Limanora the island of progress
into excessive specialism, such as would atrophy all but one set of
faculties and energies. No part of the body or mind was left without
daily or weekly exercise. The elders mapped out the various types of
intellectual and physical work from which a man or woman might select
to fill leisure time. Everyone had a large choice within a limited
number of kinds of work, generally kinds of work which were dissimilar
to his special employment. If it were left to a man to choose his own
type of distractions, he might select that which would feed high the
sides of his nature he most used, and atrophy those that most needed
development; for ease of application is an important factor in his
choice of exercise and amusement, and might become too dominant.
It was not in order to assimilate the bases of the natures of the
community that this limitation of leisure employments was adopted.
On the contrary, one of the subordinate aims of the elders was to
introduce as great a variety as possible into the talents, faculties,
and tendencies of the race. Equality, and still more similarity, of
members of a community, they well knew from the laws of nature meant
stagnation if not complete national death. Throughout the cosmos it
was the unequal degree to which various bodies and existences shared
in different types of energy that produced the unstable equilibrium we
call life. The disparate masses of the planets induced those currents
of influence we call gravitation, one of the greatest sources of power
in our world. The differences in temperature between the sun and the
planets make it of such vast importance as a source of heat and energy
to them, and it is the difference of two bodies as to electric state
that induces currents of electricity between them. As soon as there
is equilibrium of all the atoms or bodies or existences within a
certain sphere of influence there ceases to be movement in it and death
supervenes; and if all bodies and existences in the cosmos had an equal
and similar share of all its elements and forces, it would be dead.
The Deity himself, the sum and source of all life, must, as an eternal
existence, have unending variety.
The law of the universe is the law of the political and moral world.
There can be no life where there is complete stable equilibrium, that
is, where every member of a community is exactly similar to every
other member in privileges. Currents of influence cease. Impetus and
motive vanish. Desire and yearning and love disappear with passion and
ambition. The socialistic ideal is social and political death.
The everlasting flow of influence or power from point to point is the
essential condition of vigorous existence in a community or race,
therefore one of the chief subsidiary aims of the directors of Limanora
was the creation of variety and inequality of nature and position. This
made them adopt the family as the unit in the state, for in the family
there would be shelter for any new individual talent, and heredity
would cherish and increase it as it handed it on. In the Western
states the influence of the family over its children ceases not long
after boyhood or girlhood, and the world soon puts them into the same
moulds as its favourite men and women; individuality and originality
in most are planed down by the recognised conventions. A longer
continuance of family life and influence would secure and strengthen
any new variations in a talent or tendency, till the character was
strong enough to stand by them as its own and defend them against the
criticism of aliens and strangers. Diversity in unity was the ideal of
family life in Limanora. The elders of a family watched with eagerness
for any modification of the special faculties or powers, and nursed it
with the most anxious care, if they decided that it would assist the
advance of the race, and the medical elders were ever suggesting the
proper cross for producing a new variety of the old talents. Indeed,
one of the most responsible duties of the council of elders was to
decide as to the matings and parenthoods of the community; in this lay,
they felt, the guidance of their destiny, the real germ of the future.
Thus and thus alone were they able to keep up that divergence of new
species which would ensure an ever-quickening flow of life in the race.
They had cut off by their policy of complete isolation most of the
stimulus that comes from alien rivalry. Such rivalry, they thought,
would be worse than none; for it would at last drive them to adopt
the means and weapons of their rivals, which they considered wholly
retrograde and evil. It would be not unlike a competition between
man and the wild beasts. Any kind of communication with those who
were below them in civilisation and deliberately unprogressive, was
certain to taint and drag down, and the strong consciousness of this
fact checked the natural tendency of such benignity as theirs towards
missionaryism.
At the same time they knew well that no people would ever advance
without competition and the struggle that ensues on competition. They
greatly encouraged variation and inequality within their state, but
were certain that this was not enough. There must be the knowledge, if
not the immediate presence, of another type of being, similar to their
own yet higher in some features, in order to stimulate advance. To
get this was the object of their system of couriers into space, both
mechanic and human. They were never weary of gathering in all possible
indications of higher intelligences in extra-terrestrial elements and
regions. For a long period they had been satisfied with the reports
of their idrovamolans, and other recorders of events which occurred
on the earth, out of reach of their unaided senses. But it gradually
pressed itself home upon them that the comedy of terrestrial existence
gave no stimulus to progress; it stirred their laughter, or scorn, or
indignation, or disgust too often to edify. Rare, indeed, was it to
witness a deed or phase of civilisation that gave them a new model, or
inspired them to higher life. It was, as a rule, degrading to watch
beings in their own shape waste their noble faculties on the cruelties
of war, the meannesses of commerce and industrialism, the pettinesses
of social intercourse, and the gross deceits and pretences of politics,
diplomacy, and public life.
Year by year the racial energy was drawn off from the spectacle of
terrestrial history. It grew less and less attractive, and the elders
came to the decision that it had almost better pass unnoticed by all
but the most mature and experienced. Thus it became the more necessary
to open up other spheres of stimulus and inspiration. The thoughts of
the race gravitated, first to other stars, then to the exuberant life
they found in interstellar space. For a time they thought that only in
other worlds could be found intelligences like their own to stimulate
them by their competition; and their intellectual energy was set upon
opening up intercourse with the inhabitants of these. The imaginative
families published book after book on the possibilities and means
of stellar intercommunication, and afterwards of stellar migration.
Astronomy and its subsidiary and allied sciences and arts for several
centuries outpaced all others in development. The world began to seem
narrow and prison-like, so eager was Limanoran thought after stellar
flight. All the conditions of voyaging through space were investigated,
all available means experimented on, all the possible routes and their
laws discovered. It seemed as if within a few centuries the round
of the earth would be spurned, and the nearest star colonised by
terrestrial beings.
The discovery of the varied life inhabiting the ether gave pause to
all such speculations and schemes. It was manifestly possible to find
stimulus from intelligences nearer than the other planets. Infinite
space, instead of being a desert strewn with the wrecks or embryos of
stars, is as full of life, and of the elements and nuclei of life, as
any world which spins through it. They had ever counted it as unlikely
that the life and the life-energy of the cosmos should be confined to
the star-dust strewn over it, or that its vast interstellar spaces
should be given up to nothing but the passage of rays from star to
star, cold and inhospitable to every form of existence. They felt it to
be more in accordance with the lavishness of nature that these spaces
should be life-crammed instead of life-proof. Why should life be unable
to adapt itself to the conditions of space, when it has been found to
adapt itself to the bewildering variety of conditions existing on the
surface of any one world at different stages of its development, and
even to the infinite variety of conditions that govern the countless
stars?
On the first discovery of life beyond the atmosphere they were led
by the medical investigators to think that it was merely embryonic,
waiting to colonise the worlds that pushed through it. But recent
reports and researches showed that the existences of interstellar space
were far beyond the rudimental stage. Beings as intricately organised
as themselves left impressions on their supra-aerial lavolans. They
grew more and more convinced that the senses which had evolved in them,
amid the gross atmosphere of the earth and with the gross feeding that
alone would suit terrene constitutions, were fit to detect no other
creatures than those developed under similar terrestrial conditions.
Their more recent and more refined developments of sensuous perception,
and still more their latest mechanical inventions, had brought them
within range of an infinity they had not dreamt of. Daily came in from
above the atmosphere reports that confirmed their old belief in the
vast and varied population of space. Beings, so constituted as never
to impress sight or hearing such as men had, yet fit to hold their own
with the noblest spirits that earthly imagination had ever conceived,
swam close to their atmosphere, close enough to leave their impress
on the sensitive films of their courier-instruments, close enough for
their own later-developed senses to perceive, if only these were more
exquisitely trained. What a vista of new stimulus the knowledge opened
up to their imaginations!
There was no more need of projects for stellar migration. Here were
beings loftier than themselves at the very gates of their senses,
possible sources of exalted, if not divine, influence. Out of them
would flow into this little island energy that would give measureless
impetus to its inhabitants. Who could place a limit to the nobleness
of the existences they might find in the ether, once they were on
this track, and were refining and ennobling the perceptive power of
their senses? There was no conceivable end to the ethical elevation
and development they might reach, now that they had pierced the prison
walls of the earth. The sublimer amongst their old beliefs were,
indeed, coming true in the fuller fruition of scientific discovery.
These they had long laid aside, lest they should be mere fancies
based upon illusion and delusion, when they saw the evil that the
perversions of them by churches and priests worked amongst men. Till
they discovered a sounder basis for them than faithmongers asserted
for their crude superstitions, they felt they must not entertain them
seriously or found action upon them; and over they threw them till they
should find their way to them again upon the solid ground of scientific
reason.
Now that they saw so wide a horizon before them they knew that they
need no longer seek stimulus in the races of men that they had left so
far behind them, and they rejoiced. For, though there were ever noble