Limanora the island of progress
of science or life. And this great graveyard was also the library of
the race, so classified and summarised and indexed that any man could
take a complete survey of its contents in a few years. There was the
living index, too, available in every grove. Anything that was obscure
could be at once explained by the representatives of the family.
Besides these there were families whose duty it was to supervise the
relationships of the various sciences and branches; they could point
out to the investigators how far their work tended to overlap or
interfere, what was futile in their efforts, what directions had still
to be taken and what paths to be traversed. They permitted no piece of
work to be wasted; everything was correlated by them to the purpose of
the race and to its contemporary efforts. The boundary-lines of the
various departments were defined and mapped by them. They were the
organisers of research, the dividers and economisers of intellectual
labour.
But they themselves had their separate functions and duties. Some
had the faculty of order exceptionally developed; and they were the
classifiers of the community and of the work of the community. Others
had the logical powers in especial vigour; and they followed out
the philosophy of the race, the correlation of the ideas and of the
lines of reasoning. A third group consisted of those with a dominant
imagination; these looked into the future; they performed some of the
functions of imaginative writers in Europe, sketching out imaginary
routes for the race and for each family into the unknown; but they also
covered a much wider field; they put into form and expression schemes
and projects such as European men of action of the most romantic
careers have often attempted to carry out, but have seldom been able to
put into words; these were not allowed to interfere with action, but
the ideas, plans, and romances they invented and put into shape were
tested and accepted or rejected by the practical men whose sphere they
touched. Imagination, it was held by the Limanorans, was apt to be a
futile, if not mischievous, faculty through want of its being ranged on
the side of utility; and yet, if trammelled and yoked to the necessity
of practice in the individual, it came to be stifled. They specially
cultivated it in these families in order that it should have full scope
and development, but took care, by ranging these families with those
that superintend the purpose and progress of the race, that their
romances should have full relevancy to the goal of all their efforts.
Many of the projects and ideas which seemed at first the most fantastic
were found after many generations to be sound and most possible of
realisation.
One of the striking features of the civilisation was the complete
absence of a literary class or profession or group of families. They
smiled at the “pure frippery” of European literature, which used
imagination as a mere means of entertainment. It seemed a complete
inversion of the natural order of things to make that faculty which
was the prerogative of everyone who could speak, and the servant of
the highest purpose of life, into a special art to suit the pleasure
of the idler hours. They held that the man who had thought a thing out
could express it best. So they trained up every citizen to the fullest
power of lucid and final expression. In their language, so perfect was
it, there was one best way of saying a thing; and everyone who knew
the language aright and understood the thing could find this best way.
Style as a matter of mere expression they laughed at as linguistic
trickery; the force and life of everything lay in the idea, and the
expression grew out of that and was a part of it, as the colour was a
part of the flower. It was only a clumsy and inchoate language that
could admit of style or literature as a special art; and it was
trifling with one of the most divine faculties to prostitute it to the
entertainment of leisure hours; it was to class imagination with the
arts of the mimic, the buffoon, and the juggler.
Art for art’s sake, one of the latest creeds of the writers of Europe,
was to them almost blasphemy. It made the garment of ideas, the garb of
human progress, into a separate entity, and the servants of God into
the tailors of human folly, the dress more than the figure it clothed
and the body more than the soul. Literature without the intensity of
the loftiest purpose of the race was but a tinkling cymbal. Expression
was the gift of nature to every civilised man, and woe to the race that
neglected it in any of its individuals, the race that should divorce it
from its ideas, that let the men who write filch the glory of those who
think!
Like strong beliefs had they about the profession of teaching as
separate from parenthood and investigation. It meant disloyalty on
the part of most citizens to their most immediate duties. Who could
develop the instincts of youth and be so deeply interested in his
future welfare as those who were bound to him by the ties of nature?
And then, when he had matured and needed the wider education, who
could give it him so well as those who were most familiar with its
special objects and themes? If he was to follow the art and knowledge
of some other family, the sooner he went under the tutelage of its
representatives after his intellectual life began the better. The only
portion of their youth that the young men and women could spend with
profit under others than their parents or proparents was the period of
general knowledge, of summarising the results of the whole past. The
representative of one of the supervising families alone could give
with ease a survey of the whole field of knowledge and art and action.
They and they alone were in any way an approach to the profession of
teaching, and they were saved from the petrifying influence of pedagogy
by their wider duties in correlating the sciences and arts, the fields
of knowledge and action. Thus reason and the emotions were kept from
getting benumbed by the vanity of a too easy superiority. The beings
they pitied most in the world were the despot and the professional
teacher; for these get buried in unreality before the life is out
of them, and are so unquestionably supreme that nothing but what is
pleasing to their minds dare approach them. They fall out of relation
to truth, and it is difficult for them ever to regain that wholesome
fear of contradiction and that shyness before destiny which constitute
the essence of sanity; they have to become intolerant. The schoolmaster
soon becomes intellectually barren; the despot soon falls the victim
of luxury and of illusion. For the sake of the grown men and women who
might be sacrificed to it, as well as of the children and youth, they
abolished the profession of teacher. Individual training was the only
true foundation of a sound progress. Two might be permitted to form
a companionship in education and study, just as two might form the
friendship of marriage; but that was only when the periods of possible
atavism had been safely traversed. Nor must they be wholly given up to
their comradeship; the parental influence and solitude must continue to
govern their lives.
Thyriel and I had become educational companions and friends; but every
item of our education was supervised without our noticing or feeling
galled by it. There was no prying into details; but every change
in our character and every stage in our training was tested at the
periodical investigation of the citizens. Our parents or proparents
took the keenest interest in all that we did and all that we tended to
become.
Now, that our specialisation had begun, we were put wholly under the
care of Thyriel’s parents and family. I still returned to the home of
my proparents, but spent the hours of training with the Leomo. There
had evidently been discovered in the preliminary investigation of my
faculties some especially suited to the pursuit of earth-seeing. From
the beginning of my journeys to Fialume I had been attached to this
family of earth-seers, and the result confirmed the decision; my tastes
all developed in this same direction, and the more I penetrated into
the mysteries of the science and craft, the more deeply interested
in it I became. Every day, under the guidance of my new friends, I
listened to the voices of their ancestors stored up on irelium tablets;
for these tablets, when placed in a voice instrument, reproduced the
exact sounds which had engraved the letters upon them. Their written
alphabet was in fact a natural one; the letters were the forms produced
by the sounds themselves when uttered by an instrument that blew upon
loose particles of irelium arranged on a vibrating disc of the same
metal. By a simple process the particles, when they took their form,
were permanently fixed to the disc, which then became an everlasting
record, easily read by any Limanoran; or, when placed in the voice
instrument, speaking the words into his ear. This voice instrument was
a kind of organ, whose minute keys and stops were easily controlled by
the ridge of letters.
I ever preferred to listen to the records of the past instead of
reading them; for I never attained great facility in deciphering the
letters because of my own long familiarity with the English alphabet
and writing. But Thyriel could read the tablets with great ease; I came
to prefer her reading to the sound of her ancestors’ voices although
these gave fuller meaning to the ideas they communicated, and it was
pleasant to feel that she was listening with me and not tiring her
throat. Our minds seemed to become one, as we sat silent and motionless
with ears intent on the statue of some one of her forefathers. There
was a strong magnetism from the dead minds gradually welding our souls
together.
Yet there was nothing personal or emotional in our studies. For years
they were chiefly historical, watching the growth of earth-science
through the generations, seeing the share that each member had in its
development. How little they knew of it even up to the time of the
exilings! The earliest ancestors groped amongst barren facts and their
classifications. They named the rocks and the elements of the rocks,
and speculated on the order of their formation; they told the story of
the growth of glaciers in the original Antarctic land from which their
ancestors had migrated, and tried to explain the origin and development
of the strange archipelago in which they lived. But they saw no
practical application of the resulting theories: even when they knew
the stratum and its trend, they often failed in their directions as to
where certain minerals would be found in it.
Still the strides made by the family both in the knowledge and its
application were marvellous, since the island had been purified and
the true purpose of their civilisation was known. An instrument that
I had grown accustomed to during the previous or general stage of my
education enabled me now to see at a glance the improvements of each
age or generation. It was the ammerlin, which might be translated
historoscope. It focussed for the eye and ear any periods of the past.
The whole pageant of some section of the history of any man, science,
or object could be flashed stereoscopically in a few minutes on a dark
surface, whilst all the sounds that accompanied the scenes would be
reproduced in any required pitch and tone. It was one of the duties of
the students and representatives to take numberless sun pictures and
sound pictures of all the important scenes in the life of the family
and in the development of their science and art and instruments. In
order to reproduce any scene, the two long strips of irelium that
contained the series of momentary pictures of it were made to rotate