Limanora the island of progress
longed to advance with the new age into spheres that had so long lain
under the horizon, only half-guessed at. Before he closed his eyes
on Limanora what wonders might not yet be revealed to them? His blood
had tingled with the thought, and his organs were filled with the old
energy. He would resume the direction of his science for many a year to
come.
But the intrusion of accident into his own sphere had palsied his
renewed enthusiasms. For a time, whilst he was restoring Tamarna to
her old self, and barring out the chance of accident again, he was not
conscious of the check given to the vigour of his functions. But, when
all was well and the families of the Piramo were busy again at the
expansion of meteorology, he knew that the old nausea had returned with
redoubled force. The impetus of the new age was beginning to fail; its
pace had perceptibly slackened; its best triumphs had been won; and
it needed the ignorance of eyes newly opened upon the green earth and
the azure vault of sky to peer into the darkness with thrilling hope;
it needed the elasticity of youthful muscles and tissues to withstand
the weariness and despair that come with the truer perspective of a
gigantic future become a pigmy past. What had he to do with human
prospects, when a thousand times he had seen them loom large on the
horizon, and then fade into commonplace when realised? Here had he
outlasted a dozen generations of ordinary men, and shared the triumphs
of a people whose progress compared with that of the rest of the earth
was as lightning to the pace of a snail; and yet, when he looked at
all that they had done in these thousand years, it was as nothing in
the shadow of what had yet to be done, a poor hand’s breadth beside
the voyage of light from a distant star. Where lay the advantage in
extending a life that had seen such humiliation before the everlasting
future? He might spin the thread of his life out for another thousand
years without great effort. But what would that do for his race,
or himself who had seen his past, with all the achievements that
had each seemed as it came within the range of possibility a marvel
surpassing the human, fade into a microscopic speck underneath the
sumless stars? The voices of his friends, as they poured consolation
and eulogy, persuasion and prayer, into his ears, sounded now like the
undistinguishable hum of insects as sleep comes upon a man in the open.
What would they not have meant to him in the ambitious time of youth?
How strongly they rang out to him at the beginning of the last stage of
enthusiasm, when they drove out of him the love of going for ever to
sleep! But, now, that the longing had come to him again, they sounded
idly as the exultant wail of gnats on the evening air. The life of
earth was withdrawn and distant for him.
And who could raise a word against his release? He had done more than
his share for the progress of the race. He had watched the interests
of his science and made it an essential of all advance. He had braced
his energies again and again to meet the requirements of a new age,
another march ahead into the night. He had time after time molten the
Piramo into a new unity by the magnetism of his enthusiasm. More than
once he had extended the years of his life that he might serve his
race. And now he had skilled men and women under him, who could do all
that he had done, and more. The exceptional needs of the new time had
found their attendants mechanic or human. The strain it had put on the
efforts of the race was unbent. Why should he linger in a world grown
so stale to him, a world that needed no longer his guidance or even
his help?
There was one question to answer before the mind of the community was
made up. It was the final scientific question. Was his vitality great
enough yet to bear the strain, were the impulses of another new age to
give it enthusiasm? Was the soul already too detached from the body to
allow of the two being closely reunited for another great effort? The
question was one for their medical science and psychology to answer.
The sidralan or biometer abridged the task of the medical elders. It
reported a low pitch of vital energy, too feeble to bear up through the
labours and watches of another period. But they were afraid to trust
wholly to so newly invented an instrument and fell back upon their old
elaborate methods of testing; they investigated the state of every
organ and tissue of the aged body with lavolans, the heart and brain
with especial care. And it was clear from their state that the spirit
could not long reside in them and function them with ease. It was at
this point that the Ooaromo came in to aid them with their instruments
for testing the bond between soul and body, and for measuring the
psychic power that still remained ready to use the brain and its
instruments the senses. Their older methods and their newest apparatus,
the ooaran, all agreed in confirming the conclusion that the medical
elders had come to.
For Amiralno himself there remained one serious question, which had
troubled the race from the time that mere faith had ceased to rule and
pilot their creed, and reason had been accepted as the only ultimate
guide of life, the final court of appeal in which all questions must be
decided. They could not trust to emotion or instinct; for these were
but hard-won creeds and habits of past imperfect ages grown unconscious
of their origin by transmission from generation to generation.
Authority out of the past, tradition, law of nature, had the same
taint upon them. They were but the crude conclusions of comparatively
primitive times, with the logic leading to them veiled by oblivion,
then thrust upon later ages as inspiration. All these dogmatic judges
of the present and the future were but the shadows of their own
worst and atavistic selves. It was only an illusion, a mirage in the
desert of the past, to trust these merely subjective impressions as
reflections from the ultimately real, the absolute. A people like this
was sure to abandon all such projections of their own dead selves as
steps to higher than themselves.
Every man had to settle for himself the problems that his science
had been unable to solve, and that he must find some solution of in
death. They had longed and striven for absolute certainty, yet every
new age had to fall back upon the individual consciousness and hope,
which were wholly on the side of belief in personal immortality. They
knew that the energy in them could never die, whatever form it might
take. Never had they found in the whole round of their investigations
anything like absolute death or annihilation; every change that they
observed, however far into infinity they had searched, was but a
transformation of energy, and not its final evanishment. Matter was
only a resting-place, a half-way house, of energy. And even matter was
a comparative term, depending on the sensuous point of view of the
observer. What was matter to one generation was found by a later to
be pure energy, or even a mass of life. What was matter to one sense
was to another nothing but energy. And the development of new senses,
that gave them full consciousness of some hitherto-unrecognised type
of energy, saved them from the dogmatism about the future based upon
the idea that all types of energy were known to them. Their wonderful
instruments of research revealed to them worlds of energy which might
have lain for ages undiscovered, and swept out all stupid trust in the
omniscience of the senses or the instincts. They refused to dogmatise
about the existence or non-existence of any type of energy or being.
Nay, they preferred to accept provisionally the existence of any form
that their imagination might sketch out as possible and as consistent
with the laws they had found permeating all the known universe. Belief
was for them hope waiting for realisation.
Every new discovery pointed more and more definitely to the greater
persistence of the higher forms of energy. What appeals to the more
primitive and lower set of senses holds to even its inner form for but
a comparatively brief time. Touch is the primary sense, and all that
it, unaided by the other senses, can discover is apt to keep changing
its form. Taste and smell are simple modifications of touch and they
report of things in perpetual transformation. Hearing and sight are the
highest of the first set of senses; for they respond to types of energy
that travel from vast distances. Hearing is the lower of the two,
because the lower senses are conscious unaided of the medium in which
the energy travels. Sight has as her courier an energy which bridges
infinity, and its medium no lower sense can cognise. Light approaches
nearer to indestructibility than anything the original senses know.
The last-developed of the senses, the firla, takes cognisance of
an energy, magnetism, which is farthest of all from the need of a
material medium; whilst the filammu or will-telegraph brings soul to
soul irrespective of all sense-cognisable means of communication, and
proves the existence of a medium more refined than any that either the
senses or the reason has yet come to know. This medium, doubtless that
of thought itself, as the highest and least material, must be least
destructible, least transformable, least unstable in equilibrium of
all known mediums. Their ooarans would soon be made delicate enough
to measure the faintest presence of soul, and would decide the point
whether this medium, evidently spread throughout the universe, was of
the same stuff as the soul.
Still were they far from scientific proof of the eternal unity and
individuality of the soul. They had reasoned out in accordance with
all the axioms of their science the indestructibility of energy,
and the rising untransformability of the higher types of energy;
they had also reasoned out as certainly that mediums of energy had
stability of equilibrium proportionate to the refinement of the
energy travelling through them, and that thus the soul was nearer to
everlasting persistence as a unity than any medium they scientifically
knew. But that on its escape from the body it continued for ever as an
individuality they could only assume; they could not prove it. They
shrank from the idea that it was for ever past transformation; for that
meant the eternal continuance of the last stage of life. It was indeed
contrary to all the results of their scientific investigations to think
that any type of energy or medium could at any time cease to change,
that is, to improve or degenerate. Perpetual transformation was, as far
as they had been able to search, the universal law: it might be into
a higher or more stable form, or into a lower or more material form,
but onwards must every energy move. The higher it went, the less did it
tend to fall back. The law of eternal advance was surer in its action
in the higher ranges of existence. And the whole effort of Limanoran
life was to purify and ennoble the energy that was in it. For,
reasoning on the analogy of all the nature they knew, they had little
doubt that the platform they reached by the end of their terrene life
was the platform from which their enfranchised energy or individuality,
whichever it was, started on its new career.
Whether it was mere unconscious energy or energy conscious of its own
unity that escaped from the body, when it was left to the disintegrant
power of microscopic organisms, was still a question. The recent
discoveries and investigations of the Ailomo or astrobiological
families had revealed all space filled not merely with types of
energy that were directed and did not guide themselves, but with
embodiments of energy which were clearly individualities; not alone