Chapter VII: Pioneering (1)

IMAGINATION, corrected by racial instinct in the assemblies of all, was the seeker for foregleams of what was to be. And a people that had organised its civilisation into a disciplined advance was not likely to leave its scouts and vanguard unorganised. Its destiny was largely in the hands of those who went before it into the night, or who ascended the heights above it, and told of the region to be traversed next, and the best routes through it. There was no service that needed so much the best powers of the race and its best organisation.

Into the pioneering families were gathered their most powerful imaginations. For imagination is the only clairvoyant of the faculties; it can see what lies below the horizon of knowledge; it can forecast the world as it might be and as it is to be; and it can draw the human mind onwards by the splendours of this forecast. This people had early realised the sibylline character of the faculty, and the great part it might play in their devotion to progress. And they resolved to save it from all waste. They refused to have it become the mere slave of luxury or of popular amusement, such as they saw it was in most other civilised nations. Even where it conjured up the past in magnificent literary pictures, what else was it than the pander to tastes and habits that were overworn, the encomiast of deeds that had better be buried in oblivion? It frequented the palaces of kings and licked the dust off their feet, or it played the buffoon to the indolent, sensuous crowd. At rare times it isolated itself, and, heedless of the babbling world that offered it so many prizes, it wrestled with the powers of darkness and ignorance. But what could a poor recluse do against the infinite night? If it were to help the forward march of humanity, it must be disciplined and organised to a definite aim.

All other peoples have left imagination to struggle for itself. This people recognised it as the most unschooled and shiftless of the human faculties, whilst they felt it to be the most divine and fullest of promise. They determined that amongst them it should lose its reeling gait and wandering, aimless eye, and become the pioneer of their march onwards; instead of fixing its eye on the past or on the favours of the great, it should skirmish before the main army into the region of the unknown; it should report on the difficulties and the enemies to be met, and map out the world as it was to be. What would be thought of the shipmaster who let the keenest-eyed of his crew lounge round the ship looking into the pockets of his comrades and making them laugh, or lean over the stern watching the track left behind, if darkness and cloud and a broken sea ever lay on the horizon ahead? What else were the nations doing with their lookout faculty, imagination, but allowing it to waste itself on providing amusement for the luxurious, or on figuring the problem of the past?

It was one of the first duties of the Limanoran elders, after the great series of purgations of the race, to organise and develop the imagination they had in their midst. They had observed that there were two great types and uses of the faculty; one was short of vision, and could see with great distinctness the regions that were hidden in twilight immediately in front of them; the other was far-sighted, and could descry the features of wide regions that lay in darkness under the horizon. There happened to be amongst them two families distinguished from all others by their great imaginativeness, and from each other by pre-eminence in one of these two kinds of imagination. The task therefore was easy. It only needed care in disciplining the members of these to the main purpose of the race, in developing the faculty of each, and in recruiting their numbers from the most imaginative children of other families. The Loomiamo or pioneers of the immediate were recruited chiefly from the scientific and technical families; for their duties lay most of all in supplying hypotheses for experimentation, in suggesting methods of solving difficult problems, and in tracing out paths that invention should take; invention in fact was what they were oftenest engaged in. But there was a subordinate function, that was, however, of equal importance for the forward movements of the race; it was to take the far-reaching conceptions of the other imaginative family, and show how they could be attained by the civilisation and means they already had. They accepted the scientific ideas and apparatus of the time as they were and out of them and their development they engineered a highway through the intervening twilight to the ideal that the Fraloomiamo or pioneers of the distant had pictured and set up ahead of the race.

I had not known of this division of pioneering work when I flew back from the marvellous spectacle in the valley of futuritions. As I thought over it, I became more and more sceptical of the realisability of the scene. It had the inconsecution and absurdity of a dream. I said to Thyriel, where was the possibility of ever substituting artificial for natural propagation of the race? It was completely out of the line of evolution, and could lead to nothing but what was unnatural and evil. They could modify nature to an indefinite extent, I knew; but what was the use of attempting to supersede nature? And suppose it were possible to supersede it in this respect, where would be the advantage? They could already modify and guide nature so as to produce the type of children they desired for the progress of the race; what more was needed?

Thyriel gave no answer, partly because she thought that the elders were more capable of answering, partly because she knew that the publication of the book on human sculpture was by no means finished. Next day my sense of community with the immediate yearning and aim of the Limanorans drew me unconsciously to Loomiefa again; and on my way the streaming wings through the sky showed me that my impulse was not purposeless; there was a general movement towards the same goal. Soon the whole amphitheatre was filled from height to hollow with spectators enriched in colour by the rays of the afternoon sun.

I had scarcely settled in my rest and surveyed the scene when I knew that all eyes were fixed on the hollow of the valley. The platform had again run out with the globular magnifier covering it. But the succession of scenes upon it was almost too swift for my observation, untrained as I still was in my senses, and a certain confusion still rests over the spectacle in my memory. Many of the links in the chain were so amazing as to bewilder me, and yet the general purpose and effect of the scene as a whole rise above the confusion in my mind.

I knew before it was done that it was a complete answer to my questions and scepticism. The Loomiamo were enacting the various stages in the evolution of the race which would connect its actual state with the possibility of artificial human propagation. One scene enacted what they had long been able to do, the production of animal tissue of all kinds; even the most subtle nerve was spun, and under their microscopes they could examine it like a rope. Another showed animal creation at work on the combination of tissue into one of the lower types of animal. One after another in a long series we saw the creative power rise in its ambitions and efforts through the animal creation up to the human. But the most striking scene was to come. It was the application of the newly discovered biometer to the search for the principle of life. We saw the creative artists investigate with the instrument plant after plant and animal after animal, and fail in their attempts to isolate it or produce it. They modified the biometer in innumerable ways. Then we saw them fly though the atmosphere, and set the new life-measuring apparatus afloat in space. After repeated attempts, ever pulling the faleena back empty, they at last showed by the joy on their faces that they had attained the goal of their quest. In the delicate test-tubes of their new biometers was found something that kept agitating their indicators. Soon they had it in their laboratories, and were experimenting with it. Again and again they gathered it from the vacuum above the atmosphere. At last by means of it they were enabled to find it in the plants around them, and in the animals of the surrounding islands. A series of scenes as amazing showed how they came at the discovery of the principle of soul by means of the psychometer. Step by step (and each step, I came afterwards to feel, represented a Limanoran generation) they traced it back to its secret. Most of all were they aided in their researches by investigations outside of the atmosphere; there they captured in the tubes of their psychometers the form of energy that constituted human soul. And in their laboratories they were able to study it at leisure.

For long I felt that these pictures of the future were unlikely to be realised. Yet the steps in the process were so gradual, and the scene representing each so vivid that I came in after years to accept it as well within the range of Limanoran possibilities; for I realised at last how far into the future imagination could pioneer, and what a vast number of ages one of these predictive dramas would cover. My sense of time was crude and weak during my earlier years in the island, and it was difficult for me to appreciate the passage of cosmic periods, such as were often implied in the scenes representing the publication of a book by the Fraloomiamo.

I afterwards listened to the book of Human Sculpture itself, as it uttered itself from a loud-sounding linasan or reproducer of speech. This automaton-reader had the long strip of irelium constituting a Limanoran book fed into it off the cylinder on which the book was kept rolled. It gave the sound and every intonation of the author’s voice, so that there was no difficulty in following his every thought as it found expression. I never came to be able to read those books on the irelium rolls themselves under a microscope, as the Limanorans could, and preferred to use my hearing instead of my eyes. There was no possibility of ambiguity if I listened to the words as they came hot from the thinker’s own lips.

A new and more esoteric kind of book tended to supersede this at a later period. It consisted of an electrogram of the author’s thoughts, as they developed and shaped themselves, flashed on to long moving strips of labramor or electricity-sponge by his active magnetic sense; this placed in an idrosan or electrograph affected the firla of the receiver so that he followed the whole process of thinking. Such a permanent record of creative thought in its process of creating was of measureless value to such a people as this, for every economy of time and intelligence meant a quickening of their march into the nobler future. But for many ages the effort of electrographing the thought was too much except for the most powerful of mature creative minds; and that of receiving the flash of the electrogram through the firla was within the capacity of none but those who had developed their magnetic faculty to great refinement of power.

The book of Human Sculpture was the first of the recent imaginative productions that I became acquainted with. Thyriel and I joined a party of youth who, under the guidance of our proparents, were to listen to it, as it sounded through the linasan in the valley of Loomiefa. Hour after hour we followed the melodious periods, as they echoed up the slopes; at brief intervals on the rocky curtain at the head of the gorge there would flame out for several minutes a moving picture of the scenes we had witnessed the enaction of on the stage; and a still more striking illustration of the text of the book was a magnetic communication to our minds of the originating impulse which moulded each thought and scene in the imagination of the author, and the creative enthusiasm he felt as each idea burst in all its light upon his soul. By the time we had finished the book we knew its whole conception and history, its purpose, and its probable effect upon the civilisation.

It answered all my questions, and rooted out all my scepticism. The whole object of their unending labours was to take command of nature by finding out her secrets and abridging her processes, so as to make them serviceable to their advance. I felt how absurd had been my objections; for where would this people have been, if they had left nature to herself? What else was barbarism but leaving nature to herself, so that the more cruel animal part of her became dominant? Nature included an infinite range of gradations of energy and life from what we call dead matter to the subtle and elevated organisations that fill space and evade the finest perception of our senses. Within our own systems are to be found many of those, from the débris of our bodily tissues and organs to the noblest thought we can conceive; the precept to let nature alone is fraught with inextricable ambiguity; and if we let the myriad natures within us fight it out, it is not difficult to see which would have dominance, for it is easier to level down than to level up. Every interference with the lower nature in order to bring it under the sway of the higher, every new mastery of our systems as a whole by our creative thought, is a step upwards in the scale of existences. Three fourths of the process of human propagation belonged to the sphere of our lower nature, so that civilised men and women were ashamed to speak of it, and tended to become gross and coarse if they did freely speak of it. Every act seemed to drag them back again to the level of the animals, and it took them years of effort to drive the thoughts and traces of it into oblivion. They had as a people painfully fought their way up out of the slough of passion, and mastered the emotions that tended to overbalance them by their excess, and to plunge them back again into it. Guard themselves as they might by all kinds of precautions, and spiritualise the act as they ever tried to do, its necessary recurrence never failed to embrute the nature for a moment, whilst it still kept open a path for retrogression. To shut out this possibility of re-descent into the beast would be one of the greatest services to their race.

As useful for their advance would the command of human propagation be in another direction. The only fear of deterioration that still haunted them arose from atavism. Nature had still a trick of returning on her own footsteps. The child of the noblest pair had at times traces of far-back ancestry resurgent in evil or retrogressive traits; and it wasted the time and the best energy of parents and proparents to obliterate these. In every germ lay dormant the potentialities of its whole ancestral past; and any one of them might assert itself as master during the dim unguided life of gestation. With all their precautions something evil might still lurk in the systems of the young to be developed in full maturity of life. But if they moulded every tissue and organ and faculty for themselves, this retrogressive tendency that nature treasures up in every germ and child would disappear. There would be nothing to watch or obliterate in the immature.

A still greater economy of time and labour would result in the abridgment of the earlier processes of education. Education, it is true, never ceased throughout life. But the education of the mature was self-conducted; the citizen was his own schoolmaster, and his surroundings were his instruments and assistants. That of the earlier stages used up the labour and wisdom of two other personalities for the long period of discipline; they were ever on watch and guard lest the past that lay in the youthful nature should suddenly rise and master it. For all education is a wrestle with the superseded past, which becomes evil as soon as it grows superfluous or obstructs further advance. Every form of vitality that has played its part on the stage of existence leaves it with reluctance; it clings to the new, that it may have a little more of life, and impedes its advance. The obsolete most survives in the tissues of the young and immature; and to educate is to struggle with the obsolete or obsolescent. The labour and thought needed to make the struggle end in the success of the new and progressive have never been understood so well by any as by the elders of the Limanorans. No effort of their civilisation was so exhausting as the educative. To enter on parenthood or proparenthood made them pause, for all acknowledged that the assumption of this duty was the greatest sacrifice a man or woman could make for the progress of the race. They knew that for half a century their individual vigilance could never cease, and that the strain would come on all their faculties, and not on one or two alone, as it would in most of the other duties they owed to the race, even invention or discovery. Whatsoever would commute or abolish this heavy service to the nation was sure to be welcomed. So vast an amount of the best time and wisest ability of the island would be set free that it would be difficult to calculate the acceleration of progress it would effect.

All this and a thousand other considerations passed through my mind, as I listened to the book of Human Sculpture and drank in its inspirations. The doubts that its dramatic publication had left in me were all laid. I now knew that this would be a new sacred book, which would hold up for ages an ideal for Limanora to struggle towards.

This book of Human Sculpture made clear to me the meaning and purpose of another publication that I soon witnessed. It was the book of Asexuality, which showed us dramatically how sex and its results belonged to a lower and more physical stage of personal development. It revealed to us the nature of the beings that flit through sidereal space just outside the ken of our senses, centres of energy less inert and more ethereal than any terrestrial creatures. Into them flows more freely than it flows into us the divine energy that is above all. Out of themselves they give as freely to their fellows as they receive. They need no such inequality and unstable equilibrium as sex to teach them such bounteous benignity. Living in the precincts of the fountain of life as they do, not imprisoned within local and temporal limits, but free to move whither they will and to drink unstintingly of supernal existence, they know how essentially all nobler life consists in free bounty; the more of themselves and their energy they give, the higher the energy they receive in its place. Sex is only the rude beginning of this higher law, the principle of antagonism to stagnation, of giving lavishly in order to have room for receiving from higher sources. It supersedes and antagonises the law of parasitism, which governs the crude beginnings of life on a new world. The lower microscopic creatures that live a famished jejune life in space ready to pounce upon any orb their shoals encounter, propagate by mere self-division; they have nothing to give. A new star cooling down on its surface sufficiently for life to settle on is their great opportunity. There they may parasite and feed to their heart’s content, propagating by the myriad every infinitesimal fraction of time. And, as long as they live in such primeval luxury, they never move one step higher in life. Over-supply of food, indeed all luxury, damns a being to stagnancy. The full-fed parasite is unprogressive, and, though multiplying teemingly, is practically sterile; his generations are on a level with himself; he is immortal by mere fission; the only function of his life is to grab, till his gettings make him too big for his microscopic unity, and he has to break up. In the higher stages of life, even in human life, this infecundity attaches in the same way to luxurious living, whilst the sycophant is sterile of purpose and existence. All take and no give is a monstrosity above the lowest bacterial life. The more of dependence or flattery there is in a people, the lower their natures; a tyranny is the lowest political organism; and of tyrannies the worst is the socialistic; for there, there is no inequality to antagonise and overcome the lethargy of parasitism.

Even when bacteria begin to feel the pinch of scanty nutrition or malnutrition, they start on a new career, and show the first traces of an advance in life. They incline to give as well as receive, and here are the primeval beginnings of sex. Ill-fed bacteria tend to propagate by means of special cells or spores. Instead of steeping themselves in food till they burst, they now begin to nurse within their systems a germ, to which they give of their best till it is able to launch out for itself; they cease to reproduce by fission, and reproduce by spore-formation. This is the first step upwards on the long road to human morality. The beginnings of sex are the beginnings of unlikeness of individuals, and the beginnings of unstable equilibrium and of overflow of energy from one being into another. This is the organisation of the policy of give in a new star, ultimately meant to drive out, after a world-long struggle, the antagonistic policy of mere get. Sex first introduced into our world the eagerness of one being to give of its best for the good of another being. Conjugal love in the human era is the first noble form of sexuality; and parental love is its still nobler offshoot.

The development of parenthood is the knell of sexuality. For it is a new and higher phase of the policy of give, and antiquates the mere mutuality of sexual love. It gives of its all expecting nought in return. And into the place of the energy that has gone out of it flows an energy that is nearer the divine and raises towards the divine. It is at this point that sex becomes a lower stage, seeming almost to mingle with brute life. Out of it must humanity struggle in order to progress. “In the spirit there is no sex.” This I had heard as a meaningless echo from wise lips in the West. Now I saw its significance. The higher, the more spiritual we become, the less we permit sex to dominate, and the less difference there is between the sexes. It was in the world of imagination and intellect that the first idea of equality of the sexes arose. And the more intellectual a people became, the less it insisted on the difference between man and woman. Emphasis on sex in a civilised people was a sure sign of approaching decay.

For the goal towards which the human race is advancing is asexual; not that that will be the main characteristic; but it is the most striking compared with our present phase of being. The more highly organised existences that fill space and hover just outside the range of our grosser senses have reached the stage in which the stimulus of sex or even of parenthood is no longer needed in order to save the benignant instincts from dying out. And the higher a centre of energy climbs in the scale of existence, the more eager does it become to overflow into other centres, to give of its highest and best. What we call life, or the spontaneous rejection of stagnancy, begins on its lowest fringe with a tendency to take all and give none, with appetite. Below this are inert centres of energy, that resist all receiving as well as all giving, that exist only in persisting, in keeping what they have and what they are; this stage is usually called dead matter in contrast to energy, although it consists of nuclei of energy as truly as any living creature. Between the two stages of mere keep and mere take seems to lie a great gulf fixed; but there are minute evidences of transition to be found all through nature. We ourselves, the human race, form the transition from the stage of take all to the stage of give all. And sex is the chief impetus to progress in the earlier history of human evolution. Parenthood takes its place in the upper levels, where the human is rapidly approaching the supersensuous. The very fact of our nature being so heterogeneous and complex reveals that we are making for something higher; and, as our appetites imply a stage behind us, in which our systems were fitted for nothing but taking, so our loves, our benevolences, our self-sacrifices, point forward to a stage in which the whole of existence will consist in giving. I remember, whenever an average man in Europe quoted the phrase, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” he meant it as a jest, or in a sinister sense; even the priest, when he had to preach the doctrine as one of the foundations of his religion, had incredulity in his heart if not in the smile on his lips, as he spoke the words. Amongst the Limanorans it was a truism that was implied in all conduct and need never be explicitly stated. And the book of Asexuality revealed the inner and scientific significance to me. The highest state of any centre of energy in the cosmos was to be eagerly, lavishly, and perpetually giving out of its best. For thus was it ever kept in unstable equilibrium, towards which flowed higher and higher energies from centres above it; thus it kept its life unstagnant and immortal. That which only received, and was eager only to receive, suffered the maladies of the luxurious, soon reached its utmost capacity, and fell into stagnancy and decay. Above the human rose the hierarchy of sexless, supersensuous beings, who peopled infinite space; but into their ranks rose the human by means of struggle, by means of the effluence of their energy into others, by means of sex, and still more of parenthood. The purpose of sex is to attain to the higher asexuality.

Not that monasticism is good for the human race. It is on the contrary the greatest of evils in the sexual stage of progress. It counts as wicked and harmful that which alone prevents self-absorption and the beginning of decay and death. Sex is the provision of nature for drawing the animal outside of itself so that it may introduce into its generations the seeds of development. It makes it as a centre of energy feel the need of other centres, to which it may give, from which it may receive. It is her chief means of keeping any vital centre from falling back into stagnancy and the desire of stagnancy. And, as long as man is still animal, sex and its resultant parenthood must continue to play the main part in development. To attempt to reach asexuality before the animal is ejected from his system is to balk progress and invite stagnancy and decay.

The book of Asexuality showed how the family must remain the unit and lever of advance till sex should be superseded by individual creation. Then friendship or the bond of contrast in community will take the place of the bond of heredity, or of that bond which is based upon sexual passion. The mutual choice will be completely rational and in the will of the choosers. There will be nothing instinctive or mediate or unconscious about it. It is indeed one of the indignities of this present sexual stage of evolution that we are thrust on in spite of ourselves, that we have little command over the stimulus that is urging us on the road of progress.

The Limanorans had got rid of some of this indignity inasmuch as the elders and wise men took command of the instinct of sex, and bent it in the direction of their own line of advance. In other peoples, and especially in the West, it stumbled blindly on, led sometimes by the love of youthful beauty, sometimes by the love of money, sometimes by the necessities of position and diplomacy, most frequently by ambition and the love of power or social influence, seldom or never by the deliberate intent of producing noble posterity. As a consequence retrogression in health, physique, morality, or intellectual power was seen in all ranks far oftener than progress. Over the whole there might be a slight advance in centuries; but in most families it was one generation forward and the next back. This people had by their purgations become the assistants of nature; and since the era of the exilings they had wisely piloted sex to serve the highest purposes of evolution. The young were still driven half-blindly by the sting of sex, and might by chance accelerate progress; but the elders without revealing their art wisely controlled the instinct, and by the governance of proximity and opportunity, companionship and circumstances, amongst the immature made it the guardian and keeper of past advance and the prompter of still renewed advance. The final step was pictured by this new imaginative book, the supersession of sex and the deliberate creation of posterity. This would relieve the elders of their anxious task of match-making, and put into the hands of the pairs themselves the control of the parental instinct and the power of improving their posterity.

Even as it was, I could see, from the axioms and postulates of this book of Asexuality, and the impression it made on my friends and companions, that the sex-instinct was already to a large extent under the control of those whom it impelled. It had become, like their appetite for food, saturated with intellect and deliberation. It was no mere goad that drove them on in the dark stumbling towards some object that would gratify the passion. They knew its physiological and psychological working, and understood how the destinies of the race waited upon the wisdom or folly of its guidance. Not even the youngest of them would allow it the caprice and perverse whimsicality that was considered its native prerogative in the West. The passionate whim of the moment for “a grey eye or so” was no more to them than toothache or the pangs of indigestion, an aberrancy from healthy nature, to be checked and healed as soon as possible. I found that I was far in the rear of their advance in respect to love. My Western heroics and amorous transports were discounted and yet curiously watched as the antiquated manners of an age long gone by. Nothing gave so keen a shock to my self-approval as the smile that played upon the face of Thyriel when I first broke into the raptures of adoration for her which are the natural expression of passionate love in my native Europe. Romeo-and-Julietism had been consecrated by centuries of the traditions of Christendom as the true attitude and conduct of lovers. And here was I, only fulfilling the instinct and bursting into the appropriate transports of passion, reined in by what I thought at first the cynicism of my Juliet. The smile would have been cynical on the lips of a young European inamorata. In Thyriel it was no more than the amused recognition of manners which she had laughed at in studying the ancient history and literature of the island, as if I had seen a comrade in the commonness of European daily life adopting the language and attitude of Homeric or Ossianic heroes.

I grew ashamed of the amorous ardours of the West, and, when I felt the tendency to erotic idolatry come upon me, I kept it to myself. Even then I knew that I was centuries behind my Limanoran coevals in the rational guidance of the sexual instinct. Nothing brought this so clearly to my mind as the reception of the book of Asexuality. During its dramatic publication I looked round to see the shock of unnatural innovation on the faces of the audience, or the shrinking of modesty, or the sense of outraged religious or traditional instincts. But there was none of these to be found there. The ideal was accepted at once as the proper and possible goal of the race, and the book was treasured amongst the sacred literature of the time.

It soon flashed upon me, too, as I frequented Loomiefa, that their art had all a far higher purpose than I had conjectured from my European experience. It was not meant merely to stir or to satisfy the sense of beauty and harmony, but to implant in the emotions and the imagination the love of the future and the passion for rising in the scale of existence. I grew ashamed to think that I had attributed to this wonderful people the frivolity and even lowness of aim that I had so often seen in European art. Here was a drama that the West had not even a conception of. At its best the stage of Europe professed to educate by representing heroic scenes from the past, by evolving from them lessons for the audience, and by stirring their enthusiasm for great deeds of history or myth. In its commonest mood it reproduced in mimic form some scene or action from contemporary life. At its worst it was but a pander to the survivals of a gross and animal past. What I now thought of as the Limanoran stage was wholly occupied with the future, so far as it was a possible evolution from the present. The noblest ideal that the imagination of the race could shape was brought dramatically before the people that their thoughts and ambitions might be fixed on something beyond themselves.

For this high purpose and not for luxury or personal enjoyment their sculpture and painting and music had been developed, and the newest discoveries and inventions of science had been brought to their aid. There was no objection to what gave pleasure; but to spend the thought and effort of the fully developed human mind on that alone was, they held, a degradation. Strenuous endeavour towards a higher and better future was the note that characterised their pursuits. But, if they could add attractiveness to the prosecution of the aim, the task was all the easier; if they could make the path ahead beautiful and pleasant so as to decoy the reluctant senses onwards, the pace would be all the swifter.

Even with this high aim, I could not understand how this people, who loathed all pretence, could condescend to their dramatic art; for on this stage of Loomiefa were members of their community representing in their persons what they were not and could not be for many ages. And I had heard them often decry the histrionic art as one that encouraged in the actors a habit of delighting in mere semblance and superficial show, a habit that is the basis of hypocrisy and deceit; whilst the love of mimicry and pageantry, I had been led to believe, had vanished from the island at one of the last purgations of the race.

The seeming contradiction was afterwards explained. As one of the necessary steps in my initiation into the privileges and duties of the mature citizen I was led behind the scenes. Through the gorge at the upper end of the valley I passed into a great hall that seemed to me a combination of a museum and workshop. Here were the youth of the Loomiamo and the Fraloomiamo at work upon automata and the elaborate machinery that would guide their motions. Had I kept at a distance from them as they worked, I would have thought that the play of human sculpture was being again enacted, such exact reproductions of the human system were the figures that grew under their hands. In one section stood thousands of what I would have called statues, which had served in the publication of former books. In another the puppets were going through dramatic scenes by way of experimentation, and in many the illusion was complete; I should have said that human beings were talking and acting. In others there was some imperfection, and there one could see that they were all mere fantoccini galvanised into life. In a third section the tissues and parts that were to make mimic men and women were being manufactured; the workers and artists could draw on Rimla for as much force as they needed, whilst the advice of the scientific families was at their command. The machinery of the great workshop was bewildering in its complexity and refinement. The finest tissue or nerve of the human brain could be here imitated so that under a microscope I would have said it was part of a living body.

After all it was only the acting of marionettes that I had seen upon the stage in the valley. But it was greatly aided by another department where the pioneering families cultivated the art and science of illusions. They could imitate the human voice at any point in the valley measured to the fraction of an inch; they could reproduce any scene of history, of contemporary existence, or of futuritive fiction so exactly, making it so full of the lights and shadows of life and of the developments of all advance, that none of the senses unaided by the reasoning and analytic faculties could assert that the men and women were not living, and that their actions and words were not real. Even the electric sense could be deluded by the impulses manufactured by these machinists and illusionists; it would take the magnetic thrills it received for genuine enthusiasm and sympathy from the mind of a man or from a crowd. This department was even more important than the factory of puppets; for it made the play of the marionettes look still more human on the stage. After all it was not the puppets themselves I had watched with such breathless excitement, but a mere illusory picture of their proceedings; the illusion was far more lifelike than the play of the marionettes themselves. So much stress did they lay on stirring the imagination and emotions of the race in favour of the ideals of the future that half the work of these two families consisted in the dramatic publication of their books.

The next sacred book I saw produced in Loomiefa would have of itself persuaded me that this people could have nothing to do with the histrionic art or any art that would encourage the habit of pretence and show in the individual nature. It was called the book of Human Transparency and described the various methods by which the inner working of the human brain could be made patent to Limanoran senses. The tissues could be clarified; the significance of every fibre and nerve could be made familiar to all as an essential part of their education; the eye, the ear, and the firla could be made more subtle and acute in their perceptions, till at last they were able to tell in a moment everything that was proceeding beneath the skull and within the heart. What was done slowly and painfully by the medical elders with the help of their instruments, their hypnotic powers, and the interpretation of dreams, every man would be able to do instantaneously, and without extraneous aid, exceptional wisdom, or occult powers. The general drift of a neighbour’s emotions was known to everyone through his magnetic senses, but not the particular intention or thought; this would be known only after the long course of training and development mapped out in the book of Human Transparency.

One of the chief ethical purposes that had in recent times been fixed in the mind of the community was to eject from the human system all elements and processes that were offensive to the finer feelings and senses, everything in fact that a man or woman might be ashamed of or wish to conceal. The new book of the time aimed at extending this to the operations of thought and emotion. To get clear of the waste products of the mind in a way that would be inoffensive to others was an ideal they had not yet been able to entertain. They had learned with much pain and self-denial the habit of concealing the crude processes of thought that lead to what is worth saying or doing. It was one of the things they were most ashamed of in looking over the history or the memorials of their far past to see the vast amount of the raw digestion of thought and of the refuse of emotion that was made public, and even put into literature meant to be permanent. Most of the orations and magazine articles, and ultimately most of the books that had been produced in past ages were much the same as if the stomach and intestines of the speaker or writer had been anatomised and laid open with all their offensive processes to the gaze of spectators. One of the most beneficent events of their later history had been a conflagration in their valley of memories; for it had wiped out of existence the libraries and art accumulations of many centuries, of which they had come to be ashamed. They could not understand the long-past stage of their civilisation, in which men, and especially young men, had been so proud of displaying the mere débris of their worst and crudest processes of thought; it had actually been the case that most of the literature and art had been produced by youths under fifty years of age, who had not yet begun to appreciate the difference between the processes of thinking and the results of thinking; and one of the most extraordinary features of that period was that the most applauded literary and artistic productions, those that were supposed to be most distinctively the outcome of what they called genius, were the work of boys and girls, mere children under twenty-five years of age. Natures that should still have been in the nursery for many a year were stimulated to address the public and seek applause with work that was merely tentative and disciplinary. The result was that, on the one hand, one half of the most original and promising minds racked themselves to death years before they should have faced life, whilst on the other a juvenile ideal was set before literature and art, and boys and girls became their chief audience and most powerful arbiters. They felt heartily ashamed of that singular stage in their development, and were glad to have accidental fire come to their assistance in huddling its products out of sight.

One of the first instincts they evolved after the series of purgations was the desire to conceal within their minds what was crude or mere process in thinking, and, still more, what was mere waste product and refuse of the mind. Instead of being eager to speak out or publish all that came into the thoughts, bad or good, they grew shy of public exhibition of their projects and schemes till they had been shaped by long years of thinking and experimenting, and criticised and checked by the caution and wisdom of their fully matured nature. Publication became the last resort of the mature and old instead of the first ambition of the young, so afraid were they of exhibiting what might be crude or offensive. Even in the give and take of conversation and social intercourse they preferred long periods of silence to the utterance of truisms and commonplaces. The trivial and conventional in speech, as in life, was what they abhorred, as revealing an intellectual nature on the road back to the infertility and childishness of barbarism, the elaborate mechanism of thought whizzing round without connection with what represents work.

But now the book of Human Transparency proposed as an ideal to eject from the system every process of thought and feeling that they might blush to let others see. If the nature was made transparent then would it become a self-preserving instinct to develop their natures in this direction. Everything crude or false or offensive, that might begin to show itself in their minds, would be at once suppressed before it got headway, instead of having to be slowly reasoned out of existence with the aid of the moral instincts. This accomplished, the race would be able to take another great leap forward. The advance of their processes of thought and feeling to the level of the former results of them would give them a higher point of view from which to look forth into the future.

A mediate book, soon afterward produced by one of the Loomiamo, supplied one of the steps towards the consummation of this ideal. It was the book of Ethereal Nutriment. It took as basis a former discovery, the liquefaction of air, and showed how, by similar methods, the medium that filled interstellar space could be made available in the halls of nutriment and medication, and how it could be manufactured in such a concentrated form as to allow of its being poured along conduits and imbibed by the human organs through the mouth and nostrils, just as air was. For some time the atmosphere had been distilled in liquid form, and supplied to the houses of the citizens absolutely rid of all impurities. Nay, it had been made a fountain of power, transmissible to long distances, and available in a form that was easily carried. Compressed and liquefied, it rapidly returned to the gaseous form as soon as the pressure began to be removed. And the re-equilibrising of the liquid to the expansion of the surrounding air had been made to supply vast quantities of power in the centre of force. The new book proposed to find in the compression and liquefication of the ether an infinite fountain of force that would enable their civilisation to progress at an ever-accelerating pace.

But the most immediate effect proposed by the book was to enable the Limanorans to etherealise their bodies by introducing the liquefied ether into their dietary. The result would be that the tissues would grow more diaphanous. They had already been able to transport some of the universal medium in their anchored vacuum faleenas from the outer margin of the atmosphere to their laboratories, and now they had been able to find it in their manufactured vacuums. With the enormous power they had in Rimla they could easily compress it into forms that would touch the senses, and enter into the blood and the formation of the tissues. As the medium of light and magnetism it was almost certain to make the human body more translucent than it had ever been. All the tissues, even the osseous, had always been pervious to light, but many of them not apparently so to the untrained human eye. Recently their lavolans had shown that by means of certain kinds of luminous rays the human system gave up its most hidden secrets to the human eye. But once they were able to chemicalise and compress the luminiferous ether into palpable form, and to mingle it with the volatile food that could be taken into their bodies as they breathed, there would be no need of lavolans or other apparatus to see the inner movements of the human system.

The sanitary effects of this advance would be no mean result. The medical council would have much of their time set free for their ever-pressing investigations; they would not be needed for the diagnosis of deteriorative symptoms in the tissues; each individual would be able, by the aid of magnifying mirrors to examine for himself what was going on in any part of his system; and every man had sufficient physiological and medical knowledge to understand the beginnings of all the ordinary diseases, and, if he recognised them, to prescribe for himself the hall in Oomalefa that he should frequent in order to check them. Now it would be only the symptoms of obscure or new diseases or deteriorations of the system that the medical elders would have to diagnose. And thus they would have great tracts of their life to devote to new discoveries, and medical science was certain to advance more rapidly.

Another sanitary effect of the new permeability to light would be to render the human body less open to diseases either known or unknown. For it had long been a commonplace of medical science that sunlight reduced the vitality, and therefore the virulence, of all noxious microbes; after nightfall their power increased tenfold. Wherever the sun’s rays could not reach by day, there diseases multiplied and festered. And one of the chief reasons why, in their far past history, incurable maladies were generally internal, was that sunshine could not get to the parts affected except in a feeble and straggling way. The fact that they had fixed themselves deeply in the tissues before they could be observed, and that it was difficult to get at their roots without cutting a passage in to them had been generally accepted as the explanation of their frequency and deadliness. But it had been one of the most important discoveries of the new era after the purgation period, that pure oxygen and pure sunlight were the most medicative of all things, and that the nearer any affected part could get to them the sooner it healed. The new book of Ethereal Nutrition pointed out that one of the results of rendering the human system easily pervious to light would be to rid its internal parts of all trace of immedicability; sunlight, permeating the inner organs and tissues, would make any noxious microbes that might lodge in them innocuous.

The reciprocity of suggestion and discovery was never more saliently exemplified than by one of the less immediate results pointed out by this book as likely to flow from the attainment of its ideal. Volatile ether-food, gradually introduced into the halls of nutrition and gradually increased, would, step by step, bring the human organs to adapt themselves to existence outside of the atmosphere of the earth. For a long time they would be amphibious, with organs adapted to both aërial and ethereal life. Even as it was, the human body revealed in it traces of having already passed through an amphibious stage. There were in the neck glands that were the remains of gills, which must have once belonged to an aquatic habit; besides, there was the last vestige of an eye in the back of the neck still extant in the pineal gland, and this could have been of use only when the ancestor of man was passing through the stage of a water-animal which must watch his enemies from the surface, his body being submerged and out of sight. Step by step he abandoned the water for a littoral, and even at first arboreal, habit; the result was that the gills came to be unused and closed up, and the upward-looking eye was useless in a head that was held upright and could be turned swiftly in all directions; still man retains the memory of the aquatic stage of his ancestry in the ease with which he learns to swim, and in his love of a life on the sea; whilst an occasional birth in more barbarous tribes with the webbed toes of a water-animal still showing reveals his ancestry atavistically.