Limanora the island of progress
everyone into the knowledge and sight of his fellow-men, the rota of
physical exercise at the centre of force, the flight-drill, the general
meeting of the community, and the medical review. And every day and
almost every hour of the day communion of spirit could go on in the
magnificent baths, in the halls of recuperation, and in the valley of
memories. There was no lack of occasion to draw the Limanorans together.
But the other duty to the higher self was sacredly guarded and
fostered, especially in the earlier stages of life. One of the greatest
blunders they had to correct in their former civilisation had been
gregarious education. Large families had been one of the consequences
of a half-developed humanity, more kin to the animal world than to
the spiritual. The lower a living thing is in the scale of life the
more prolific it is, the more devoted to the mere function of keeping
its species alive. Unicellular organisms perpetuate their existence
by continual fission. Microbes become massive in their effects by
the countless myriads each is capable of producing. The higher the
organisation, the less is the energy that can be spared for generation,
and the more capable is the offspring when matured of ensuring its own
survival, of rising above and managing the laws of nature. Civilisation
has not advanced far when it acts by masses and needs masses to keep it
going. Then mere subsistence and procreation are the only purposes and
functions of most life. To feed, to reproduce, to die, that is their
history.
The Limanorans looked back to that stage of their development with a
shudder, so far in the mists and darkness of animalism did it seem.
Now one man of them was more able to do battle with nature and her
fecundity and her catastrophes than a hundred thousand of that olden
time, and not one hundred-thousandth of the generative power was
needed. Then but a poor fraction of the life-energy could be given up
to education. The offspring had to be trained in masses or have no
training at all. The parents were too busy earning the means of life
to mould their families, and had too many children to give heed to the
character of the individual. All the offspring were handed over to
professional trainers, who managed them in the mass, and who had to
work by the methods of nature with its myriad children through the law
of the survival of the fittest. They had to be handled like armies, and
the stricter the discipline, the better the result was supposed to be;
and where the people were counted in masses and moved in masses the
better it undoubtedly was for the survival of the state. Schools and
universities were a necessity of that far-back stage of civilisation;
they were the drill-sergeants of civil life, dragooning the young and
their ideas into accordance with the prevailing and accepted type. Too
much independence of character or thought or manner would have broken
the ranks and endangered the existence of the commonweal. But the chief
purpose of life on the world, the progress of the species, was ignored
in this devotion to mere persistence of the species. All variant germs
and elements that nature supplies in every individual it brings forth
were smoothed down or annihilated into uniformity. The type persisted
from century to century unchanged. Only by stealth or by audacity did
any new or alien element succeed in modifying the species; and when it
did succeed the modification was as often retrograde as progressive.
Therefore, in order to be secure from variation, public opinion
punished all habits that would lead to independence of character or
thought or feeling.
As soon as the great exilings had been completed, the Limanorans
recognised that the best chance of swift progress was the selection and
preservation of the finest variants in their character and thoughts.
They therefore abolished the profession of teacher, that manufacturer
of uniformity, and all schools and universities, hot-beds of
convention, worship of antiquity, and retrogression. They by no means
abolished education; they recreated it, intensified it, and made it the
chief function of the community. The whole time and energies of the
parents, or, as the case might be, of the proparents, were given up for
a period of from fifty to seventy years to the training and moulding
of each child. Nothing was left to nature or haphazard. And every new
tendency or faculty that was discovered in the pupil was recorded and
reported to the council of sages. It was discussed by them, and, if
judged to be hostile to the progress of the race, the parents were
assisted in eradicating it; if manifestly progressive, every means was
taken to make it grow; if doubtful in its results, it was submitted to
the community, and their instincts soon brought them to a decision.
Thus it was that their world was being continually renovated. Never was
an idea or method of action rejected simply because it was new. Every
opportunity of advance was seized and tested. Every suggestion of a new
direction of progress was investigated and followed out till it was
seen to be impracticable.
And, to prevent emphasising the old and outworn or reviving the past,
the young were isolated from one another; for, as the embryo records
in its growth the stages of animalism through which terrestrial life
passed upwards from the unicellular to the complex human organisation,
so the immature periods that come between infancy and full manhood
record human development, prehistoric as well as historic. The long
ages of primitive futility in presence of the powers of nature are
abbreviated into the helpless years of infancy. Prehistoric savagery
shows itself in various traces in the rebellious, adventure-loving,
omnivorous phase of boyhood. The first stages of civilisation appear in
the early years of puberty; its later stages in the approach to full
manhood. The imperfect past ever springs up like weeds amid the growth
of the new life, and will choke it if encouraged. And nothing, they
held, gave such persistence to the evils and imperfections of the past,
thus appearing in early life, as the gregariousness of youth. Nothing
had done so great a wrong to the race, or had so hindered its progress,
as their former education system with its schools and universities. To
throw men in the immature stages of their life into close intercourse
was to confirm their immaturities, to encourage atavism, to make the
past tyrannise over the future. As long as their old system continued,
their civilisation was enslaved to the times that were gone, and
imagination deified the world as it had been.
Next to their exiling policy, their educational reform was one of the
most important starting-points of their new and swiftly progressive
civilisation. I was astonished at the length and frequency of my
isolations during the period of my training. For years I saw few or
none but the two proparents to whose care I had been handed over,
even after I had been introduced to other sections of the community.
In the process of my advance towards Limanoran habits and powers, I
was often left for days together to my own thoughts, and yet in the
presence of some supervising power that seldom made itself definite
to any of my senses or even to my mind. Throughout these intervals of
solitude, I felt continual suggestion of noble thought and emotion
come to me from my surroundings, the divine music that rang so softly
and variedly amid the silences, the deep meaning of the arts that
filled every corner of my life, the magnetic energy that rayed forth
from unknown centres upon my spirit. The finest impulses of my nature
became dominant in me at these times and grew in strength. I came to
recognise the power that such solitude gave to character. Without it I
should have inclined to become the echo of my tutors, even though they
were ever impressing upon me the necessity of thinking and acting for
myself. They were so noble, so far above the men and women I had met
or heard of or read of that it was a hard task not to fall down and
worship them.
Once I had the misfortune to question the benefits of prolonged
seclusion. I urged the praises of friendship so common in the
literature of my country, and spoke with great fervour of the pleasures
of social intercourse, the keen emulation on the path of development
it stirred, and the wide influence which the finest characters had. I
painted in glowing colours all that refined society might become,--the
witty Parisian salons of the eighteenth century, the artistic circles
in the fifteenth-century Italian republics, the brilliant association
of thoughtful men in some of the London literary sets of the nineteenth
century. What could be nobler than such intellectual brilliancy of
intercourse as is recorded in the biographies of the great men and
beautiful and refined women of the West! Then I turned to the happiness
of children and youth together in the gardens or woods or on the
shores of the ocean, and their sadness when they moped alone in their
rooms or at their books. Companionship was the very life of childhood
and youth. Did not solitary musings even in maturity produce morbid
self-introspection? The intercourse, even with superiors and elders,
was somewhat unwholesome for the young spirit,--it crushed spontaneity
and naturalness and confidence in one’s inner self.
I worked myself up to a climax of eloquence, and thought that I had
demolished all possibility of defence of their system. But I had
succeeded only by ignoring the vices and weaknesses of society. These
wise men quietly and almost unconcernedly took me behind the gaudy
theatrical curtain of the world, and smiled to think how like their old
social ideals had been to those I had described, and to see the same
vanity and posturing in European refinement as in their own evil past.
They mourned over my blindness of mind in failing to look through the
gorgeous transparency at the tawdry vulgarities behind. Following it
through many forms and stages of life, animal and human, they showed me
the law of social intercourse; not the highest but the lowest emotional
and moral level of a herd or circle do the natures and minds of its
members ultimately reach, however lofty the aspirations of some of them
may be. A company in which free utterance is the rule is soon mastered
by base interpretation of the noblest lives, and it is to guard against
the effects of this hydrostatic law of ethics that churches and temples
have been erected. There the awe of a higher power and the conventions
of worship conceal the inevitability of the law, and save the shyer
natures for brief periods from the evil influence of the bold. The most
masterful religions have always provided permanent refuges for the
finer spirits who dread conflict with the unscrupulous wit or power of
the world, and who know how in a struggle of speech or action or even
pure thought the wielder of the fouler weapons wins. It has been the
rule throughout civilised history that the greatest characters, if
they cling to moral principle, at last withdraw into solitude partial
or complete, and become the sages of the world; if they remain in
action and succeed, the necessity for further success drives them to
accept the moral level of the lowest they have to struggle with; for if
immoral men of less intellectual power overcome them, defeat means to
them ultimate exhaustion of the soul; nothing bleaches the faculties
and reduces them to the common level like failure after failure.
However great a hero may be to begin with, success in action closes his
moral career, whilst failure closes his intellectual. To die in his
first great victory is the truest happiness that can befall him.
In fact the Limanorans came ages before to see that all public life