Limanora the island of progress
that swept upwards. If such lapses from the universal progress of the
cosmos occur in self-conscious forms, as in the soul of man, then are
they breaches of morality, or, from the point of view of the all, sins.
Conversion is the entrance of consciousness of the universal law and
of willing obedience to it into the nature. Religious and moral codes
are strivings after it and, unfortunately, attempts to define it that
soon falsify its spirit. Miracles are fore-glimpses of this law of
progress half-understood, intrusions of an energy loftier than the
sect or circle or star has been accustomed to. Every new faith is a
miracle to its early believers; for it is a prevision of the universal
law which is so far beyond their natural powers that it surprises them
into enthusiasm; its miraculous quality makes them accept it as the
final revelation, and their descendants, after they have advanced to
a natural view of its truths, still uphold the tradition that it is
divine, and strain every word and feature of it in order to find the
divine in it.
A pioneering book of the time attempted to point the way of biological
psychology towards the goal of religion. It showed how the plant
has a dim sense of its being moulded from without, chiefly by the
grosser forms of energy; and how the animal though subject to them
is yet capable of moving amongst them and rebelling against their
power; whilst the human is attained when this rebellion rises into
capacity to rule them and mould them to its will. It emphasised the
Limanoran distinction between the grossly human and the wisely human,
and held that there were geological ages of development lying between
these; for the one is conscious of the self as merely allied with the
grosser forms of energy like the animal; the mark of the other is the
consciousness of self as a part of the all, as allied with the law of
the all. It conceived that the next grade was the divine, distinguished
by consciousness of the all as created and guided by the self. The wise
amongst men in its view had thus in them a share of the divine. There
was it is true in all men the possibility of this, though in most it
was latent. The loftiest kind of energy they had yet discovered had
as its distinction the sense of continuity of existence, the power to
think back through the past and forward through the future; this is
perhaps what is meant by personal identity in Western philosophy, the
capacity to keep the self from being merged in the mass of energies
that fill space. Men have attained it in but a fitful and shadowy
way. In savages and in those of the civilised who fall away from the
universal law of progress it is obscured or buried by the dominance of
the lower and transitory forms of energy. The book imagined that when
the wise die this highest energy is so strong in them that it cannot
amalgamate again with those they have been accustomed to upon earth; it
seeks higher alliance and higher spheres than it has hitherto known;
and, once having found its new and sublimer affinities, it can move
amid the grosser forms and elements untainted, unsubdued, unrecognised,
by them. Gravitation and heat and electricity have no power over it
and come into relationship to it only when it wills to use them; for
they are the mediate forms of energy that move the molecules and
atoms; and they are moved and piloted by still higher forms, that are
perchance the will-power or spirit of God; these higher forms come not
yet within the range of human senses, but are inferred by human reason
and conceived by human imagination as conscious of themselves, evident
every where by their results, the marks of intelligence throughout the
cosmos. But this book imagined that the disembodied energy of the wise
knew and felt them, and thus came nearer to the spirit and fountain of
all. Once our universe has distilled its best energies into space and
has accomplished the best it can, our swarm of firefly worlds “paling
their now ineffectual fires” encounter in their natural epicycloidal
course round unperceived centres the systems that they have encountered
myriads of geological ages before; and the collision of the two again
sends them on their career of the evolution of their lower energies
into higher.
But the Limanorans were chary of claiming anything that they discovered
or conceived as the ultimate or the absolute; so many absolutes of the
past had after a time yielded points of view into infinities beyond
them. Hundreds of their scientific highroads led manifestly towards
one centre; but they could not say that that was the final centre or
God. Just as their sun with its satellites moved round another centre,
which was itself in revolution, so might the common point to which
their various sciences seemed to converge be but on the outer rim of a
series of sciences that had a still more inward centre. Their highest
faculties might have above them faculties belonging to other beings
in the cosmos as superior to reason and imagination as reason and
imagination were to the sensuous perceptions of the animals. The savage
had no power to comprehend the results of the reasoning capacities of
the civilised man; and the soul of the sage, when disembodied, might
begin to perceive the heights of development in faculty he had still
to climb. All their recent experience bade them wait further light
and refuse to accept any revelation of being as ultimate, and in the
rejection of all dogmatism they attained the true religious attitude
for imperfect seekers of knowledge like men, the attitude of waiting
for light. The book had embodied in it an apologue that put this belief
concretely.
If the parasite of a microbe in the body of a flea were able to examine
and analyse its conditions and surroundings and had the faculty of
reverence, its first religion would have as its object the host on
which it battened, and would endow its deity with its own parasitic
faculties and desires. But as its horizon widened and it found its
host but the dependent of another vital centre, it would contemn the
mediacy of the microbe, and fix all its reverence and adoration upon
the flea, which would seem to it a miraculous and omnipotent edition of
itself. With its vision and all its powers of observation fixed upon
the host of its host, it would soon come to see how its deity was not
self-subsistent but ricochetted from spot to spot, and the human body
with its comparative infinitude would afterwards take the place of the
flea in the reverence of the microbe’s parasite, and be accepted as
the vastest and most etherealised edition of itself the parasite could
conceive, having no means of ascertaining the real limits and faculties
of its new deity. As soon as it was able to measure and define these,
it would undeify man and substitute for him that which man inhabited,
and endow it with all its own parasitic powers and limitations.
Following the analogy, the new book saw an infinitude of pitfalls
and disillusionments before the religious faculty of man, and
refused to accept man’s similes and metaphors as in any way accurate
representations of the truth. Similes and metaphors they must remain
marked by all the narrowness of human limitations. Scientific discovery
must be the only guide of religion; and the more they advanced in their
sciences, the nearer they came to the true God. For this reason it was
that they felt it to be sin to withdraw any portion of their energy or
time from scientific pursuits and investigations. To know the cosmos
better was to approach nearer to the spirit of the cosmos, to grow more
truly religious.
The last decennial review that I witnessed, occurring as it did just
before I set out over the circle of mist, impressed upon me the
provisional as well as the fundamental character of their religious
ideals. Most of the books dramatically presented in Loomiefa at that
period had the final aim of cosmic life and energy as their theme; to
me they struck far beyond all that the most idealistic of Western
religious books had ever attempted to foreshadow; and yet they were
wholly based upon the indications that recent discoveries had given.
In a still more startling way, they were taken as but temporary
satisfactions of futuritive yearnings; they bent the highest energies
of the Limanorans into paths that led beyond what they could see from
their actual standpoint in science; but they knew from past experience
that the full blaze of noon would before long fall upon these dim
regions now lit up only by presciential imagination. These books they
now reverenced for their pioneering power; but as soon as scientific
advance should wither them into the trite and commonplace, nothing
could ever make them again guides into the darkness of the unknown,
nothing in short could ever restore their sacredness.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LAST FLIGHT
THOUGH this Manora seemed to me so solemn and almost sacramental in
its spirit, there was no withdrawal of any of the families from the
duties of their daily life. They were as eager for the advance of their
special sciences as they had ever been. Nay, the progress seemed to
me more and more rapid. The faculties were whetted to their utmost
keenness; their energies were buoyant and free. I had expected at this
religious review of the whole of their life to find a relaxation of
their intellectual temper, a languor in their wills, such as I had
often noted in periods of great religious outburst in the West. I had
been accustomed to look for an aloofness from the common pursuits of
life and a prostration before the great ideals of faith, whenever a
wave of worshipful enthusiasm broke over any community in Europe.
This people would have thought a religion that thus blanched
common life of its interests and enthusiasms not merely useless
but mischievous. Prostration before the infinities and eternities
was the last attitude they would encourage; for they considered it
blasphemy against the spirit of the cosmos. If the Manora had in any
way withdrawn their energies from their forward march, they would
have abolished it. Progress was religion, or the fulfilment of the
irrepressible yearning of all things to rise in the cosmic scale of
being, and that anything religious should check or obstruct advance was
to them the grossest contradiction in terms. Religion was in Limanora
the essence of practical life, or rather practical life was the highest
religion.
Though the review was an intense pleasure to the whole nation, throwing
the thought as it did farther and farther into the future, none
neglected for a moment the severe physical labour that was their daily
portion in the centre of force. None felt their spirits relax in their
eagerness to perform the work of their life. On the contrary, the new
religious enthusiasm added a zest to all that they had to do.
To no families did so many or so urgent demands come as to those of the
Leomo; for the great mountain had been more than ordinarily perturbed.
In spite of numerous new lava-wells, the crust of the whole island had
been shaken by frequent earthquakes, and out of the mouth of the crater
had stormed far pennons of dust and ashes, showing that something
unusual was occurring in the depths below. Then had come a sudden and
ominous lull during the latter half of the Manora; the earth had grown
quiescent and the whole summit of Limanora stood vivid and clear in the
azure.
The Leomo were not deceived by this sudden cessation of subterranean
activity. It meant new issues for the volcanic energy amid the
antarctic snows, and new dangers from the possible intrusion of
southern waters. Most members of the families were needed in the island