Limanora the island of progress
But there were other and wider differences than this I have stated.
Though all phases of the civilisation were reviewed in relation to
the future, generally one phase took prominence and gave character
to each Imanora. In the earlier periods, after the purgations, the
physiological and biological sciences and arts predominated; for the
elders were most anxious then to bring the physical basis of their
life up to the level of quickening progress. Then came the periods
specially devoted to advance in chemistry and physics and the other
sciences and arts that gave them new power over the outside world. One
century was the great astronomical period, when the imagination of the
race stretched out with yearning to other stars. Another was the great
inventive era, when it seemed as easy as a dream to make new machines
which should open out wide prospects of additional conquest over nature
and humanity.
In the more recent centuries ethics had again come to the front,
new points of view having been shown by the great discoveries and
inventions of many centuries. The first Imanora after the series of
purgations was complete had been predominantly ethical. The race had
bent its attention so exclusively upon the crimes and vices which had
hindered their advance for ages, that they could think of almost no
other development than the ethical. The elders had been investigating
for years little else than the defects in the moral nature, their bases
in the physical system, and the methods of remedying them. They had
come to the conclusion after all their researches that nothing could
be done for the cure of the minor vices till the most vicious and
defective characters had been cleared out. A systematic purification
of the commonweal must precede attempts at moral reform. Most of the
purgations were managed by wise and cautious diplomacy; the bait of
more than their share of the wealth of the island in portable form,
and the chance of a new country in which to indulge their vice to
license, induced them to ship off to a distance. Only a few needed
forcible measures to make them remove. The lying and hypocritical, the
licentious, the envious and jealous, the boastful and the epicurean,
the religiously intolerant and superstitious, readily seized the
opportunity of seeking a country where they might make their own laws
and shape their customs to suit their special weakness. The warlike
and murderous and the thievish and socialistic thought they could
force a still better bargain; they had strong inner doubts whether
they would be likely to have as fine an arena for their talents in a
new country, and whether they would make the best companions for one
another. An increase of the inducement had little effect on them; they
felt that their special vices would lose half their attraction when
removed from the presence of the contrasted and shrinking virtues.
Much of the pleasure of a murder or a theft lay in the necessity for
its concealment, and the ingenuity required to evade punishment.
The occupations ceased to be fine arts as soon as they became the
occupations of the whole community. To these criminal sections of the
race force had to be applied before they left the island; it had to be
a policy of deportation.
It was little wonder that for a century after absorption in such work
the civilisation of Limanora was essentially ethical. To rid themselves
of every trace of the detestable vices of which they had just seen the
worst specimens deported over the horizon, became the one aim and ideal
of the now-expurgated people. Development seemed nothing more than
greater ease and habitualness in the virtues. To be purer, truer, more
tolerant, more generous, more gentle and modest and loving, was their
one idea of progress. The outlook from the first Imanora was towards
an ideal of such benignity and kindliness as would make all personal
relations easy and happy beyond the conception of other nations.
The first few decades of the next century gave them exhilaration in
the pursuit of this aim. They took the greatest delight in eradicating
the seedling ferocities of their savage past. Spite, rancour, disdain,
pitilessness, vanity, surliness, ingratitude, partiality, want of
candour, acerbity, meanness, and all uncharitableness were rigorously
checked, and every thought or energy that might, when abused, tend in
these directions was finally mastered. It was a delight to help one
another in the crusade against these petty defects. Nothing seemed so
noble or progressive as to spend every leisure moment on cultivating
the generous attitude towards one another.
But they soon saw the limits of such a progress. The virtues became
easy and common to all and it grew difficult to find new ethical worlds
to conquer. Most of them indulged too eagerly in introspection and some
turned morbidly self-critical, finding defects where there were none.
Imagination became a factory of petty faults and vices. The result was
new and real faults, which threatened to maim their civilisation and
bar their further progress. They were painfully self-conscious, fearing
lest the eyes of a neighbour or comrade should discover in them germs
of moral disease which had escaped their own microscopic criticism.
They shrank from beginning any enterprise; they feared to come to
decisions or make resolves, lest they should be wrong. They tolerated
and even encouraged faults and defects in their friends which they
would have drastically eradicated from their own natures; they nursed
in pity and generosity weak characters and diseased systems into length
of life, and shrank from forbidding them parenthood and posterity.
They strained at gnats and swallowed camels and indulged in constant
casuistry. In short, the whole race fell into a chronic spiritual
invalidism and many of them were afflicted with moral hypochondria.
They felt the pulses of their souls daily and hourly, and were ever
haunted with the fear of the old vices returning on them, so losing
their masculine grit and self-command. Finally they threatened to
become a race of sinewless effeminates with nothing but spiritual
collapse and palsy before them.
It was clear that this microscopic introspection and moral unrest must
cease, if there was to be any real advance. They had already recognised
that ethics developed by stages, and that any attempt on the part of
a race to force it beyond the intellectual point of view which they
had reached only ended in temporary failure and retrogression. No new
moral outlook can be attained unless reason has ascended a higher
mount of vision. Revelation can never come without new achievement. A
fixed quantity of ethical knowledge in a nation is moral death, and to
systematise ethical maxims into an absolute code for all time is to
enslave the reason of the world. For what is the almost unattainable
ideal of one stage of racial development is the antiquated truism of
a later stage. Savage man compares ill in polity and moral code with
the republics of the bee and the ant, just as his engineering and
architectural skill are infantile beside those of the beaver. How
unprotective and even cruel he is to his aged and women and children,
compared with many animals! How unadvanced even the most civilised are
in truth and loyalty compared with the dog! How weak in the reasoning
that is based on the reports of the senses are men in general compared
with the wild animals! There is evidently an infinite variety of
stages in the ethical and intellectual development and vision of man,
as there is in those of the animals. The most advanced human beings,
just like the least advanced, are, in some points, lower than the
beasts. But man can, if he will, have mastery of his circumstances and
conditions, inasmuch as he can examine himself by reflection, and tends
to examine himself through self-consciousness. The power and tendency,
however, are only fitfully taken advantage of, and it is therefore at
long intervals that even the best races accelerate the pace of their
progress beyond that which nature herself indicates.
The elders, and through them the people, were persuaded that this
absorbing pursuit of ethical improvement must be abandoned. The
development of the physical system was the first distraction that they
thought of; and their bodies grew in muscular power, in grace of form,
and in litheness of movement. It was during this athletic period that
flight through the air was achieved; then, too, physiology and medicine
grew into real sciences and began to direct the evolution of physical
man, and the struggle against the hosts of microscopic parasites that
over-populate the elements and have to seek pastures in the human body.
It was in this era, too, that they mastered the secret of prolonging
life and began the series of experiments in food and other forms of
sustenance, and in heredity, which ended in giving them centuries
instead of decades to live.
It soon came to be noticed, however, that a new but analogous
hypochondria began to seize even the youthful athletes of the race.
There was too much direct attention paid to the state and development
of the body to be wholesome. Athletic egotism became rampant, and as
a result of it a scorn of intellectual pursuits. It was as truly a
diseased state of the human system as the moral invalidism with which
they had been afflicted in the previous era. Thews and sinews were
measured and examined with scientific minuteness. Muscular development
was appraised and applauded as moral qualities had formerly been.
The spirit began to be impoverished; the brain decreased in weight
and fineness of convolution. Athletic introspection was coming to be
as painful and masterful a disease as moral introspection had been.
Diet and exercise became the absorbing topics of daily conversation
and nothing was invented but machines for training the body. Most
palpable of all the consequences was the growth of arrogant gait and
rough manners, and this was the first symptom to call attention to
the new malady. It became clear to the elders that the worst form of
atavism, return to the savagery that is just above animalism, was
about to reappear, and with it would come weakened heart and lungs and
disordered digestion; for the new training overstrained all the organs,
and threw them into disrepair.
The conclusions drawn from these two experiences were that variety of
occupation was one of the first essentials of mental and bodily health,
and that absorption in the improvement of any part or section of the
human system induced disease both of mind and body; morality and health
are better cultivated as indirect aims of individual existence; they
defeat their own ends when they become egoistic or introspective. In
order to remedy the evils which were threatening the life of the state,
its framework was completely reformed. To every family and individual
was assigned an external work that would draw the thoughts away from
self for the greater part of the twenty-four hours; every mature member
of the community was expected to achieve something unconnected with
himself every day. Exercise merely for amusement was cut down to a
minimum, and in order to keep the body in full vigour, the centre of
force was organised, where every man and woman had to do so much useful
physical work in the round of the clock. The care of the health,
both mental and bodily, was handed over to the medical elders, who
were, first of all, the healthiest and healthiest-minded of the older
men of the nation. Watching for symptoms of disease in one’s system,
whether moral or corporeal, fell into oblivion, and the great era
of external achievement began. Specialisation of work was its chief
principle and the source of its success, but no one was allowed to fall