Limanora the island of progress
to the operations of thought and emotion. To get clear of the waste
products of the mind in a way that would be inoffensive to others was
an ideal they had not yet been able to entertain. They had learned
with much pain and self-denial the habit of concealing the crude
processes of thought that lead to what is worth saying or doing. It
was one of the things they were most ashamed of in looking over the
history or the memorials of their far past to see the vast amount of
the raw digestion of thought and of the refuse of emotion that was made
public, and even put into literature meant to be permanent. Most of the
orations and magazine articles, and ultimately most of the books that
had been produced in past ages were much the same as if the stomach
and intestines of the speaker or writer had been anatomised and laid
open with all their offensive processes to the gaze of spectators.
One of the most beneficent events of their later history had been a
conflagration in their valley of memories; for it had wiped out of
existence the libraries and art accumulations of many centuries, of
which they had come to be ashamed. They could not understand the
long-past stage of their civilisation, in which men, and especially
young men, had been so proud of displaying the mere débris of their
worst and crudest processes of thought; it had actually been the case
that most of the literature and art had been produced by youths under
fifty years of age, who had not yet begun to appreciate the difference
between the processes of thinking and the results of thinking; and one
of the most extraordinary features of that period was that the most
applauded literary and artistic productions, those that were supposed
to be most distinctively the outcome of what they called genius, were
the work of boys and girls, mere children under twenty-five years of
age. Natures that should still have been in the nursery for many a
year were stimulated to address the public and seek applause with work
that was merely tentative and disciplinary. The result was that, on
the one hand, one half of the most original and promising minds racked
themselves to death years before they should have faced life, whilst on
the other a juvenile ideal was set before literature and art, and boys
and girls became their chief audience and most powerful arbiters. They
felt heartily ashamed of that singular stage in their development, and
were glad to have accidental fire come to their assistance in huddling
its products out of sight.
One of the first instincts they evolved after the series of purgations
was the desire to conceal within their minds what was crude or mere
process in thinking, and, still more, what was mere waste product and
refuse of the mind. Instead of being eager to speak out or publish
all that came into the thoughts, bad or good, they grew shy of public
exhibition of their projects and schemes till they had been shaped by
long years of thinking and experimenting, and criticised and checked
by the caution and wisdom of their fully matured nature. Publication
became the last resort of the mature and old instead of the first
ambition of the young, so afraid were they of exhibiting what might
be crude or offensive. Even in the give and take of conversation and
social intercourse they preferred long periods of silence to the
utterance of truisms and commonplaces. The trivial and conventional
in speech, as in life, was what they abhorred, as revealing an
intellectual nature on the road back to the infertility and
childishness of barbarism, the elaborate mechanism of thought whizzing
round without connection with what represents work.
But now the book of Human Transparency proposed as an ideal to eject
from the system every process of thought and feeling that they might
blush to let others see. If the nature was made transparent then would
it become a self-preserving instinct to develop their natures in this
direction. Everything crude or false or offensive, that might begin to
show itself in their minds, would be at once suppressed before it got
headway, instead of having to be slowly reasoned out of existence with
the aid of the moral instincts. This accomplished, the race would be
able to take another great leap forward. The advance of their processes
of thought and feeling to the level of the former results of them would
give them a higher point of view from which to look forth into the
future.
A mediate book, soon afterward produced by one of the Loomiamo,
supplied one of the steps towards the consummation of this ideal.
It was the book of Ethereal Nutriment. It took as basis a former
discovery, the liquefaction of air, and showed how, by similar
methods, the medium that filled interstellar space could be made
available in the halls of nutriment and medication, and how it could
be manufactured in such a concentrated form as to allow of its being
poured along conduits and imbibed by the human organs through the mouth
and nostrils, just as air was. For some time the atmosphere had been
distilled in liquid form, and supplied to the houses of the citizens
absolutely rid of all impurities. Nay, it had been made a fountain of
power, transmissible to long distances, and available in a form that
was easily carried. Compressed and liquefied, it rapidly returned to
the gaseous form as soon as the pressure began to be removed. And the
re-equilibrising of the liquid to the expansion of the surrounding
air had been made to supply vast quantities of power in the centre
of force. The new book proposed to find in the compression and
liquefication of the ether an infinite fountain of force that would
enable their civilisation to progress at an ever-accelerating pace.
But the most immediate effect proposed by the book was to enable the
Limanorans to etherealise their bodies by introducing the liquefied
ether into their dietary. The result would be that the tissues would
grow more diaphanous. They had already been able to transport some of
the universal medium in their anchored vacuum faleenas from the outer
margin of the atmosphere to their laboratories, and now they had been
able to find it in their manufactured vacuums. With the enormous power
they had in Rimla they could easily compress it into forms that would
touch the senses, and enter into the blood and the formation of the
tissues. As the medium of light and magnetism it was almost certain
to make the human body more translucent than it had ever been. All the
tissues, even the osseous, had always been pervious to light, but many
of them not apparently so to the untrained human eye. Recently their
lavolans had shown that by means of certain kinds of luminous rays the
human system gave up its most hidden secrets to the human eye. But once
they were able to chemicalise and compress the luminiferous ether into
palpable form, and to mingle it with the volatile food that could be
taken into their bodies as they breathed, there would be no need of
lavolans or other apparatus to see the inner movements of the human
system.
The sanitary effects of this advance would be no mean result. The
medical council would have much of their time set free for their
ever-pressing investigations; they would not be needed for the
diagnosis of deteriorative symptoms in the tissues; each individual
would be able, by the aid of magnifying mirrors to examine for
himself what was going on in any part of his system; and every man
had sufficient physiological and medical knowledge to understand the
beginnings of all the ordinary diseases, and, if he recognised them, to
prescribe for himself the hall in Oomalefa that he should frequent in
order to check them. Now it would be only the symptoms of obscure or
new diseases or deteriorations of the system that the medical elders
would have to diagnose. And thus they would have great tracts of their
life to devote to new discoveries, and medical science was certain to
advance more rapidly.
Another sanitary effect of the new permeability to light would be to
render the human body less open to diseases either known or unknown.
For it had long been a commonplace of medical science that sunlight
reduced the vitality, and therefore the virulence, of all noxious
microbes; after nightfall their power increased tenfold. Wherever
the sun’s rays could not reach by day, there diseases multiplied and
festered. And one of the chief reasons why, in their far past history,
incurable maladies were generally internal, was that sunshine could
not get to the parts affected except in a feeble and straggling way.
The fact that they had fixed themselves deeply in the tissues before
they could be observed, and that it was difficult to get at their roots
without cutting a passage in to them had been generally accepted as
the explanation of their frequency and deadliness. But it had been one
of the most important discoveries of the new era after the purgation
period, that pure oxygen and pure sunlight were the most medicative
of all things, and that the nearer any affected part could get to
them the sooner it healed. The new book of Ethereal Nutrition pointed
out that one of the results of rendering the human system easily
pervious to light would be to rid its internal parts of all trace of
immedicability; sunlight, permeating the inner organs and tissues,
would make any noxious microbes that might lodge in them innocuous.
The reciprocity of suggestion and discovery was never more saliently
exemplified than by one of the less immediate results pointed out by
this book as likely to flow from the attainment of its ideal. Volatile
ether-food, gradually introduced into the halls of nutrition and
gradually increased, would, step by step, bring the human organs to
adapt themselves to existence outside of the atmosphere of the earth.
For a long time they would be amphibious, with organs adapted to both
aërial and ethereal life. Even as it was, the human body revealed in
it traces of having already passed through an amphibious stage. There
were in the neck glands that were the remains of gills, which must have
once belonged to an aquatic habit; besides, there was the last vestige
of an eye in the back of the neck still extant in the pineal gland, and
this could have been of use only when the ancestor of man was passing
through the stage of a water-animal which must watch his enemies from
the surface, his body being submerged and out of sight. Step by step he
abandoned the water for a littoral, and even at first arboreal, habit;
the result was that the gills came to be unused and closed up, and the
upward-looking eye was useless in a head that was held upright and
could be turned swiftly in all directions; still man retains the memory
of the aquatic stage of his ancestry in the ease with which he learns
to swim, and in his love of a life on the sea; whilst an occasional
birth in more barbarous tribes with the webbed toes of a water-animal
still showing reveals his ancestry atavistically.
What was to hinder him, now he had the mastery of himself and his
destiny, becoming again amphibious in a new way? Without guidance of
his own, driven only by the forces of nature, he had risen out of the
waters that once covered the earth, and taken to dry land; for a long
period he had been able to live at will in either of two elements, air
and water. Where lay the difficulty in making himself again capable
of living in two elements, in air and in the luminiferous ether? In
prehistoric times nature had worked her evolution in his system by long
and slow stages. But in Limanora progress had become lightning-swift,
and would again and again increase its pace. For there man had taken
command of nature, and made her accommodate her step to his stride. She
was his willing servant, nimble as her own electric flash. He could