Limanora the island of progress
relations and friends, to whose pity and sympathy he might appeal.
He trembled in alarm when he was led to the chamber in which he was
to be tested. But it was found that, though his humanity had not
progressed in the lines or with the rapidity that the Limanorans have
developed since his departure, all the atavistic taint had disappeared
from his nature, and the weak elements of his system, love, pity,
tenderness, sympathy, had greatly strengthened. He could no longer by
any possibility side with the warlike and revengeful in human nature.
“But even if he had only kept the evil qualities in abeyance, in the
state they showed before his exile, we should have let him return; for
with his strong desire to keep pace with our advance and his regret
for his retrogression, he would have gladly submitted himself to our
new creative surgery. Our increased knowledge of the functions and
constitution of the brain and nervous system enables us to reduce
or excise any portion that interferes with the development of the
individual. And we can also stimulate or retard the activity of any
part by placing the patient in any of our medicated atmospheres
specially adapted to his circumstances, and making him breathe in the
element required by his system.
“Noola is now supremely happy in the confidence that he is to be
allowed to remain. Every defect in his system has been tested and
measured, and he knows how far he has fallen behind our race. He would
have accepted any conditions, and in order to overtake us is willing to
enter upon a new education,--the abbreviation of the slow and painful
advance of many ages into the hurried pace of a few years. He wishes,
though three hundred years of age, to become a child again and return
to his first century. But his long and painful self-discipline in
Broolyi has shortened the process; and he will soon be able to keep
step with his old comrades. He will be aided in every way by the wise
men, some of whom will give their best wisdom and energies to him.
All the physical arts we have will be brought into play to shorten
his term of probation, our creative surgery and medicine, our arts
for the development of tissue and nerve, our magnetic arts for the
development of the senses, and our ethical arts for the development of
the spiritual sensitiveness.
“For yourself he has pleaded, and, though our wise men have recognised
that you are thousands of years in the rear of our civilisation, and
have confirmed their recognition by scientific measurement of the
forces and elements in you, they have consented to let you remain and
to take your education in hand. It seems an almost impossible task to
contract thousands of years into tens; but they do not despair; for our
system of education has already accomplished this for children born
amongst us, and you have a nature peculiarly open to our educational
influences. You have first of all the passion for progress as strongly
in you as in any of ourselves; and this is the prime essential of our
ethics and civilisation; to it all other passions must yield; from it
flows all that subdues the material world and gives dominance to the
spirit, and makes for righteousness. But with it often go pride and
arrogance. In you was found strongly developed the desire to treat
all good men as equals, whatever difference of capacity or position
or possessions might seem to separate them from you. Had you had even
the slightest tinge of contemptuousness or hauteur in you, you would
have been sternly repelled. To contemn is the mark of an incurably
savage nature, a nature incapable of true knowledge of itself and
of its relations to life. From these two desires come purity of
thought and life, the love of peace, respect for the rights of others
and reverence for what is fine in their personality, and absolute
transparency of nature. This last we ever take to be the shortest
and truest test of a progressive character, the love of truth and
simplicity, complete harmony of word and act with the inmost thought.
As long as a man or a nation lacks this, there can be no real advance;
what seems advance is but a mirage of fame or glory. Accuracy of vision
and of prevision is the first condition of true progress. It was one of
the first things that Noola saw in you, and the first reason he urged
for your retention; you had no desire to conceal your thoughts, so
closely did they tally with your life; you had an overwhelming passion
for truth and for the truthful.
“There was no need to distrust his assertions for we all felt how
genuine he had become; and even sick and unconscious as you were, our
magnetic sense told us that his description of you was correct. But
it has become the custom to test scientifically the nature of every
inhabitant of our island every week, and also at every crisis in his
nature or in the history of the community, in order that any incipient
defect may be at once remedied, and that drastic applications may
never be needed. A complete survey of your character and faculties and
corporeal system was the first step towards your admission into the
community. Everything had to be known, in order that your education
should be mapped out. And the cerebrometers gave us a favourable
report of you. Your body and your working faculties are far in the
rear of ours; you lack transparency of tissue, ethereality of motion;
the material side of you is earthy and ponderous. These elements of
retrogression we shall never be able to eject wholly from your system;
but we shall be able to modify them, and in your children and your
children’s children the body will keep pace with the spirit. The
forwardness of your emotions, of your soul, is what has drawn us to
you; you love the ideal and imaginative more than any but one section
of our community; and you have an intermixture of the finer spiritual
elements such as we have either lost or never had amongst us. We hope
to graft your nature upon one of the divisions or castes of our race
and so produce in the next generation a variety that we need. Your
retention has thus been justified by the highest morality of our
civilisation. We never take any step without reference to the ultimate
aims of our progress: so to improve the breed that our posterity may
feel nearer to the highest life in the universe.
“Your education has indeed already begun. We have assumed from your
highly disciplined and progressive spirit that you would be willing to
submit to those medical methods that shorten the already abbreviative
process of education. It is true that these make an enormous drain upon
the physical strength for a time; and we prefer the ordinary spiritual
methods of training. But you have gained from the open-air employments
in which you have passed your life great stores of bodily health and
vigour. You are still but a child. The period of childhood and tutelage
extends with us to the thirtieth, sometimes to the fiftieth, year,
that of youth to beyond the hundredth. At the time that other men are
preparing to die the natural death of old age, we are just beginning to
feel what it is to live.
“And from some ancestral cause you are developed beyond your years
in some of our ethical lines. You have reached a humility before the
living forces of the universe which is the primary mark of the true
governor of the world. How you have attained so rare a virtue amidst
the pretentious barbarity of civilisation it is not easy to conceive.
There worldliness and arrogance inherit the earth, though there are not
signs wanting that they feel the approaching triumph of its true heirs
and mask as the meeker virtues. In older times they were not ashamed
to show themselves as they really were; for those were the days of
glorified highwaymen who seized the throne of the world. Conquest is
nothing but successful brigandage on a large scale, veneer it over with
diplomacy and historical fame as you will. But for centuries there has
been an uneasy feeling abroad that the humble must come to their rights
some day; and so the gilded brigands have allied themselves with a
religion of the meek and despised, that they may hoodwink mankind into
acquiescence in their ancient dishonesty.
“We banished all the makings of monarchs, aristocracies, and great
men at the purifications of our people. We could see no difference
between these and the worst criminals except one of degree. We measured
their skulls and brains by the rough, unscientific methods we used to
have, and found in them almost no difference from those of murderers
and thieves; and comparing them with the skulls of savages and of
our own far-back ancestry, we found that in the case of both heroes
and criminals the cause of their likeness to each other was their
recoil upon the footsteps of the past, and away from the line of human
progress which leads towards harmony with the higher laws of the
universe.
“Happily for you every trace of such arrogance and contempt and
ambition is absent from your system. You have nothing merely mimetic
in you; you live unashamed and truthful in presence of all that the
world is capable of being. It is one of the surest signs of fear of
threatening annihilation that a species has to simulate the appearance
or the modes of life of another. Hypocrisy in the human race, like
mimicry in the kinds of animals and plants, is the brand of feebleness
and the omen of coming decay and subjugation. We use truth and
sincerity as one of the most inward of tests of a strong and healthy
nature. In the olden days, as in all large and mixed civilisations,
it was difficult to distinguish the imitation virtue from the real,
and when it was discovered it was easy to pardon it and even accept
it as a virtue amid the universal effort at simulation. But when we
had swept out the survivals of primitive and savage times and the
atavistic returns to them, we found that every need of mimetic virtue
had disappeared. The slightest taint of unreality or falsehood in any
of our community is as offensive as carrion; we rise in a body and
have it removed. And we have as keen an enjoyment of sincerity and
truthfulness. Your loyal character at once attracted us to you; we felt
that all germs of moral disease would lose their virulence within its
influence, as germs of physical disease lose theirs in sunshine.”
CHAPTER II
MY EDUCATION
THE strain on my attention had been extreme as I tried to follow his
explanations. It was not merely the words that were unfamiliar, but the
very manner of the thoughts. I had not felt how exhausted my tissues
were growing, or how soothing was the influence of the perfumes and
soft music. I had been deeply moved by the joy of my acceptance by this
strange community and by the profound truths woven into the fabric of
its civilisation. Imperceptibly the mist of dreams stole over me. I was
not even conscious of the gesture of his hand. I thought that I had
fallen back again into the darkness of Western civilisation, and yet
that my Limanoran guardian was silently hovering round me, protecting
me amid the horrors of the reality. I seemed to be present at a court
scene, where the monarch and his ablest statesmen and soldiers were
welcoming a hero back from a victorious campaign that had added a great
province to the kingdom. There were shoutings and huzzas without,
whilst within strains of triumphant music alternated with bowings and
ceremonies from the gorgeously robed officials. In some strange way
I thought that it was I who was being lauded. Conscious of the tens
of thousands left dead upon my battle-fields, I loathed it all; for
by some soul-magic, perchance my Limanoran influence, the hearts of
eulogists and courtiers were laid bare before my eyes, all (there was