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 Eleventh Edition

Vector Mechanics
For Engineers
Statics and Dynamics

Ferdinand P. Beer
Late of Lehigh University

E. Russell Johnston, Jr.

Late of University of Connecticut

David F. Mazurek
U.S. Coast Guard Academy

Phillip J. Cornwell
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Brian P. Self
California Polytechnic State University—San Luis Obispo
VECTOR MECHANICS FOR ENGINEERS: STATICS AND DYNAMICS, ELEVENTH EDITION

Published by McGraw-Hill Education, 2 Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121. Copyright © 2016 by
McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Previous editions
© 2013, 2010, and 2007. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any
form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written consent
of McGraw-Hill Education, including, but not limited to, in any network or other electronic storage or
transmission, or broadcast for distance learning.

Some ancillaries, including electronic and print components, may not be available to customers outside the
United States.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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ISBN 978-0-07-339824-2
MHID 0-07-339824-1

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All credits appearing on page or at the end of the book are considered to be an extension of the copyright
page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beer, Ferdinand P. (Ferdinand Pierre), 1915–2003.

Vector mechanics for engineers. Statics and dynamics / Ferdinand P. Beer, Late of Lehigh University,
E. Russell Johnston, Jr., Late of University of Connecticut, David F. Mazurek, U.S. Coast Guard Academy,
Phillip J. Cornwell, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology; with the collaboration of Brian P. Self,
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.—Eleventh edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-07-339824-2
1. Statics. 2. Dynamics. I. Johnston, E. Russell (Elwood Russell), 1925–2010. II. Mazurek,
David F. (David Francis) III. Title. IV. Title: Statics and dynamics.
TA350.B3552 2016
620.1’054—dc23 2014041301

The Internet addresses listed in the text were accurate at the time of publication. The inclusion of a website
does not indicate an endorsement by the authors or McGraw-Hill Education, and McGraw-Hill Education
does not guarantee the accuracy of the information presented at these sites.
www.mhhe.com
 About the Authors
Ferdinand P. Beer. Born in France and educated in France and Switzerland,
Ferd received an M.S. degree from the Sorbonne and an Sc.D. degree in
theoretical mechanics from the University of Geneva. He came to the United
States after serving in the French army during the early part of World War II
and taught for four years at Williams College in the Williams-MIT joint
arts and engineering program. Following his service at Williams College,
Ferd joined the faculty of Lehigh University where he taught for thirty-seven
years. He held several positions, including University Distinguished Professor
and chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics,
and in 1995 Ferd was awarded an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree
by Lehigh University.
E. Russell Johnston, Jr. Born in Philadelphia, Russ received a B.S. degree
in civil engineering from the University of Delaware and an Sc.D. degree
in the field of structural engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He taught at Lehigh University and Worcester Polytechnic Insti-
tute before joining the faculty of the University of Connecticut where he held
the position of chairman of the Department of Civil Engineering and taught
for twenty-six years. In 1991 Russ received the Outstanding Civil Engineer
Award from the Connecticut Section of the American Society of Civil
Engineers.
David F. Mazurek. David holds a B.S. degree in ocean engineering and
an M.S. degree in civil engineering from the Florida Institute of Technol-
ogy and a Ph.D. degree in civil engineering from the University of
Connecticut. He was employed by the Electric Boat Division of General
Dynamics Corporation and taught at Lafayette College prior to joining the
U.S. Coast Guard Academy, where he has been since 1990. He is a reg-
istered Professional Engineer in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and has
served on the American Railway Engineering & Maintenance-of-Way
Association’s Committee 15—Steel Structures since 1991. He is a Fellow
of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and was elected to the
Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering in 2013. He was the
2014 recipient of both the Coast Guard Academy’s Distinguished Faculty
Award and its Center for Advanced Studies Excellence in Scholarship
Award. Professional interests include bridge engineering, structural foren-
sics, and blast-resistant design.

iii
iv About the Authors

Phillip J. Cornwell. Phil holds a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering

from Texas Tech University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical
and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. He is currently a
professor of mechanical engineering and Vice President of Academic
Affairs at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology where he has taught since
1989. Phil received an SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award in 1992,
the Dean’s Outstanding Teacher Award at Rose-Hulman in 2000, and the
Board of Trustees’ Outstanding Scholar Award at Rose-Hulman in 2001.
Phil was one of the developers of the Dynamics Concept Inventory.
Brian P. Self. Brian obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering
Mechanics from Virginia Tech, and his Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the
University of Utah. He worked in the Air Force Research Laboratories
before teaching at the U.S. Air Force Academy for seven years. Brian has
taught in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Cal Poly, San Luis
Obispo since 2006. He has been very active in the American Society of
Engineering Education, serving on its Board from 2008–2010. With a
team of five, Brian developed the Dynamics Concept Inventory to help
assess student conceptual understanding. His professional interests include
educational research, aviation physiology, and biomechanics.
 Brief Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Statics of Particles 15
3 Rigid Bodies: Equivalent Systems of Forces 82
4 Equilibrium of Rigid Bodies 169
5 Distributed Forces: Centroids and Centers of
Gravity 230
6 Analysis of Structures 297
7 Internal Forces and Moments 367
8 Friction 429
9 Distributed Forces: Moments of Inertia 485
10 Method of Virtual Work 573
11 Kinematics of Particles 615
12 Kinetics of Particles: Newton’s Second Law 718
13 Kinetics of Particles: Energy and Momentum
Methods 795
14 Systems of Particles 915
15 Kinematics of Rigid Bodies 977
16 Plane Motion of Rigid Bodies: Forces and
Accelerations 1107
17 Plane Motion of Rigid Bodies: Energy and Momentum
Methods 1181
18 Kinetics of Rigid Bodies in Three Dimensions 1264
19 Mechanical Vibrations 1332

Appendix: Fundamentals of Engineering Examination A1

Answers to Problems AN1
Photo Credits C1
Index I1

v
 Contents
Preface xi
Guided Tour xv
Digital Resources xviii
Acknowledgments xx
List of Symbols xxi

1 Introduction 1
1.1 What is Mechanics? 2
1.2 Fundamental Concepts and Principles 3
1.3 Systems of Units 5
1.4 Converting between Two Systems of Units 10
1.5 Method of Solving Problems 12
1.6 Numerical Accuracy 14

2 Statics of Particles 15
2.1 Addition of Planar Forces 16
2.2 Adding Forces by Components 29
2.3 Forces and Equilibrium in a Plane 39
2.4 Adding Forces in Space 52
2.5 Forces and Equilibrium in Space 66
Review and Summary 75
Review Problems 79

3 Rigid Bodies: Equivalent Systems of

Forces 82
3.1 Forces and Moments 84
3.2 Moment of a Force about an Axis 105
3.3 Couples and Force-Couple Systems 120
3.4 Simplifying Systems of Forces 136
Review and Summary 161
Review Problems 166

vi
 Contents vii

4 Equilibrium of Rigid Bodies 169

4.1 Equilibrium in Two Dimensions 172
4.2 Two Special Cases 195
4.3 Equilibrium in Three Dimensions 204
Review and Summary 225
Review Problems 227

5 Distributed Forces: Centroids and

Centers of Gravity 230
5.1 Planar Centers of Gravity and Centroids 232
5.2 Further Considerations of Centroids 249
5.3 Additional Applications of Centroids 262
5.4 Centers of Gravity and Centroids of Volumes 273
Review and Summary 291
Review Problems 295

6 Analysis of Structures 297

6.1 Analysis of Trusses 299
6.2 Other Truss Analyses 317
6.3 Frames 330
6.4 Machines 348
Review and Summary 361
Review Problems 364

7 Internal Forces and Moments 367

7.1 Internal Forces in Members 368
7.2 Beams 378
7.3 Relations Among Load, Shear, and Bending
Moment 391
*7.4 Cables 403
*7.5 Catenary Cables 416
Review and Summary 424
Review Problems 427
viii Contents

8 Friction 429
8.1 The Laws of Dry Friction 431
8.2 Wedges and Screws 450
*8.3 Friction on Axles, Disks, and Wheels 459
8.4 Belt Friction 469
Review and Summary 479
Review Problems 482

9 Distributed Forces: Moments of

Inertia 485
9.1 Moments of Inertia of Areas 487
9.2 Parallel-Axis Theorem and Composite Areas 498
*9.3 Transformation of Moments of Inertia 513
*9.4 Mohr’s Circle for Moments of Inertia 523
9.5 Mass Moments of Inertia 529
*9.6 Additional Concepts of Mass Moments of Inertia 549
Review and Summary 564
Review Problems 570

10 Method of Virtual Work 573

*10.1 The Basic Method 574
*10.2 Work, Potential Energy, and Stability 595
Review and Summary 609
Review Problems 612

11 Kinematics of Particles 615

11.1 Rectilinear Motion of Particles 617
11.2 Special Cases and Relative Motion 635
*11.3 Graphical Solutions 652
11.4 Curvilinear Motion of Particles 663
11.5 Non-Rectangular Components 690
Review and Summary 711
Review Problems 715

*Advanced or specialty topics

 Contents ix

12 Kinetics of Particles:
Newton’s Second Law 718
12.1 Newton’s Second Law and Linear Momentum 720
12.2 Angular Momentum and Orbital Motion 763
*12.3 Applications of Central-Force Motion 774
Review and Summary 788
Review Problems 792

13 Kinetics of Particles: Energy and

Momentum Methods 795
13.1 Work and Energy 797
13.2 Conservation of Energy 827
13.3 Impulse and Momentum 855
13.4 Impacts 877
Review and Summary 905
Review Problems 911

14 Systems of Particles 915

14.1 Applying Newton’s Second Law and Momentum
Principles to Systems of Particles 917
14.2 Energy and Momentum Methods for a System of
Particles 936
*14.3 Variable Systems of Particles 950
Review and Summary 970
Review Problems 974

15 Kinematics of Rigid Bodies 977

15.1 Translation and Fixed Axis Rotation 980
15.2 General Plane Motion: Velocity 997
15.3 Instantaneous Center of Rotation 1015
15.4 General Plane Motion: Acceleration 1029
15.5 Analyzing Motion with Respect to a Rotating
Frame 1048
*15.6 Motion of a Rigid Body in Space 1065
*15.7 Motion Relative to a Moving Reference Frame 1082
Review and Summary 1097
Review Problems 1104
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x Contents

16 Plane Motion of Rigid Bodies:

Forces and Accelerations 1107
16.1 Kinetics of a Rigid Body 1109
16.2 Constrained Plane Motion 1144
Review and Summary 1085
Review Problems 1087

17 Plane Motion of Rigid Bodies: Energy

and Momentum Methods 1181
17.1 Energy Methods for a Rigid Body 1183
17.2 Momentum Methods for a Rigid Body 1211
17.3 Eccentric Impact 1234
Review and Summary 1256
Review Problems 1260

18 Kinetics of Rigid Bodies

in Three Dimensions 1264
18.1 Energy and Momentum of a Rigid Body 1266
*18.2 Motion of a Rigid Body in Three Dimensions 1285
*18.3 Motion of a Gyroscope 1305
Review and Summary 1323
Review Problems 1328

19 Mechanical Vibrations 1332

19.1 Vibrations without Damping 1334
19.2 Free Vibrations of Rigid Bodies 1350
19.3 Applying the Principle of Conservation of Energy 1364
19.4 Forced Vibrations 1375
19.5 Damped Vibrations 1389
Review and Summary 1403
Review Problems 1408

Appendix: Fundamentals of Engineering Examination A1

Answers to Problems AN1
Photo Credits C1
Index I1
 Preface
Objectives
A primary objective in a first course in mechanics is to help develop a
student’s ability first to analyze problems in a simple and logical manner, NEW!
and then to apply basic principles to their solutions. A strong conceptual
The 11th edition has undergone a complete
understanding of these basic mechanics principles is essential for success- rewrite to modernize and streamline the
fully solving mechanics problems. We hope this text will help instructors language throughout the text.
achieve these goals.

General Approach
Vector algebra was introduced at the beginning of the first volume and is
used in the presentation of the basic principles of statics, as well as in the
solution of many problems, particularly three-dimensional problems. Simi-
larly, the concept of vector differentiation will be introduced early in this
volume, and vector analysis will be used throughout the presentation of
dynamics. This approach leads to more concise derivations of the fundamen-
tal principles of mechanics. It also makes it possible to analyze many prob-
lems in kinematics and kinetics which could not be solved by scalar methods.
The emphasis in this text, however, remains on the correct understanding of
the principles of mechanics and on their application to the solution of engi-
neering problems, and vector analysis is presented chiefly as a convenient
tool.†

Practical Applications Are Introduced Early. One of the

characteristics of the approach used in this book is that mechanics of
particles is clearly separated from the mechanics of rigid bodies. This
approach makes it possible to consider simple practical applications at an
early stage and to postpone the introduction of the more difficult concepts.
For example:
2.2 ADDING FORCES BY
COMPONENTS
• In Statics, the statics of particles is treated first, and the principle of In Sec. 2.1E, we described how to resolve a force into components. Here we
discuss how to add forces by using their components, especially rectangular
equilibrium of a particle was immediately applied to practical situa- components. This method is often the most convenient way to add forces
and, in practice, is the most common approach. (Note that we can readily

tions involving only concurrent forces. The statics of rigid bodies is extend the properties of vectors established in this section to the rectangular
components of any vector quantity, such as velocity or momentum.)
y

considered later, at which time the vector and scalar products of two 2.2A Rectangular Components of a
Force: Unit Vectors
vectors were introduced and used to define the moment of a force In many problems, it is useful to resolve a force into two components that Fy
F
are perpendicular to each other. Figure 2.14 shows a force F resolved into
about a point and about an axis. a component Fx along the x axis and a component Fy along the y axis.
The parallelogram drawn to obtain the two components is a rectangle, and
␪
O Fx x

• In Dynamics, the same division is observed. The basic concepts of Fx and Fy are called rectangular components.
The x and y axes are usually chosen to be horizontal and vertical,
respectively, as in Fig. 2.14; they may, however, be chosen in any two Fig. 2.14 Rectangular components of a
force F.
force, mass, and acceleration, of work and energy, and of impulse perpendicular directions, as shown in Fig. 2.15. In determining the
y

and momentum are introduced and first applied to problems involv- F

x
ing only particles. Thus, students can familiarize themselves with Fy ␪
Fx

the three basic methods used in dynamics and learn their respective O

Fig. 2.15 Rectangular components of a force F

advantages before facing the difficulties associated with the motion of for axes rotated away from horizontal and vertical.

rigid bodies.
†
In a parallel text, Mechanics for Engineers, fifth edition, the use of vector algebra is limited
to the addition and subtraction of vectors, and vector differentiation is omitted.
xi
 xii Preface

New Concepts Are Introduced in Simple Terms. Since this

17.1 ENERGY METHODS FOR A text is designed for the first course in dynamics, new concepts are pre-
RIGID BODY
We now use the principle of work and energy to analyze the plane motion
sented in simple terms and every step is explained in detail. On the other
of rigid bodies. As we pointed out in Chap. 13, the method of work and hand, by discussing the broader aspects of the problems considered, and
energy is particularly well adapted to solving problems involving veloci-
ties and displacements. Its main advantage is that the work of forces and by stressing methods of general applicability, a definite maturity of
the kinetic energy of particles are scalar quantities.
approach has been achieved. For example, the concept of potential energy
17.1A Principle of Work and Energy is discussed in the general case of a conservative force. Also, the study of
To apply the principle of work and energy to the motion of a rigid body,
we again assume that the rigid body is made up of a large number n of
the plane motion of rigid bodies is designed to lead naturally to the study
particles of mass Dmi. From Eq. (14.30) of Sec. 14.2B, we have of their general motion in space. This is true in kinematics as well as in
Principle of work
and energy, rigid body
kinetics, where the principle of equivalence of external and effective forces
is applied directly to the analysis of plane motion, thus facilitating the
T1 1 U1y2 5 T2 (17.1)
transition to the study of three-dimensional motion.
where T1, T2 5 the initial and final values of total kinetic energy of
particles forming the rigid body
U1y2 5 work of all forces acting on various particles of the body Fundamental Principles Are Placed in the Context of
Just as we did in Chap. 13, we can express the work done by nonconser-
vative forces as U NC
Simple Applications. The fact that mechanics is essentially a deduc-
1 y2, and we can define potential energy terms for con-
servative forces. Then we can express Eq. (17.1) as tive science based on a few fundamental principles is stressed. Derivations
T1 1 Vg1 1 Ve1 1 U NC
1 y2 5 T2 1 Vg2 1 Ve2 (17.19) have been presented in their logical sequence and with all the rigor war-
where Vg1 and Vg2 are the initial and final gravitational potential energy of ranted at this level. However, the learning process being largely inductive,
the center of mass of the rigid body with respect to a reference point or
datum, and Ve1 and Ve2 are the initial and final values of the elastic energy simple applications are considered first. For example:
associated with springs in the system.
We obtain the total kinetic energy
• The statics of particles precedes the statics of rigid bodies, and prob-
O Dm v
n
T5
1
i
2
i (17.2) lems involving internal forces are postponed until Chap. 6.
2 i51
• In Chap. 4, equilibrium problems involving only coplanar forces
by adding positive scalar quantities, so it is itself a positive scalar quantity.
You will see later how to determine T for various types of motion of a are considered first and solved by ordinary algebra, while problems
rigid body.
The expression U1y2 in Eq. (17.1) represents the work of all the involving three-dimensional forces and requiring the full use of vector
forces acting on the various particles of the body whether these forces are
internal or external. However, the total work of the internal forces holding
algebra are discussed in the second part of the chapter.
together the particles of a rigid body is zero. To see this, consider two • The kinematics of particles (Chap. 11) precedes the kinematics of
particles A and B of a rigid body and the two equal and opposite forces F
and –F they exert on each other (Fig. 17.1). Although, in general, small rigid bodies (Chap. 15).
displacements dr and dr9 of the two particles are different, the components
of these displacements along AB must be equal; otherwise, the particles • The fundamental principles of the kinetics of rigid bodies are first
would not remain at the same distance from each other and the body
would not be rigid. Therefore, the work of F is equal in magnitude and
applied to the solution of two-dimensional problems (Chaps. 16
and 17), which can be more easily visualized by the student, while
three-dimensional problems are postponed until Chap. 18.

bee87342_ch17_1091-1173.indd 1093
The Presentation of the Principles of Kinetics Is Unified.
10/11/14 4:13 PM

The eleventh edition of Vector Mechanics for Engineers retains the unified
presentation of the principles of kinetics which characterized the previous
ten editions. The concepts of linear and angular momentum are introduced
in Chap. 12 so that Newton’s second law of motion can be presented not
only in its conventional form F 5 ma, but also as a law relating, respec-
tively, the sum of the forces acting on a particle and the sum of their
moments to the rates of change of the linear and angular momentum of
the particle. This makes possible an earlier introduction of the principle
of conservation of angular momentum and a more meaningful discussion
of the motion of a particle under a central force (Sec. 12.3A). More
importantly, this approach can be readily extended to the study of the
motion of a system of particles (Chap. 14) and leads to a more concise
and unified treatment of the kinetics of rigid bodies in two and three
dimensions (Chaps. 16 through 18).

Systematic Problem-Solving Approach. New to this edition of

NEW! the text, all the sample problems are solved using the steps of Strategy,
Modeling, Analysis, and Reflect & Think, or the “SMART” approach.
 Preface xiii
This methodology is intended to give students confidence when approaching
new problems, and students are encouraged to apply this approach in the
solution of all assigned problems.

Free-Body Diagrams Are Used Both to Solve Equilibrium

Problems and to Express the Equivalence of Force
Systems. Free-body diagrams were introduced early in statics, and their
importance was emphasized throughout. They were used not only to solve
equilibrium problems but also to express the equivalence of two systems
of forces or, more generally, of two systems of vectors. In dynamics we
will introduce a kinetic diagram, which is a pictorial representation of
inertia terms. The advantage of this approach becomes apparent in the
study of the dynamics of rigid bodies, where it is used to solve three-
dimensional as well as two-dimensional problems. By placing the empha-
sis on the free-body diagram and kinetic diagram, rather than on the
standard algebraic equations of motion, a more intuitive and more com-
plete understanding of the fundamental principles of dynamics can be
achieved. This approach, which was first introduced in 1962 in the first
edition of Vector Mechanics for Engineers, has now gained wide accep-
tance among mechanics teachers in this country. It is, therefore, used in
preference to the method of dynamic equilibrium and to the equations
of motion in the solution of all sample problems in this book.

A Careful Balance between SI and U.S. Customary Units y Sample Problem 3.10
Is Consistently Maintained. Because of the current trend in the 75 mm 45º
1000 N Three cables are attached to a bracket as shown. Replace the forces
exerted by the cables with an equivalent force-couple system at A.
45º

American government and industry to adopt the international system of 50 mm

50 mm
A
B
C STRATEGY: First determine the relative position vectors drawn from
point A to the points of application of the various forces and resolve the
forces into rectangular components. Then sum the forces and moments.
units (SI metric units), the SI units most frequently used in mechanics are 700 N 30º
1200 N

60º
MODELING and ANALYSIS: Note that FB 5 (700 N)lBE where
100 mm 
75i 2 150j 1 50k
introduced in Chap. 1 and are used throughout the text. Approximately half O D
x
lBE 5
BE
BE
5
175
Using meters and newtons, the position and force vectors are
of the sample problems and 60 percent of the homework problems are 100 mm 
rB/A 5 AB 5 0.075i 1 0.050k

FB 5 300i 2 600j 1 200k
z rC/A 5 AC 5 0.075i 2 0.050k FC 5 707i 2 707k
stated in these units, while the remainder are in U.S. customary units. The E(150 mm, –50 mm, 100 mm) 
rD/A 5 AD 5 0.100i 2 0.100j FD 5 600i 1 1039j
The force-couple system at A equivalent to the given forces con-
authors believe that this approach will best serve the need of the students, sists of a force R 5 oF and a couple MRA 5 o(r 3 F). Obtain the
force R by adding respectively the x, y, and z components of the forces:
R 5 oF 5 (1607 N)i 1 (439 N)j 2 (507 N)k b
who, as engineers, will have to be conversant with both systems of units. (continued)

It also should be recognized that using both SI and U.S. customary

units entails more than the use of conversion factors. Since the SI system R – 9.79 j Remark: Since all the forces are contained in the plane of the figure,
you would expect the sum of their moments to be perpendicular to that
A
of units is an absolute system based on the units of time, length, and mass,
bee87302_ch03_082-168.indd 145

O
9.04 i 70 ft
plane. Note that you could obtain the moment of each force component 11/8/14
directly from the diagram by first forming the product of its magnitude
9:54 AM

and perpendicular distance to O and then assigning to this product a posi-

whereas the U.S. customary system is a gravitational system based on the x

Fig. 3 Point of application of

tive or a negative sign, depending upon the sense of the moment.
b. Single Tugboat. The force exerted by a single tugboat must be equal
units of time, length, and force, different approaches are required for the single tugboat to create same
effect as given force system.
to R, and its point of application A must be such that the moment of R
about O is equal to MRO (Fig. 3). Observing that the position vector of A is
r 5 xi 1 70j
solution of many problems. For example, when SI units are used, a body you have
r 3 R 5 MRO
is generally specified by its mass expressed in kilograms; in most prob- (xi 1 70j) 3 (9.04i 2 9.79j) 5 21035k
2x(9.79)k 2 633k 5 21035k x 5 41.1 ft b
lems of statics it will be necessary to determine the weight of the body REFLECT and THINK: Reducing the given situation to that of a single
force makes it easier to visualize the overall effect of the tugboats in
in newtons, and an additional calculation will be required for this purpose. maneuvering the ocean liner. But in practical terms, having four boats
applying force allows for greater control in slowing and turning a large
ship in a crowded harbor.
On the other hand, when U.S. customary units are used, a body is speci-
fied by its weight in pounds and, in dynamics problems, an additional
calculation will be required to determine its mass in slugs (or lb?s2/ft).
The authors, therefore, believe that problem assignments should include
both systems of units.
The Instructor’s and Solutions Manual provides six different lists of
assignments so that an equal number of problems stated in SI units and
in U.S. customary units can be selected. If so desired, two complete lists
of assignments can also be selected with up to 75 percent of the problems
stated in SI units.

bee87302_ch03_082-168.indd 145 11/8/14 9:54 AM

xiv Preface

Optional Sections Offer Advanced or Specialty Topics.

A large number of optional sections have been included. These sections
are indicated by asterisks and thus are easily distinguished from those
which form the core of the basic dynamics course. They can be omitted
without prejudice to the understanding of the rest of the text.
The topics covered in the optional sections in statics include the
reduction of a system of forces of a wrench, applications to hydrostatics,
equilibrium of cables, products of inertia and Mohr’s circle, the determina-
tion of the principal axes and the mass moments of inertia of a body of
arbitrary shape, and the method of virtual work. The sections on the inertia
properties of three-dimensional bodies are primarily intended for students
who will later study in dynamics the three-dimensional motion of rigid
bodies.
The topics covered in the optional sections in dynamics include
graphical methods for the solution of rectilinear-motion problems, the
trajectory of a particle under a central force, the deflection of fluid streams,
problems involving jet and rocket propulsion, the kinematics and kinetics
of rigid bodies in three dimensions, damped mechanical vibrations, and
electrical analogues. These topics will be found of particular interest when
dynamics is taught in the junior year.

The material presented in the text and most of the problems require
no previous mathematical knowledge beyond algebra, trigonometry, elemen-
tary calculus, and the elements of vector algebra presented in Chaps. 2
and 3 of the volume on statics. However, special problems are included,
which make use of a more advanced knowledge of calculus, and certain
sections, such as Secs. 19.5A and 19.5B on damped vibrations, should be
assigned only if students possess the proper mathematical background. In
portions of the text using elementary calculus, a greater emphasis is placed
on the correct understanding and application of the concepts of differentia-
tion and integration, than on the nimble manipulation of mathematical for-
mulas. In this connection, it should be mentioned that the determination of
the centroids of composite areas precedes the calculation of centroids by
integration, thus making it possible to establish the concept of moment of
area firmly before introducing the use of integration.
 Guided Tour
Chapter Introduction. Each chapter begins with a list of learning
objectives and an outline that previews chapter topics. An introductory
section describes the material to be covered in simple terms, and how it
will be applied to the solution of engineering problems.

Chapter Lessons. The body of the text is divided into sections, each
consisting of one or more sub-sections, several sample problems, and a
large number of end-of-section problems for students to solve. Each section
corresponds to a well-defined topic and generally can be covered in one
lesson. In a number of cases, however, the instructor will find it desirable
to devote more than one lesson to a given topic. The Instructor’s and Solu-
tions Manual contains suggestions on the coverage of each lesson.

Sample Problems. The Sample Problems are set up in much the same
form that students will use when solving assigned problems, and they Introduction
1
employ the SMART problem-solving methodology that students are encour-
The tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere, One World

aged to use in the solution of their assigned problems. They thus serve the Trade Center is a prominent feature of the New York City skyline.
From its foundation to its structural components and mechanical
systems, the design and operation of the tower is based on the
double purpose of reinforcing the text and demonstrating the type of neat fundamentals of engineering mechanics.

and orderly work that students should cultivate in their own solutions. In
addition, in-problem references and captions have been added to the sample bee87302_ch01_001-014.indd 1 28/07/14 11:50 AM

problem figures for contextual linkage to the step-by-step solution.

Concept Applications. Concept Applications are used within NEW!

selected theory sections in the Statics volume to amplify certain topics,
and they are designed to reinforce the specific material being presented Sample Problem 4.10
and facilitate its understanding. A 450-lb load hangs from the corner C of a rigid piece of pipe ABCD
that has been bent as shown. The pipe is supported by ball-and-socket
joints A and D, which are fastened, respectively, to the floor and to a
vertical wall, and by a cable attached at the midpoint E of the portion BC
of the pipe and at a point G on the wall. Determine (a) where G should
be located if the tension in the cable is to be minimum, (b) the correspond-
Solving Problems on Your Own. A section entitled Solving ing minimum value of the tension.
G

Problems on Your Own is included for each lesson, between the sample B

6 ft
E

6 ft
C D

12 ft

problems and the problems to be assigned. The purpose of these sections 450 lb

is to help students organize in their own minds the preceding theory of A

12 ft
6 ft

the text and the solution methods of the sample problems so that they can STRATEGY: Draw the free-body diagram of the pipe showing the reac-
tions at A and D. Isolate the unknown tension T and the known weight W

more successfully solve the homework problems. Also included in these by summing moments about the diagonal line AD, and compute values
from the equilibrium equations.
MODELING and ANALYSIS:
sections are specific suggestions and strategies that will enable the students Free-Body Diagram. The free-body diagram of the pipe includes the
load W 5 (2450 lb)j, the reactions at A and D, and the force T exerted by

to more efficiently attack any assigned problems. the cable (Fig. 1). To eliminate the reactions at A and D from the computations,
take the sum of the moments of the forces about the line AD and set it equal
to zero. Denote the unit vector along AD by λ, which enables you to write
 
oMAD 5 0: λ ? (AE 3 T) 1 λ ? (AC 3 W) 5 0 (1)
Dy j
y

Homework Problem Sets. Most of the problems are of a practical B

T

E C
Dx i

D
Dz k

nature and should appeal to engineering students. They are primarily designed, 6 ft

W = – 450 j
12 ft

12 ft

however, to illustrate the material presented in the text and to help students A xi
␭
6 ft x

understand the principles of mechanics. The problems are grouped according z

A zk

Ay j
A
12 ft

to the portions of material they illustrate and, in general, are arranged in Fig. 1 Free-body diagram of pipe.

order of increasing difficulty. Problems requiring special attention are indi-

cated by asterisks. Answers to 70 percent of the problems are given at the bee87302_ch04_169-229.indd 211
NEW! 8/8/14 10:05 AM

end of the book. Problems for which the answers are given are set in straight
type in the text, while problems for which no answer is given are set in italic Over 650 of the homework problems in the
text are new or revised.
and red font color.
xv
xvi Guided Tour

Chapter Review and Summary. Each chapter ends

with a review and summary of the material covered in that
chapter. Marginal notes are used to help students organize Review and Summary
their review work, and cross-references have been included to
In this chapter, we have studied the effect of forces on particles, i.e., on bodies
help them find the portions of material requiring their special of such shape and size that we may assume all forces acting on them apply
at the same point. P
R

attention. Resultant of Two Forces

A
Forces are vector quantities; they are characterized by a point of application, Q
a magnitude, and a direction, and they add according to the parallelogram law Fig. 2.30
(Fig. 2.30). We can determine the magnitude and direction of the resultant R
Review Problems. A set of review problems is included of two forces P and Q either graphically or by trigonometry using the law of
cosines and the law of sines [Sample Prob. 2.1].

at the end of each chapter. These problems provide students Components of a Force
Any given force acting on a particle can be resolved into two or more com-
further opportunity to apply the most important concepts intro- ponents, i.e., it can be replaced by two or more forces that have the same
effect on the particle. A force F can be resolved into two components P and Q

duced in the chapter. by drawing a parallelogram with F for its diagonal; the components P and Q
are then represented by the two adjacent sides of the parallelogram (Fig. 2.31).
Again, we can determine the components either graphically or by trigonom-
etry [Sec. 2.1E].

Q
F

Review Problems A

2.127 Two structural members A and B are bolted to a bracket as shown. Fig. 2.31
40° 20°
Knowing that both members are in compression and that the force
is 15 kN in member A and 10 kN in member B, determine by trigo- Rectangular Components; Unit Vectors
nometry the magnitude and direction of the resultant of the forces A force F is resolved into two rectangular components if its components Fx
A B
applied to the bracket by members A and B. and Fy are perpendicular to each other and are directed along the coordinate
axes (Fig. 2.32). Introducing the unit vectors i and j along the x and y axes,
2.128 Determine the x and y components of each of the forces shown. respectively, we can write the components and the vector as [Sec. 2.2A] y

Fx 5 Fxi Fy 5 F y j (2.6)
y Fy = Fy j
and
F
Fig. P2.127 F 5 Fxi 1 Fyj (2.7) j
24 in. 28 in.
␪
where Fx and Fy are the scalar components of F. These components, which
i Fx = Fx i x
can be positive or negative, are defined by the relations

45 in. Fx 5 F cos θ Fy 5 F sin θ (2.8) Fig. 2.32

102 lb
106 lb
x
75
200 lb O
30 in.

40 in.
bee87302_ch02_015-081.indd 75 09/07/14 4:38 PM

Fig. P2.128

2.129 A hoist trolley is subjected to the three forces shown. Knowing that
α 5 40°, determine (a) the required magnitude of the force P if the
resultant of the three forces is to be vertical, (b) the corresponding
magnitude of the resultant.

α
C
P
a

400 lb a
200 lb
30° 20°
Fig. P2.129
300 lb

2.130 Knowing that α 5 55° and that boom AC exerts on pin C a force A
directed along line AC, determine (a) the magnitude of that force,
(b) the tension in cable BC. Fig. P2.130

79

bee87302_ch02_015-081.indd 79 09/07/14 4:38 PM

Computer Problems. Accessible through Connect are problem sets

for each chapter that are designed to be solved with computational software.
Many of these problems are relevant to the design process; they may involve
the analysis of a structure for various configurations and loadings of the
structure, or the determination of the equilibrium positions of a given
mechanism that may require an iterative method of solution. Developing the
algorithm required to solve a given mechanics problem will benefit the
students in two different ways: (1) it will help them gain a better
understanding of the mechanics principles involved; (2) it will provide them
with an opportunity to apply their computer skills to the solution of a
meaningful engineering problem.
 Guided Tour xvii
Concept Questions. Educational research has shown that students can
often choose appropriate equations and solve algorithmic problems without
having a strong conceptual understanding of mechanics principles.† To help
assess and develop student conceptual understanding, we have included Con-
cept Questions, which are multiple choice problems that require few, if any,
calculations. Each possible incorrect answer typically represents a common
misconception (e.g., students often think that a vehicle moving in a curved
path at constant speed has zero acceleration). Students are encouraged to
solve these problems using the principles and techniques discussed in the
text and to use these principles to help them develop their intuition. Mastery
and discussion of these Concept Questions will deepen students’ conceptual
understanding and help them to solve dynamics problems.

Free Body and Impulse-Momentum Diagram Practice

Problems. Drawing diagrams correctly is a critical step in solving kinetics
problems in dynamics. A new type of problem has been added to the text to
emphasize the importance of drawing these diagrams. In Chaps. 12 and 16
the Free Body Practice Problems require students to draw a free-
body diagram (FBD) showing the applied forces and an equivalent
diagram called a “kinetic diagram” (KD) showing ma or its FREE-BODY PRACTICE PROBLEMS
16.F1 A 6-ft board is placed in a truck with one end resting against a block
B

78°
A
components and Iα. These diagrams provide students with a secured to the floor and the other leaning against a vertical partition.
Draw the FBD and KD necessary to determine the maximum
allowable acceleration of the truck if the board is to remain in the

pictorial representation of Newton’s second law and are critical position shown.

16.F2 A uniform circular plate of mass 3 kg is attached to two links AC Fig. P16.F1
in helping students to correctly solve kinetic problems. In Chaps. and BD of the same length. Knowing that the plate is released
from rest in the position shown, in which lines joining G to A and
B are, respectively, horizontal and vertical, draw the FBD and KD
13 and 17 the Impulse-Momentum Diagram Practice Problems for the plate.

require students to draw diagrams showing the momenta of the D

bodies before impact, the impulses exerted on the body during C

75°

impact, and the final momenta of the bodies. The answers to all 75°
A
B

G
of these questions can be accessed through Connect.
Fig. P16.F2

16.F3 Two uniform disks and two cylinders are assembled as indicated.
Disk A weighs 20 lb and disk B weighs 12 lb. Knowing that the
system is released from rest, draw the FBD and KD for the whole
system.

A
B

8 in. 6 in.

TA TB

A B

3.3 ft

G
6.6 ft
C 15 lb 18 lb D

Fig. P16.F3

16.F4 The 400-lb crate shown is lowered by means of two overhead cranes.
1.8 ft
Knowing the tension in each cable, draw the FBD and KD that can
be used to determine the angular acceleration of the crate and the 3.6 ft
acceleration of the center of gravity. Fig. P16.F4

1039

bee87342_ch16_1017-1090.indd 1039 9/29/14 4:43 PM

†
Hestenes, D., Wells, M., and Swakhamer, G (1992). The force concept inventory. The Physics
Teacher, 30: 141–158.
Streveler, R. A., Litzinger, T. A., Miller, R. L., and Steif, P. S. (2008). Learning conceptual knowl-
edge in the engineering sciences: Overview and future research directions, JEE, 279–294.
 Digital Resources
Connect® Engineering provides online presenta-
tion, assignment, and assessment solutions. It
connects your students with the tools and
resources they’ll need to achieve success. With Connect Engineering you
can deliver assignments, quizzes, and tests online. A robust set of questions
and activities are presented and aligned with the textbook’s learning
outcomes. As an instructor, you can edit existing questions and author
entirely new problems. Integrate grade reports easily with Learning
Management Systems (LMS), such as WebCT and Blackboard—and much
more. Connect Engineering also provides students with 24/7 online access
to a media-rich eBook, allowing seamless integration of text, media, and
assessments. To learn more, visit connect.mheducation.com
Find the following instructor resources available through Connect:
• Instructor’s and Solutions Manual. The Instructor’s and Solutions
Manual that accompanies the eleventh edition features solutions to all
end of chapter problems. This manual also features a number of tables
designed to assist instructors in creating a schedule of assignments for
their course. The various topics covered in the text have been listed in
Table I and a suggested number of periods to be spent on each topic
has been indicated. Table II prepares a brief description of all groups
of problems and a classification of the problems in each group accord-
ing to the units used. Sample lesson schedules are shown in Tables III,
IV, and V, together with various alternative lists of assigned homework
problems.
• Lecture PowerPoint Slides for each chapter that can be modified.
These generally have an introductory application slide, animated
worked-out problems that you can do in class with your students,
concept questions, and “what-if?” questions at the end of the units.
• Textbook images
• Computer Problem sets for each chapter that are designed to be
solved with computational software.
• C.O.S.M.O.S., the Complete Online Solutions Manual Organization
System that allows instructors to create custom homework, quizzes,
and tests using end-of-chapter problems from the text.

NEW! LearnSmart is available as

an integrated feature of McGraw-Hill Connect. It is an adaptive learning
system designed to help students learn faster, study more efficiently, and
retain more knowledge for greater success. LearnSmart assesses a student’s
knowledge of course content through a series of adaptive questions. It
pinpoints concepts the student does not understand and maps out a
personalized study plan for success. This innovative study tool also has
features that allow instructors to see exactly what students have
accomplished and a built-in assessment tool for graded assignments.

xviii
 Digital Resources xix

SmartBook™ is the first and NEW!

only adaptive reading experience available for the higher education mar-
ket. Powered by an intelligent diagnostic and adaptive engine, SmartBook
facilitates the reading process by identifying what content a student knows
and doesn’t know through adaptive assessments. As the student reads, the
reading material constantly adapts to ensure the student is focused on the
content he or she needs the most to close any knowledge gaps.

Visit the following site for a demonstration of LearnSmart or Smart-

Book: www.learnsmartadvantage.com

CourseSmart. This text is offered through CourseSmart for both

instructors and students. CourseSmart is an online browser where stu-
dents can purchase access to this and other McGraw-Hill textbooks in a
digital format. Through their browser, students can access the complete
text online at almost half the cost of a traditional text. Purchasing the
eTextbook also allows students to take advantage of CourseSmart’s web
tools for learning, which include full text search, notes and highlighting,
and e-mail tools for sharing notes among classmates. To learn more
about CourseSmart options, contact your sales representative or visit
www.coursesmart.com.
Visit https://textbookfull.com
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 Acknowledgments
A special thanks to our colleagues who thoroughly checked the solutions
and answers to all problems in this edition and then prepared the solutions
for the accompanying Instructor’s and Solutions Manual, James Widmann
of California Polytechnic State University and Amy Mazurek.
The authors thank the many companies that provided photographs
for this edition.
We are pleased to acknowledge David Chelton, who carefully reviewed
the entire text and provided many helpful suggestions for revising this edition.
The authors also thank the members of the staff at McGraw-Hill for
their support and dedication during the preparation of this new edition.
We particularly wish to acknowledge the contributions of Global Brand
Manager Raghu Srinivasan, Brand Manager Thomas Scaife, Product
Developers Robin Reed & Joan Weber, Content Project Manager Jolynn
Kilburg, and Program Manager Lora Neyens.
David F. Mazurek
Phillip J. Cornwell
Brian P. Self
The authors gratefully acknowledge the many helpful comments and
suggestions offered by focus group attendees and by users of the previous
editions of Vector Mechanics for Engineers:
George Adams Howard Epstein Amir G Rezaei
Northeastern University University of Connecticut California State Polytechnic
William Altenhof Asad Esmaeily University, Pomona
University of Windsor Kansas State University, Civil Martin Sadd
Sean B. Anderson Engineering Department University of Rhode Island
Boston University David Fleming Stefan Seelecke
Manohar Arora Florida Institute of Technology North Carolina State University
Colorado School of Mines Jeff Hanson Yixin Shao
Gilbert Baladi Texas Tech University McGill University
Michigan State University David A. Jenkins Muhammad Sharif
Francois Barthelat University of Florida The University of Alabama
McGill University Shaofan Li Anthony Sinclair
Oscar Barton, Jr. University of California, Berkeley University of Toronto
U.S. Naval Academy William R. Murray Lizhi Sun
M. Asghar Bhatti Cal Poly State University University of California, lrvine
University of Iowa Eric Musslman Jeffrey Thomas
Shaohong Cheng University of Minnesota, Duluth Northwestern University
University of Windsor Masoud Olia Jiashi Yang
Philip Datseris Wentworth Institute of Technology University of Nebraska
University of Rhode Island Renee K. B. Petersen Xiangwa Zeng
Timothy A. Doughty Washington State University Case Western Reserve University
University of Portland
xx
 List of Symbols
a, a Acceleration k Centroidal radius of gyration
a Constant; radius; distance; semimajor l Length
axis of ellipse L Linear momentum
a, a Acceleration of mass center L Length; inductance
aB/A Acceleration of B relative to frame in m Mass
translation with A m9 Mass per unit length
aP/^ Acceleration of P relative to rotating M Couple; moment
frame ^ MO Moment about point O
ac Coriolis acceleration MRO Moment resultant about point O
A, B, C, . . . Reactions at supports and connections M Magnitude of couple or moment; mass of
A, B, C, . . . Points earth
A Area MOL Moment about axis OL
b Width; distance; semiminor axis of n Normal direction
ellipse N Normal component of reaction
c Constant; coefficient of viscous damping O Origin of coordinates
C Centroid; instantaneous center of rotation; P Force; vector
capacitance #
P Rate of change of vector P with respect
d Distance
to frame of fixed orientation
en, et Unit vectors along normal and tangent
q Mass rate of flow; electric charge
er, eθ Unit vectors in radial and transverse
Q Force; vector
directions #
e Coefficient of restitution; base of natural Q Rate of change of vector Q with respect
logarithms # to frame of fixed orientation
E Total mechanical energy; voltage (Q)Oxyz Rate of change of vector Q with respect to
f Scalar function frame Oxyz
ff Frequency of forced vibration r Position vector
fn Natural frequency rB/A Position vector of B relative to A
F Force; friction force r Radius; distance; polar coordinate
g Acceleration of gravity R Resultant force; resultant vector; reaction
G Center of gravity; mass center; constant of R Radius of earth; resistance
gravitation s Position vector
h Angular momentum per unit mass s Length of arc
H# O Angular momentum about point O t Time; thickness; tangential direction
HG Rate of change of angular momentum HG T Force
T Tension; kinetic energy
# with respect to frame of fixed orientation
u Velocity
(HG)Gxyz Rate of change of angular momentum HG
with respect to rotating frame Gxyz u Variable
i, j, k Unit vectors along coordinate axes U Work
NC
i Current U122 work done by non-conservative forces
I, Ix, . . . Moments of inertia v, v Velocity
I Centroidal moment of inertia v Speed
Ixy, . . . Products of inertia v, v Velocity of mass center
J Polar moment of inertia vB/A Velocity of B relative to frame in
k Spring constant translation with A
kx, ky, kO Radii of gyration vP/^ Velocity of P relative to rotating frame ^

xxi
xxii List of Symbols

V Vector product θ Angular coordinate; Eulerian angle;

V Volume; potential energy angle; polar coordinate
w Load per unit length μ Coefficient of friction
W, W Weight; load ρ Density; radius of curvature
x,
# y,# z# Rectangular coordinates; distances τ Periodic time
x, y, z Time derivatives of coordinates x, y, z τn Period of free vibration
x, y, z Rectangular coordinates of centroid, f Angle of friction; Eulerian angle; phase
center of gravity, or mass center angle; angle
α, α Angular acceleration w Phase difference
α, β, g Angles c Eulerian angle
g Specific weight v, v Angular velocity
δ Elongation vf Circular frequency of forced vibration
e Eccentricity of conic section or of orbit vn Natural circular frequency
l Unit vector along a line V Angular velocity of frame of reference
η Efficiency
 1
Introduction
The tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere, One World
Trade Center is a prominent feature of the New York City skyline.
From its foundation to its structural components and mechanical
systems, the design and operation of the tower is based on the
fundamentals of engineering mechanics.
2 Introduction

Introduction Objectives
• Define the science of mechanics and examine its
1.1 WHAT IS MECHANICS?
fundamental principles.
1.2 FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS
AND PRINCIPLES • Discuss and compare the International System of
Units and U.S. Customary Units.
1.3 SYSTEMS OF UNITS
1.4 CONVERTING BETWEEN • Discuss how to approach the solution of mechanics
TWO SYSTEMS OF UNITS problems, and introduce the SMART problem-solving
1.5 METHOD OF SOLVING methodology.
PROBLEMS • Examine factors that govern numerical accuracy in the
1.6 NUMERICAL ACCURACY solution of a mechanics problem.

1.1 What is Mechanics?

Mechanics is defined as the science that describes and predicts the condi-
tions of rest or motion of bodies under the action of forces. It consists of
the mechanics of rigid bodies, mechanics of deformable bodies, and
mechanics of fluids.
The mechanics of rigid bodies is subdivided into statics and dynamics.
Statics deals with bodies at rest; dynamics deals with bodies in motion.
In this text, we assume bodies are perfectly rigid. In fact, actual structures
and machines are never absolutely rigid; they deform under the loads to
which they are subjected. However, because these deformations are usu-
ally small, they do not appreciably affect the conditions of equilibrium or
the motion of the structure under consideration. They are important,
though, as far as the resistance of the structure to failure is concerned.
Deformations are studied in a course in mechanics of materials, which is
part of the mechanics of deformable bodies. The third division of mechan-
ics, the mechanics of fluids, is subdivided into the study of incompressible
fluids and of compressible fluids. An important subdivision of the study
of incompressible fluids is hydraulics, which deals with applications
involving water.
Mechanics is a physical science, since it deals with the study of
physical phenomena. However, some teachers associate mechanics with
mathematics, whereas many others consider it as an engineering subject.
Both these views are justified in part. Mechanics is the foundation of most
engineering sciences and is an indispensable prerequisite to their study.
However, it does not have the empiricism found in some engineering sci-
ences, i.e., it does not rely on experience or observation alone. The rigor
of mechanics and the emphasis it places on deductive reasoning makes it
resemble mathematics. However, mechanics is not an abstract or even a
pure science; it is an applied science.
The purpose of mechanics is to explain and predict physical phe-
nomena and thus to lay the foundations for engineering applications. You
need to know statics to determine how much force will be exerted on a
point in a bridge design and whether the structure can withstand that force.
Determining the force a dam needs to withstand from the water in a river
requires statics. You need statics to calculate how much weight a crane
can lift, how much force a locomotive needs to pull a freight train, or how
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Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow
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with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. How he came there,
or indeed how anything else came there, is a thing for theologians and
philosophers and scientists and not for historians. But an excellent test case
of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of art. This
creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a
creator as well as a creature. Nothing in that sense could be made in any
other image but the image of man. But the truth is so true that, even in the
absence of any religious belief, it must be assumed in the form of some
moral or metaphysical principle. In the next chapter we shall see how this
principle applies to all the historical hypotheses and evolutionary ethics
now in fashion; to the origins of tribal government or mythological belief.
But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is this popular
one of what the cave-man really did in his cave. It means that somehow or
other a new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of nature; a mind that
is like a mirror. It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It
is like a mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like
shining shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the
only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble each other
in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in various
ways; just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round like a mirror or
a cupboard may be larger than a mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that
can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all
things; man is the image of God. These are the only real lessons to be learnt
in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road.
It will be well in this place, however, to sum up once and for all what is
meant by saying that man is at once the exception to everything and the
mirror and the measure of all things. But to see man as he is, it is necessary
once more to keep close to that simplicity that can clear itself of
accumulated clouds of sophistry. The simplest truth about man is that he is a
very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In
all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing
alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an
unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own
skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving
miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in
artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called
furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild
limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful
madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very
shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the
animals he feels the need of averting his thoughts from the root realities of
his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher
possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these
things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in
the same sense unique. This is realised by the whole popular instinct called
religion, until disturbed by pedants, especially the laborious pedants of the
Simple Life. The most sophistical of all sophists are Gymnosophists.
It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense
to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing
straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light;
against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality.
It is reached by stretching a point, by making out a case, by artificially
selecting a certain light and shade, by bringing into prominence the lesser or
lower things which may happen to be similar. The solid thing standing in
the sunlight, the thing we can walk round and see from all sides, is quite
different. It is also quite extraordinary; and the more sides we see of it the
more extraordinary it seems. It is emphatically not a thing that follows or
flows naturally from anything else. If we imagine that an inhuman or
impersonal intelligence could have felt from the first the general nature of
the non-human world sufficiently to see that things would evolve in
whatever way they did evolve, there would have been nothing whatever in
all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such an unnatural novelty.
To such a mind, man would most certainly not have seemed something like
one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer pasture; or one swallow out
of a hundred swallows making a summer under a strange sky. It would not
be in the same scale and scarcely in the same dimension. We might as truly
say that it would not be in the same universe. It would be more like seeing
one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly jump over the moon or one pig out
of a hundred pigs grow wings in a flash and fly. It would not be a question
of the cattle finding their own grazing-ground but of their building their
own cattle-sheds, not a question of one swallow making a summer but of
his making a summer-house. For the very fact that birds do build nests is
one of those similarities that sharpen the startling difference. 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; it proves it more
completely than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at all, he might
possibly be a philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to
all but the mind within. But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied
and sings aloud with satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible
veil like a pane of glass between him and us, like the window on which a
bird will beat in vain. But suppose our abstract onlooker saw one of the
birds begin to build as men build. Suppose in an incredibly short space of
time there were seven styles of architecture for one style of nest. Suppose
the bird carefully selected forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the
piercing piety of Gothic, but turned to broad foliage and black mud when he
sought in a darker mood to call up the heavy columns of Bel and Ashtaroth;
making his nest indeed one of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Suppose the
bird made little clay statues of birds celebrated in letters or politics and
stuck them up in front of the nest. Suppose that one bird out of a thousand
birds began to do one of the thousand things that man had already done
even in the morning of the world; and we can be quite certain that the
onlooker would not regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of the
other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed; possibly
as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That bird would tell the augurs,
not of something that would happen, but of something that had happened.
That something would be the appearance of a mind with a new dimension
of depth; a mind like that of man. If there be no God, no other mind could
conceivably have foreseen it.
Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence that this thing
was evolved at all. There is not a particle of proof that this transition came
slowly, or even that it came naturally. In a strictly scientific sense, we
simply know nothing whatever about how it grew, or whether it grew, or
what it is. There may be a broken trail of stones and bones faintly
suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even
faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it
was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something
happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside time. It has
therefore nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense. The historian
must take it or something like it for granted; it is not his business as a
historian to explain it. But if he cannot explain it as a historian, he will not
explain it as a biologist. In neither case is there any disgrace to him in
accepting it without explaining it; for it is a reality, and history and biology
deal with realities. He is quite justified in calmly confronting the pig with
wings and the cow that jumped over the moon, merely because they have
happened. He can reasonably accept man as a freak, because he accepts
man as a fact. He can be perfectly comfortable in a crazy and disconnected
world, or in a world that can produce such a crazy and disconnected thing.
For reality is a thing in which we can all repose, even if it hardly seems
related to anything else. The thing is there; and that is enough for most of
us. But if we do indeed want to know how it can conceivably have come
there, if we do indeed wish to see it related realistically to other things, if
we do insist on seeing it evolved before our very eyes from an environment
nearer to its own nature, then assuredly it is to very different things that we
must go. We must stir very strange memories and return to very simple
dreams if we desire some origin that can make man other than a monster.
We shall have discovered very different causes before he becomes a
creature of causation; and invoked other authority to turn him into
something reasonable, or even into anything probable. That way lies all that
is at once awful and familiar and forgotten, with dreadful faces thronged
and fiery arms. We can accept man as a fact, if we are content with an
unexplained fact. We can accept him as an animal, if we can live with a
fabulous animal. But if we must needs have sequence and necessity, then
indeed we must provide a prelude and crescendo of mounting miracles, that
ushered in with unthinkable thunders in all the seven heavens of another
order, a man may be an ordinary thing.

CHAPTER II

PROFESSORS AND PREHISTORIC MEN

Science is weak about these prehistoric things in a way that has hardly
been noticed. The science whose modern marvels we all admire succeeds
by incessantly adding to its data. In all practical inventions, in most natural
discoveries, it can always increase evidence by experiment. But it cannot
experiment in making men; or even in watching to see what the first men
make. An inventor can advance step by step in the construction of an
aeroplane, even if he is only experimenting with sticks and scraps of metal
in his own back-yard. But he cannot watch the Missing Link evolving in his
own back-yard. If he has made a mistake in his calculations, the aeroplane
will correct it by crashing to the ground. But if he has made a mistake about
the arboreal habitat of his ancestor, he cannot see his arboreal ancestor
falling off the tree. He cannot keep a cave-man like a cat in the back-yard
and watch him to see whether he does really practise cannibalism or carry
off his mate on the principles of marriage by capture. He cannot keep a tribe
of primitive men like a pack of hounds and notice how far they are
influenced by the herd instinct. If he sees a particular bird behave in a
particular way, he can get other birds and see if they behave in that way; but
if he finds a skull, or the scrap of a skull, in the hollow of a hill, he cannot
multiply it into a vision of the valley of dry bones. In dealing with a past
that has almost entirely perished, he can only go by evidence and not by
experiment. And there is hardly enough evidence to be even evidential.
Thus while most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly
corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line
uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can
really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind
that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one
scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is
constructed at last out of whole scrap-heaps of scraps of metal. The trouble
with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The
marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes.
The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department it
would be truer to talk of the impatience of science. Owing to the difficulty
above described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry. We have a series
of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called fancies, and cannot in
any case be further corrected by facts. The most empirical anthropologist is
here as limited as an antiquary. He can only cling to a fragment of the past
and has no way of increasing it for the future. He can only clutch his
fragment of fact, almost as the primitive man clutched his fragment of flint.
And indeed he does deal with it in much the same way and for much the
same reason. It is his tool and his only tool. It is his weapon and his only
weapon. He often wields it with a fanaticism far in excess of anything
shown by men of science when they can collect more facts from experience
and even add new facts by experiment. Sometimes the professor with his
bone becomes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at
least does not deduce a theory from it, proving that mankind is going to the
dogs—or that it came from them.
For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keeping a monkey and
watching it evolve into a man. Experimental evidence of such an evolution
being impossible, the professor is not content to say (as most of us would be
ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough anyhow. He produces
his little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous
things from it. He found in Java a part of a skull, seeming by its contour to
be smaller than the human. Somewhere near it he found an upright thigh-
bone, and in the same scattered fashion some teeth that were not human. If
they all form part of one creature, which is doubtful, our conception of the
creature would be almost equally doubtful. But the effect on popular
science was to produce a complete and even complex figure, finished down
to the last details of hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an
ordinary historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or
Fox or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the
portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing was
reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his head were
all numbered. No uninformed person looking at its carefully lined face and
wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the portrait of a
thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium. In the same way
people talked about him as if he were an individual whose influence and
character were familiar to us all. I have just read a story in a magazine
about Java, and how modern white inhabitants of that island are prevailed
on to misbehave themselves by the personal influence of poor old
Pithecanthropus. That the modern inhabitants of Java misbehave themselves
I can very readily believe; but I do not imagine that they need any
encouragement from the discovery of a few highly doubtful bones.
Anyhow, those bones are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up
the whole of the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between man
and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors. On the assumption of
that evolutionary connection (a connection which I am not in the least
concerned to deny), the really arresting and remarkable fact is the
comparative absence of any such remains recording that connection at that
point. The sincerity of Darwin really admitted this; and that is how we came
to use such a term as the Missing Link. But the dogmatism of Darwinians
has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly
fallen into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image. They
talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one
were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the
hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or dining with an
undistributed middle.
In this sketch, therefore, of man in his relation to certain religious and
historical problems, I shall waste no further space on these speculations on
the nature of man before he became man. His body may have been evolved
from the brutes; but we know nothing of any such transition that throws the
smallest light upon his soul as it has shown itself in history. Unfortunately
the same school of writers pursue the same style of reasoning when they
come to the first real evidence about the first real men. Strictly speaking of
course we know nothing about prehistoric man, for the simple reason that
he was prehistoric. The history of prehistoric man is a very obvious
contradiction in terms. It is the sort of unreason in which only rationalists
are allowed to indulge. If a parson had casually observed that the Flood was
antediluvian, it is possible that he might be a little chaffed about his logic. If
a bishop were to say that Adam was Preadamite, we might think it a little
odd. But we are not supposed to notice such verbal trifles when sceptical
historians talk of the part of history that is prehistoric. The truth is that they
are using the terms historic and prehistoric without any clear test or
definition in their minds. What they mean is that there are traces of human
lives before the beginning of human stories; and in that sense we do at least
know that humanity was before history.
Human civilisation is older than human records. That is the sane way of
stating our relations to these remote things. Humanity has left examples of
its other arts earlier than the art of writing; or at least of any writing that we
can read. But it is certain that the primitive arts were arts; and it is in every
way probable that the primitive civilisations were civilisations. The man left
a picture of the reindeer, but he did not leave a narrative of how he hunted
the reindeer; and therefore what we say of him is hypothesis and not
history. But the art he did practise was quite artistic; his drawing was quite
intelligent, and there is no reason to doubt that his story of the hunt would
be quite intelligent, only if it exists it is not intelligible. In short, the
prehistoric period need not mean the primitive period, in the sense of the
barbaric or bestial period. It does not mean the time before civilisation or
the time before arts and crafts. It simply means the time before any
connected narratives that we can read. This does indeed make all the
practical difference between remembrance and forgetfulness; but it is
perfectly possible that there were all sorts of forgotten forms of civilisation,
as well as all sorts of forgotten forms of barbarism. And in any case
everything indicated that many of these forgotten or half-forgotten social
stages were much more civilised and much less barbaric than is vulgarly
imagined to-day. But even about these unwritten histories of humanity,
when humanity was quite certainly human, we can only conjecture with the
greatest doubt and caution. And unfortunately doubt and caution are the last
things commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism of current culture.
For that culture is full of curiosity; and the one thing that it cannot endure is
the agony of agnosticism. It was in the Darwinian age that the word first
became known and the thing first became impossible.
It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by
impudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that men have
hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are without
support. The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric
tribe began confidently with the words ‘They wore no clothes.’ Not one
reader in a hundred probably stopped to ask himself how we should come to
know whether clothes had once been worn by people of whom everything
has perished except a few chips of bone and stone. It was doubtless hoped
that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet. It was evidently
anticipated that we might discover an everlasting pair of trousers of the
same substance as the everlasting rock. But to persons of a less sanguine
temperament it will be immediately apparent that people might wear simple
garments, or even highly ornamental garments, without leaving any more
traces of them than these people have left. The plaiting of rushes and
grasses, for instance, might have become more and more elaborate without
in the least becoming more eternal. One civilisation might specialise in
things that happened to be perishable, like weaving and embroidering, and
not in things that happen to be more permanent, like architecture and
sculpture. There have been plenty of examples of such specialist societies.
A man of the future finding the ruins of our factory machinery might as
fairly say that we were acquainted with iron and with no other substance;
and announce the discovery that the proprietor and manager of the factory
undoubtedly walked about naked—or possibly wore iron hats and trousers.
It is not contended here that these primitive men did wear clothes any
more than they did weave rushes; but merely that we have not enough
evidence to know whether they did or not. But it may be worth while to
look back for a moment at some of the very few things that we do know and
that they did do. If we consider them, we shall certainly not find them
inconsistent with such ideas as dress and decoration. We do not know
whether they decorated themselves; but we do know that they decorated
other things. We do not know whether they had embroideries, and if they
had, the embroideries could not be expected to have remained. But we do
know that they did have pictures; and the pictures have remained. And there
remains with them, as already suggested, the testimony to something that is
absolute and unique; that belongs to man and to nothing else except man;
that is a difference of kind and not a difference of degree. A monkey does
not draw clumsily and a man cleverly; a monkey does not begin the art of
representation and a man carry it to perfection. A monkey does not do it at
all; he does not begin to do it at all; he does not begin to begin to do it at all.
A line of some kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin.
Another distinguished writer, again, in commenting on the cave-
drawings attributed to the neolithic men of the reindeer period, said that
none of their pictures appeared to have any religious purpose; and he
seemed almost to infer that they had no religion. I can hardly imagine a
thinner thread of argument than this which reconstructs the very inmost
moods of the prehistoric mind from the fact that somebody who has
scrawled a few sketches on a rock, from what motive we do not know, for
what purpose we do not know, acting under what customs or conventions
we do not know, may possibly have found it easier to draw reindeers than to
draw religion. He may have drawn it because it was his religious symbol.
He may have drawn it because it was not his religious symbol. He may have
drawn anything except his religious symbol. He may have drawn his real
religious symbol somewhere else; or it may have been deliberately
destroyed when it was drawn. He may have done or not done half a million
things; but in any case it is an amazing leap of logic to infer that he had no
religious symbol, or even to infer from his having no religious symbol that
he had no religion. Now this particular case happens to illustrate the
insecurity of these guesses very clearly. For a little while afterwards, people
discovered not only paintings but sculptures of animals in the caves. Some
of these were said to be damaged with dints or holes supposed to be the
marks of arrows; and the damaged images were conjectured to be the
remains of some magic rite of killing the beasts in effigy; while the
undamaged images were explained in connection with another magic rite
invoking fertility upon the herds. Here again there is something faintly
humorous about the scientific habit of having it both ways. If the image is
damaged it proves one superstition and if it is undamaged it proves another.
Here again there is a rather reckless jumping to conclusions; it has hardly
occurred to the speculators that a crowd of hunters imprisoned in winter in a
cave might conceivably have aimed at a mark for fun, as a sort of primitive
parlour game. But in any case, if it was done out of superstition, what has
become of the thesis that it had nothing to do with religion? The truth is that
all this guesswork has nothing to do with anything. It is not half such a
good parlour game as shooting arrows at a carved reindeer, for it is shooting
them into the air.
Such speculators rather tend to forget, for instance, that men in the
modern world also sometimes make marks in caves. When a crowd of
trippers is conducted through the labyrinth of the Marvellous Grotto or the
Magic Stalactite Cavern, it has been observed that hieroglyphics spring into
sight where they have passed; initials and inscriptions which the learned
refuse to refer to any remote date. But the time will come when these
inscriptions will really be of remote date. And if the professors of the future
are anything like the professors of the present, they will be able to deduce a
vast number of very vivid and interesting things from these cave-writings of
the twentieth century. If I know anything about the breed, and if they have
not fallen away from the full-blooded confidence of their fathers, they will
be able to discover the most fascinating facts about us from the initials left
in the Magic Grotto by ’Arry and ’Arriet, possibly in the form of two
intertwined A’s. From this alone they will know (1) That as the letters are
rudely chipped with a blunt pocket-knife, the twentieth century possessed
no delicate graving-tools and was unacquainted with the art of sculpture. (2)
That as the letters are capital letters, our civilisation never evolved any
small letters or anything like a running hand. (3) That because initial
consonants stand together in an unpronounceable fashion, our language was
possibly akin to Welsh or more probably of the early Semitic type that
ignored vowels. (4) That as the initials of ’Arry and ’Arriet do not in any
special fashion profess to be religious symbols, our civilisation possessed
no religion. Perhaps the last is about the nearest to the truth; for a
civilisation that had religion would have a little more reason.
It is commonly affirmed, again, that religion grew in a very slow and
evolutionary manner; and even that it grew not from one cause, but from a
combination that might be called a coincidence. Generally speaking, the
three chief elements in the combination are, first, the fear of the chief of the
tribe (whom Mr. Wells insists on calling, with regrettable familiarity, the
Old Man), second, the phenomena of dreams, and third, the sacrificial
associations of the harvest and the resurrection symbolised in the growing
corn. I may remark in passing that it seems to me very doubtful psychology
to refer one living and single spirit to three dead and disconnected causes, if
they were merely dead and disconnected causes. Suppose Mr. Wells, in one
of his fascinating novels of the future, were to tell us that there would arise
among men a new and as yet nameless passion, of which men will dream as
they dream of first love, for which they will die as they die for a flag and a
fatherland. I think we should be a little puzzled if he told us that this
singular sentiment would be a combination of the habit of smoking
Woodbines, the increase of the income tax and the pleasure of a motorist in
exceeding the speed limit. We could not easily imagine this, because we
could not imagine any connection between the three or any common feeling
that could include them all. Nor could any one imagine any connection
between corn and dreams and an old chief with a spear, unless there was
already a common feeling to include them all. But if there was such a
common feeling it could only be the religious feeling; and these things
could not be the beginnings of a religious feeling that existed already. I
think anybody’s common sense will tell him that it is far more likely that
this sort of mystical sentiment did exist already; and that in the light of it
dreams and kings and cornfields could appear mystical then, as they can
appear mystical now.
For the plain truth is that all this is a trick of making things seem distant
and dehumanised, merely by pretending not to understand things that we do
understand. It is like saying that prehistoric men had an ugly and uncouth
habit of opening their mouths wide at intervals and stuffing strange
substances into them, as if we had never heard of eating. It is like saying
that the terrible Troglodytes of the Stone Age lifted alternate legs in
rotation, as if we had never heard of walking. If it were meant to touch the
mystical nerve and awaken us to the wonder of walking and eating, it might
be a legitimate fancy. As it is here intended to kill the mystical nerve and
deaden us to the wonder of religion, it is irrational rubbish. It pretends to
find something incomprehensible in the feelings that we all comprehend.
Who does not find dreams mysterious, and feel that they lie on the dark
borderland of being? Who does not feel the death and resurrection of the
growing things of the earth as something near to the secret of the universe?
Who does not understand that there must always be the savour of something
sacred about authority and the solidarity that is the soul of the tribe? If there
be any anthropologist who really finds these things remote and impossible
to realise, we can say nothing of that scientific gentleman except that he has
not got so large and enlightened a mind as a primitive man. To me it seems
obvious that nothing but a spiritual sentiment already active could have
clothed these separate and diverse things with sanctity. To say that religion
came from reverencing a chief or sacrificing at a harvest is to put a highly
elaborate cart before a really primitive horse. It is like saying that the
impulse to draw pictures came from the contemplation of the pictures of
reindeers in the cave. In other words, it is explaining painting by saying that
it arose out of the work of painters; or accounting for art by saying that it
arose out of art. It is even more like saying that the thing we call poetry
arose as the result of certain customs; such as that of an ode being officially
composed to celebrate the advent of spring; or that of a young man rising at
a regular hour to listen to the skylark and then writing his report on a piece
of paper. It is quite true that young men often become poets in the spring;
and it is quite true that when once there are poets, no mortal power can
restrain them from writing about the skylark. But the poems did not exist
before the poets. The poetry did not arise out of the poetic forms. In other
words, it is hardly an adequate explanation of how a thing appeared for the
first time to say it existed already. Similarly, we cannot say that religion
arose out of the religious forms, because that is only another way of saying
that it only arose when it existed already. It needed a certain sort of mind to
see that there was anything mystical about the dreams or the dead, as it
needed a particular sort of mind to see that there was anything poetical
about the skylark or the spring. That mind was presumably what we call the
human mind, very much as it exists to this day; for mystics still meditate
upon death and dreams as poets still write about spring and skylarks. But
there is not the faintest hint to suggest that anything short of the human
mind we know feels any of these mystical associations at all. A cow in a
field seems to derive no lyrical impulse or instruction from her unrivalled
opportunities for listening to the skylark. And similarly there is no reason to
suppose that live sheep will ever begin to use dead sheep as the basis of a
system of elaborate ancestor-worship. It is true that in the spring a young
quadruped’s fancy may lightly turn to thoughts of love, but no succession of
springs has ever led it to turn however lightly to thoughts of literature. And
in the same way, while it is true that a dog has dreams, while most other
quadrupeds do not seem even to have that, we have waited a long time for
the dog to develop his dreams into an elaborate system of religious
ceremonial. We have waited so long that we have really ceased to expect it;
and we no more look to see a dog apply his dreams to ecclesiastical
construction than to see him examine his dreams by the rules of psycho-
analysis. It is obvious, in short, that for some reason or other these natural
experiences, and even natural excitements, never do pass the line that
separates them from creative expression like art and religion, in any
creature except man. They never do, they never have, and it is now to all
appearance very improbable that they ever will. It is not impossible, in the
sense of self-contradictory, that we should see cows fasting from grass
every Friday or going on their knees as in the old legend about Christmas
Eve. It is not in that sense impossible that cows should contemplate death
until they can lift up a sublime psalm of lamentation to the tune the old cow
died of. It is not in that sense impossible that they should express their
hopes of a heavenly career in a symbolical dance, in honour of the cow that
jumped over the moon. It may be that the dog will at last have laid in a
sufficient store of dreams to enable him to build a temple to Cerberus as a
sort of canine trinity. It may be that his dreams have already begun to turn
into visions capable of verbal expression, in some revelation about the Dog
Star as the spiritual home for lost dogs. These things are logically possible,
in the sense that it is logically difficult to prove the universal negative
which we call an impossibility. But all that instinct for the probable, which
we call common sense, must long ago have told us that the animals are not
to all appearance evolving in that sense; and that, to say the least, we are not
likely to have any personal evidence of their passing from the animal
experience to the human experiments. But spring and death and even
dreams, considered merely as experiences, are their experiences as much as
ours. The only possible conclusion is that these experiences, considered as
experiences, do not generate anything like a religious sense in any mind
except a mind like ours. We come back to the fact of a certain kind of mind
as already alive and alone. It was unique and it could make creeds as it
could make cave-drawings. The materials for religion had lain there for
countless ages like the materials for everything else; but the power of
religion was in the mind. Man could already see in these things the riddles
and hints and hopes that he still sees in them. He could not only dream but
dream about dreams. He could not only see the dead but see the shadow of
death; and was possessed with that mysterious mystification that for ever
finds death incredible.
It is quite true that we have even these hints chiefly about man when he
unmistakably 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 allegation. 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
philosophy. 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 exhibited as much ritual in religion as a man or as much
simplicity in religion as an ape. He may have been a mythologist or he may
have been a myth. It might be interesting to inquire whether this mystical
quality appeared in a transition from the ape to the man, if there were really
any types of the transition to inquire 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 deduce any evolutionary views
about the origin of religion from him. Even in trying to prove that religion
grew slowly from rude or irrational sources, they begin their proof with the
first men who were men. But their own proof only proves that the men who
were already men were already mystics. They used the rude and irrational
elements as only men and mystics can use them. We come back once more
to the simple truth; that at some time too early for these critics to trace, a
transition had occurred to which bones and stones cannot in their nature
bear witness; and man became a living soul.
Touching this matter of the origin of religion, the truth is that those who
are thus trying to explain it are trying to explain it away. Subconsciously
they feel that it looks less formidable when thus lengthened out into a
gradual and almost invisible process. But in fact this perspective entirely
falsifies the reality of experience. They bring together two things that are
totally different, the stray hints of evolutionary origins and the solid and
self-evident block of humanity, and try to shift their standpoint till they see
them in a single foreshortened line. But it is an optical illusion. Men do not
in fact stand related to monkeys or missing links in any such chain as that in
which men stand related to men. There may have been intermediate
creatures whose faint traces can be found here and there in the huge gap. Of
these beings, if they ever existed, it may be true that they were things very
unlike men or men very unlike ourselves. But of prehistoric men, such as
those called the cave-men or the reindeer men, it is not true in any sense
whatever. Prehistoric men of that sort were things 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.
Looking from our human standpoint up the long perspective of
humanity, we simply recognise this thing as human. If we had to recognise
it as animal, we should have had to recognise it as abnormal. If we chose to
look through the other end of the telescope, as I have done more than once
in these speculations, if we chose to project the human figure forward out of
an unhuman world, we could only say that one of the animals had obviously
gone mad. But seeing the thing from the right end, or rather from the inside,
we know it is sanity; and we know that these primitive men were sane. We
hail a certain human freemasonry wherever we see it, in savages, in
foreigners or in historical characters. For instance, all we can infer from
primitive legend, and all we know of barbaric life, supports a certain moral
and even mystical idea of which the commonest symbol is clothes. For
clothes are very literally vestments, and man wears them because he is a
priest. It is true that even as an animal he is here different from the animals.
Nakedness is not nature to him; it is not his life but rather his death; even in
the vulgar sense of his death of cold. But clothes are worn for dignity or
decency or decoration where they are not in any way wanted for warmth. It
would sometimes appear that they are valued for ornament before they are
valued for use. It would almost always appear that they are felt to have
some connection with decorum. Conventions of this sort vary a great deal
with various times and places; and there are some who cannot get over this
reflection, and for whom it seems a sufficient argument for letting all
conventions slide. They never tire of repeating, with simple wonder, that
dress is different in the Cannibal Islands and in Camden Town; they cannot
get any further and throw up the whole idea of decency in despair. They
might as well say that because there have been hats of a good many
different shapes, and some rather eccentric shapes, therefore hats do not
matter or do not exist. They would probably add that there is no such thing
as sunstroke or going bald. Men have felt everywhere that certain forms
were necessary to fence off and protect certain private things from contempt
or coarse misunderstanding; and the keeping of those forms, whatever they
were, made for dignity and mutual respect. The fact that they mostly refer,
more or less remotely, to the relations of the sexes illustrates the two facts
that must be put at the very beginning of the record of the race. The first is
the fact that original sin is really original. Not merely in theology but in
history it is a thing rooted in the origins. Whatever else men have believed,
they have all believed that there is something the matter with mankind. This
sense of sin has made it impossible to be natural and have no clothes, just as
it has made it impossible to be natural and have no laws. But above all it is
to be found in that other fact, which is the father and mother of all laws as it
is itself founded on a father and mother: the thing that is before all thrones
and even all commonwealths.
That fact is the family. Here again we must keep the enormous
proportions of a normal thing clear of various modifications and degrees
and doubts more or less reasonable, like clouds clinging about a mountain.
It may be that what we call the family had to fight its way from or through
various anarchies and aberrations; but it certainly survived them and is quite
as likely as not to have also preceded them. As we shall see in the case of
communism and nomadism, more formless things could and did lie on the
flank of societies that had taken a fixed form; but there is nothing to show
that the form did not exist before the formlessness. What is vital is that form
is more important than formlessness; and that the material called mankind
has taken this form. For instance, of the rules revolving round sex, which
were recently mentioned, none is more curious than the savage custom
commonly called the couvade. That seems like a law out of topsyturvydom;
by which the father is treated as if he were the mother. In any case it clearly
involves the mystical sense of sex; but many have maintained that it is
really a symbolic act by which the father accepts the responsibility of
fatherhood. In that case that grotesque antic is really a very solemn act; for
it is the foundation of all we call the family and all we know as human
society. Some groping in these dark beginnings have said that mankind was
once under a matriarchy; I suppose that under a matriarchy it would not be
called mankind but womankind. But others have conjectured that what is
called matriarchy was simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone
remained fixed because all the fathers were fugitive and irresponsible. Then
came the moment when the man decided to guard and guide what he had
created. So he became the head of the family, not as a bully with a big club
to beat women with, but rather as a respectable person trying to be a
responsible person. Now all that might be perfectly true, and might even
have been the first family act, and it would still be true that man then for the
first time acted like a man, and therefore for the first time became fully a
man. But it might quite as well be true that the matriarchy or moral anarchy,
or whatever we call it, was only one of the hundred social dissolutions or
barbaric backslidings which may have occurred at intervals in prehistoric as
they certainly did in historic times. A symbol like the couvade, if it was
really such a symbol, may have commemorated the suppression of a heresy
rather than the first rise of a religion. We cannot conclude with any certainty
about these things, except in their big results in the building of mankind, but
we can say in what style the bulk of it and the best of it is built. We can say
that the family is the unit of the state; that it is the cell that makes up the
formation. Round the family do indeed gather the sanctities that separate
men from ants and bees. Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the
wall of that city; property is but the family farm; honour is but the family
flag. In the practical proportions of human history, we come back to that
fundamental of the father and the mother and the child. It has been said
already that if this story cannot start with religious assumptions, it must
none the less start with some moral or metaphysical assumptions, or no
sense can be made of the story of man. And this is a very good instance of
that alternative necessity. If we are not of those who begin by invoking a
divine Trinity, we must none the less invoke a human Trinity; and see that
triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the world. For the highest
event in history to which all history looks forward and leads up, is only
something that is at once the reversal and the renewal of that triangle. Or
rather it is the one triangle superimposed so as to intersect the other, making
a sacred pentacle of which, in a mightier sense than that of the magicians,
the fiends are afraid. The old Trinity was of father and mother and child,
and is called the human family. The new is of child and mother and father,
and has the name of the Holy Family. It is in no way altered except in being
entirely reversed; just as the world which it transformed was not in the least
different, except in being turned upside-down.

CHAPTER III

THE ANTIQUITY OF CIVILISATION

The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been like a man
watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn
breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks. But that dawn is breaking
behind the black bulk of great cities long builded and lost for us in the
original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even the
carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees; in which the
painted portrait can be twelve times the size of the man; with tombs like
mountains of man set four-square and pointing to the stars; with winged and
bearded bulls standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples;
standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world. The dawn of
history reveals a humanity already civilised. Perhaps it reveals a civilisation
already old. And among other more important things, it reveals the folly of
most of the generalisations about the previous and unknown period when it
was really young. The two first human societies of which we have any
reliable and detailed record are Babylon and Egypt. It so happens that these
two vast and splendid achievements of the genius of the ancients bear
witness against two of the commonest and crudest assumptions of the
culture of the moderns. If we want to get rid of half the nonsense about
nomads and cave-men and the old man of the forest, we need only look
steadily at the two solid and stupendous facts called Egypt and Babylon.
 Of course most of these speculators who are talking about primitive men
are thinking about modern savages. They prove their progressive evolution
by assuming that a great part of the human race has not progressed or
evolved; or even changed in any way at all. I do not agree with their theory
of change; nor do I agree with their dogma of things unchangeable. I may
not believe that civilised man has had so rapid and recent a progress; but I
cannot quite understand why uncivilised man should be so mystically
immortal and immutable. A somewhat simpler mode of thought and speech
seems to me to be needed throughout this inquiry. Modern savages cannot
be exactly like primitive man, because they are not primitive. Modern
savages are not ancient because they are modern. Something has happened
to their race as much as to ours, during the thousands of years of our
existence and endurance on the earth. They have had some experiences, and
have presumably acted on them if not profited by them, like the rest of us.
They have had some environment, and even some change of environment,
and have presumably adapted themselves to it in a proper and decorous
evolutionary manner. This would be true even if the experiences were mild
or the environment dreary; for there is an effect in mere time when it takes
the moral form of monotony. But it has appeared to a good many intelligent
and well-informed people quite as probable that the experience of the
savages has been that of a decline from civilisation. Most of those who
criticise this view do not seem to have any very clear notion of what a
decline from civilisation would be like. Heaven help them, it is likely
enough that they will soon find out. They seem to be content if cave-men
and cannibal islanders have some things in common, such as certain
particular implements. But it is obvious on the face of it that any peoples
reduced for any reason to a ruder life would have some things in common.
If we lost all our firearms we should make bows and arrows; but we should
not necessarily resemble in every way the first men who made bows and
arrows. It is said that the Russians in their great retreat were so short of
armament that they fought with clubs cut in the wood. But a professor of
the future would err in supposing that the Russian Army of 1916 was a
naked Scythian tribe that had never been out of the wood. It is like saying
that a man in his second childhood must exactly copy his first. A baby is
bald like an old man; but it would be an error for one ignorant of infancy to
infer that the baby had a long white beard. Both a baby and an old man
walk with difficulty; but he who shall expect the old gentleman to lie on his
back, and kick joyfully instead, will be disappointed.
It is therefore absurd to argue that the first pioneers of humanity must
have been identical with some of the last and most stagnant leavings of it.
There were almost certainly some things, there were probably many things,
in which the two were widely different or flatly contrary. An example of the
way in which this distinction works, and an example essential to our
argument here, is that of the nature and origin of government. I have
already alluded to Mr. H. G. Wells and the Old Man, with whom he appears
to be on such intimate terms. If we considered the cold facts of prehistoric
evidence for this portrait of the prehistoric chief of the tribe, we could only
excuse it by saying that its brilliant and versatile author simply forgot for a
moment that he was supposed to be writing a history, and dreamed he was
writing one of his own very wonderful and imaginative romances. At least I
cannot imagine how he can possibly know that the prehistoric ruler was
called the Old Man or that court etiquette requires it to be spelt with capital
letters. He says of the same potentate, ‘No one was allowed to touch his
spear or to sit in his seat.’ I have difficulty in believing that anybody has
dug up a prehistoric spear with a prehistoric label, ‘Visitors are Requested
not to Touch,’ or a complete throne with the inscription, ‘Reserved for the
Old Man.’ But it may be presumed that the writer, who can hardly be
supposed to be merely making up things out of his own head, was merely
taking for granted this very dubious parallel between the prehistoric and the
decivilised man. It may be that in certain savage tribes the chief is called the
Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit on his seat. It may
be that in those cases he is surrounded with superstitious and traditional
terrors; and it may be that in those cases, for all I know, he is despotic and
tyrannical. But there is not a grain of evidence that primitive government
was despotic and tyrannical. It may have been, of course, for it may have
been anything or even nothing; it may not have existed at all. But the
despotism in certain dingy and decayed tribes in the twentieth century does
not prove that the first men were ruled despotically. It does not even suggest
it; it does not even begin to hint at it. If there is one fact we really can
prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a
development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of
societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be
defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens
are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the
price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the
city while they sleep. It is also true that they sometimes needed him for
some sudden and militant act of reform; it is equally true that he often took
advantage of being the strong man armed to be a tyrant like some of the
Sultans of the East. But I cannot see why the Sultan should have appeared
any earlier in history than many other human figures. On the contrary, the
strong man armed obviously depends upon the superiority of his armour;
and armament of that sort comes with more complex civilisation. One man
may kill twenty with a machine-gun; it is obviously less likely that he could
do it with a piece of flint. As for the current cant about the strongest man
ruling by force and fear, it is simply a nursery fairy-tale about a giant with a
hundred hands. Twenty men could hold down the strongest strong man in
any society, ancient or modern. Undoubtedly they might admire, in a
romantic and poetical sense, the man who was really the strongest; but that
is quite a different thing, and is as purely moral and even mystical as the
admiration for the purest or the wisest. But the spirit that endures the mere
cruelties and caprices of an established despot is the spirit of an ancient and
settled and probably stiffened society, not the spirit of a new one. As his
name implies, the Old Man is the ruler of an old humanity.
It is far more probable that a primitive society was something like a pure
democracy. To this day the comparatively simple agricultural communities
are by far the purest democracies. Democracy is a thing which is always
breaking down through the complexity of civilisation. Any one who likes
may state it by saying that democracy is the foe of civilisation. But he must
remember that some of us really prefer democracy to civilisation, in the
sense of preferring democracy to complexity. Anyhow, peasants tilling
patches of their own land in a rough equality, and meeting to vote directly
under a village tree, are the most truly self-governing of men. It is surely as
likely as not that such a simple idea was found in the first condition of even
simpler men. Indeed the despotic vision is exaggerated, even if we do not
regard the men as men. Even on an evolutionary assumption of the most
materialistic sort, there is really no reason why men should not have had at
least as much camaraderie as rats or rooks. Leadership of some sort they
doubtless had, as have the gregarious animals; but leadership implies no
such irrational servility as that attributed to the superstitious subjects of the
Old Man. There was doubtless somebody corresponding, to use Tennyson’s
expression, to the many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery
home. But I fancy that if that venerable fowl began to act after the fashion
of some Sultans in ancient and decayed Asia, it would become a very
clanging rookery and the many-wintered crow would not see many more
winters. It may be remarked, in this connection, but even among animals it
would seem that something else is respected more than bestial violence, if it
be only the familiarity which in men is called tradition or the experience
which in men is called wisdom. I do not know if crows really follow the
oldest crow, but if they do they are certainly not following the strongest
crow. And I do know, in the human case, that if some ritual of seniority
keeps savages reverencing somebody called the Old Man, then at least they
have not our own servile sentimental weakness for worshipping the Strong
Man.
It may be said then that primitive government, like primitive art and
religion and everything else, is very imperfectly known or rather guessed at;
but that it is at least as good a guess to suggest that it was as popular as a
Balkan or Pyrenean village as that it was as capricious and secret as a
Turkish divan. Both the mountain democracy and the oriental palace are
modern in the sense that they are still there, or are some sort of growth of
history; but of the two the palace has much more the look of being an
accumulation and a corruption, the village much more the look of being a
really unchanged and primitive thing. But my suggestions at this point do
not go beyond expressing a wholesome doubt about the current assumption.
I think it interesting, for instance, that liberal institutions have been traced
even by moderns back to barbarian or undeveloped states, when it happened
to be convenient for the support of some race or nation or philosophy. So
the Socialists profess that their ideal of communal property existed in very
early times. So the Jews are proud of the Jubilees or juster redistributions
under their ancient law. So the Teutonists boasted of tracing parliaments and
juries and various popular things among the Germanic tribes of the North.
So the Celtophiles and those testifying to the wrongs of Ireland have
pleaded the more equal justice of the clan system, to which the Irish chiefs
bore witness before Strongbow. The strength of the case varies in the
different cases; but as there is some case for all of them, I suspect there is
some case for the general proposition that popular institutions of some sort
were by no means uncommon in early and simple societies. Each of these
separate schools were making the admission to prove a particular modern
thesis; but taken together they suggest a more ancient and general truth, that
there was something more in prehistoric councils than ferocity and fear.
Each of these separate theorists had his own axe to grind, but he was willing
to use a stone axe; and he manages to suggest that the stone axe might have
been as republican as the guillotine.
But the truth is that the curtain rises upon the play already in progress. In
one sense it is a true paradox that there was history before history. But it is
not the irrational paradox implied in prehistoric history; for it is a history
we do not know. Very probably it was exceedingly like the history we do
know, except in the one detail that we do not know it. It is thus the very
opposite of the pretentious prehistoric history, which professes to trace
everything in a consistent course from the amoeba to the anthropoid and
from the anthropoid to the agnostic. So far from being a question of our
knowing all about queer creatures very different from ourselves, they were
very probably people very like ourselves, except that we know nothing
about them. In other words, our most ancient records only reach back to a
time when humanity had long been human, and even long been civilised.
The most ancient records we have not only mention but take for granted
things like kings and priests and princes and assemblies of the people; they
describe communities that are roughly recognisable as communities in our
own sense. Some of them are despotic; but we cannot tell that they have
always been despotic. Some of them may be already decadent, and nearly
all are mentioned as if they were old. We do not know what really happened
in the world before those records; but the little we do know would leave us
anything but astonished if we learnt that it was very much like what
happens in this world now. There would be nothing inconsistent or
confounding about the discovery that those unknown ages were full of
republics collapsing under monarchies and rising again as republics,
empires expanding and finding colonies and then losing colonies, kingdoms
combining again into world-states and breaking up again into small
nationalities, classes selling themselves into slavery and marching out once
more into liberty; all that procession of humanity which may or may not be
a progress but is most assuredly a romance. But the first chapters of the
romance have been torn out of the book; and we shall never read them.
It is so also with the more special fancy about evolution and social
stability. According to the real records available, barbarism and civilisation
were not successive stages in the progress of the world. They were
conditions that existed side by side, as they still exist side by side. There
were civilisations then as there are civilisations now; there are savages now
as there were savages then. It is suggested that all men passed through a
nomadic stage; but it is certain that there are some who have never passed
out of it, and it seems not unlikely that there were some who never passed
into it. It is probable that from very primitive times the static tiller of the
soil and the wandering shepherd were two distinct types of men; and the
chronological rearrangement of them is but a mark of that mania for
progressive stages that has largely falsified history. It is suggested that there
was a communist stage, in which private property was everywhere
unknown, a whole humanity living on the negation of property; but the
evidences of this negation are themselves rather negative. Redistributions of
property, jubilees, and agrarian laws occur at various intervals and in
various forms; but that humanity inevitably passed through a communist
stage seems as doubtful as the parallel proposition that humanity will
inevitably return to it. It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest
plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a
revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. There is
an amusing parallel example in the case of what is called feminism. In spite
of all the pseudo-scientific gossip about marriage by capture and the cave-
man beating the cave-woman with a club, it may be noted that as soon as
feminism became a fashionable cry, it was insisted that human civilisation
in its first stage had been a matriarchy. Apparently it was the cave-woman
who carried the club. Anyhow all these ideas are little better than guesses;
and they have a curious way of following the fortune of modern theories
and fads. In any case they are not history in the sense of record; and we may
repeat that when it comes to record, the broad truth is that barbarism and
civilisation have always dwelt side by side in the world, the civilisation
sometimes spreading to absorb the barbarians, sometimes decaying into
relative barbarism, and in almost all cases possessing in a more finished
form certain ideas and institutions which the barbarians possess in a ruder
form; such as government or social authority, the arts and especially the
decorative arts, mysteries and taboos of various kinds especially
surrounding the matter of sex, and some form of that fundamental thing
which is the chief concern of this inquiry: the thing that we call religion.
Now Egypt and Babylon, those two primeval monsters, might in this
matter have been specially provided as models. They might almost be called
working models to show how these modern theories do not work. The two
great truths we know about these two great cultures happen to contradict
flatly the two current fallacies which have just been considered. The story
of Egypt might have been invented to point the moral that man does not
necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often
finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is
experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is
exhausted. And the story of Babylon might have been invented to point the
moral that man need not be a nomad or a communist before he becomes a
peasant or a citizen; and that such cultures are not always in successive
stages but often in contemporary states. Even touching these great
civilisations with which our written history begins, there is a temptation of
course to be too ingenious or too cocksure. We can read the bricks of
Babylon in a very different sense from that in which we guess about the
Cup and Ring stones; and we do definitely know what is meant by the
animals in the Egyptian hieroglyphic as we know nothing of the animals in
the neolithic cave. But even here the admirable archeologists who have
deciphered line after line of miles of hieroglyphics may be tempted to read
too much between the lines; even the real authority on Babylon may forget
how fragmentary is his hard-won knowledge; may forget that Babylon has
only heaved half a brick at him, though half a brick is better than no
cuneiform. But some truths, historic and not prehistoric, dogmatic and not
evolutionary, facts and not fancies, do indeed emerge from Egypt and
Babylon; and these two truths are among them.
Egypt is a green ribbon along the river edging the dark red desolation of
the desert. It is a proverb, and one of vast antiquity, that it is created by the
mysterious bounty and almost sinister benevolence of the Nile. When we
first hear of Egyptians they are living as in a string of river-side villages, in
small and separate but co-operative communities along the bank of the Nile.
Where the river branched into the broad Delta there was traditionally the
beginning of a somewhat different district or people; but this need not
complicate the main truth. These more or less independent though
interdependent peoples were considerably civilised already. They had a sort
of heraldry; that is, decorative art used for symbolic and social purposes;
each sailing the Nile under its own ensign representing some bird or animal.
Heraldry involves two things of enormous importance to normal humanity;
the combination of the two making that noble thing called co-operation; on
which rest all peasantries and peoples that are free. The art of heraldry
means independence; an image chosen by the imagination to express the
individuality. The science of heraldry means interdependence; an agreement
between different bodies to recognise different images; a science of
imagery. We have here therefore exactly that compromise of co-operation
between free families or groups which is the most normal mode of life for
humanity and is particularly apparent wherever men own their own land
and live on it. With the very mention of the images of bird and beast the
student of mythology will murmur the word ‘totem’ almost in his sleep. But
to my mind much of the trouble arises from his habit of saying such words
as if in his sleep. Throughout this rough outline I have made a necessarily
inadequate attempt to keep on the inside rather than the outside of such
things; to consider them where possible in terms of thought and not merely
in terms of terminology. There is very little value in talking about totems
unless we have some feeling of what it really felt like to have a totem.
Granted that they had totems and we have no totems; was it because they
had more fear of animals or more familiarity with animals? Did a man
whose totem was a wolf feel like a were-wolf or like a man running away
from a were-wolf? Did he feel like Uncle Remus about Brer Wolf or like St.
Francis about his brother the wolf, or like Mowgli about his brothers the
wolves? Was a totem a thing like the British lion or a thing like the British
bulldog? Was the worship of a totem like the feeling of niggers about
Mumbo Jumbo, or of children about Jumbo? I have never read any book of
folk-lore, however learned, that gave me any light upon this question,
which I think by far the most important one. I will confine myself to
repeating that the earliest Egyptian communities had a common
understanding about the images that stood for their individual states; and
that this amount of communication is prehistoric in the sense that it is
already there at the beginning of history. But as history unfolds itself, this
question of communication is clearly the main question of these riverside
communities. With the need of communication comes the need of a
common government and the growing greatness and spreading shadow of
the king. The other binding force besides the king, and perhaps older than
the king, is the priesthood; and the priesthood has presumably even more to
do with these ritual symbols and signals by which men can communicate.
And here in Egypt arose probably the primary and certainly the typical
invention to which we owe all history, and the whole difference between the
historic and the prehistoric: the archetypal script, the art of writing.
The popular pictures of these primeval empires are not half so popular as
they might be. There is shed over them the shadow of an exaggerated
gloom, more than the normal and even healthy sadness of heathen men. It is
part of the same sort of secret pessimism that loves to make primitive man a
crawling creature, whose body is filth and whose soul is fear. It comes of
course from the fact that men are moved most by their religion; especially
when it is irreligion. For them anything primary and elemental must be evil.
But it is the curious consequence that while we have been deluged with the
wildest experiments in primitive romance, they have all missed the real
romance of being primitive. They have described scenes that are wholly
imaginary, in which the men of the Stone Age are men of stone like walking
statues; in which the Assyrians or Egyptians are as stiff or as painted as
their own most archaic art. But none of these makers of imaginary scenes
have tried to imagine what it must really have been like to see those things
as fresh which we see as familiar. They have not seen a man discovering
fire like a child discovering fireworks. They have not seen a man playing
with the wonderful invention called the wheel, like a boy playing at putting
up a wireless station. They have never put the spirit of youth into their
descriptions of the youth of the world. It follows that amid all their
primitive or prehistoric fancies there are no jokes. There are not even
practical jokes, in connection with the practical inventions. And this is very
sharply defined in the particular case of hieroglyphics; for there seems to be
serious indication that the whole high human art of scripture or writing
began with a joke.
There are some who will learn with regret that it seems to have begun
with a pun. The king or the priests or some responsible persons, wishing to
send a message up the river in that inconveniently long and narrow territory,
hit on the idea of sending it in picture-writing, like that of the Red Indian.
Like most people who have written picture-writing for fun, he found the
words did not always fit. But when the word for taxes sounded rather like
the word for pig, he boldly put down a pig as a bad pun and chanced it. So a
modern hieroglyphist might represent ‘at once’ by unscrupulously drawing
a hat followed by a series of upright numerals. It was good enough for the
Pharaohs and ought to be good enough for him. But it must have been great
fun to write or even to read these messages, when writing and reading were
really a new thing. And if people must write romances about ancient Egypt
(and it seems that neither prayers nor tears nor curses can withhold them
from the habit), I suggest that scenes like this would really remind us that
the ancient Egyptians were human beings. I suggest that somebody should
describe the scene of the great monarch sitting among his priests, and all of
them roaring with laughter and bubbling over with suggestions as the royal
puns grew more and more wild and indefensible. There might be another
scene of almost equal excitement about the decoding of this cipher; the
guesses and clues and discoveries having all the popular thrill of a detective
story. That is how primitive romance and primitive history really ought to
be written. For whatever was the quality of the religious or moral life of
remote times, and it was probably much more human than is conventionally
supposed, the scientific interest of such a time must have been intense.
Words must have been more wonderful than wireless telegraphy; and
experiments with common things a series of electric shocks. We are still
waiting for somebody to write a lively story of primitive life. The point is in
some sense a parenthesis here; but it is connected with the general matter of
political development, by the institution which is most active in these first
and most fascinating of all the fairy-tales of science.
It is admitted that we owe most of this science to the priests. Modern
writers like Mr. Wells cannot be accused of any weakness of sympathy with
a pontifical hierarchy; but they agree at least in recognising what pagan
priesthoods did for the arts and sciences. Among the more ignorant of the
enlightened there was indeed a convention of saying that priests had
obstructed progress in all ages; and a politician once told me in a debate
that I was resisting modern reforms exactly as some ancient priest probably
resisted the discovery of wheels. I pointed out, in reply, that it was far more
likely that the ancient priest made the discovery of the wheels. It is
overwhelmingly probable that the ancient priest had a great deal to do with
the discovery of the art of writing. It is obvious enough in the fact that the
very word hieroglyphic is akin to the word hierarchy. The religion of these
priests was apparently a more or less tangled polytheism of a type that is
more particularly described elsewhere. It passed through a period when it
co-operated with the king, another period when it was temporarily
destroyed by the king, who happened to be a prince with a private theism of
his own, and a third period when it practically destroyed the king and ruled
in his stead. But the world has to thank it for many things which it considers
common and necessary; and the creators of those common things ought
really to have a place among the heroes of humanity. If we were at rest in a
real paganism, instead of being restless in a rather irrational reaction from
Christianity, we might pay some sort of pagan honour to these nameless
makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of the man who first
found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who first tamed a
horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices, there would be more
sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with cockney statues of stale
politicians and philanthropists. But one of the strange marks of the strength
of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilisation has been
able to be really human.
The point is here, however, that the Egyptian government, whether
pontifical or royal, found it more and more necessary to establish
communication; and there always went with communication a certain
element of coercion. It is not necessarily an indefensible thing that the State
grew more despotic as it grew more civilised; it is arguable that it had to
grow more despotic in order to grow more civilised. That is the argument
for autocracy in every age; and the interest lies in seeing it illustrated in the
earliest age. But it is emphatically not true that it was most despotic in the
earliest age and grew more liberal in a later age; the practical process of
history is exactly the reverse. It is not true that the tribe began in the
extreme of terror of the Old Man and his seat and spear; it is probable, at
least in Egypt, that the Old Man was rather a New Man armed to attack new
conditions. His spear grew longer and longer and his throne rose higher and
higher, as Egypt rose into a complex and complete civilisation. That is what
I mean by saying that the history of the Egyptian territory is in this the
history of the earth; and directly denies the vulgar assumption that terrorism
can only come at the beginning and cannot come at the end. We do not
know what was the very first condition of the more or less feudal amalgam
of landowners, peasants, and slaves in the little commonwealths beside the
Nile; but it may have been a peasantry of an even more popular sort. What
we do know is that it was by experience and education that little
commonwealths lose their liberty; that absolute sovereignty is something
not merely ancient but rather relatively modern; and it is at the end of the
path called progress that men return to the king.
Egypt exhibits, in that brief record of its remotest beginnings, the
primary problem of liberty and civilisation. It is the fact that men actually
lose variety by complexity. We have not solved the problem properly any
more than they did; but it vulgarises the human dignity of the problem itself
to suggest that even tyranny has no motive save in tribal terror. And just as
the Egyptian example refutes the fallacy about despotism and civilisation,
so does the Babylonian example refute the fallacy about civilisation and
barbarism. Babylon also we first hear of when it is already civilised; for the
simple reason that we cannot hear of anything until it is educated enough to
talk. It talks to us in what is called cuneiform; that strange and stiff
triangular symbolism that contrasts with the picturesque alphabet of Egypt.
However relatively rigid Egyptian art may be, there is always something
different from the Babylonian spirit which was too rigid to have any art.
There is always a living grace in the lines of the lotus and something of
rapidity as well as rigidity in the movement of the arrows and the birds.
Perhaps there is something of the restrained but living curve of the river,
which makes us in talking of the serpent of old Nile almost think of the Nile
as a serpent. Babylon was a civilisation of diagrams rather than of
drawings. Mr. W. B. Yeats, who has a historical imagination to match his
mythological imagination (and indeed the former is impossible without the
latter), wrote truly of the men who watched the stars ‘from their pedantic
Babylon.’ The cuneiform was cut upon bricks, of which all their
architecture was built up; the bricks were of baked mud, and perhaps the
material had something in it forbidding the sense of form to develop in
sculpture or relief. Theirs was a static but a scientific civilisation, far
advanced in the machinery of life and in some ways highly modern. It is
said that they had much of the modern cult of the higher spinsterhood and
recognised an official class of independent working women. There is
perhaps something in that mighty stronghold of hardened mud that suggests
the utilitarian activity of a huge hive. But though it was huge it was human;
we see many of the same social problems as in ancient Egypt or modern
England; and whatever its evils this also was one of the earliest
masterpieces of man. It stood, of course, in the triangle formed by the
almost legendary rivers of Tigris and Euphrates, and the vast agriculture of
its empire, on which its towns depended, was perfected by a highly
scientific system of canals. It had by tradition a high intellectual life, though
rather philosophic than artistic; and there preside over its primal foundation
those figures who have come to stand for the star-gazing wisdom of
antiquity; the teachers of Abraham; the Chaldees.