Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
themselves, they are the Causes of everything worth doing, that is done
by others.
Although popularly everyone called a Circle is deemed a Circle, yet
among the better educated Classes it is known that no Circle is really
a Circle, but only a Polygon with a very large number of very small
sides. As the number of the sides increases, a Polygon approximates to
a Circle; and, when the number is very great indeed, say for example
three or four hundred, it is extremely difficult for the most delicate
touch to feel any polygonal angles. Let me say rather, it WOULD be
difficult: for, as I have shown above, Recognition by Feeling is
unknown among the highest society, and to FEEL a Circle would be
considered a most audacious insult. This habit of abstention from
Feeling in the best society enables a Circle the more easily to sustain
the veil of mystery in which, from his earliest years, he is wont to
enwrap the exact nature of his Perimeter or Circumference. Three feet
being the average Perimeter it follows that, in a Polygon of three
hundred sides each side will be no more than the hundredth part of a
foot in length, or little more than the tenth part of an inch; and in a
Polygon of six or seven hundred sides the sides are little larger than
the diameter of a Spaceland pin-head. It is always assumed, by
courtesy, that the Chief Circle for the time being has ten thousand
sides.
The ascent of the posterity of the Circles in the social scale is not
restricted, as it is among the lower Regular classes, by the Law of
Nature which limits the increase of sides to one in each generation.
If it were so, the number of sides in a Circle would be a mere question
of pedigree and arithmetic, and the four hundred and ninety-seventh
descendant of an Equilateral Triangle would necessarily be a Polygon
with five hundred sides. But this is not the case. Nature's Law
prescribes two antagonistic decrees affecting Circular propagation;
first, that as the race climbs higher in the scale of development, so
development shall proceed at an accelerated pace; second, that in the
same proportion, the race shall become less fertile. Consequently in
the home of a Polygon of four or five hundred sides it is rare to find
a son; more than one is never seen. On the other hand the son of a
five-hundred-sided Polygon has been known to possess five hundred and
fifty, or even six hundred sides.
Art also steps in to help the process of the higher Evolution. Our
physicians have discovered that the small and tender sides of an infant
Polygon of the higher class can be fractured, and his whole frame
re-set, with such exactness that a Polygon of two or three hundred
sides sometimes--by no means always, for the process is attended with
serious risk--but sometimes overleaps two or three hundred generations,
and as it were doubles at a stroke, the number of his progenitors and
the nobility of his descent.
Many a promising child is sacrificed in this way. Scarcely one out of
ten survives. Yet so strong is the parental ambition among those
Polygons who are, as it were, on the fringe of the Circular class, that
it is very rare to find a Nobleman of that position in society, who has
neglected to place his first-born in the Circular Neo-Therapeutic
Gymnasium before he has attained the age of a month.
One year determines success or failure. At the end of that time the
child has, in all probability, added one more to the tombstones that
crowd the Neo-Therapeutic Cemetery; but on rare occasions a glad
procession bears back the little one to his exultant parents, no longer
a Polygon, but a Circle, at least by courtesy: and a single instance of
so blessed a result induces multitudes of Polygonal parents to submit
to similar domestic sacrifices, which have a dissimilar issue.
Section 12. Of the Doctrine of our Priests
As to the doctrine of the Circles it may briefly be summed up in a
single maxim, "Attend to your Configuration." Whether political,
ecclesiastical, or moral, all their teaching has for its object the
improvement of individual and collective Configuration--with special
reference of course to the Configuration of the Circles, to which all
other objects are subordinated.
It is the merit of the Circles that they have effectually suppressed
those ancient heresies which led men to waste energy and sympathy in
the vain belief that conduct depends upon will, effort, training,
encouragement, praise, or anything else but Configuration. It was
Pantocyclus--the illustrious Circle mentioned above, as the queller of
the Colour Revolt--who first convinced mankind that Configuration makes
the man; that if, for example, you are born an Isosceles with two
uneven sides, you will assuredly go wrong unless you have them made
even--for which purpose you must go to the Isosceles Hospital;
similarly, if you are a Triangle, or Square, or even a Polygon, born
with any Irregularity, you must be taken to one of the Regular
Hospitals to have your disease cured; otherwise you will end your days
in the State Prison or by the angle of the State Executioner.
All faults or defects, from the slightest misconduct to the most
flagitious crime, Pantocyclus attributed to some deviation from perfect
Regularity in the bodily figure, caused perhaps (if not congenital) by
some collision in a crowd; by neglect to take exercise, or by taking
too much of it; or even by a sudden change of temperature, resulting in
a shrinkage or expansion in some too susceptible part of the frame.
Therefore, concluded that illustrious Philosopher, neither good conduct
nor bad conduct is a fit subject, in any sober estimation, for either
praise or blame. For why should you praise, for example, the integrity
of a Square who faithfully defends the interests of his client, when
you ought in reality rather to admire the exact precision of his right
angles? Or again, why blame a lying, thievish Isosceles when you ought
rather to deplore the incurable inequality of his sides?
Theoretically, this doctrine is unquestionable; but it has practical
drawbacks. In dealing with an Isosceles, if a rascal pleads that he
cannot help stealing because of his unevenness, you reply that for that
very reason, because he cannot help being a nuisance to his neighbours,
you, the Magistrate, cannot help sentencing him to be consumed--and
there's an end of the matter. But in little domestic difficulties,
where the penalty of consumption, or death, is out of the question,
this theory of Configuration sometimes comes in awkwardly; and I must
confess that occasionally when one of my own Hexagonal Grandsons pleads
as an excuse for his disobedience that a sudden change of the
temperature has been too much for his Perimeter, and that I ought to
lay the blame not on him but on his Configuration, which can only be
strengthened by abundance of the choicest sweetmeats, I neither see my
way logically to reject, nor practically to accept, his conclusions.
For my own part, I find it best to assume that a good sound scolding or
castigation has some latent and strengthening influence on my
Grandson's Configuration; though I own that I have no grounds for
thinking so. At all events I am not alone in my way of extricating
myself from this dilemma; for I find that many of the highest Circles,
sitting as Judges in law courts, use praise and blame towards Regular
and Irregular Figures; and in their homes I know by experience that,
when scolding their children, they speak about "right" or "wrong" as
vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names
represented real existences, and that a human Figure is really capable
of choosing between them.
Constantly carrying out their policy of making Configuration the
leading idea in every mind, the Circles reverse the nature of that
Commandment which in Spaceland regulates the relations between parents
and children. With you, children are taught to honour their parents;
with us--next to the Circles, who are the chief object of universal
homage--a man is taught to honour his Grandson, if he has one; or, if
not, his Son. By "honour", however, is by no means meant "indulgence",
but a reverent regard for their highest interests: and the Circles
teach that the duty of fathers is to subordinate their own interests to
those of posterity, thereby advancing the welfare of the whole State as
well as that of their own immediate descendants.
The weak point in the system of the Circles--if a humble Square may
venture to speak of anything Circular as containing any element of
weakness--appears to me to be found in their relations with Women.
As it is of the utmost importance for Society that Irregular births
should be discouraged, it follows that no Woman who has any
Irregularities in her ancestry is a fit partner for one who desires
that his posterity should rise by regular degrees in the social scale.
Now the Irregularity of a Male is a matter of measurement; but as all
Women are straight, and therefore visibly Regular so to speak, one has
to devise some other means of ascertaining what I may call their
invisible Irregularity, that is to say their potential Irregularities
as regards possible offspring. This is effected by carefully-kept
pedigrees, which are preserved and supervised by the State; and without
a certified pedigree no Woman is allowed to marry.
Now it might have been supposed that a Circle--proud of his ancestry
and regardful for a posterity which might possibly issue hereafter in a
Chief Circle--would be more careful than any other to choose a wife who
had no blot on her escutcheon. But it is not so. The care in choosing
a Regular wife appears to diminish as one rises in the social scale.
Nothing would induce an aspiring Isosceles, who had hopes of generating
an Equilateral Son, to take a wife who reckoned a single Irregularity
among her Ancestors; a Square or Pentagon, who is confident that his
family is steadily on the rise, does not inquire above the
five-hundredth generation; a Hexagon or Dodecagon is even more careless
of the wife's pedigree; but a Circle has been known deliberately to
take a wife who has had an Irregular Great-Grandfather, and all because
of some slight superiority of lustre, or because of the charms of a low
voice--which, with us, even more than you, is thought "an excellent
thing in Woman".
Such ill-judged marriages are, as might be expected, barren, if they do
not result in positive Irregularity or in diminution of sides; but none
of these evils have hitherto proved sufficiently deterrent. The loss
of a few sides in a highly-developed Polygon is not easily noticed, and
is sometimes compensated by a successful operation in the
Neo-Therapeutic Gymnasium, as I have described above; and the Circles
are too much disposed to acquiesce in infecundity as a Law of the
superior development. Yet, if this evil be not arrested, the gradual
diminution of the Circular class may soon become more rapid, and the
time may be not far distant when, the race being no longer able to
produce a Chief Circle, the Constitution of Flatland must fall.
One other word of warning suggests itself to me, though I cannot so
easily mention a remedy; and this also refers to our relations with
Women. About three hundred years ago, it was decreed by the Chief
Circle that, since women are deficient in Reason but abundant in
Emotion, they ought no longer to be treated as rational, nor receive
any mental education. The consequence was that they were no longer
taught to read, nor even to master Arithmetic enough to enable them to
count the angles of their husband or children; and hence they sensibly
declined during each generation in intellectual power. And this system
of female non-education or quietism still prevails.