Limanora the island of progress
was self-conducted; the citizen was his own schoolmaster, and his
surroundings were his instruments and assistants. That of the earlier
stages used up the labour and wisdom of two other personalities for
the long period of discipline; they were ever on watch and guard lest
the past that lay in the youthful nature should suddenly rise and
master it. For all education is a wrestle with the superseded past,
which becomes evil as soon as it grows superfluous or obstructs further
advance. Every form of vitality that has played its part on the stage
of existence leaves it with reluctance; it clings to the new, that it
may have a little more of life, and impedes its advance. The obsolete
most survives in the tissues of the young and immature; and to educate
is to struggle with the obsolete or obsolescent. The labour and
thought needed to make the struggle end in the success of the new and
progressive have never been understood so well by any as by the elders
of the Limanorans. No effort of their civilisation was so exhausting as
the educative. To enter on parenthood or proparenthood made them pause,
for all acknowledged that the assumption of this duty was the greatest
sacrifice a man or woman could make for the progress of the race. They
knew that for half a century their individual vigilance could never
cease, and that the strain would come on all their faculties, and not
on one or two alone, as it would in most of the other duties they owed
to the race, even invention or discovery. Whatsoever would commute or
abolish this heavy service to the nation was sure to be welcomed. So
vast an amount of the best time and wisest ability of the island would
be set free that it would be difficult to calculate the acceleration of
progress it would effect.
All this and a thousand other considerations passed through my
mind, as I listened to the book of Human Sculpture and drank in its
inspirations. The doubts that its dramatic publication had left in me
were all laid. I now knew that this would be a new sacred book, which
would hold up for ages an ideal for Limanora to struggle towards.
This book of Human Sculpture made clear to me the meaning and purpose
of another publication that I soon witnessed. It was the book of
Asexuality, which showed us dramatically how sex and its results
belonged to a lower and more physical stage of personal development.
It revealed to us the nature of the beings that flit through sidereal
space just outside the ken of our senses, centres of energy less inert
and more ethereal than any terrestrial creatures. Into them flows
more freely than it flows into us the divine energy that is above
all. Out of themselves they give as freely to their fellows as they
receive. They need no such inequality and unstable equilibrium as
sex to teach them such bounteous benignity. Living in the precincts
of the fountain of life as they do, not imprisoned within local and
temporal limits, but free to move whither they will and to drink
unstintingly of supernal existence, they know how essentially all
nobler life consists in free bounty; the more of themselves and their
energy they give, the higher the energy they receive in its place.
Sex is only the rude beginning of this higher law, the principle of
antagonism to stagnation, of giving lavishly in order to have room for
receiving from higher sources. It supersedes and antagonises the law of
parasitism, which governs the crude beginnings of life on a new world.
The lower microscopic creatures that live a famished jejune life in
space ready to pounce upon any orb their shoals encounter, propagate
by mere self-division; they have nothing to give. A new star cooling
down on its surface sufficiently for life to settle on is their great
opportunity. There they may parasite and feed to their heart’s content,
propagating by the myriad every infinitesimal fraction of time. And,
as long as they live in such primeval luxury, they never move one
step higher in life. Over-supply of food, indeed all luxury, damns
a being to stagnancy. The full-fed parasite is unprogressive, and,
though multiplying teemingly, is practically sterile; his generations
are on a level with himself; he is immortal by mere fission; the only
function of his life is to grab, till his gettings make him too big for
his microscopic unity, and he has to break up. In the higher stages
of life, even in human life, this infecundity attaches in the same
way to luxurious living, whilst the sycophant is sterile of purpose
and existence. All take and no give is a monstrosity above the lowest
bacterial life. The more of dependence or flattery there is in a
people, the lower their natures; a tyranny is the lowest political
organism; and of tyrannies the worst is the socialistic; for there,
there is no inequality to antagonise and overcome the lethargy of
parasitism.
Even when bacteria begin to feel the pinch of scanty nutrition or
malnutrition, they start on a new career, and show the first traces of
an advance in life. They incline to give as well as receive, and here
are the primeval beginnings of sex. Ill-fed bacteria tend to propagate
by means of special cells or spores. Instead of steeping themselves
in food till they burst, they now begin to nurse within their systems
a germ, to which they give of their best till it is able to launch
out for itself; they cease to reproduce by fission, and reproduce
by spore-formation. This is the first step upwards on the long road
to human morality. The beginnings of sex are the beginnings of
unlikeness of individuals, and the beginnings of unstable equilibrium
and of overflow of energy from one being into another. This is the
organisation of the policy of give in a new star, ultimately meant to
drive out, after a world-long struggle, the antagonistic policy of mere
get. Sex first introduced into our world the eagerness of one being to
give of its best for the good of another being. Conjugal love in the
human era is the first noble form of sexuality; and parental love is
its still nobler offshoot.
The development of parenthood is the knell of sexuality. For it is
a new and higher phase of the policy of give, and antiquates the
mere mutuality of sexual love. It gives of its all expecting nought
in return. And into the place of the energy that has gone out of it
flows an energy that is nearer the divine and raises towards the
divine. It is at this point that sex becomes a lower stage, seeming
almost to mingle with brute life. Out of it must humanity struggle
in order to progress. “In the spirit there is no sex.” This I had
heard as a meaningless echo from wise lips in the West. Now I saw its
significance. The higher, the more spiritual we become, the less we
permit sex to dominate, and the less difference there is between the
sexes. It was in the world of imagination and intellect that the first
idea of equality of the sexes arose. And the more intellectual a people
became, the less it insisted on the difference between man and woman.
Emphasis on sex in a civilised people was a sure sign of approaching
decay.
For the goal towards which the human race is advancing is asexual; not
that that will be the main characteristic; but it is the most striking
compared with our present phase of being. The more highly organised
existences that fill space and hover just outside the range of our
grosser senses have reached the stage in which the stimulus of sex or
even of parenthood is no longer needed in order to save the benignant
instincts from dying out. And the higher a centre of energy climbs in
the scale of existence, the more eager does it become to overflow into
other centres, to give of its highest and best. What we call life, or
the spontaneous rejection of stagnancy, begins on its lowest fringe
with a tendency to take all and give none, with appetite. Below this
are inert centres of energy, that resist all receiving as well as all
giving, that exist only in persisting, in keeping what they have and
what they are; this stage is usually called dead matter in contrast to
energy, although it consists of nuclei of energy as truly as any living
creature. Between the two stages of mere keep and mere take seems to
lie a great gulf fixed; but there are minute evidences of transition
to be found all through nature. We ourselves, the human race, form
the transition from the stage of take all to the stage of give all.
And sex is the chief impetus to progress in the earlier history of
human evolution. Parenthood takes its place in the upper levels,
where the human is rapidly approaching the supersensuous. The very
fact of our nature being so heterogeneous and complex reveals that we
are making for something higher; and, as our appetites imply a stage
behind us, in which our systems were fitted for nothing but taking,
so our loves, our benevolences, our self-sacrifices, point forward
to a stage in which the whole of existence will consist in giving. I
remember, whenever an average man in Europe quoted the phrase, “It is
more blessed to give than to receive,” he meant it as a jest, or in a
sinister sense; even the priest, when he had to preach the doctrine
as one of the foundations of his religion, had incredulity in his
heart if not in the smile on his lips, as he spoke the words. Amongst
the Limanorans it was a truism that was implied in all conduct and
need never be explicitly stated. And the book of Asexuality revealed
the inner and scientific significance to me. The highest state of
any centre of energy in the cosmos was to be eagerly, lavishly, and
perpetually giving out of its best. For thus was it ever kept in
unstable equilibrium, towards which flowed higher and higher energies
from centres above it; thus it kept its life unstagnant and immortal.
That which only received, and was eager only to receive, suffered
the maladies of the luxurious, soon reached its utmost capacity, and
fell into stagnancy and decay. Above the human rose the hierarchy of
sexless, supersensuous beings, who peopled infinite space; but into
their ranks rose the human by means of struggle, by means of the
effluence of their energy into others, by means of sex, and still more
of parenthood. The purpose of sex is to attain to the higher asexuality.
Not that monasticism is good for the human race. It is on the contrary
the greatest of evils in the sexual stage of progress. It counts as
wicked and harmful that which alone prevents self-absorption and the
beginning of decay and death. Sex is the provision of nature for
drawing the animal outside of itself so that it may introduce into its
generations the seeds of development. It makes it as a centre of energy
feel the need of other centres, to which it may give, from which it may
receive. It is her chief means of keeping any vital centre from falling
back into stagnancy and the desire of stagnancy. And, as long as man is
still animal, sex and its resultant parenthood must continue to play
the main part in development. To attempt to reach asexuality before
the animal is ejected from his system is to balk progress and invite
stagnancy and decay.
The book of Asexuality showed how the family must remain the unit and
lever of advance till sex should be superseded by individual creation.
Then friendship or the bond of contrast in community will take the
place of the bond of heredity, or of that bond which is based upon
sexual passion. The mutual choice will be completely rational and in
the will of the choosers. There will be nothing instinctive or mediate
or unconscious about it. It is indeed one of the indignities of this
present sexual stage of evolution that we are thrust on in spite of
ourselves, that we have little command over the stimulus that is urging
us on the road of progress.