Chapter XI: Ethics (3)

Another instance of a former virtue having become a vice was statesmanship and political patriotism. At one time half the conspicuous talent of the race went in this direction, so greatly was it admired. And, when there were other races and nations to diplomatise or struggle with, and one half of the race had to provide for or keep watch on the other half, it is no strange thing that to enter into the domain of politics was considered the noblest thing a man could do, and love of the welfare of the country was considered the noblest sentiment a man could entertain. The most difficult problems, involving, some of them, the very continuance of the race, occupied the attention of the statesman and politician; what to do with the vast pauper class and the still vaster fringe of the poverty-stricken and improvident, how to deal with the criminally inclined, how to educate the half-savage denizens of hovels in cities and even in the open country, how to prevent the deadlocks in industry, how to regulate the labour market and how to check the recurrent plagues and famines, were questions that tasked the finest intellectual energies of the nation. What complicated the answer was the fact that the themes of the discussions, the pauper, the criminal, the improvident, the employer, the labourer, the plague-stricken, and the starving had all a share in the government of the country, and had to be persuaded that any scheme proposed was to their individual interests. The virtue of political patriotism was streaked with loquacity, conceit, self-seeking, hypocrisy, corruption, and intrigue, long before it came to be recognised as a vice. The statesman and politician had to make his principles as interchangeable as his coats, had to be a master in the art of making the worse appear the better reason, had to be skilful in lying without seeming to lie, had to rob whilst putting on the guise of self-sacrifice, had to cringe and fawn, bully and overbear, by turns, had to be an artist in bribing men and in taking bribes, in short had to be the most expert of the criminal classes. By the time the end came, none in the list of virtues had become so like a vice as patriotism. The great purgations swept out all occasions for politics and patriots in exiling all the subjects of statesmanship. Where there were no paupers or criminals, no masters or servants, no uneducated or savage except young children, and no chance of plague or famine, the occupation of the statesman and politician vanished. Where every man was taught to be a law to himself, legislation had no place. The problems of most inchoate civilisations had gone into exile with all the isms that were proposed to solve them, and all the charlatans that proposed their solution. Patriotism was now, like breathing, the organic and unconscious process of every mind, and not the exception upon which anyone could plume himself. No longer was it the safety of the country, or the continuance of the race, or the sustenance or justice or criminality of part of the people that demanded conscious effort, but the advance of the human system in all. To propose and argue legislative schemes for the benefit of any section of the race would have been accounted immorality, if it had not been taken as a symptom of atavism or mental disease. A hospital was the certain fate of anyone who indulged in political projects or political eloquence; the old virtue had passed beyond the stage of obstructiveness and vice, and had become one of the tests of insanity.

This disease of politics rarely appeared except amongst the youthful and immature and the methods of driving out the evil spirit had recently grown scientific and unfaltering. The old plan of exiling, it was now felt, had become cruel and pitiless. For in recent generations the pace of evolution in the race had so quickened that now even its laggards and the breakers of its moral law were centuries ahead of the most advanced citizens of the most advanced nations on the face of the earth; and no longer could they, if expatriated, find any to consort with. They would have to live with men who, in their eyes, were vicious and criminal. Noola had been the last to be exiled; the system was finally abandoned as inhumane and unscientific; and science soon found methods of treatment that were prompt and efficient in their cure of all such mental diseases.

My final instance of the old virtue grown vice is of a different kind. It belonged more to the intellectual sphere than to the practical, and seemed to me at first rather a mistake than a defect of the nature. It was the common error of taking a verbal originality or advance for a real, a mere change of name for a change in essence. In the old times it had been counted as a great merit to a man, if he manufactured a new nomenclature for any wide spread phase of civilisation, and so gave the race the sensation of dealing with something novel. Some of the greatest heroes of philosophy and science in the pre-purgation ages of the island had owed their fame to the substitution of fresh phraseology for what had grown outworn and trite, and most of the great writers had done nothing more for their fellows than re-illumine a linguistic world fallen dull and dark. Men grow sick of ideas that have worn the same verbal dress for a generation or more, and hail as a discoverer and benefactor anyone who tricks them out anew; they delight in feeling them to be familiar old friends, whom they have to make no mental effort to know. Even to dye the old garments in new imaginative tints is a service they will not readily forget; whilst the great discoverers and pioneers of the human race have had years or ages of oblivion according to the newness and difficulty of their ideas and the distance beyond the common horizon they have looked into the future. The Limanorans of old, like most other men, abhorred having to think out again their creeds and ideas, and especially having to reform them; and so they stood out lustily against every real advance proposed, and shouted it down as irreverence or blasphemy in overturning the old barriers and old altars. The maker of a new nomenclature and the tinter of the old phraseology pandered to this intellectual indolence.

One of the most striking results of the new point of view after the great purgation was the transformation the fame of these old scientists and philosophers and writers suffered. They began to be execrated as dealers in illusions, as men who fed the passion of the human race for stagnance or retrogression to monstrous proportions. They were thrown down from their lofty pedestals, and cast into oblivion for their sins against truth and reality. To seduce men from the pursuit of truth by mere verbal jugglery was now counted no mere mistake, but a heinous offence against morality. To take as a real discovery what was but a new name or set of names revealed a vicious obliquity of mental vision, that needed attention from the ethical physicians. This was especially easy in the domain of ethics, and the Limanorans were constantly on their guard against the delusion of accepting a change of nomenclature as a moral advance. The elders carefully reviewed every stage of progress, lest it should have been in words and phrases. This was the main purpose of the Manora and of the Imanora, and every month linguistic councils were held to revise the language, and to throw out any fallacies and illusions it might harbour. Every new nomenclature and phraseology was searched and probed, and torn off the ideas that they were meant to express, in order to see if there was anything new underneath them. Delusion, they had resolved, they would have nothing to do with in any shape or form. For delusion blinded the eyes to the route they were taking, and made them march in a circle or back over the old roads under the belief that they were advancing to what was new. It was the greatest foe to true progress, and any man who fell into it revealed vicious tendencies, which needed the ministrations of the physicians and nurses in the ethical sanatorium. To take verbal ingenuity for true pioneering was the most grievous offence against the future of the race.

The great standard and test of morality was progress. How far will an act or habit aid the true development of the race? This was the crucial question in Limanora; and in order that it might be answered satisfactorily and easily by any member of the community, the council of elders was careful to accommodate the ideals of the race to every advance made. It had been a rare thing in their history to change or add to the cardinal instincts of morality. But this they knew was by no means impossible; and indeed they were buoyed up with the hope that the moral cosmos was still to open up new marvels like the physical cosmos, that in fact the two would ultimately be found to be one when looked at from the final and divine point of view. There was the strongest conservatism in the ethical phase of life; for it is the last, highest, and most complex development of vitality. The lower we investigate in the animal world, the more revolutions and transformations we see the individual go through, the more enslaved is it to circumstances, to locality, to season, to the moment. The higher we go, the greater we find the conservatism, and at the same time the greater the origination and the adaptability. In man these two conflicting powers grow stronger side by side as he advances in civilisation. He retains features and forms that are outworn and useless longer than most of the higher animals; and yet he originates and adapts himself and his surroundings with far more ease and swiftness. In ethics, his last evolution, the conservatism dominates the origination and the advance, obscures them or makes them simulate its own features, and produces the belief that the final maxims and cue of morality have been reached from the first. Ethical progress has naturally been slow, and it is only the student of vast periods of history and of many nations and races who becomes fully persuaded that there has been any change in the point of view. Because there is not complete transformation, as in the case of the minuter and lower animals, it is assumed that there is no evolution, and that morality and conscience have remained fixed quantities, from the beginning of historic times at least. And the close bond between ethics and religion has assisted this dominant and delusive conservatism in its task. Each great step in ethical evolution has been claimed by religion as its own, and as resulting from its own special revelation from heaven.

The Limanorans were quick to recognise that morality must be subject to growth and development, not only in the individual, but in the race, and that man must gain higher ethical points of view as he progresses. They knew that many of the finest impulses and inspirations towards progress, and especially ethical progress, had come from beyond the earth and the earth’s atmosphere. But that any age or race could have caught the ultimate ethical light from the central sun of the cosmos seemed to them after their experience the height of absurdity. There could be no spiritual eye trained and developed enough to receive it. As the bodily eye of man is capable of taking in only a limited range of rays of light, whilst an immense range of them above and below its faculty either blind it or pass unnoticed, so his spirit at any given stage of its development can understand and accept ethical ideas only within certain limits; but, as it progresses, it is able to see beyond, and appreciate ideas that were non-existent to it before. There is as much difference between the ethical comprehension of the modern Limanoran and that of the most highly civilised European as between that of the latter and the savage’s, or as between the savage’s and the pig’s; and if they could have brought themselves to believe that they had attained the fullest and the final light upon morality, the thought would have struck their very hearts to stone.

It was this that kept them from formulating their morality or ethics in any definite code. They knew that a code would soon petrify morality and itself become a fetich ignorantly worshipped, and, gathering to it through the ages the self-interest of its officials and the irrational devotion of its worshippers, attain a despotism that could never be broken or controlled. A code issues in a series of prohibitions which become a boundless slavery, and prohibitions develop the sense of rights which dominates and obscures all sense of duties; this keeps men hanging between savagery and true civilisation. The growing dominance of duty with its complementary obscuration of rights is the first symptom of the approach of rapid ethical progress. To insist on one’s rights imprisons the soul in the living sepulture of selfishness. To think of one’s duty is to admit the self-revealing and future unmisting light of self-sacrifice. Once prohibitions become the order of the day, especially in a limited community, the spirit of intolerance is abroad; every man yearns to confine his neighbour and put him in moral and intellectual leading strings. The origin and meaning of the “Thou shalt nots” are forgotten; the spirit of them dies rapidly, and the letter binds and petrifies the souls that must obey them. Progress in ethics is finally stopped, and it is accepted as a law of nature that there never was any development of conscience and never can be any other ethical point of view. Moral stagnance is taken as the rule of human life, and nothing short of a new impulse from spheres outside the world can liberate the race, thus blinded, from its vicious circle of thought.

Advance of the human system to higher points of view is in Limanora the moral test and standard of actions and conduct. In all that is, nothing has ever died, nothing is dead; what seems dead and fixed for ever in permanent form is suffering change as truly as the flitting aurora of the north; the rock, that seems the same in our old age as when we saw it in infancy, is in process of transformation no less than we ourselves are; it is made up of particles that are groups of molecules; and these molecules, moving with varying degrees of rapidity round and across each other’s orbits, consist themselves of still more minute atoms that are but points of living energy. Send another form of energy, like heat, through this apparently torpid mass, and it stirs palpably to our senses; what was dormant to us before has awakened, and, as the supply of the foreign energy increases, the rock moves and changes beneath our gaze; not that the long-torpid mass has not an energy of its own; it is a store of energy, every atom of it waiting but for the touch of another kind to awaken from its age-long sleep, and to send most of it free and a step higher into the wandering sphere again. The difference between solid and liquid and between liquid and gas is only a question of time. In the solids the molecules take longer to move through the same space than those of the liquid, which in their turn take longer than those of the gas; for solids flow under the influence of gravitation or other force just as truly as liquids or gases flow.

It is the same with energies; one differs from another in pace; time is the only essential difference between them. The pace of vital energy is so distinctive in its swiftness that it forms a new order of existence. Thought is the swiftest of the vital energies that we know, and to rise in the scale is to quicken the pace. The civilised man thinks as much more rapidly than the savage as the savage thinks more rapidly than the mollusc, if the last may be said to think or feel at all. And there are heights above existing human thought for man to climb. Higher and ever higher the scale of energies in the cosmos must go, till time becomes what would seem to us but a vanishing point; immediately above us lies the vital energy to which a thousand years are but as a moment. To the microbe, if it could think, human life would seem an eternity. To creative thought, which is the Limanoran ideal, eternity, future as well as past, is focussed into a moment.

Up through the scale of energy the whole cosmos is ever climbing, with occasional lapses and falls, time being the only differentiating quality. To quicken the pace of development is the one immediate aim of Limanoran civilisation, and the morality of an action is measured by its contribution to this aim. The higher they climb, the nobler, the more ethereal, becomes their energy; the less governed and clogged by animal conditions, the more easy to quicken the pace of development. For the cosmic law of influence is that the closer in quality and degree the spheres of energy, the more likely is the higher to mould the lower and raise it near to its level. The source of the everlasting movement and life in the cosmos is the unstable equilibrium of all nuclei and stores of energy. Every world differs from every other world in its capacity for various forms of energy; and so does everything in it differ from everything else in the amount of any particular form of energy it can contain. Comparative proximity sets up a current between any two nuclei of energy that thus differ. Whenever the two reach stable equilibrium, that is, whenever they come to have equal shares of the energy, the current of influence ceases, and they are dead to each other. The socialistic ideal is political and social death; when all the members of a community are equal and alike in their share of its privileges and products and capacities, its rights and duties, it ceases to grow or develop; stagnation is the law of its being, especially if there are no neighbouring communities differing from it on which it can react. The Limanorans deliberately strove to keep up and strengthen the differences between not only families, but individuals, in rights, duties, capacities, aims. The differences were an everlasting fountain of renewing life. The law of political and social life is exactly the same as that of gravitation and of all the other cosmic forces. Two sources of energy will continue to influence each other, till they reach equality, the greater giving of its share of energy a larger proportion than the less. What keeps the cosmos eternally alive is the complexity of the mutual influences. There are no two bodies or centres of an energy so isolated or so simply constituted as to remain for ever dead or unchanging, once they have reached stable equilibrium towards each other in respect to their special form of energy. And so it is with men; the socialistic ideal is an impossibility in this universe.

In the human sphere this cosmic law has farther-reaching issues than the merely political. The Limanorans were willing to do much for the advance of mankind, but they had come to see that apostolism is a case of this law of mutuality of influence as truly as any other phenomenon; the higher must not only give voluntarily of his influence and character to the lower, but the lower must give of his to the apostle; and if the proximity continues long enough, this mutual give-and-take will end in the missionary coming nearer to the original moral standard of the convert than the convert comes to his patron’s original standard. Where the grades of the two civilisations are widely separated, though the process of assimilation may be long, extended over even many generations, it will be most disastrous to human progress. It is better, they concluded from their long experience, to isolate an advancing race that is far ahead of all other races, and thus to give it the chance of coming within the sphere of still higher intelligences.

Most advanced religions have begun with the impulse towards this, yearning for a loftier sphere than that in which they are hedged. They try to isolate their followers from the lowering influences of the world around, in order that they may reach the ideal and influence that are just above them. But, as they apostolise and expand, the worshippers become mere parasites of their God; they try to batten upon Him with their lower natures, and thus drag Him down to their level. After the first noble impulse and inspiration, it is seldom that a religion does not become as truly an instance of parasitism as the meanest bacterial life. The lower all through the universe is eager to parasite on the higher; minute organisms try to lodge in the tissues of those that are larger and more developed. As long as host and parasite can pursue their functions unhindered by their intimate relationships, little harm is done; but as soon as the débris of the lower clogs the organs of the host, what we call disease results and the minute guest becomes a hurtful parasite. As long as the religious impulse sends the nature higher on the path of development, so long does it give of its best to the Deity, so long does it fail to clog the advance of the cosmos. But when it extends its conquest to mean and unprogressive natures, the common, unenthusiastic natures that are saturated with envy and jealousy, then does it become mere parasitism; the religion has grown into a disease. The warm, humane, and generous natures which are touched by a new inspiration, rise to an exceptional pitch of fervour under its influence, and develop at a pace that stirs the alarm and envy of their neighbours; whilst the resultant persecution continues unabated, there can be no degeneration, the worship can never be parasitic. But as soon as the persistence and progress of the early worshippers and their propagandist enthusiasm begin to invite the commonplace, cowardly spirits of the mass, who can never appreciate what is above them except to envy it and drag it down to their level, its era of development is past. The cosmic law of reciprocity never fails to act, and the united influence of the meaner majority is greater in its power over the whole than the fervour of the noble few; down falls the worship to the level of the many.

It was on this cosmic law that the Limanorans based their refusal to go out and attempt to convert and raise the rest of mankind to their standard. They knew from the nature of the universe that the attempt would end in corrupting themselves and dragging them down farther than they could drag up their converts. They preferred to give of their best to the unorbed existence which filled space outside of the world, and to make their best still better. Thus they knew they were serving most truly the great end of all being, the development of the cosmos, the elevation of the energy in it towards more and more spiritual and progressive grades. They strove to perpetuate and strengthen their consciousness of what was above them, and to break the yoke of the lower self, the self that at death amalgamates with what is material and stagnant, although the latter was needed as a stepping-stone as long as they remained upon the face of the earth. In seeking the proximity and influence of the higher energies and existences that seldom touched the earth, they anxiously guarded themselves from all parasitism which might drag these down in the scale of being; and this led them to abandon attempts to personalise the relationship to them. They would have no part in worshipping or prostrating themselves before these beings in order to obtain their protection and patronage; for this, they knew, becomes merely sectarian, the outcome of envy and jealousy, the cause of bigotry and intolerance, persecution and revenge. They did not desire the exclusive influence of a higher being, nor to become obstructions to its further development; to rise to its level was their active spiritual ambition in striving to gain proximity to it.

As their senses, especially their inner senses, developed, they were getting more and more certain of a vast universe of being just outside the merely terrestrial, and new inspirations and senses were ever awakening in them; nobler ideas and impulses pressed in upon them, they scarcely knew whence. They were afraid to define the source, lest they should humanise the idea of it and pollute it. What they were sure of was that infinite space was filled with unorbed life and energy, rising in higher and higher grades, as it receded from the terrene. The energy of the worlds and of the other nuclei of force was gradually rising through the grades of being, thanks chiefly to the measureless existence which hovered round them, yet settled upon no centre of fixed energy. Out of this unorbed life came the impulses and inspirations that made such epochs in the history of a world. Their magnetic sympathy with this they were strengthening and elevating every generation, as they strove to rise higher and higher amongst these existences in order that into their spirits might come nobler and nobler influences. As long as they were conscious of qualities and degrees of existence above them, so long would they be stimulated on their upward development. They had no fear that they would ever reach a point from which they could not see heights beyond. That, they knew, would be complete spiritual death. But they knew too that there was no such thing as death, or entire annihilation, in the whole cosmos. What seemed to us death was but the final parting of two grades of being or energy, the lower to coalesce with some fixed form of energy and attach itself again to some more rapidly developing form, the higher to range itself with the unnucleated energies of space, still to rise by proximity to some higher life. They were scientifically certain that there could be no end to this process of development upwards. Aspiration was the duty and true function of all existence. To quicken the pace of the evolution, to range themselves more and more swiftly with the higher life of the cosmos, this was the prerogative of vital energy that had gained consciousness of itself and its purpose.

Their conscience and morality were based upon this quickening ascension. The test of an action was this: does it help in raising the humanity higher in the scale of being? Nothing could be good that stopped their ascent; nothing could be bad that compelled them to rise more quickly. The elders generally saw at a glance all the bearings of an act and knew whether it contributed to this general aim or not. Where they hesitated on account of the complexity of the problem, they met and discussed it, calling in all the accurate science they had to their aid; if after all they had to lay the question aside unanswered, then was the act left in that neutral zone of conduct which the Limanorans might or might not enter as they saw fit. Such acts carried no moral discount or credit with them for the time. But often the advance of an age, or even a few years, would remove the act from the neutral zone into the bad or the good; a higher point of view generally solved their doubt. From the opinion of the elders there rayed out magnetically into the young and immature the sense of what was right, to act as conscience where they were incapable of reasoning out the position.

There was thus no feature of their lives but came within the range of morality. Even the habitual and automatic movements and actions, which form so large a proportion of the life of the other terrestrial races had been reduced to an almost inappreciable proportion in theirs and were ever being questioned and tested to see if they harmonised with the newer points of view that had been reached. There was nothing in their whole existence that had not its moral relationships. Their sciences and arts, their experiments and inventions, were as much a part of their moral life as their character and their conduct towards each other. Morality was the relationship to the ever-developing, ever-advancing, aim of the race, and nothing in the whole range of their life was indifferent to that.