Limanora the island of progress

and more subtle mediums of energy in the universe, mediums which had long evaded the rude cognisance of their primitive senses but which now yielded the secret of their presence, first to their imaginations, then to their refined apparatus, and last of all to their more recently developed senses. The energies that came through them were impressed upon their senses before the mediums themselves were; and not till the senses were touched would the reason be finally persuaded of their existence. It took long ages to refine their senses or develop new senses up to the power of detecting new energies or the mediums through which these travelled. Imagination led the way; but its lead could not be trusted unless guided by scientific fact and method. Its most trustworthy henchman was invention; for this supplied apparatus that increased the perceptive powers of the senses a thousand-fold. And, as their senses grew in refinement, the instruments they invented to aid them increased in subtlety and magnifying power, so that they were ever able to keep well in advance of their own unassisted perceptive faculties. Their sciences too had grown subtler and farther-reaching in their methods every generation. To their older chemistry, for instance, the atoms had but a speculative existence. The newer, with magnetism and electricity as its main agents and the clirolans as chief aids, dealt with them directly; and a still more marvellous analysis was developing which, adding will-force to magnetism and electricity as reagents, could find the mediums of nervous energy and classify its various kinds and modes of action. By means of this analysis they were able to get at the physical basis of reflex action, desire, appetite, and the various other semi-spiritual phenomena of humanity. A book of the time pointed out a science as far beyond this as this had been beyond the older chemistry, for there were far subtler and higher media of energy to be discovered and analysed than those of appetite and desire. Subtlest of all must be that in which the energy called soul moved. It appeared predominantly in none but the higher types of the human race, the men and women of wise creative power. Others had it as a faint aroma which asserted itself only in moments of great enthusiasm over the gross powers of appetite and passion and at other times seemed almost to vanish. In the Limanorans it had grown to be dominant over all the faculties and powers of the human system. The book foresaw that the medium of this noble energy would be found akin to that of the central energy of the cosmos, the great being whose phases and manifestations were stars and universes. And the loftier the mind, the more of this medium did it possess, and the clearer affinity it had with the creative power of infinitude. Not far below this was the medium in which the energy of morality moved; and the higher the morality the more sympathetic was its medium with that of creation. The new science foreshadowed by the book would display to the advanced race of the future the movements of these finer media, and the modes of action by which moral energy and spiritual and creative energy worked through them. Then would they see their way to such continuance of their life as would seem to other men practical immortality. They would be able so to refine and sublimate the energies of their systems and the media through which they acted, as to be free from any of the transformations called death for almost measureless periods of time. For the subtler the medium, the more self-existent is the energy that moves in it, the less is it subject to change and the less it needs change in order to fulfil the purpose of all being. The nearer to creative power an energy comes, the less it needs alliance with grosser and more perishable media in order to rise in the scale of existence; decay and death become rarer and rarer incidents. As yet Limanoran science had not discovered absolute immortality; nor did it seem likely to discover it. Its experience of the cosmos pointed to change as the most widely spread of all principles; whatsoever is allied with any lower media must shed them, or in other words suffer death, if it is to continue its march upwards; the whole history of the earth was a continual record of these transformations. The Limanorans had taken this aim of terrestrial existence into their own hands, and by gradually rejecting the grosser and shorter-lived elements of their system, they had been able to extend their life, at first to hundreds, and afterwards to thousands of years. They now saw before them a limitless vista along which the necessity of death or transformation would be hunted farther and farther from birth. And the same story they saw written all over the cosmos, energy as it becomes purer and subtler and less dependent for evolution upon lower forms approaching nearer and nearer to what would seem immortality from the human point of view, coming closer and closer to the creative energy of the cosmos. To them therefore all their life was religion, and science was its true hierophant. If the analytic sciences like chemistry revealed a path that led the minds of men towards God, the wide-ranged sciences like astronomy, astrobiology, and astromagnetism might themselves be called the highways to God. The embodied energy and life of the earth on this side of death seem to the human mind self-explanatory and self-involved; but the enfranchised life and energy that fill space have no human philosophy to account for them and have generally been denied by men. The Limanoran sciences had found space, as far as they could investigate it with their senses and their instruments, no less full of energy and life than the world itself, not merely the infinitesimal and attenuated life that they thought the débris of other worlds and systems, but the enfranchised life of highly organised beings, most of it so subtle and noble as to evade even the new senses of the Limanorans. It was the life of such beings that the science of this people aimed at knowing intimately. On some stars, they were certain, existed inhabitants subtly enough organised to cognise this interstellar life without aid of instruments; and they seemed themselves to be on the verge of attaining such a power. When they gained it, they might hold intercourse with that disembodied energy which perchance has close affinity with the soul of God. Towards this higher, enfranchised energy they laboured and struggled incessantly. They believed that its existence could be accounted for only on the assumption of some perennial fountain of free energy in the cosmos; that there must be some great centre of completely enfranchised energy; the course of cosmic evolution pointed that way, and every so-called death or dissolution was but the enfranchisement of some higher type of energy from the lower forms with which it had been for a time allied. Even the fixed nuclei of energy, what were called matter and the atoms, were ever aiming at liberation of the energy that formed their essence. Every dissolution, every step higher in the gradation, implied an ultimate energy that was free from all the trammels of lower forms. This must be the life of pure thought that sees time past and time to be as clearly as time present, that takes in the cosmos at a glance, that needs no sustenance from lower energies, and suffers no birth or dissolution. Towards this the whole cosmos strives; and perhaps there may be a time in the history of existence when all the fixed forms of energy shall have evolved into the free form, till at last there is nothing but space and disembodied thought which is universally perceptive and creative without the aid of mediums of energy or senses. Vast systems of worlds have come and gone in the infinite past only to distil the energy that was in them through living beings up into the final and immortal form that needs no process of dissolution or migration to purify it. When they turned back from these heights to view the history of the earth, it seemed to them that creative thought was written all over it; could there be any clearer manifestation of the vast intelligence informing the whole than this marvellous elaboration of genus and species raising terrestrial life step by step upwards from the microbe to the highest type of man? Their astronomical sciences pointed still more unmistakably upwards to the fountain of creative thought. The evolution of stars and systems and of life upon them seemed to them but the history of the intelligence of infinitude. They deliberately avoided all conventional idea of the thought of the cosmos, yet were ever tempted through desire of firm ground to use the analogy of a living terrene thing. Just as the body of a plant or animal is ever decaying, ever renewing itself, so is this cosmos, the material existence, the body of the spirit we call God, ever decaying, ever renewing itself, ever raising its energies into higher and higher forms. The universes and systems are molecules, the stars the atoms, of the infinite body of the cosmos, and each one of them is moving and developing in strict relation to all the others and to the abiding spirit that is their aim and master. There is law or thought guiding the history of every one of them and nothing of them is lost; the energy of everything that seems to die has but distilled elsewhere, or transmuted into something higher and less localised. What seems to us decay is but the liberation of an energy from the less refined forms with which it has been allied. Every process moves in rhythm to the pulsations of everlasting thought that is, and realises all that was and is and is to be. Nothing falls by accident. All is transformation, growth, development towards self-subsistent thought, which moves through all the processes, conscious of itself and of them all. To this final spirit of the cosmos ten thousand ages are but as a moment. The myriads of millions of years that some stars live, and that crush our puny thoughts with their vastness, are but one heartbeat of God. The whirling universes are but molecules looked at from the view-point of the final spirit; our telescopic is his microscopic. Thitherwards all their astronomy pointed. Round our sun move our planets without failure of harmony, and ever round some still farther point moves our sun and his satellites, as thousands of other suns and systems do. Nor did the epicycloidal movement cease there; great systems of universes have still more inward centres. But all this infinitude of concentricism points to some ultimate centre which is again the pivot of the cosmos. Following their analogy from man, they occasionally allowed themselves to think that this was the brain of God, the concentration of His thought-energy. But they refused to let the analogy master them; they threw it off as but a metaphor and waited for clearer and farther-reaching light. To define what lay so far beyond their horizon was to falsify; and they knew too well from their own past history into what labyrinths of error a single untruth will lead a race, especially if it is planted and watered by religion. Only where science flashed its light forth into the darkness would they dare to define any feature or form of religion. God, they felt, was the infinite conservation of energy. Up an infinite scale it ever climbed towards the ultimate, the purest of all energies, the divine, the goal to which creation groaned and struggled. The grosser forms of energy were the _caput mortuum_ of former mixed beings and worlds, after the sublimation of their purest elements. Out of this residue in its new period of probation were distilled again energies