Limanora the island of progress
powerful clirolans. Then experiments were made in finding remedies
which would check the growth of the disease in the tissue. At first
the therapeutics of morality were merely empirical; they tried the
remedies which had been successful with the common physical ailments
of humanity, and found most fail, a few succeed. By degrees they
discovered that the most powerful antidote against the moral poison lay
in the character of the operator; wherever the ethical investigator
had led a nobler life, the cure was more rapid and effective; wherever
the attendant had more development of intellect than of lofty moral
principle, the patient lingered and often relapsed. Yet there were
other prophylactics of a more material kind that greatly aided in the
recovery of the patient. Hygienic measures and courses were prescribed
for preventing the recurrence of the disorder; and at last something
not unlike a science of the art of moral healing seemed to emerge out
of the empiricism and chaos.
This culminated in the establishment of an ethical sanatorium, which
was in reality a children’s hospital for obstinate moral diseases.
No mature or half-mature Limanoran had for ages shown symptoms of a
relapse upon any ancestral or barbaric ethical code, and the mild moral
ailments lasting for only a few hours or days were easily managed
by the parents or proparents. Gentle influence, or at most gentle
discipline, was all that was needed to dislodge the evil spirit, or if
that did not succeed, magnetic remedies were applied to the part of the
nervous centres affected.
Should the moral defect still hold out obstinately against all
remedies, the patient was removed to the hospital for treatment. There
were collected together as moral physicians and nurses the wisest and
noblest personalities of the race, who applied all their therapeutic
power to the centre that was supposed to be the source of the disease.
But the centre had been scientifically examined and fixed by the
ethical investigators, who reproduced the parts affected and their
symptoms in greatly magnified forms, and suggested the various physical
remedies that would aid the sanative influences of the physicians
and nurses. The child was isolated from circumstances and conditions
tending to reinforce the moral poison; and his better nature was
invigorated and encouraged, so that it might be able to throw off the
germs of the malady.
Within recent times the ethical investigators had made great advances
in their science. The immediate stimulus of the progress was
accidental, as so often had been the case, or in other words it had
come from outside their recognised spheres of causation. An epidemic
of deceit had almost simultaneously seized upon the children of the
community, in spite of the solitary method of training adopted. Boys
and girls who had not seen each other for months were on the same day
impelled to habits of concealment, even when they were in the stage of
development that corresponded to the ravening fury and open warfare of
the barbaric past. Nothing in their ordinary methods of research could
furnish a cause for the outbreak. They searched the general condition
of the previous moral health of the children, and found it excellent.
None of the patients had come near each other for long periods; none
of them had shown any symptoms of the disorder before the epidemic had
appeared.
They were driven to some hypothesis quite outside the limits of their
usual sphere, for they saw that there was something uncommon in the
occurrence. Beginning to suspect that the germs of the disease had
come from other regions, as had so often happened, they increased the
powers of their magnifying apparatus by means of photography, and
invented more delicate aids to the investigation of the nerve-centres
than they had ever used before. On watching the part in which they had
localised the physical equivalent of deceit, they found signs that the
presence of the minutest foreign life was disturbing the nerve-tissues.
In the moving microscopic photographs and electrographs of the centre
they could detect the growth of a new type of microbe, inflaming
and interfering with the nerves of the part. Afterwards they found
some specimens of the disturbers in the atmosphere, and were able to
cultivate them for investigation and experiment. Soon they accumulated
a large enough quantity of the débris to apply to the cultures
themselves, and in every case it seemed to prove a steriliser; what the
minute life had used up and thrown off acted as a poison and destroyer.
By means of the medicine that they manufactured from it they were able
to annihilate or eject the disturbers of the nerve-centre of truth in
the patients. But in curing the part affected the moral equilibrium of
the children was upset. The bio-chemical families applied themselves to
the problem, and soon succeeded in isolating the medicative elements
from the injurious.
Thus a new and efficient method of treatment was introduced into the
ethical sanatorium. Chambers were reserved for sublimating the drug,
and thither children were sent if any obstinate form of deceit appeared
in them. And by means of the sterilised form of it they fumigated the
child’s quarters in any household, whenever signs of a return of the
epidemic appeared. The ethical investigators proceeded on the new path
thus opened up to them and were in time able to describe and classify
the microbes of moral epidemics and their antidotes. After some years’
toil they supplied the ethical sanatorium with a complete scientific
pharmacopœia, for at least all the grosser forms of vice, all the
offences against the moral codes that had been atavised or thrown into
the ancestral past.
The nerve-centres concerned with these offences were easy to find and
localise; so the minute life that interfered with such centres was
studied till it yielded its secrets to science. But it was a more
difficult task for the new scientific art of therapeutic ethics to
trace out the physiology of the newer moral codes and to discover a
cure for the maladies which hindered their complete adoption into the
Limanoran human system. The moral offences they had now to deal with
were sluggishness of the higher faculties of man, acts that dragged
the thoughts downwards, dominance of a physical need, concessions to
mere nature as against the highest knowledge of nature, excesses of
emotion or disturbances of the mental equilibrium by passion, devotion
to the past, superstition, stagnancy of belief, efforts to base belief
on unreason or ignorance, faith in a moral code as the terminus of
human ethics, or in a state of human scientific knowledge that was
omniscient. Step by step the ethical investigators found their way
to the nerve-centre that was disturbed when any one of these faults
appeared in a man; and after long years of research and experiment they
were able to add to their pharmacopœia the antidotes to these maladies
or weaknesses.
They would have thought the basis of existence irrational, if they had
persuaded themselves that ethics was unprogressive, whilst all other
things in the universe were subject to the law of evolution. A moral
code could be as easily superseded as a polity or a type of society. At
one time no race could see beyond the moral codes of barbaric life that
recognised no evil in treachery or revenge. Some at last advanced to
the moral code of the warrior, which based every rule of life upon the
idea of honour. Later still the civilised races of the world adopted
the moral ideal of the priest, which could find nothing good beyond
the limits of its special ecclesiastical forms. One by one these had
been antiquated and Limanoran civilisation had now found as the basis
for its moral code the principle of the cosmos, that of evolution. To
advance, to raise his system higher, to evolve its possibilities, was
the first duty of man as understood by the Limanorans of this later
age. To see beyond their present horizon was their ideal. They would
rather march forward into the darkness than stand still or retrograde
in light. To know clearly and definitely the possibilities that
lay before them, and to be able to choose the best of them was the
primary and fundamental maxim of their ethical code. All others were
corollaries of it.
If they had any unreasoned, unreasoning, and authoritative monitor
within them making for all that was right, in short any conscience,
it was now the prophetic voice of the ideals that they were still
to reach. Ages before it had ceased to be a voice out of the past.
Before the great purgation of the island half of their education
and literature had been based upon the literatures of two ancient
peoples, to whose conquests and legacies of energy and thought they
had fallen heir. They now shuddered at the pollution that these used
to communicate to the minds of their youth. The ethics running through
them belonged to a stage of civilisation that had been long antiquated,
and embodied ideals now far beneath them. The heroes and wisest men
were recorded in them as having done deeds with applause that the most
atavistic of their children would be ashamed to mention. Whatever
wisdom or nobleness they might otherwise teach, it would be completely
neutralised by the taint of vices which were approved or counted as
venial peccadilloes. To submit their youth to such pollution for the
sake of the problematic refinement they might gain from the books was
to do the greatest wrong a civilisation could commit, to prostrate its
own ideals before those of a vanished and barbaric past. Out with the
exiles went every trace of those old literatures; and the isle of liars
and the isle of lechers had taken them to their bosoms, with the result
that they had to adopt lying and impurity as their standards of life.
To return upon any past was to reject with recklessness the advantages
that it had gained and handed on to the centuries between. But to
adopt with deliberateness a past steeped in the grossest impurities,
and honouring intrigue and hypocrisy, was to commit moral suicide.
It was only in the immature that conscience, or the future invisibly
shepherding the present, was either needed or existent. They had
pitfalls and dangers out of the savage past to avoid, and an unreasoned
instinct was an essential to their development as an ever-present
guide, authoritatively bending their steps this way and that. This
moral and instinctive anticipation of the future, though mysterious
in its origin to the young whose conduct it moulded, was in reality
no mystery; it came from the magnetism of the wisest and best of the
elders; the ideal these saw in front of them and held out as the
immediate goal of the race, passed sympathetically and magnetically
into the moral and intellectual atmosphere of the island. The mature
knew whence the influence came, and grasped it rationally. But it was
round the young as a subtle inspiration and halo that came they knew
not whence; nor dared they question it or disobey its injunctions,
lest some evil should entrap them. When they came to maturity, they
learned the origin of the mysterious voice within, not to disregard its
monitions, but to reason them out and revise them by the light of the
advancing ideals of the race and to know that it changes and grows like
everything in the cosmos.
One of the first aims and maxims of their polity was to let their
citizens on reaching maturity think all through their lives for
themselves. The first guaranty of this freedom was rationality, the
power of tracing back every act and feeling and thought to the primary
principles of existence, combined with the sense of responsibility
for the future of the race. There was no repression, no prohibition;