish anything philosophical even in support of that philoso- phy. A scrap of skull found in Java cannot establish anything about religion or about the absence of religion. If there ever was any such ape-man, he may have exhib- ited as much ritual in religion as a man or as much sim- plicity in religion as an ape. He may have been a myth- ologist or he may have been a myth. It might be inter- esting to enquire whether this mystical quality appeared in a transition from the ape to the man, if there were really any types of the transition to enquire about. In other words, the missing link might or might not be mystical if he were not missing. But compared with the evidence we have of real human beings, we have no evidence that he was a human being or a half-human being or a being at all. Even the most extreme evolutionists do not attempt to