Another defect that seemed to have vanished without effort was immodesty. The lustful had been exiled and it was easy to eradicate from the natures of those that remained all trace of sexual passion, and with it all pruriency. The chief purpose of sex in nature, that of propagation of the family, became its sole purpose; and this, by the control which the elders exercised over posterity, grew as rare as death. Its other ends, the development of self-sacrifice and the growth of love and friendship, had been completely detached from it and rationalised. Procreation with the extension of the race into the future was counted so tremendous a responsibility that most preferred to postpone it as far in life as the instinct of the people would allow. The sexual passion thus died out of their minds as out of their natures, just as the mere appetites of eating and drinking had died out. They had become parts of the rational nature when they were thought of at all.
There was, therefore, nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to conceal. Immodesty vanished with the cue and motive for modesty. They wore irelium draperies more to temper the power of heat and cold and the rigours of the upper atmosphere, and to aid them in flight, than to hide their bodies from the eyes of others. For the draperies were gossamer-like and semi-diaphanous and emphasised the beauty and grace of the body as an expression of soul. It was not the face alone that interpreted the mind, or attracted by its radiance. Magnetism rayed from every limb; and none of the surface of the body was lost under masses of garments; it all came into play as expressive of the life within. They shrank at first from the unhealthy pallidity of my body as it appeared when I first donned their raiment, but under the transparency of my new garments it soon lost its ghastly whiteness and acquired the ruddy, healthy tints of the face. For a time I shrank from the eyes of my comrades, but as I grew accustomed to their absolute purity of thought, I lost all consciousness of my body. There can be no modesty or immodesty where there is nothing to conceal. It was one of their subordinate aims to simplify and purify the functions of the human system, so that none of them should be offensive to any of the senses, new or old.
By this semi-diaphanous exposure of most of the surface of the body there was far more space of skin for the development of sensations and new types of senses. In their pre-purgation ages, when the greater part of the corporeal system had to be muffled in opaque garments for the sake of what was called decency, the finer modes of perception came to be concentrated in the head and the hand; one sense crowded another and blunted its observations. Now every inch of the corporeal surface was open to the influences of sunlight and magnetism and the other energies that so freely permeated space, and new forms of perception began to develop over the body, chiefly refined modifications of touch. The region of the shoulders became especially sensitive to magnetic indications. The arms and chest monopolised the finer sensations of muscular force, and especially of strain and push. Their feet came to gauge with great subtleness the strength and direction of currents of the wind as they flew through the atmosphere. The spinal region tested the temperature of the surrounding space better than any other part of the body, reacting at once to the slightest change in heat or cold. Another advantage of the half-transparent raiment was the ease with which the slightest change of emotion or thought could be seen, making concealment and hypocrisy an impossibility. A third was the aid it gave the medical elders in their periodical inspections of the health of each member of the community; with unstrengthened senses they could detect the smallest obstruction in any of the organs or tissues, so that a mere passing notice might be enough to report on the health of the people.
But if the sex-problem had retained its old obtrusiveness, this seemingly superficial but really important reform in dress would have been impracticable. Amongst the earliest questions that the Limanoran scientists faced was the place of sex in the universe. After minute and wide research they came to the conclusion that it was but an accident of existence on some worlds. It was not an essential of the propagation of life; for some species, like bacteria, multiply by mere fission, so that part of the individual is immortal, and others, like the medusæ, and ferns, and mosses, alternate asexual with sexual reproduction. It was manifestly no characteristic of the first and lowliest forms of life that settled on the earth; in fact large sections of vegetal life retain the older habit parallel with the new or sexual habit; any piece of many plants and trees cut off and thrust into the earth will become a new plant or tree of the same kind without the intervention of a seed or germinative stage. But the change in habit must have been introduced into the world not long after the appearance of animal life upon it; for it is only in the least-highly organised animals that parthenogenesis appears in any form. Their conjecture was that sexuality originated from the meeting of the germs of two worlds on which life had not gone far on the path of evolution. The newcomers would be unable to adapt themselves and their mode of generation to the new conditions they had to meet; and where members of the two types settled side by side in a position isolated from their kind, the instinct of propagation would evolve out of their proximity a new mode of generation, that would, from the cross-fertilisation of two worlds and the combination of the vital energy of both, make a progeny more vigorous and a development easier and more rapid. The species that remained faithful to parthenogenetic propagation, and those that adopted the new mode only partially, fell behind in the evolutionary race. Sexual generation, uniting in itself the vital principles of two universes, swiftly improved the qualities of the species that adopted it and made them dominant upon the earth. Asexual propagation, the easier and more primitive, gave the advantage in numbers of individuals to the vegetal and lowly animal species that clung to it, but left them almost incapable of evolution. On and upwards have passed the dominant species through the invertebrates and the mammals up to man, guided by that bi-sexual principle which has in it the stimulus of two types of life and two universes. Nor did it seem to them contrary to the analogy that some worlds should have in the life upon them a tri-sexual or even a quadri-sexual mode of propagation, according to the types of vital principle which have settled and continued upon them. Wherever multi-sexual generation holds sway, there life is rarer but swifter, and evolution carries it into those higher reaches where localisation of it upon an orb is unnecessary.
It was out of sexuality, they acknowledged, that all the higher phases of existence upon earth had come, love, friendship, self-sacrifice; this, too, had given to humanity in its nobler developments the irrepressible yearning for another and extra-terrene sphere and another life. A vital principle issuing from a different universe seemed to have kept within it the memory of its first home if not of the free existence of space. And in man, at least, this had come to consciousness of itself and led him to religious reverence and devotion and the expectation of immortality.
They considered none the less that sex had almost finished its task in many worlds, and would, in no very distant age, have accomplished all it could do for the Limanoran race. When a principle of life has done its task it must retire and give place to something better; else it would become retrogressive and wholly evil, a mere despot selfishly stopping all progress. Every race that meant to quicken the pace of its evolution had to take command of it and guide it to its own higher ends. It is the prerogative of the nobler types of man to raise nature above her lower needs; the Limanoran ideal was to develop the creative power of the human system so far that it might master all the secrets of life and be able to mould human beings and breathe the breath of life into them, and thus they would be able to supersede the sexual mode of propagation.
As it was, they had gone far towards the complete mastery of the sexual principle, and could mould and guide it to any purpose that the future of the race demanded. They knew the conditions that would govern any new human variety they needed in the state just as well as they could produce new modifications of trees and plants and flowers. They read the nature of each individual on the island as easily as they could read a book. But besides this they had in the pedigree-annals in the valley of memory a complete account of all the possibilities of any family or any branch of it. From the developments of recent years and the outlook that they ever kept up far into the future they judged when some new type of nature would be needed for some post in the community and gauged exactly the qualities that would have to be blended in order to produce it. Then turning to the valley of memories, they studied the characters and possibilities of the various families that had one or more of those qualities exceptionally developed. By the aid of the physiological and biological experts they were able to fix the two out of which the individual parents would have to be chosen; and from their knowledge of the character and history of every member, the elders of these two families along with the medical elders were able to indicate the man and the woman who would exactly fulfil the purpose of the state. Years were spent on maturing the pair in the directions required and in entangling their imaginations and affections mutually. None were allowed to assume the responsibilities of parenthood till they were matured to their fullest possibility; for they held that all the essential characteristics of the two natures had to be developed before the embryo could be produced in its fullest and most virile form.
One of the most singular features of this moulding of posterity was that they did not always choose the most highly developed to become the parents of the commonweal. For it had often been found in the past that the individual who had brought his peculiar faculties or qualities to the highest state of refinement in his own life had exhausted the natural wellspring of them, and that he handed them on in most diminished degree to his children. They often preferred in their selection of possible parents a member of a family who exhibited no exceptional energy in the use of its special talent; sometimes the least active and the least conspicuous were selected. In them individual work had never overstrained their faculty; it lay fallow for a generation and was likely to spring forth with exceptional vigour the next. To this I attributed their acceptance of my own imperfect nature in their midst and my selection for mating with Thyriel.
When a pair had bred the child that was required, if they were not conspicuous for wisdom or self-control, it was taken from them and given to a new pair who became its true parents and trained it in the direction it ought to take. These proparents were generally more successful than parents in educating and moulding a character; they never allowed the bias of natural affinity to affect the future of the child; the parents, besides being swayed by the pride of parenthood and the vigour of their affection for it, were too closely akin to it in qualities and character to view it from an impartial and independent standpoint; and the proparents were as a rule selected on account of their contrastive qualities, qualities which would form the complement to its own.
Though so much care was spent on the choice of the stock, they considered it far more important to have the citizens of the future properly trained, and were quite unbending in their insistence that every child should have the most suitable natures in the community to educate it, whether these should be its own parents or proparents. Nor for ages had more than one child been permitted in a household at one time. If a pair had proved themselves exceptionally successful in the production and moulding of the two children they owed to the community, they were allowed to adopt for a lengthened period the profession of parent, by far the most important, if not really the only, profession in the island. But they must bring one child up to maturity before they undertook another. For, they held, there was no problem so complicated, no duty so responsible, no task so exhausting for every faculty, as the training of a human being in its earlier stages; to sculpture a new and noble nature was considered the greatest creative work that a Limanoran could achieve for the state; the greatest talents that ever appeared on earth could not be better spent than on the parental profession. Another and as important reason for the unitary basis of the household was the moral contagion imperfect natures bring to bear on each other. Children were never allowed together except under the strictest supervision; for they soon undid all the work of their guardians, and confirmed in each other the retrogressive savagery through which they were passing. Before the Limanorans had come to their full heritage of scientific knowledge and wise experience, they had allowed for a few generations households of three or more children together, in order to keep up the breed. But they soon discovered this feature of their domestic life to be at the bottom of the slowness of their development, and abandoned it. After long experience they decided that it was better worth the while for the race to devote half a century of the life of the wisest and ablest to the training of one nature than to do any other work to be found in the universe. The greatest book, the most illuminating discovery or invention, was as nothing compared with a living centre of development and progress. Parenthood and proparenthood well done were considered the greatest claims to gratitude and love, and to everlasting memory if there were such a thing. For a man and a woman to have given to the state by fifty years’ work a better trained, more nobly moulded character, with larger possibilities than they themselves had was to have done more than if they had discovered and mapped out a new sphere for science and thought. It was one of the greatest honours therefore that the community could bestow upon any pair, to select them a third or fourth time for parenthood or proparenthood.
That the two sexes were both needed for the training of a young nature to maturity was one of the most unhesitating conclusions from their experience. In spite of the obliteration of all demarcating lines between the sexes as to privileges and duties in the state, there was nothing more clear to them than the permanence of the distinction in their natures, as far as life upon earth was concerned; it had grown less and less marked as the ages went on, and as maternity came to be a mere episode in the long life of a woman, yet it remained as real as it ever had been, passing into every phase of the nature, imaginative and intellectual as well as emotional and physical, and becoming salient and striking in the procreative era of life. As the animal part of the nature fell into greater subordination, it needed keener powers of observation to note the difference; yet it had left its permanent mark upon the spirit.
To women was assigned work which required slow continuous effort; for although they are more emotional, they are also by nature more passive. The temperature of the female in all species is lower than that of the male, and in human beings this means less energy and less explosiveness; the woman is ever building up her system by storing sources of energy, the man is ever using up his stores of energy in impetuous outbursts of work. The generations of active employment in which Limanoran women had been engaged, and the complete cessation of the warlike pursuits that used to fill the lives of the men, had not obliterated these distinctions. The women were still best at sedentary occupations; whatsoever needed continuity and singleness of purpose was given to them; for they have more unity of nature, and can settle down for long periods to an investigation that would be monotonous to a man, and are on the whole longer lived. So any investigation that was uninvolved, but needed intensity of application on the part of one mind for more than an average lifetime, was handed over to a woman; and where the work of several was required for a generation or two, a woman was always one of the workers in order to preserve the continuity.
In the imaginative families it was generally the men who did the most striking work. Their bursts of energy enabled them to go by leaps. They pioneered best into the future; they found the new principles for advance in invention and discovery. The women gathered the material for the sciences; the men invented and applied the great hypotheses leading to new laws and new advances; they also showed the way in progress, and tended rather to revolution than to rest. Whatsoever needed artistic talent was theirs to do. In physical work, wherever rapidity of movement and fitful application of torrents of energy were required, the men took the lead; for they were small and active, having now no distinctively muscular employments, like war and hunting, to develop their muscle and bone exceptionally. The women, as naturally accumulative instead of prodigal of energy, were larger and more passive, and took up departments of labour that needed long and gentle persistence. In counsel they were the conservative element, and in all the assemblies but those that superintended investigation into the future, invention, and discovery, that is, in all councils of judgment, they slightly predominated in numbers. If they had wholly guided the community, it would have stood still or moved at a rate that would not have been noticeable in the generations of men. Happily the masculine imagination dominated the civilisation, and hence it was ever quickening its pace. But the women were no less useful in preventing revolutionary progress, and in making the men wait and meditate over the leaps they thought of taking.
It was not so much sex-function itself, as the impress it had left upon the natures of the people that supplied a rough-and-ready classification of types. A few of the women who were especially fitted to be mothers were assigned to the maternal profession; their natures seemed moulded to bring forth strong, healthy, unexhausted offspring, fit for the duties of a new advance. There were other women who because of their nervous vigour and inclination to exhaust their best energies in work were not the most suitable for the production of children, and yet by their sympathy and wisdom and love of the young seemed especially created to bring up children as citizens; these adopted the proparental profession. A third type of women were, on account of their quick, irritable vigour and their super-emotional temperament and lack of self-control, considered incapable of either function except on rare occasions; and they formed the largest class, the worker-women, rarely generative and always uneducative; they were engaged in the sedentary, acquisitive, and continuous employments that demanded no great strain on the imagination or the creative powers or the muscular vigour. But none in the community were wholly freed from daily active work both of body and of mind, not even those whose lives were given up to the profession of maternity. Amongst men all were eligible as fathers; for though there were always a special diet and training for prospective paternity, these might be enforced simultaneously with the usual work. Not all, however, were called on to exercise paternity; it was a rare and little-noticed duty, and left small impress on the community. But there were some who on account of their great wisdom and self-control and lofty character were specially fitted for the rearing of youth, and these formed the male proparental profession. These had their other duties to perform in the family and to the state as well as to attend to their individual households, but they were dedicated to the guidance of posterity; their eyes were more on the future than even those of the imaginative families. The rest of the men formed the class of male workers at creative and imaginative work, and at muscular work that required agility and concentration of force.
Of the numbers in these different classes the elders had full control. They knew all the physiological laws governing the proportions of the sexes and types, and by their dietary and training and medical precautions they could fill the exact number of vacancies to be anticipated in any class. For instance, if one was needed for the profession of maternity, almost all the energy of both parents was spent for a time in nutrition; they were isolated from most activities, surrounded with what in other civilisations would be called luxuries, and encouraged to spend their time in resting. So, if a male worker were required, the man and woman selected for parenthood were active workers themselves; and during their generative period their nutrition was reduced to the minimum for sustaining their energies, whilst they were encouraged to put all the activity they were capable of into their daily work. Their manuals of guidance in the difficult work of filling prospective vacancies in the community were full of minute detail which was based upon long experience carefully recorded and classified, and still more upon scientific experimentation in human embryology and physiology.
It was one of the earliest conquests of the future that they made after the great purgation, this guidance of the sexual and other characteristics of embryos. They knew the exact stage at which any new organ or function appeared, for they had first of all studied the moulding of embryos in animals; and afterwards, by the aid of their new photographic and microscopic apparatus that revealed the minutest detail of any part or movement within the living human body, they were able to study the effect of changes in exercise or diet or mode of life upon the development of the human embryo. Nothing was neglected to make the knowledge complete and scientific, nothing that might help to turn the science of embryology into a creative art. The invention of instruments which could take the senses of the investigators close to any internal item of the living system had made an era in the history of physiology, and cancelled the necessity of anatomy as its handmaid. The most microscopic change in the structure of any tissue in the innermost part of the body became patent to the eye or the ear or the electric sense of research. Embryology had thus become almost an exact science; even the physiological side of it had attained to such exactitude as to make it practically an art. The medical elders could investigate the health of the embryo and guide its development as well as in the case of the full-grown child.
They were thus able to formulate a complete art for the moulding of the unborn to the purpose the elders indicated as best for the future of the race. Training and education in the truest sense of the words began long before birth. Of course it had begun with the father and mother, if not with the ancestry; but the directly plastic art of fashioning the character began with the first appearance of life. The elders would have blamed themselves if any sign of gross atavism had shown itself in a youth, now that they had full command of his prenatal history, and for generations retrogression had become an impossibility in the race. In former ages it had been one of the most difficult moral problems to fix the responsibility of a man’s crimes; somewhat was due to his own choice; but part, they saw, was due to his ancestry, and still more to his parents, not only in their training of him, but in their prenatal preparation if they were not careful to exclude gross or criminal ideas and emotions from their systems whilst he was in process of formation. Now they were able to apportion the blame with ease if anything went astray in the character of the child. They were therefore minutely careful in the precautions they took not only in the half-century of education, but in the choice of ancestry and in the guidance of the prenatal development. To prospective parents the character of the future offspring was as a conscience to their daily conduct and method of life. Every thought, emotion, act, was guided by a sense that it would affect the embryo of the coming citizen.
The newest addition to their list of sciences, the physiology of ethics, put into their hands one of the most effective aids to this plasmic art of character, prenatal and postnatal. With their instruments of investigation into the human tissue ever advancing in refinement and power, they were able at last to localise the physical centre and equivalent of each emotion; and thus having mapped out the brain and the nerve-centres, they were able to watch with their new modifications of the lavolan the palpitating life and movement in each part with the strong manifestations of its special feeling. Step by step they found their way towards the nosology of these centres, and classified every disease that turned an emotion from right to wrong. Whenever a Limanoran child became afflicted with an evil or retrogressive passion, he was hurried off to the ethical laboratory, and the nerve-centres of his emotional and moral nature were microscopically photographed as they worked; a complete history of his tissues was recorded on irelium-slips, and, after he had gone, the investigators could run these through the recording instrument and study the phases of the feeling or passion at leisure. The bursts of mistaken emotion were livingly photographed with the greatest care, and afterwards the records were watched through their most powerful clirolans. Then experiments were made in finding remedies which would check the growth of the disease in the tissue. At first the therapeutics of morality were merely empirical; they tried the remedies which had been successful with the common physical ailments of humanity, and found most fail, a few succeed. By degrees they discovered that the most powerful antidote against the moral poison lay in the character of the operator; wherever the ethical investigator had led a nobler life, the cure was more rapid and effective; wherever the attendant had more development of intellect than of lofty moral principle, the patient lingered and often relapsed. Yet there were other prophylactics of a more material kind that greatly aided in the recovery of the patient. Hygienic measures and courses were prescribed for preventing the recurrence of the disorder; and at last something not unlike a science of the art of moral healing seemed to emerge out of the empiricism and chaos.
This culminated in the establishment of an ethical sanatorium, which was in reality a children’s hospital for obstinate moral diseases. No mature or half-mature Limanoran had for ages shown symptoms of a relapse upon any ancestral or barbaric ethical code, and the mild moral ailments lasting for only a few hours or days were easily managed by the parents or proparents. Gentle influence, or at most gentle discipline, was all that was needed to dislodge the evil spirit, or if that did not succeed, magnetic remedies were applied to the part of the nervous centres affected.
Should the moral defect still hold out obstinately against all remedies, the patient was removed to the hospital for treatment. There were collected together as moral physicians and nurses the wisest and noblest personalities of the race, who applied all their therapeutic power to the centre that was supposed to be the source of the disease. But the centre had been scientifically examined and fixed by the ethical investigators, who reproduced the parts affected and their symptoms in greatly magnified forms, and suggested the various physical remedies that would aid the sanative influences of the physicians and nurses. The child was isolated from circumstances and conditions tending to reinforce the moral poison; and his better nature was invigorated and encouraged, so that it might be able to throw off the germs of the malady.
Within recent times the ethical investigators had made great advances in their science. The immediate stimulus of the progress was accidental, as so often had been the case, or in other words it had come from outside their recognised spheres of causation. An epidemic of deceit had almost simultaneously seized upon the children of the community, in spite of the solitary method of training adopted. Boys and girls who had not seen each other for months were on the same day impelled to habits of concealment, even when they were in the stage of development that corresponded to the ravening fury and open warfare of the barbaric past. Nothing in their ordinary methods of research could furnish a cause for the outbreak. They searched the general condition of the previous moral health of the children, and found it excellent. None of the patients had come near each other for long periods; none of them had shown any symptoms of the disorder before the epidemic had appeared.
They were driven to some hypothesis quite outside the limits of their usual sphere, for they saw that there was something uncommon in the occurrence. Beginning to suspect that the germs of the disease had come from other regions, as had so often happened, they increased the powers of their magnifying apparatus by means of photography, and invented more delicate aids to the investigation of the nerve-centres than they had ever used before. On watching the part in which they had localised the physical equivalent of deceit, they found signs that the presence of the minutest foreign life was disturbing the nerve-tissues. In the moving microscopic photographs and electrographs of the centre they could detect the growth of a new type of microbe, inflaming and interfering with the nerves of the part. Afterwards they found some specimens of the disturbers in the atmosphere, and were able to cultivate them for investigation and experiment. Soon they accumulated a large enough quantity of the débris to apply to the cultures themselves, and in every case it seemed to prove a steriliser; what the minute life had used up and thrown off acted as a poison and destroyer. By means of the medicine that they manufactured from it they were able to annihilate or eject the disturbers of the nerve-centre of truth in the patients. But in curing the part affected the moral equilibrium of the children was upset. The bio-chemical families applied themselves to the problem, and soon succeeded in isolating the medicative elements from the injurious.
Thus a new and efficient method of treatment was introduced into the ethical sanatorium. Chambers were reserved for sublimating the drug, and thither children were sent if any obstinate form of deceit appeared in them. And by means of the sterilised form of it they fumigated the child’s quarters in any household, whenever signs of a return of the epidemic appeared. The ethical investigators proceeded on the new path thus opened up to them and were in time able to describe and classify the microbes of moral epidemics and their antidotes. After some years’ toil they supplied the ethical sanatorium with a complete scientific pharmacopœia, for at least all the grosser forms of vice, all the offences against the moral codes that had been atavised or thrown into the ancestral past.
The nerve-centres concerned with these offences were easy to find and localise; so the minute life that interfered with such centres was studied till it yielded its secrets to science. But it was a more difficult task for the new scientific art of therapeutic ethics to trace out the physiology of the newer moral codes and to discover a cure for the maladies which hindered their complete adoption into the Limanoran human system. The moral offences they had now to deal with were sluggishness of the higher faculties of man, acts that dragged the thoughts downwards, dominance of a physical need, concessions to mere nature as against the highest knowledge of nature, excesses of emotion or disturbances of the mental equilibrium by passion, devotion to the past, superstition, stagnancy of belief, efforts to base belief on unreason or ignorance, faith in a moral code as the terminus of human ethics, or in a state of human scientific knowledge that was omniscient. Step by step the ethical investigators found their way to the nerve-centre that was disturbed when any one of these faults appeared in a man; and after long years of research and experiment they were able to add to their pharmacopœia the antidotes to these maladies or weaknesses.
They would have thought the basis of existence irrational, if they had persuaded themselves that ethics was unprogressive, whilst all other things in the universe were subject to the law of evolution. A moral code could be as easily superseded as a polity or a type of society. At one time no race could see beyond the moral codes of barbaric life that recognised no evil in treachery or revenge. Some at last advanced to the moral code of the warrior, which based every rule of life upon the idea of honour. Later still the civilised races of the world adopted the moral ideal of the priest, which could find nothing good beyond the limits of its special ecclesiastical forms. One by one these had been antiquated and Limanoran civilisation had now found as the basis for its moral code the principle of the cosmos, that of evolution. To advance, to raise his system higher, to evolve its possibilities, was the first duty of man as understood by the Limanorans of this later age. To see beyond their present horizon was their ideal. They would rather march forward into the darkness than stand still or retrograde in light. To know clearly and definitely the possibilities that lay before them, and to be able to choose the best of them was the primary and fundamental maxim of their ethical code. All others were corollaries of it.
If they had any unreasoned, unreasoning, and authoritative monitor within them making for all that was right, in short any conscience, it was now the prophetic voice of the ideals that they were still to reach. Ages before it had ceased to be a voice out of the past. Before the great purgation of the island half of their education and literature had been based upon the literatures of two ancient peoples, to whose conquests and legacies of energy and thought they had fallen heir. They now shuddered at the pollution that these used to communicate to the minds of their youth. The ethics running through them belonged to a stage of civilisation that had been long antiquated, and embodied ideals now far beneath them. The heroes and wisest men were recorded in them as having done deeds with applause that the most atavistic of their children would be ashamed to mention. Whatever wisdom or nobleness they might otherwise teach, it would be completely neutralised by the taint of vices which were approved or counted as venial peccadilloes. To submit their youth to such pollution for the sake of the problematic refinement they might gain from the books was to do the greatest wrong a civilisation could commit, to prostrate its own ideals before those of a vanished and barbaric past. Out with the exiles went every trace of those old literatures; and the isle of liars and the isle of lechers had taken them to their bosoms, with the result that they had to adopt lying and impurity as their standards of life. To return upon any past was to reject with recklessness the advantages that it had gained and handed on to the centuries between. But to adopt with deliberateness a past steeped in the grossest impurities, and honouring intrigue and hypocrisy, was to commit moral suicide.
It was only in the immature that conscience, or the future invisibly shepherding the present, was either needed or existent. They had pitfalls and dangers out of the savage past to avoid, and an unreasoned instinct was an essential to their development as an ever-present guide, authoritatively bending their steps this way and that. This moral and instinctive anticipation of the future, though mysterious in its origin to the young whose conduct it moulded, was in reality no mystery; it came from the magnetism of the wisest and best of the elders; the ideal these saw in front of them and held out as the immediate goal of the race, passed sympathetically and magnetically into the moral and intellectual atmosphere of the island. The mature knew whence the influence came, and grasped it rationally. But it was round the young as a subtle inspiration and halo that came they knew not whence; nor dared they question it or disobey its injunctions, lest some evil should entrap them. When they came to maturity, they learned the origin of the mysterious voice within, not to disregard its monitions, but to reason them out and revise them by the light of the advancing ideals of the race and to know that it changes and grows like everything in the cosmos.
One of the first aims and maxims of their polity was to let their citizens on reaching maturity think all through their lives for themselves. The first guaranty of this freedom was rationality, the power of tracing back every act and feeling and thought to the primary principles of existence, combined with the sense of responsibility for the future of the race. There was no repression, no prohibition; the prerogative and duty of every man was to make himself fit to be a law to himself. In former ages their ancestors used to talk of the innocence of childhood; all that they meant was unconsciousness of conventional emotions, ideas, phrases, and habits, and superiority to them. They smiled at it as a temporary stage from which they would soon pass into the restrictions of manhood and womanhood; and only the greatest sages were able to work themselves free again from conventions so far as to be moral and noble and yet to have the innocence, the unperturbed vision and candour of the earliest years. But now all men and women retained the naïve openness of childhood and its artless simplicity; for they had no conventions to trammel the freedom of spiritual movement, no prohibitions to make the will shrink from origination or action. Even when childhood or youth was checked in some mistaken career, the check was veiled in persuasion and reasoning and a vision of the truth. The atmosphere of freedom was an absolute essential for the full development of individuality; and the guaranty that this freedom would never pass into license was the fact that every mature man and woman had a noble aim, and that the magnetism of the race was around everyone. None had to obtrude the claims of his personality upon others; and none was abashed by a sense of despair, or the feeling of insignificance. Humility was a virtue needing no conscious cultivation; there was no occasion for its appearance, for the place and merits of everyone were accurately gauged and acknowledged by all. It was only the insignificance of all humanity against the infinite, of the life of this world against cosmic periods, that deeply impressed them, and rendered them weary of efforts so feeble as those of human life. But the mood was brief in such sanguine temperaments and agile natures. Action they knew to be exhilaration and health and the building up of tissue and faculty.
All they wished to be sure of was that the action was to lead forward. The test of its morality was this: did it make the human system progress? How far did it tend to make the future better than the present? Whether a thing was pleasant or not for the moment, had no influence upon their choice of courses of action. That had been the motive and guide of the barbarous past, the artist of its conduct, the creator of its character. The civilisation of other periods and races had meant only the development of needs. And the pure savage is ever superior to civilised man in this sense; with his minimum of needs and the wherewithal to satisfy them wherever he may find himself, he is not so localised as even the wealthiest and most cultured man of the most luxurious civilisations who is tied to his property and investments, and is miserable unless in the one or two cities where he can indulge his taste for luxury to the full. There was no such thing as luxury in Limanora; everything that was brought into being was essential for advance, for the final aim of the life. Not needs but ultimate ends gave them their point of view, not desires but means, not rights but duties. If there was anything that could stir them to greater eagerness, it was the prospect of more work for the good of others; if anything could be looked upon as a luxury amongst them, it was a surfeit of work that contemplated a widening of the racial horizon. To serve the future of all was their deepest longing. Far into the savage past had faded the idea of servitude; and, as they looked into history, there was nothing they were more thankful for than the disappearance of such a necessity; for they considered the servant, especially if slave, the despot of his master in moulding and pandering to his needs and whims, and an evil despot too, as less advanced and less cultivated.
Among the things they most deeply abhorred was despotism. And the worst despotism of all, they held, was the social, that which is exercised daily and hourly, and from the vantage-ground of proximity; the narrow scope and limited horizon make it all the more intense. The most accursed of despotisms is the system of espionage; it wrecks every chance of freedom and crushes originality, turning the race back into crawling venomous things. It is a vain attempt at complete spiritual repression and feebly assumes omniscience and omnipresence on the part of the despots. Its only chance of success is a spiritual society disciplined like an army and ruled by nothing but loyalty to its superiors who base their authority on the assumption of intercourse with supernatural omniscience and omnipresence; and its only chance of continuance is grovelling prostration of all its subjects and possible critics, in abject fear of unknown terror and of spies in the very precincts of the heart, who can hear and interpret its every beat. That was one of their hells, which they occasionally brought before their imaginations in order to warn them against minute supervision and interference. It was this that urged them on to complete transparency of nature, so that their inmost thoughts and feelings might be open to all. Ever since the liars had been thrust forth, one of the immediate goals of their civilisation had become absolute truthfulness. Now that this had been attained, a further goal was complete limpidity of the human system. The wise elders had already been able to interpret what passed in the heart or brain of a Limanoran; now the aim was to make the sensuous garment of the soul diaphanous to the magnetic sense, if not to the eyes of all. Of nothing in his whole system must a man be ashamed, before he could endure such continuous confessional to his fellows, and it was towards this goal that every Limanoran was now consciously working.
The constant inspections and examinations by the elders might seem to conflict with this horror of espionage and spiritual despotism. But these were voluntary on the part of mature Limanorans; it was one of their recurring pleasures to be able to submit their tissues and faculties to the wise observation of the elders, and to gain the advantage of their experience. Had it been felt as a despotism, it would have been abandoned at once. With children and the immature it was a matter of discipline; they were in the pre-purgation stages of Limanoran history, and had to be in pupillage and under authority. As soon as they were able to keep step with the advancing civilisation, or in other words to be a law to themselves, they were allowed to walk alone and without the trammels of guidance. It was the strenuous aim of the elders and guides of the community to keep the atmosphere of thought free. They were constantly reviewing and revising the end and aim of existence in the light of the new developments of thought and science; hence its form never became a hard dogma. They believed in ultimate truth, but knew that nothing short of omniscience could attain it. They were now and again getting glimpses of it, but fought shy of expressing it in words, for everyone would know it to be only a provisional expression. Language itself was a shifting mirage of the mind, dependent on the point of view for its meaning and even existence; and one of the most constant duties of the community was to define and clarify it, and to free it from its ever-growing opaqueness or nebulosity, and the fallacies that haunted it. One thing they never hesitated about, but grasped with unerring instinct; and that was the goal that they kept before them, or in other words the advance they were eager to make. They hated all jesuitry, knowing that it meant the suppression of spiritual freedom by what merely professed to be progressive and good, and the obscuration of spiritual truth in clouds of subtlety. Nothing that was evil, they held firmly, could lead ultimately to good; nothing that was retrograde could in the end be progress.
