Limanora the island of progress
and mapped out a new sphere for science and thought. It was one of
the greatest honours therefore that the community could bestow upon
any pair, to select them a third or fourth time for parenthood or
proparenthood.
That the two sexes were both needed for the training of a young nature
to maturity was one of the most unhesitating conclusions from their
experience. In spite of the obliteration of all demarcating lines
between the sexes as to privileges and duties in the state, there was
nothing more clear to them than the permanence of the distinction in
their natures, as far as life upon earth was concerned; it had grown
less and less marked as the ages went on, and as maternity came to be a
mere episode in the long life of a woman, yet it remained as real as it
ever had been, passing into every phase of the nature, imaginative and
intellectual as well as emotional and physical, and becoming salient
and striking in the procreative era of life. As the animal part of the
nature fell into greater subordination, it needed keener powers of
observation to note the difference; yet it had left its permanent mark
upon the spirit.
To women was assigned work which required slow continuous effort;
for although they are more emotional, they are also by nature more
passive. The temperature of the female in all species is lower than
that of the male, and in human beings this means less energy and less
explosiveness; the woman is ever building up her system by storing
sources of energy, the man is ever using up his stores of energy in
impetuous outbursts of work. The generations of active employment in
which Limanoran women had been engaged, and the complete cessation of
the warlike pursuits that used to fill the lives of the men, had not
obliterated these distinctions. The women were still best at sedentary
occupations; whatsoever needed continuity and singleness of purpose
was given to them; for they have more unity of nature, and can settle
down for long periods to an investigation that would be monotonous to a
man, and are on the whole longer lived. So any investigation that was
uninvolved, but needed intensity of application on the part of one mind
for more than an average lifetime, was handed over to a woman; and
where the work of several was required for a generation or two, a woman
was always one of the workers in order to preserve the continuity.
In the imaginative families it was generally the men who did the most
striking work. Their bursts of energy enabled them to go by leaps.
They pioneered best into the future; they found the new principles for
advance in invention and discovery. The women gathered the material
for the sciences; the men invented and applied the great hypotheses
leading to new laws and new advances; they also showed the way in
progress, and tended rather to revolution than to rest. Whatsoever
needed artistic talent was theirs to do. In physical work, wherever
rapidity of movement and fitful application of torrents of energy were
required, the men took the lead; for they were small and active, having
now no distinctively muscular employments, like war and hunting, to
develop their muscle and bone exceptionally. The women, as naturally
accumulative instead of prodigal of energy, were larger and more
passive, and took up departments of labour that needed long and gentle
persistence. In counsel they were the conservative element, and in
all the assemblies but those that superintended investigation into
the future, invention, and discovery, that is, in all councils of
judgment, they slightly predominated in numbers. If they had wholly
guided the community, it would have stood still or moved at a rate that
would not have been noticeable in the generations of men. Happily the
masculine imagination dominated the civilisation, and hence it was ever
quickening its pace. But the women were no less useful in preventing
revolutionary progress, and in making the men wait and meditate over
the leaps they thought of taking.
It was not so much sex-function itself, as the impress it had left
upon the natures of the people that supplied a rough-and-ready
classification of types. A few of the women who were especially fitted
to be mothers were assigned to the maternal profession; their natures
seemed moulded to bring forth strong, healthy, unexhausted offspring,
fit for the duties of a new advance. There were other women who because
of their nervous vigour and inclination to exhaust their best energies
in work were not the most suitable for the production of children,
and yet by their sympathy and wisdom and love of the young seemed
especially created to bring up children as citizens; these adopted the
proparental profession. A third type of women were, on account of their
quick, irritable vigour and their super-emotional temperament and lack
of self-control, considered incapable of either function except on rare
occasions; and they formed the largest class, the worker-women, rarely
generative and always uneducative; they were engaged in the sedentary,
acquisitive, and continuous employments that demanded no great strain
on the imagination or the creative powers or the muscular vigour. But
none in the community were wholly freed from daily active work both
of body and of mind, not even those whose lives were given up to the
profession of maternity. Amongst men all were eligible as fathers; for
though there were always a special diet and training for prospective
paternity, these might be enforced simultaneously with the usual work.
Not all, however, were called on to exercise paternity; it was a rare
and little-noticed duty, and left small impress on the community. But
there were some who on account of their great wisdom and self-control
and lofty character were specially fitted for the rearing of youth,
and these formed the male proparental profession. These had their other
duties to perform in the family and to the state as well as to attend
to their individual households, but they were dedicated to the guidance
of posterity; their eyes were more on the future than even those of
the imaginative families. The rest of the men formed the class of male
workers at creative and imaginative work, and at muscular work that
required agility and concentration of force.
Of the numbers in these different classes the elders had full control.
They knew all the physiological laws governing the proportions of
the sexes and types, and by their dietary and training and medical
precautions they could fill the exact number of vacancies to be
anticipated in any class. For instance, if one was needed for the
profession of maternity, almost all the energy of both parents was
spent for a time in nutrition; they were isolated from most activities,
surrounded with what in other civilisations would be called luxuries,
and encouraged to spend their time in resting. So, if a male worker
were required, the man and woman selected for parenthood were active
workers themselves; and during their generative period their nutrition
was reduced to the minimum for sustaining their energies, whilst they
were encouraged to put all the activity they were capable of into their
daily work. Their manuals of guidance in the difficult work of filling
prospective vacancies in the community were full of minute detail which
was based upon long experience carefully recorded and classified, and
still more upon scientific experimentation in human embryology and
physiology.
It was one of the earliest conquests of the future that they made
after the great purgation, this guidance of the sexual and other
characteristics of embryos. They knew the exact stage at which any
new organ or function appeared, for they had first of all studied the
moulding of embryos in animals; and afterwards, by the aid of their
new photographic and microscopic apparatus that revealed the minutest
detail of any part or movement within the living human body, they were
able to study the effect of changes in exercise or diet or mode of
life upon the development of the human embryo. Nothing was neglected
to make the knowledge complete and scientific, nothing that might help
to turn the science of embryology into a creative art. The invention
of instruments which could take the senses of the investigators close
to any internal item of the living system had made an era in the
history of physiology, and cancelled the necessity of anatomy as its
handmaid. The most microscopic change in the structure of any tissue in
the innermost part of the body became patent to the eye or the ear or
the electric sense of research. Embryology had thus become almost an
exact science; even the physiological side of it had attained to such
exactitude as to make it practically an art. The medical elders could
investigate the health of the embryo and guide its development as well
as in the case of the full-grown child.
They were thus able to formulate a complete art for the moulding of the
unborn to the purpose the elders indicated as best for the future of
the race. Training and education in the truest sense of the words began
long before birth. Of course it had begun with the father and mother,
if not with the ancestry; but the directly plastic art of fashioning
the character began with the first appearance of life. The elders would
have blamed themselves if any sign of gross atavism had shown itself
in a youth, now that they had full command of his prenatal history, and
for generations retrogression had become an impossibility in the race.
In former ages it had been one of the most difficult moral problems to
fix the responsibility of a man’s crimes; somewhat was due to his own
choice; but part, they saw, was due to his ancestry, and still more to
his parents, not only in their training of him, but in their prenatal
preparation if they were not careful to exclude gross or criminal ideas
and emotions from their systems whilst he was in process of formation.
Now they were able to apportion the blame with ease if anything went
astray in the character of the child. They were therefore minutely
careful in the precautions they took not only in the half-century of
education, but in the choice of ancestry and in the guidance of the
prenatal development. To prospective parents the character of the
future offspring was as a conscience to their daily conduct and method
of life. Every thought, emotion, act, was guided by a sense that it
would affect the embryo of the coming citizen.
The newest addition to their list of sciences, the physiology of
ethics, put into their hands one of the most effective aids to
this plasmic art of character, prenatal and postnatal. With their
instruments of investigation into the human tissue ever advancing in
refinement and power, they were able at last to localise the physical
centre and equivalent of each emotion; and thus having mapped out
the brain and the nerve-centres, they were able to watch with their
new modifications of the lavolan the palpitating life and movement
in each part with the strong manifestations of its special feeling.
Step by step they found their way towards the nosology of these
centres, and classified every disease that turned an emotion from
right to wrong. Whenever a Limanoran child became afflicted with an
evil or retrogressive passion, he was hurried off to the ethical
laboratory, and the nerve-centres of his emotional and moral nature
were microscopically photographed as they worked; a complete history
of his tissues was recorded on irelium-slips, and, after he had gone,
the investigators could run these through the recording instrument
and study the phases of the feeling or passion at leisure. The bursts
of mistaken emotion were livingly photographed with the greatest
care, and afterwards the records were watched through their most