Limanora the island of progress
and watched the throb and struggle of the various constituents and
forces as they collapsed; then, when it seemed to have surrendered
all life or hope of life, they brought it back, by their knowledge
of its existence, to the upward struggle again and no feature of the
return escaped their notice; most watchful of all were they on that
dim borderland between life and death, where dawn is sunset and sunset
dawn. In every stage were they able to isolate each strand of the
thread of life; yet the essential secret of all escaped them. Once
the organism had shrivelled into a bundle of dead fibres or fallen to
dust, no effort of theirs could give it the throb of life again. They
could reproduce every element and tissue and fibre, and under their
clirolans place them together in the forms of life with marvellous art.
One thing was still wanting to make it all it had been. They could even
mimic the flow of life through it by means of their command over the
sources of energy; but the result was only mechanical; they had not
supplied it with the never-failing spring of vitality.
At last, during the period of this great illumination there was thrown
a beam of light on the right path for solving this problem. One of
the Sidralmo was experimenting on certain substances to see how they
behaved under the rays issuing from a lavolan or revealer of inner
mechanism. They were chiefly new vegetable substances the properties of
which it was his duty to discover and tabulate. He was also mingling
one or two new minerals with the plant-products in order to see what
modification the blending would cause. One metal had lately been found
issuing from the deepest of their lava-wells in the form of vapour;
when cooled, it had assumed a crystalline character, and acted to
some extent like a magnet; yet it was sensitive to energies that an
ordinary magnet ignored, as, for instance, the passage of exceptional
nerve-force through the human body. Lightly hung, it quivered when
near anyone who happened to be greatly excited. But it paid no heed
to the normal currents of energy along the nerves. There was also a
species of plant recently evolved that had shown itself singularly
sensitive on the approach of any living thing; it shrank not merely
from the touch of a hand or of any animal, but from the proximity of
life, whilst it remained unmoved when touched by any falling leaf or
stone. The experimenter had taken a number of these plants and made of
them a basketwork, in which he hung a piece of the new magnetic metal
by a slender thread. This he placed above his lavolan to see how the
rays from it would affect, or be affected by, the new combination of
influences. There seemed to be little or no effect, but he continued
his experiment to make sure. Through some imperfection in its walls his
vacuum failed; he tried to pump the air out again, but, this failing
too, he substituted an alfarene-vacuum which happened to be near him.
The result was most striking. The metal, lightly hung in the basket,
became agitated at once, and its movements grew more or less active as
it approached or was drawn off from the vacuum. After a time it began
to show less sensitiveness, and at last became almost quiescent, even
though the vacuum remained efficient. On examining the alfarene plant
under a magnifier, he found a minute slug, that had evidently escaped
the notice of the maker of the vacuum; this had been the source of
the agitation of the metal in the basket during its last spasmodic
efforts to hold on to life; and, when death, through the lack of air,
had overcome it, the agitation had ceased. The plant itself had by the
presence of its life kept the test from becoming completely quiescent.
The influence of the life of the experimenter himself seemed to be
largely neutralised by the surrounding air; it was only when he came
very close to the test that it indicated his presence.
Here was revealed to the Sidralmo the path they had to follow; a wide
vista into the darkness had been suddenly opened. It was not long
before they had taken full advantage of the discovery. They invented
the most helpful of all their instruments, the sidralan or biometer;
they hung the combination of life-sensitive plant and nerve-sensitive
metal itself in a vacuum, directly in the path of an electric current;
the details of its mechanism they rapidly improved till it measured
with accuracy the degree of vitality in any plant or animal. But they
soon found that it was differently affected by vegetable and animal
life. The energy of the former moved it but slightly, and only in
certain directions; the latter seemed to surround it and agitate it
from all sides; it quivered as if with subdued excitement. Yet there
were degrees in both; some plants moved it more than the most primitive
unicellular animals, although the movement was less pervasive. Thus
were they well on the way towards the isolation of the life-principle
from its constant concomitants.
The biometer came to be of as much importance to the medical
superintendents as to the Sidralmo; it abridged the labour of their
weekly inspection; for it told in a moment whether the vitality in
any member of the community had fallen or risen in degree, whether
it was below the proper average, in short whether all his organs and
tissues would have to be minutely examined for the cause, and whether
his dietary scheme would have to be revised. The psycho-physiological
families found it of some use in their investigations into the
faculties of man and their basis in his bodily constitution. They found
that the wiser and more intellectual a personality was, the more gently
he moved the sidralan; the more of animal vitality he had, the more
violently he agitated it by his presence.
But the instrument was too rough and undiscriminating for their
purposes. It could not distinguish between the purely spiritual and the
purely animal except in this loose way. They tried modifications of it,
but without success. It was the Ailomo or astrobiological families that
helped them to take the right direction. They were constantly bringing
down out of the stratum above the atmosphere vessels full of the
seeming nothingness that existed there, in order to investigate it and
see whether it was mere vacuum or not; and though the contents appealed
to none of their senses but the electric, their various instruments
of research revealed different energies and a large amount of life,
besides minute forms of matter without life. On several occasions
they had noticed that the contents affected their tests differently
when the experimenter was near and when he stood at a distance. Step
by step they separated the element that acted thus from its various
concomitants. And soon they were able to concentrate a considerable
quantity of it in a receiver exhausted of air, and to precipitate it in
powdery metallic form.
The substance was handed over to the Ooaromo, who saw that it would
supply the test they wanted; for it was but slightly sensitive to the
presence of animals, and its sensitiveness gradually vanished as they
tried it with lower and lower species of animals; whilst it quivered
near men, less near young men and women, only slightly near infants,
but with quick tremors when near the older and wiser Umanorans, who
had suffered and thought through long centuries. They came to the
conclusion that this residuum was the essence of some element in the
ether that responded to the energy of the higher faculties, as the
magnet responded to electricity. They had in fact found at last a true
test of soul, that refinement of the higher animal energies which has
assumed a new grade in life, the consciousness of itself, and the power
of keeping its own form and essence as an entity for ever separate from
all other beings and things.
It was not long before the Ooaromo had made from it an apparatus which
would test the presence of soul and measure its force. In this ooaran
or psychometer they were at last furnished with an instrument that
would give organic unity and new purpose to their science. They would
now be able to watch and measure the growth of soul in the child, and
the ebb and flow of its strength in youth; and thus would they give new
vigour and life to the creative function of their science. They had now
an exact basis for education; as guides of parents and proparents in
tuition they would walk in the full day, where before they had groped
in dim twilight; in every case would they be able to advise with the
same certainty as the medical elders advised on the health of the body.
For the mature men and women would they act as true father-confessors,
and do what the priests of so many religions pretended to do, but
did not do; they would be able to tell everyone, who desired it,
whether his soul had advanced or receded in power after any series of
sufferings and deeds, or any line of conduct, and thus to give advice
as to what should be done or omitted in the future. And when the
elders had come near what had before seemed the utmost limit of life,
they would be able to tell them whether their nausea of existence was
only fleeting and subjective, or whether the roots of their soul were
loosening themselves from the soil of the body.
CHAPTER II
AN ACCIDENT
BUT so vast an expansion of science and the unveiling of so many
outlooks into the future left no room for the thought of death. The
pace of life quickened perceptibly, and the energy of every dweller
on the island was strained to its utmost to meet the requirements
of the new additions to the force of the country and of all the new
inventions. It was impossible to think of anything but the tasks in
hand. None had an idle thought, none a leisure moment to waste on mere
introspection or dreams.
In fact it became quite clear that the old dream-factory might be
closed for a time at least. For several generations it had been the
custom of the Limanorans to stimulate invention and discovery by
the use of magnetism. When anyone felt his problem insoluble, or an
insuperable obstacle in the way of his advance towards some practical
goal, he had his dream-consciousness awakened and quickened as he
slept. A member of the medical families would attend by his bedside,
and apply a magnetic current to the particular point of his brain that
controlled the powers concerned in his pursuit, and especially to the
parts which were the physical expression of the imaginative faculties.
And by day he would instruct the thinker as to what nutritive or
medicated chambers he should enter in order to draw the main strength
of his system towards the faculties he needed. Day after day the
patient nurtured the parts of the brain and of the nervous system
that would help him to the solution; night after night he dreamt out
the terms of the problem. At last either in day-dream or night-fancy
the curtain would be raised, and he would see the path to take; light
flashed in on him as if from another world. What in my buried life
used to be called inspiration was cultivated, moulded, and directed
with as deliberate foresight and care as any feature of the body or
the character. Nor were these dream-stimulants ever abused; when the
purpose had been served, the goal reached, at once the other faculties
and physical parts had equal attention; the strain was unbent, and
the symmetry and balance of the whole system restored. Never was the
stimulation of dream-consciousness permitted for a mere pleasure or
whim; the importance of the aim to the progress of the race had to be
proved before it was granted; nay it was only problems the solution
of which would lead to extraordinary advances, that were dealt with