CHAPTER XI

ETHICS

I AFTERWARDS found that Imanora necessarily differed from Imanora as widely as age from age or man from man, it being as it was the universal outlook of so progressive a people. What one centennial mount of vision foresaw as a possibility the next viewed as an accomplished fact. What one century peered into the darkness to descry, another brought into the daylight of achievement, and a third antiquated.

But there were other and wider differences than this I have stated. Though all phases of the civilisation were reviewed in relation to the future, generally one phase took prominence and gave character to each Imanora. In the earlier periods, after the purgations, the physiological and biological sciences and arts predominated; for the elders were most anxious then to bring the physical basis of their life up to the level of quickening progress. Then came the periods specially devoted to advance in chemistry and physics and the other sciences and arts that gave them new power over the outside world. One century was the great astronomical period, when the imagination of the race stretched out with yearning to other stars. Another was the great inventive era, when it seemed as easy as a dream to make new machines which should open out wide prospects of additional conquest over nature and humanity.

In the more recent centuries ethics had again come to the front, new points of view having been shown by the great discoveries and inventions of many centuries. The first Imanora after the series of purgations was complete had been predominantly ethical. The race had bent its attention so exclusively upon the crimes and vices which had hindered their advance for ages, that they could think of almost no other development than the ethical. The elders had been investigating for years little else than the defects in the moral nature, their bases in the physical system, and the methods of remedying them. They had come to the conclusion after all their researches that nothing could be done for the cure of the minor vices till the most vicious and defective characters had been cleared out. A systematic purification of the commonweal must precede attempts at moral reform. Most of the purgations were managed by wise and cautious diplomacy; the bait of more than their share of the wealth of the island in portable form, and the chance of a new country in which to indulge their vice to license, induced them to ship off to a distance. Only a few needed forcible measures to make them remove. The lying and hypocritical, the licentious, the envious and jealous, the boastful and the epicurean, the religiously intolerant and superstitious, readily seized the opportunity of seeking a country where they might make their own laws and shape their customs to suit their special weakness. The warlike and murderous and the thievish and socialistic thought they could force a still better bargain; they had strong inner doubts whether they would be likely to have as fine an arena for their talents in a new country, and whether they would make the best companions for one another. An increase of the inducement had little effect on them; they felt that their special vices would lose half their attraction when removed from the presence of the contrasted and shrinking virtues. Much of the pleasure of a murder or a theft lay in the necessity for its concealment, and the ingenuity required to evade punishment. The occupations ceased to be fine arts as soon as they became the occupations of the whole community. To these criminal sections of the race force had to be applied before they left the island; it had to be a policy of deportation.

It was little wonder that for a century after absorption in such work the civilisation of Limanora was essentially ethical. To rid themselves of every trace of the detestable vices of which they had just seen the worst specimens deported over the horizon, became the one aim and ideal of the now-expurgated people. Development seemed nothing more than greater ease and habitualness in the virtues. To be purer, truer, more tolerant, more generous, more gentle and modest and loving, was their one idea of progress. The outlook from the first Imanora was towards an ideal of such benignity and kindliness as would make all personal relations easy and happy beyond the conception of other nations.

The first few decades of the next century gave them exhilaration in the pursuit of this aim. They took the greatest delight in eradicating the seedling ferocities of their savage past. Spite, rancour, disdain, pitilessness, vanity, surliness, ingratitude, partiality, want of candour, acerbity, meanness, and all uncharitableness were rigorously checked, and every thought or energy that might, when abused, tend in these directions was finally mastered. It was a delight to help one another in the crusade against these petty defects. Nothing seemed so noble or progressive as to spend every leisure moment on cultivating the generous attitude towards one another.

But they soon saw the limits of such a progress. The virtues became easy and common to all and it grew difficult to find new ethical worlds to conquer. Most of them indulged too eagerly in introspection and some turned morbidly self-critical, finding defects where there were none. Imagination became a factory of petty faults and vices. The result was new and real faults, which threatened to maim their civilisation and bar their further progress. They were painfully self-conscious, fearing lest the eyes of a neighbour or comrade should discover in them germs of moral disease which had escaped their own microscopic criticism. They shrank from beginning any enterprise; they feared to come to decisions or make resolves, lest they should be wrong. They tolerated and even encouraged faults and defects in their friends which they would have drastically eradicated from their own natures; they nursed in pity and generosity weak characters and diseased systems into length of life, and shrank from forbidding them parenthood and posterity. They strained at gnats and swallowed camels and indulged in constant casuistry. In short, the whole race fell into a chronic spiritual invalidism and many of them were afflicted with moral hypochondria. They felt the pulses of their souls daily and hourly, and were ever haunted with the fear of the old vices returning on them, so losing their masculine grit and self-command. Finally they threatened to become a race of sinewless effeminates with nothing but spiritual collapse and palsy before them.

It was clear that this microscopic introspection and moral unrest must cease, if there was to be any real advance. They had already recognised that ethics developed by stages, and that any attempt on the part of a race to force it beyond the intellectual point of view which they had reached only ended in temporary failure and retrogression. No new moral outlook can be attained unless reason has ascended a higher mount of vision. Revelation can never come without new achievement. A fixed quantity of ethical knowledge in a nation is moral death, and to systematise ethical maxims into an absolute code for all time is to enslave the reason of the world. For what is the almost unattainable ideal of one stage of racial development is the antiquated truism of a later stage. Savage man compares ill in polity and moral code with the republics of the bee and the ant, just as his engineering and architectural skill are infantile beside those of the beaver. How unprotective and even cruel he is to his aged and women and children, compared with many animals! How unadvanced even the most civilised are in truth and loyalty compared with the dog! How weak in the reasoning that is based on the reports of the senses are men in general compared with the wild animals! There is evidently an infinite variety of stages in the ethical and intellectual development and vision of man, as there is in those of the animals. The most advanced human beings, just like the least advanced, are, in some points, lower than the beasts. But man can, if he will, have mastery of his circumstances and conditions, inasmuch as he can examine himself by reflection, and tends to examine himself through self-consciousness. The power and tendency, however, are only fitfully taken advantage of, and it is therefore at long intervals that even the best races accelerate the pace of their progress beyond that which nature herself indicates.

The elders, and through them the people, were persuaded that this absorbing pursuit of ethical improvement must be abandoned. The development of the physical system was the first distraction that they thought of; and their bodies grew in muscular power, in grace of form, and in litheness of movement. It was during this athletic period that flight through the air was achieved; then, too, physiology and medicine grew into real sciences and began to direct the evolution of physical man, and the struggle against the hosts of microscopic parasites that over-populate the elements and have to seek pastures in the human body. It was in this era, too, that they mastered the secret of prolonging life and began the series of experiments in food and other forms of sustenance, and in heredity, which ended in giving them centuries instead of decades to live.

It soon came to be noticed, however, that a new but analogous hypochondria began to seize even the youthful athletes of the race. There was too much direct attention paid to the state and development of the body to be wholesome. Athletic egotism became rampant, and as a result of it a scorn of intellectual pursuits. It was as truly a diseased state of the human system as the moral invalidism with which they had been afflicted in the previous era. Thews and sinews were measured and examined with scientific minuteness. Muscular development was appraised and applauded as moral qualities had formerly been. The spirit began to be impoverished; the brain decreased in weight and fineness of convolution. Athletic introspection was coming to be as painful and masterful a disease as moral introspection had been. Diet and exercise became the absorbing topics of daily conversation and nothing was invented but machines for training the body. Most palpable of all the consequences was the growth of arrogant gait and rough manners, and this was the first symptom to call attention to the new malady. It became clear to the elders that the worst form of atavism, return to the savagery that is just above animalism, was about to reappear, and with it would come weakened heart and lungs and disordered digestion; for the new training overstrained all the organs, and threw them into disrepair.

The conclusions drawn from these two experiences were that variety of occupation was one of the first essentials of mental and bodily health, and that absorption in the improvement of any part or section of the human system induced disease both of mind and body; morality and health are better cultivated as indirect aims of individual existence; they defeat their own ends when they become egoistic or introspective. In order to remedy the evils which were threatening the life of the state, its framework was completely reformed. To every family and individual was assigned an external work that would draw the thoughts away from self for the greater part of the twenty-four hours; every mature member of the community was expected to achieve something unconnected with himself every day. Exercise merely for amusement was cut down to a minimum, and in order to keep the body in full vigour, the centre of force was organised, where every man and woman had to do so much useful physical work in the round of the clock. The care of the health, both mental and bodily, was handed over to the medical elders, who were, first of all, the healthiest and healthiest-minded of the older men of the nation. Watching for symptoms of disease in one’s system, whether moral or corporeal, fell into oblivion, and the great era of external achievement began. Specialisation of work was its chief principle and the source of its success, but no one was allowed to fall into excessive specialism, such as would atrophy all but one set of faculties and energies. No part of the body or mind was left without daily or weekly exercise. The elders mapped out the various types of intellectual and physical work from which a man or woman might select to fill leisure time. Everyone had a large choice within a limited number of kinds of work, generally kinds of work which were dissimilar to his special employment. If it were left to a man to choose his own type of distractions, he might select that which would feed high the sides of his nature he most used, and atrophy those that most needed development; for ease of application is an important factor in his choice of exercise and amusement, and might become too dominant.

It was not in order to assimilate the bases of the natures of the community that this limitation of leisure employments was adopted. On the contrary, one of the subordinate aims of the elders was to introduce as great a variety as possible into the talents, faculties, and tendencies of the race. Equality, and still more similarity, of members of a community, they well knew from the laws of nature meant stagnation if not complete national death. Throughout the cosmos it was the unequal degree to which various bodies and existences shared in different types of energy that produced the unstable equilibrium we call life. The disparate masses of the planets induced those currents of influence we call gravitation, one of the greatest sources of power in our world. The differences in temperature between the sun and the planets make it of such vast importance as a source of heat and energy to them, and it is the difference of two bodies as to electric state that induces currents of electricity between them. As soon as there is equilibrium of all the atoms or bodies or existences within a certain sphere of influence there ceases to be movement in it and death supervenes; and if all bodies and existences in the cosmos had an equal and similar share of all its elements and forces, it would be dead. The Deity himself, the sum and source of all life, must, as an eternal existence, have unending variety.

The law of the universe is the law of the political and moral world. There can be no life where there is complete stable equilibrium, that is, where every member of a community is exactly similar to every other member in privileges. Currents of influence cease. Impetus and motive vanish. Desire and yearning and love disappear with passion and ambition. The socialistic ideal is social and political death.

The everlasting flow of influence or power from point to point is the essential condition of vigorous existence in a community or race, therefore one of the chief subsidiary aims of the directors of Limanora was the creation of variety and inequality of nature and position. This made them adopt the family as the unit in the state, for in the family there would be shelter for any new individual talent, and heredity would cherish and increase it as it handed it on. In the Western states the influence of the family over its children ceases not long after boyhood or girlhood, and the world soon puts them into the same moulds as its favourite men and women; individuality and originality in most are planed down by the recognised conventions. A longer continuance of family life and influence would secure and strengthen any new variations in a talent or tendency, till the character was strong enough to stand by them as its own and defend them against the criticism of aliens and strangers. Diversity in unity was the ideal of family life in Limanora. The elders of a family watched with eagerness for any modification of the special faculties or powers, and nursed it with the most anxious care, if they decided that it would assist the advance of the race, and the medical elders were ever suggesting the proper cross for producing a new variety of the old talents. Indeed, one of the most responsible duties of the council of elders was to decide as to the matings and parenthoods of the community; in this lay, they felt, the guidance of their destiny, the real germ of the future. Thus and thus alone were they able to keep up that divergence of new species which would ensure an ever-quickening flow of life in the race.

They had cut off by their policy of complete isolation most of the stimulus that comes from alien rivalry. Such rivalry, they thought, would be worse than none; for it would at last drive them to adopt the means and weapons of their rivals, which they considered wholly retrograde and evil. It would be not unlike a competition between man and the wild beasts. Any kind of communication with those who were below them in civilisation and deliberately unprogressive, was certain to taint and drag down, and the strong consciousness of this fact checked the natural tendency of such benignity as theirs towards missionaryism.

At the same time they knew well that no people would ever advance without competition and the struggle that ensues on competition. They greatly encouraged variation and inequality within their state, but were certain that this was not enough. There must be the knowledge, if not the immediate presence, of another type of being, similar to their own yet higher in some features, in order to stimulate advance. To get this was the object of their system of couriers into space, both mechanic and human. They were never weary of gathering in all possible indications of higher intelligences in extra-terrestrial elements and regions. For a long period they had been satisfied with the reports of their idrovamolans, and other recorders of events which occurred on the earth, out of reach of their unaided senses. But it gradually pressed itself home upon them that the comedy of terrestrial existence gave no stimulus to progress; it stirred their laughter, or scorn, or indignation, or disgust too often to edify. Rare, indeed, was it to witness a deed or phase of civilisation that gave them a new model, or inspired them to higher life. It was, as a rule, degrading to watch beings in their own shape waste their noble faculties on the cruelties of war, the meannesses of commerce and industrialism, the pettinesses of social intercourse, and the gross deceits and pretences of politics, diplomacy, and public life.

Year by year the racial energy was drawn off from the spectacle of terrestrial history. It grew less and less attractive, and the elders came to the decision that it had almost better pass unnoticed by all but the most mature and experienced. Thus it became the more necessary to open up other spheres of stimulus and inspiration. The thoughts of the race gravitated, first to other stars, then to the exuberant life they found in interstellar space. For a time they thought that only in other worlds could be found intelligences like their own to stimulate them by their competition; and their intellectual energy was set upon opening up intercourse with the inhabitants of these. The imaginative families published book after book on the possibilities and means of stellar intercommunication, and afterwards of stellar migration. Astronomy and its subsidiary and allied sciences and arts for several centuries outpaced all others in development. The world began to seem narrow and prison-like, so eager was Limanoran thought after stellar flight. All the conditions of voyaging through space were investigated, all available means experimented on, all the possible routes and their laws discovered. It seemed as if within a few centuries the round of the earth would be spurned, and the nearest star colonised by terrestrial beings.

The discovery of the varied life inhabiting the ether gave pause to all such speculations and schemes. It was manifestly possible to find stimulus from intelligences nearer than the other planets. Infinite space, instead of being a desert strewn with the wrecks or embryos of stars, is as full of life, and of the elements and nuclei of life, as any world which spins through it. They had ever counted it as unlikely that the life and the life-energy of the cosmos should be confined to the star-dust strewn over it, or that its vast interstellar spaces should be given up to nothing but the passage of rays from star to star, cold and inhospitable to every form of existence. They felt it to be more in accordance with the lavishness of nature that these spaces should be life-crammed instead of life-proof. Why should life be unable to adapt itself to the conditions of space, when it has been found to adapt itself to the bewildering variety of conditions existing on the surface of any one world at different stages of its development, and even to the infinite variety of conditions that govern the countless stars?

On the first discovery of life beyond the atmosphere they were led by the medical investigators to think that it was merely embryonic, waiting to colonise the worlds that pushed through it. But recent reports and researches showed that the existences of interstellar space were far beyond the rudimental stage. Beings as intricately organised as themselves left impressions on their supra-aerial lavolans. They grew more and more convinced that the senses which had evolved in them, amid the gross atmosphere of the earth and with the gross feeding that alone would suit terrene constitutions, were fit to detect no other creatures than those developed under similar terrestrial conditions. Their more recent and more refined developments of sensuous perception, and still more their latest mechanical inventions, had brought them within range of an infinity they had not dreamt of. Daily came in from above the atmosphere reports that confirmed their old belief in the vast and varied population of space. Beings, so constituted as never to impress sight or hearing such as men had, yet fit to hold their own with the noblest spirits that earthly imagination had ever conceived, swam close to their atmosphere, close enough to leave their impress on the sensitive films of their courier-instruments, close enough for their own later-developed senses to perceive, if only these were more exquisitely trained. What a vista of new stimulus the knowledge opened up to their imaginations!

There was no more need of projects for stellar migration. Here were beings loftier than themselves at the very gates of their senses, possible sources of exalted, if not divine, influence. Out of them would flow into this little island energy that would give measureless impetus to its inhabitants. Who could place a limit to the nobleness of the existences they might find in the ether, once they were on this track, and were refining and ennobling the perceptive power of their senses? There was no conceivable end to the ethical elevation and development they might reach, now that they had pierced the prison walls of the earth. The sublimer amongst their old beliefs were, indeed, coming true in the fuller fruition of scientific discovery. These they had long laid aside, lest they should be mere fancies based upon illusion and delusion, when they saw the evil that the perversions of them by churches and priests worked amongst men. Till they discovered a sounder basis for them than faithmongers asserted for their crude superstitions, they felt they must not entertain them seriously or found action upon them; and over they threw them till they should find their way to them again upon the solid ground of scientific reason.

Now that they saw so wide a horizon before them they knew that they need no longer seek stimulus in the races of men that they had left so far behind them, and they rejoiced. For, though there were ever noble and wise individuals to be found here and there throughout the masses of the nations, and though they knew that these set the standard of morality to the world around them, the bulk of men lagged far in the rear and often, when unnoticed, sneaked into the barbarity and vice which they had been persuaded to abandon. The moral law of a nation, or race, or period is voluntarily carried into practice only by the few best of the mature men and women; in fact, their lives and characters are the makers and arbiters of the moral law. Their fellow-countrymen and contemporaries feel the ideal thus held out practically before them as a mysterious influence that surrounds and shepherds them into the path of right. Sometimes, if the age or nation has degenerated, the mystery comes from the best men of the past through books, or still more powerfully through tradition and instinct; this unaccountable influence they call conscience, or the sense of duty, or the voice of God, or some other name that indicates its mystery, its directing power, and its superior standpoint. Priests and primitive legislators try to formulate its commands in definite codes, and at a later stage thinkers and philosophers attempt to reason out its maxims, and find a unity and universality in them. But the influence defies such codification and rationalisation; with the growth of the ages it overflows and antiquates the primitive attempt at its petrifaction, and the variety of codes in different races or in different periods laughs to scorn all efforts at finding a universal basis for them. As soon as a code is proclaimed or a philosophical system worked out, it begins to be antiquated; the best find a better ideal in front of them and, striving after it, reveal the flaws in the life they have hitherto lived, or they resign themselves passively to the drift of circumstance and degenerate into luxury and license; in the one case the influence overflows the code or system, and makes it seldom necessary or apparent to the view of the race; in the other it ebbs from it and leaves it high and dry, the flouted, neglected wreck of an age gone by.

After all, moral law is nothing but the example and character of the best of them working dimly upon their yearning and capacity for advance; and their best are limited by the point of view of their time and surroundings. A progressive race or age soon discovers the flaws in its accepted codes or systems and throws doubt on their authority. It is only in a stagnant or retrograde period that there is no scepticism or free thought; sufficient unto it is the law that has come down out of the past; so satisfied are its people with it that they never live up to it, and never feel any qualms of conscience or entertain troubled thoughts about its neglect. Developing civilisation means developing ethics; the best of a race advance to higher points of view, and soon come to be astonished at the narrow and primitive moral law their forefathers have handed down to them. As they advance in ideals, the conscience of the mass of their countrymen or contemporaries advances too; what is the rare virtue or heroism of the noblest of one age becomes the commonplace of the next; what was the weakness or vice of all becomes the crime of the outcast and atavist. Injunctions not to kill are soon superfluous to all but the criminally inclined; addressed to a whole people, they imply an age of the greatest rudeness and ferocity.

I realised this more and more clearly as I continued to live amongst this wonderful people, and to see into their lives. The criminal and grossly atavistic had been long ago swept out of the island and vicious tendencies against the moral law of past ages had vanished before selection, crossing, and training. They would have laughed if they had been enjoined not to kill, or steal, or lie, or commit adultery. It would be like telling the civilised Europeans not to eat each other, especially when uncooked, or telling the latter-day Englishman not to enslave his brothers. The proud tribes of wild men counted it as one of their noblest prerogatives to banquet on their slain foes and even on their dead relatives, and the fathers of the present race of English and Americans, sensitive as these latter are to the crime of enslavement, held their slaves with no feeling that they were outraging the moral law, whilst their grandfathers winked at the horrors of the slave trade. The best protested and gradually their opinions, and still more their characters and lives, sank as a mysterious influence into the hearts of the race. The next generation felt the protest as a moral law and a conscience, stinging them to advance to the standard of their noblest. The Greeks and Romans describe and applaud in their finest literature vices that modern men are ashamed even to mention. And it will be the same with acts and conduct that nineteenth century society condones and even boasts of; if the European world advances, in a century or two respectable men and women will be ashamed to hear them spoken of.

The Limanorans repudiated scorn of their lowly kin, the animals; they had long ago shed that blind and false shame which rejected the affinity of universal nature; man was as truly kin in his lower representatives to the mammoth as the mammoth to the mollusc, or the mollusc to the microbe. It is true they desired close proximity to the non-human animal as little as they did to undeveloped or degenerate man; intercourse with a lower stage of life and intelligence, they had long ago proved, leads ultimately to adoption of some of its features and much of its standard, even where there is in it the aloofness of the master to his slave, or the tamer to his beast; they desired no masterdom over lower natures and so they exiled all animals and all degenerate or undeveloped men from their island. They welcomed, however, every indication of approach to human traits or human intelligence in any section of terrestrial life; it was to them no bewilderment that they found most species of animals more courageous and many more provident and keen in their outlook than most men, some of them more tender and humane to their fellows, and some infinitely more loyal than the most advanced races. It is difficult to deny, not merely the higher emotions, but the more difficult processes of reasoning to many of the animals. The cunning of man is often outwitted by them.

Facts like these, instead of driving them to find subtle methods of explaining them away or denying them, urged them on to greater effort in their own evolution. They saw in them evidence that the whole creation was striving upwards, and they resolved to obey the universal law more and more fully and to quicken their pace. Any new observation of animal intelligence or advance only confirmed their faith in the rational spirit that was working but half seen throughout the universe, and gave them greater impetus on the path of development they had chosen.

Every new age had seen them rise above the possibility of some old vice or evil tendency, reach some new and higher mount of ethical vision, and descry some nobler ideal ahead of them. They were far out of reach of any return to the fierce vices or defects of a lawless or militant past. Never since the exile of Noola had they observed any tendency to belligerent atavism; and his return, purified and elevated, had finally buried in oblivion that dead and degenerate preterition. Thieving had vanished with such warlike means of destroying and restoring the balance of political power, and its possibility ceased with the devaluation of all property but time, talent, and character. Once time was taken as the standard of everything of value instead of any dull dead stuff like gold or jewels or land or houses, the whole view of property had changed: for time is a living, moving entity that becomes great or little, valuable or valueless with the method of using it; the life of a man limits it in quantity as far as existence on the earth is concerned; and as soon as a race realises this, it is the rarest and most highly prized commodity in the world; nothing can take away its value but the heedlessness or indolence of its possessor; no man can steal it from us but ourselves. For many ages then it was in terms of time that the Limanorans had expressed everything of value; even talent and character were thus expressible, for their chief value lay in their development; they were estimated according to the rapidity with which they could advance a definite and measurable stage. Thus theft became an impossible crime in this island, the true standard of all value being inseparable from the life that possessed it.

Lying and hypocrisy and all the crawling vermin that spawn from them had long ago been ejected from their systems; and wherever atavistic symptoms of them had appeared in any child they were cauterised by every known method, gentle or drastic. The task of cleansing the community of insincerity and artifice had by no means ended with the exiling of all known liars and dissemblers. Open untruth and fraudulence vanished when the development of the intelligence and observation of the people made it easy and universal to divine motives and inner thoughts quite apart from the word or the act. Yet there was still in some a tendency to evasion, or equivocation, or overstatement. The rags of the old conventionality still hung about them, and unawares there would check them in their utterances an old fear lest candour should be ill-manners, lest their freedom should hurt the feelings of their auditor, or rouse the sleeping tiger in him. Year by year was all this getting eradicated; but the process was quickened by the evolution of the magnetic sense and by the clarifying of the tissues of the body. The more transparent the human system became to the senses and the keener the senses grew, the less cue and the less chance was there for concealment of emotion or thought. They were all thoroughly trained in the anatomy and physiology of the body and the brain, and in the science that taught the physical equivalents and accompaniments of each type of thought and emotion. Even without their preternaturally keen senses they could tell from their practical knowledge of the human system the natural results of any word or act, and their eyes and ears could detect signs of emotion or motive which seemed to be non-existent. It was, however, their magnetic sense that was the greatest foe to all deception or concealment. They could read the feelings that stirred in the heart of a neighbour, and were even conscious of the definite thoughts passing in his brain.

The physical equivalents and symptoms of certain emotions and passions, that used to be common before the exilings and are too common in all other races, were scarcely ever to be found in any mature Limanoran; they had to be studied in the bodies, and especially in the faces, of children. Jealousy, envy, hate, malice, anger, lust, had become obsolete in the race, and only the young were afflicted with them now; they were classified as mild spiritual diseases that might, if neglected, risk the permanence of the child in the community; they were the record of a stage through which the race had long ago passed, and they were treated as no fault of the child itself but its legacy from an ancestry it could not be made responsible for. Great pains had been taken with these moral childish maladies in former periods with the result that their appearance was now seldom virulent or dangerous and never fatal, and that every household knew by heart the simple rules and specifics for checking their development. The worst characteristic of them was that they were infectious; but the solitary system of education rendered this inoperative; in fact this epidemic nature of the moral disorders of children made the adoption of the one-child household and the one-pupil school seem an absolute necessity. Occasionally, through some strong atavistic taint in the nature, the appearance of one or more of these maladies in a child threatened its whole spiritual life; then all the science and wisdom of the island were brought to bear upon it; the nerves and tissues of the part of the human system affected, whether in brain or heart, were isolated and powerful electro-magnetic instruments were applied to them so as to atrophy them and render them inactive; the most successful educators of the island were joined to the parents or proparents in the effort to get rid of the evil; and the child or youth was constantly brought into intercourse with the noblest natures who exercised to the full their morally healing powers. If the malady still tainted the nature up to maturity and outbalanced all the good in it in spite of such continued curative efforts, then were the elders sadly driven to the ultimate step of deporting the diseased personality. But this had not occurred for generations, and it was hoped that the necessity for drastic remedies would cease in a few years. Already the virulence of these childish ailments had almost disappeared and they had grown so mild in their attacks that few but the guardians observed their approach. They were generally confined to fixed periods of childhood or youth, periods that corresponded to the ages of past history in which they severally raged in the natures of their ancestors. But every new generation saw these periods shortened and driven farther back towards the beginning of life.

The sense of shame that attaches to some or all of these emotions in the best of advanced races is a sign that they are recognised as moral maladies and that with farther advance they will be forced back into the earlier stages of life. But, as they are, the need to conceal envy and jealousy, malice, anger, and lust and their symptoms, is felt, and this induces and confirms wide-spread habits of insincerity and deception in most civilised peoples, Western as well as Eastern. This desire of concealment has seated the habit of dissimulation so widely and so deeply in the breasts of all that the bolder and more roughly practical openly avow it as a means necessary to their advancement in life. It had been felt ages before in Limanora that as long as these hateful emotions lurked in the hearts of men and women, there could be no final expulsion of the still more hateful insincerity. Now that they were relegated to childhood, concealment of the inner emotions had vanished and the habit of petty evasion and dissimulation had been entirely eradicated. Even the histrionic in manner and gesture and facial expression had disappeared after having been subjected to drastic treatment; it had been criticised and derided whenever it showed itself in any youth; for it was only by the young and immature that so crude an artificiality could ever be adopted.

One of the last refuges of insincerity was artificial self-abasement. As soon as humility before the daily marvels of the universe came to be a common attitude amongst them, its ape, spurious self-depreciation, appeared. Young men and women would grossly understate their achievements or claims, chiefly in order to set up a reaction in the minds of their friends and companions, and tempt them to overstatement. Ridicule soon put this habit of poor and common natures to rout. The Limanorans were now proud of anything they had done well or nobly and were not ashamed to acknowledge it. They were willing without vaunting or mock-modesty to talk of any invention or discovery or any good or courageous deed, but in that simple, ingenuous way which revealed nothing but anxiety to enlighten others as to the methods of success and to stir them to advance beyond it. They needed none of that self-advertisement which is the bane of advanced and ambitious civilisations; everything of merit in their conduct and labour and its products was valuated, they knew, with an exactitude that left no room for misacceptation by their friends and companions. Everyone was so eager to find an advance in his neighbour’s work or system that no effort was needed to explain or commend it. When done its merits would be recognised to the full. The elders in their periodical reviews of the work and the progress of the community would estimate it at its full value, and it was one of the most important parts of the training of the youth to appraise the value of every deed and step with a strict impartiality of judgment. To mete out justice to everything in life was impressed upon the young nature as one of the foremost of duties; and to see every feature of history and existence with a dispassionate and unerring eye was one of the chief aims of Limanoran education.

Thus it was that for a time they enjoyed the comedy of life as it passed in other regions of the world, for they could see very clearly the exact merits of every man and every deed, and the credulity and infatuation which made them unrecognisable in popular estimation. Delusion reigned supreme and the best of the comedy was the ease with which some masters of the art of self-advertisement could swell their puny proportions into the appearance of colossal amplitude; they knew every stop in public opinion, and could play on its gullibility with consummate art. The Limanoran was taught to place every human achievement in the perspective of the future, and as he looked and heard through the idrovamolan, the whole of life, as it went in other nations, seemed one continued bathos, ridiculous disproportion between what it appeared to be and what it was.

But they ever saw a darker side to the spectacles they witnessed through this singular instrument, and their laughter was softened and modified by indignation and sorrow. There was a counterpart to the gullibility and applause in the deep-rooted habit of detraction and slander. If any had the power to see conduct and men as they were, impartially and clearly, they were not allowed to use it, so busy were the tongues of traducers and parasites. All human deeds were either underestimated or overestimated, generally underestimated if the doer or possessor had no favours to bestow and no power or influence to exhibit. Aspersion and backbiting were common habits; for the majority were undistinguished and only in courts and the circles of the great did that of overestimation find any headway.

A trivial, yet pathetic, phase of the comedy was the excessive self-esteem that ran parallel with the torrent of detraction. In Limanora the fountains of both had dried up together. For vanity is the effort of a man’s emotions to compensate for the fraud that others constantly commit upon reputation. Robbery of material things is sternly repressed in most civilised communities; thus far have they attained in their hostility to socialism; finally one or two have begun to be uneasy about fair fame as a possession more valuable than any wealth and have attempted to formulate the crime in some crude law of libel that is found yearly as inadequate and as primitive as one of the codes of ancient legislators. But the petty robberies of good fame rather than the open brigandage of it make none feel safe. Tongues will keep wagging, and as long as they wag, the conduct or character of some will surely be undervalued. The consciousness of this, that none but the great or distinguished will get their due or more than their due, keeps self-esteem alive in the breasts of all, and self-approbation an unceasing attitude. Men feel that they must recoup themselves out of the unwilling feelings of others for the perpetual fraud upon their reputation. Self-overestimation is the natural complement of the consciousness of detraction. Commonly the sensitive organisation refuses to rest under the unending injustice and will try to set itself right with the world; but most sink after a time into sullen endurance of the wrong and cease to speak of it, thinking it irremediable.

Nothing so greatly astonished the Limanorans as the concomitant disappearance of detraction and vanity from their midst. One of their earliest crusades was that against evil speaking; it was easier than they had thought, for already the principle of generosity to others had begun to work and reputation was counted more valuable than any property. When magnanimity had eradicated the habit of disparagement, the training in impartial use of the judgment prevented the nature swinging into the opposite extreme of shouting hosannas over the nothings of daily life. As they gained clear-sightedness in estimating human actions and character, they found that the cues of vanity had disappeared. They had no need of crusading against the vice; it had been vanquished.

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.

They had learned from the revolutions of their past how snaky and tortuous are the ways of deceit; and the first sure sign of its triumphant success is the bold adoption of the doctrine that good men may do evil, provided their aim is good. Under this the liars sheltered themselves for ages before they were exiled. The era of the history of the island that filled them most with shrinking and loathing was that of the struggle with the various forms of deceit. The first lesson in the valley of memories was drawn from this division of their annals; they filled their youth with hatred and scorn of untruth and hypocrisy; no firm step could be taken in education till this had become a deeply rooted feeling in their natures, and nothing awakened it so well as the study of this struggle with the liars. But they never taught any subject merely from books or records; everything, even history and its lessons, was made practical and living. Deceit, for instance, was traced back to its sources in nature, and the difficulty of getting rid of it was revealed by finding it so wide spread in the lower ranks of life. Mimicry or involuntary deceit was investigated all through plant and animal life, and it was found to be more prevalent the lower the investigators went in vital organisms. Their loathing of it as a deliberate adoption amongst human beings grew deeper as they saw that in the animal world it belonged either to incompetence or rapacity. The prey mimicked the form and colour of another species that was loathsome to its enemy in order to avoid his grasp; unconsciously the mimicry spread, for only those members of the attractive species which were like the repellent species escaped and propagated. Or the spoiler mimicked the form and colour of a species that was friendly or neutral to its victim, and only those members of the species similar to the unfeared kind succeeded in catching enough of their favourite food to survive and hand on their nature to a posterity.

It was the same in the higher life of human self-consciousness and will; only here intention and deliberateness entered in and turned mimicry into deceit. Wherever hypocrisy existed it was a sure sign of a vast number of incompetent and feeble, who made an easy quarry to the villain, and of the vigour of a cunning minority, who often found it difficult to entrap. Diplomacy and convention are the deliberate mimicry of the predatory section of a race or of its gullible section. When once the Limanorans had purged the island of the liars, they had to prevent the propagation of the feeble and incompetent; for they knew that, as long as these existed in a community, there would persist the more futile forms of deceit. After that first purgation, the weak, though retained in the island, had to abandon family life; they were provided with the means that made existence easy and pleasant in order that they might not resort to their only method of survival; and in a generation the problem of hypocrisy had disappeared.

It was then that the idrovamolan was invented and came into use in education. Having driven out the hated vice, they found that there was still the need of impressing its evil results upon the minds of the maturing youth, just as it was necessary even yet to study the diseases that had disappeared for generations from their midst in order to be able to cope with them, should they ever be reintroduced through their communication with other atmospheres. But they knew the unreality of teaching anything in a merely theoretical way; they felt that lecturing and sermonising and the mere reading of history would give them no such grasp of the vice and its evils as would living, acting things. The idrovamolan with its telescopic, telacoustic, and telemagnetic powers came to their assistance in this difficulty. By its help parents and proparents were able to bring the youths into the very presence of the loathed deceit without submitting them to the chance of contagion. They turned the object-tubes of the wonderful instrument upon Aleofane and its society; and through them they saw and heard and felt men like insects mimic and like stinging worms crawl and diplomatise, lie and cheat, still with the worship of reality and sincerity and truth upon their lips. There they noted the growth of the most offensive form of the vice. The weak learned it for protection, flattering the great and grovelling in the dust before them whilst they cursed them in their hearts, and all in order that some favour might perhaps be flung like a bone to a dog. Having learned the vicious art in this cringing fashion, the feeble were seen to march off with the proud gait and the conceit of adepts and use it like brigands on the still feebler. This combination of incompetence and unscrupulousness was the final curse of a civilisation that had taken deceit to its bosom. The whole of the energy of the race was spent in simulation and dissimulation. Every vice simulated its antagonistic virtue; even virtue simulated the vigour and arrogance of vice. The Limanoran youth needed no more teaching on the evils of hypocrisy. They rose from the idrovamolan with an intense loathing for all forms of deceit, so impressive was the drama they saw enacted in Aleofane. Even what seemed innocent mimicry they shrank from, seeing it universally employed as the means of cheating in that island of liars; mimicry they were encouraged to eschew; for as surely as the art was mastered, it was used for mean or foul purposes at some time or other, either for envy and jealousy and scorn, or in order to lay traps, sometimes for the strong, but chiefly for the weak. Even in art all mimicry was avoided, for there it betrayed feebleness or lack of individuality. The existence of mimicry in the animal world was the mark of degeneracy upon terrestrial life. It argued the wide domain of feebleness and rapacity, and the dominance of the passion for mere existence. Wherever it was wide-spread, it meant the abeyance of progress and of eagerness for progress. Mimicry is the sterilising process of faculty and power. Origination is the principle of fertility, of stimulus to progress.

Whatsoever dallied with an outgrown principle or element was immoral. Mere copying of what had been already attained and was about to be left behind or used as a stepping-stone to something better was neighbour to evil. Morality is the effort to adapt conduct and ideals to the new vistas opened up into the future by an advance already achieved; and it is ever being bribed or throttled by what is outworn. Evil is the past which has become so obsolete and is yet so living as to be obstructive. What has been outgrown has ever its allies among living elements, and its advocates in every mixed and unpurified race. Especially is this the case where there are fixed codes or creeds, and along with them professions organised to preserve and continue their sway. The world is constantly seeing the spectacle of a nation or race or species coming to a standstill after centuries of brilliant progress, and getting fossilised in a certain stage of its advance; there it remains for generation after generation as if alive, yet practically dead for all purposes of development, like a fly in amber. This dead stop is due to the dominance of some code or creed that seemed to embody the spirit of its greatest success; the nation or race sought to secure for ever to itself the advantages of the ethical or spiritual methods that had achieved for it its most brilliant results, by fixing them unalterably for all time, with their official guardians to protect them from change; so that which had given such vigorous life and development for a time became a prison-house and grave. Only the most tremendous revolution and cataclysm could burst the walls of the tomb, tear off its grave-clothes, and release its spirit for new conquests. Sometimes a nation seems to fossilise the creed or polity that first gave energy to its life, yet at the same time grows and develops spasmodically. It has only made pretence of having fixed this code for all time, whilst the living spirit of it escapes and follows its own course in freedom; it has periodically to return to its pretended prison and tomb, and to reconcile by jesuitry and in makeshift way the two methods of life which have come to differ so widely. Then it flees again into the struggle of existence and gradually ignores even the new versions of the old code, till the divorce becomes too obtrusive to escape attention, and the process of reinterpretation of the antiquated creed begins again. This has been a common enough mode of advance in the history of the world. But it is fraught with incalculable risks. It induces a habit of self-deceit and hypocrisy, and the nation or race ultimately makes a tomb and prison-house for its spirit out of its own falsities and self-delusions.

Advance like this, the Limanorans held, was no true advance. They would have no part or lot in fixity of methods or codes, for whatever became fixed grew thereby evil and obstructed development and advance to higher points of view. They had only to look into their history to see how every new step antiquated some universally accepted belief or maxim. Not so many ages ago a crudely philanthropic spirit was considered one of the surest signs of advancing virtue, in fact one of the noblest of the virtues. Now it was considered distinctly immoral to philanthropise without taking care to foresee the results of the philanthropy. Limanorans used to go out into the archipelagos and try to convert the barbarians to the special code or creed then in vogue. Instead of helping on the human race, it actually stopped the development of a section of it; for the adoption of a creed and its symbols and rites and phrases far in advance of any possible civilisation they could reach only made the savages--whose virtues had hitherto been at least genuine--conventional, false, and hypocritical; whilst the apostles left thousands of their own countrymen at home stagnant or retrogressive. It soon came to be acknowledged that intercourse with inferior civilisations, even for the purpose of raising them, lowered the moral standard of the missionaries, whilst failing in its original motive. Much of the philanthropy that began at home was found to be no less obstructive and immoral. It fed and clothed the poor and improvident, and thus helped to slay and bury the only habit that could save them out of their slough, the habit of measuring every step they took, and seeing whither it led; and it helped to perpetuate the evil; for the ready yet limited supplies combined with the improvidence to make them breed like the lower animals, and the race of paupers and unprogressive was inordinately multiplied. The same feeble and immoral philanthropy opposed all attempts to stop the multiplication of the diseased and semi-criminal, and had to increase the armies of doctors and guardians of the peace every generation. It did well to nurse the feeble in mind and body, and to reduce the penalties under which heredity had placed them; but it failed to see that it was doing endless evil by letting them penalise an increasing posterity with their own punishment. Not till it was branded as the worst of immoralities was such philanthropy ended. This had been a distinct advance and a true virtue, when it had taken the place of cruelty and neglect, and when there was unmeasured space on the earth for the expansion of population; but, once this stage had been passed, and the purgation crusade was proceeding, it became a real plague and vice.

Another immorality that had once been a virtue was the pursuit of beauty for its own sake. Men gave up their lives to the production of beautiful things which served no other purpose than their own glory and the entertainment of idle and leisured people. Others made fortunes and devoted them to the purchase of such works of art, in order that crowds might collect and admire them, and for a time there was something of truth in the assertion that it educated the taste of the people. But this was only when the bulk of the race was unenlightened and unprogressive, and anything that softened their barbarity, anything that drew their thoughts away for even a brief time from sordid cares or cruel projects or mechanical and conventional habits, implied progress or a chance of progress. When the race had been purified, and every eye was bent on the future, and every nerve strained toward some advance in human civilisation, beautiful things became the commonest features and necessities of life, and beauty ceased to be noticed as anything remarkable. Then to spend energies on producing what was artistic and beautiful without serving any other purpose than pleasing was reckless extravagance, and by wasting what should have been expended upon the progress of the race was condemned as immoral. There was no virtue in doing what everyone did by instinct. There was positive vice in making it the sole and deliberate purpose of expenditure of energy.

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.