Limanora the island of progress
the prerogative and duty of every man was to make himself fit to be
a law to himself. In former ages their ancestors used to talk of the
innocence of childhood; all that they meant was unconsciousness of
conventional emotions, ideas, phrases, and habits, and superiority
to them. They smiled at it as a temporary stage from which they
would soon pass into the restrictions of manhood and womanhood; and
only the greatest sages were able to work themselves free again from
conventions so far as to be moral and noble and yet to have the
innocence, the unperturbed vision and candour of the earliest years.
But now all men and women retained the naïve openness of childhood
and its artless simplicity; for they had no conventions to trammel
the freedom of spiritual movement, no prohibitions to make the will
shrink from origination or action. Even when childhood or youth was
checked in some mistaken career, the check was veiled in persuasion
and reasoning and a vision of the truth. The atmosphere of freedom
was an absolute essential for the full development of individuality;
and the guaranty that this freedom would never pass into license was
the fact that every mature man and woman had a noble aim, and that
the magnetism of the race was around everyone. None had to obtrude
the claims of his personality upon others; and none was abashed by a
sense of despair, or the feeling of insignificance. Humility was a
virtue needing no conscious cultivation; there was no occasion for its
appearance, for the place and merits of everyone were accurately gauged
and acknowledged by all. It was only the insignificance of all humanity
against the infinite, of the life of this world against cosmic periods,
that deeply impressed them, and rendered them weary of efforts so
feeble as those of human life. But the mood was brief in such sanguine
temperaments and agile natures. Action they knew to be exhilaration and
health and the building up of tissue and faculty.
All they wished to be sure of was that the action was to lead forward.
The test of its morality was this: did it make the human system
progress? How far did it tend to make the future better than the
present? Whether a thing was pleasant or not for the moment, had no
influence upon their choice of courses of action. That had been the
motive and guide of the barbarous past, the artist of its conduct, the
creator of its character. The civilisation of other periods and races
had meant only the development of needs. And the pure savage is ever
superior to civilised man in this sense; with his minimum of needs and
the wherewithal to satisfy them wherever he may find himself, he is not
so localised as even the wealthiest and most cultured man of the most
luxurious civilisations who is tied to his property and investments,
and is miserable unless in the one or two cities where he can indulge
his taste for luxury to the full. There was no such thing as luxury
in Limanora; everything that was brought into being was essential
for advance, for the final aim of the life. Not needs but ultimate
ends gave them their point of view, not desires but means, not rights
but duties. If there was anything that could stir them to greater
eagerness, it was the prospect of more work for the good of others;
if anything could be looked upon as a luxury amongst them, it was a
surfeit of work that contemplated a widening of the racial horizon. To
serve the future of all was their deepest longing. Far into the savage
past had faded the idea of servitude; and, as they looked into history,
there was nothing they were more thankful for than the disappearance
of such a necessity; for they considered the servant, especially if
slave, the despot of his master in moulding and pandering to his needs
and whims, and an evil despot too, as less advanced and less cultivated.
Among the things they most deeply abhorred was despotism. And the
worst despotism of all, they held, was the social, that which is
exercised daily and hourly, and from the vantage-ground of proximity;
the narrow scope and limited horizon make it all the more intense.
The most accursed of despotisms is the system of espionage; it wrecks
every chance of freedom and crushes originality, turning the race
back into crawling venomous things. It is a vain attempt at complete
spiritual repression and feebly assumes omniscience and omnipresence
on the part of the despots. Its only chance of success is a spiritual
society disciplined like an army and ruled by nothing but loyalty to
its superiors who base their authority on the assumption of intercourse
with supernatural omniscience and omnipresence; and its only chance of
continuance is grovelling prostration of all its subjects and possible
critics, in abject fear of unknown terror and of spies in the very
precincts of the heart, who can hear and interpret its every beat.
That was one of their hells, which they occasionally brought before
their imaginations in order to warn them against minute supervision and
interference. It was this that urged them on to complete transparency
of nature, so that their inmost thoughts and feelings might be open to
all. Ever since the liars had been thrust forth, one of the immediate
goals of their civilisation had become absolute truthfulness. Now that
this had been attained, a further goal was complete limpidity of the
human system. The wise elders had already been able to interpret what
passed in the heart or brain of a Limanoran; now the aim was to make
the sensuous garment of the soul diaphanous to the magnetic sense, if
not to the eyes of all. Of nothing in his whole system must a man be
ashamed, before he could endure such continuous confessional to his
fellows, and it was towards this goal that every Limanoran was now
consciously working.
The constant inspections and examinations by the elders might seem
to conflict with this horror of espionage and spiritual despotism.
But these were voluntary on the part of mature Limanorans; it was
one of their recurring pleasures to be able to submit their tissues
and faculties to the wise observation of the elders, and to gain the
advantage of their experience. Had it been felt as a despotism, it
would have been abandoned at once. With children and the immature it
was a matter of discipline; they were in the pre-purgation stages of
Limanoran history, and had to be in pupillage and under authority. As
soon as they were able to keep step with the advancing civilisation,
or in other words to be a law to themselves, they were allowed to
walk alone and without the trammels of guidance. It was the strenuous
aim of the elders and guides of the community to keep the atmosphere
of thought free. They were constantly reviewing and revising the end
and aim of existence in the light of the new developments of thought
and science; hence its form never became a hard dogma. They believed
in ultimate truth, but knew that nothing short of omniscience could
attain it. They were now and again getting glimpses of it, but fought
shy of expressing it in words, for everyone would know it to be only
a provisional expression. Language itself was a shifting mirage of
the mind, dependent on the point of view for its meaning and even
existence; and one of the most constant duties of the community was to
define and clarify it, and to free it from its ever-growing opaqueness
or nebulosity, and the fallacies that haunted it. One thing they never
hesitated about, but grasped with unerring instinct; and that was the
goal that they kept before them, or in other words the advance they
were eager to make. They hated all jesuitry, knowing that it meant
the suppression of spiritual freedom by what merely professed to be
progressive and good, and the obscuration of spiritual truth in clouds
of subtlety. Nothing that was evil, they held firmly, could lead
ultimately to good; nothing that was retrograde could in the end be
progress.
They had learned from the revolutions of their past how snaky and
tortuous are the ways of deceit; and the first sure sign of its
triumphant success is the bold adoption of the doctrine that good men
may do evil, provided their aim is good. Under this the liars sheltered
themselves for ages before they were exiled. The era of the history of
the island that filled them most with shrinking and loathing was that
of the struggle with the various forms of deceit. The first lesson in
the valley of memories was drawn from this division of their annals;
they filled their youth with hatred and scorn of untruth and hypocrisy;
no firm step could be taken in education till this had become a deeply
rooted feeling in their natures, and nothing awakened it so well as
the study of this struggle with the liars. But they never taught any
subject merely from books or records; everything, even history and its
lessons, was made practical and living. Deceit, for instance, was
traced back to its sources in nature, and the difficulty of getting
rid of it was revealed by finding it so wide spread in the lower ranks
of life. Mimicry or involuntary deceit was investigated all through
plant and animal life, and it was found to be more prevalent the lower
the investigators went in vital organisms. Their loathing of it as a
deliberate adoption amongst human beings grew deeper as they saw that
in the animal world it belonged either to incompetence or rapacity.
The prey mimicked the form and colour of another species that was
loathsome to its enemy in order to avoid his grasp; unconsciously the
mimicry spread, for only those members of the attractive species which
were like the repellent species escaped and propagated. Or the spoiler
mimicked the form and colour of a species that was friendly or neutral
to its victim, and only those members of the species similar to the
unfeared kind succeeded in catching enough of their favourite food to
survive and hand on their nature to a posterity.
It was the same in the higher life of human self-consciousness and
will; only here intention and deliberateness entered in and turned
mimicry into deceit. Wherever hypocrisy existed it was a sure sign of
a vast number of incompetent and feeble, who made an easy quarry to
the villain, and of the vigour of a cunning minority, who often found
it difficult to entrap. Diplomacy and convention are the deliberate
mimicry of the predatory section of a race or of its gullible section.
When once the Limanorans had purged the island of the liars, they had
to prevent the propagation of the feeble and incompetent; for they knew
that, as long as these existed in a community, there would persist the
more futile forms of deceit. After that first purgation, the weak,
though retained in the island, had to abandon family life; they were
provided with the means that made existence easy and pleasant in order
that they might not resort to their only method of survival; and in a
generation the problem of hypocrisy had disappeared.
It was then that the idrovamolan was invented and came into use in
education. Having driven out the hated vice, they found that there was
still the need of impressing its evil results upon the minds of the
maturing youth, just as it was necessary even yet to study the diseases
that had disappeared for generations from their midst in order to be
able to cope with them, should they ever be reintroduced through their
communication with other atmospheres. But they knew the unreality of
teaching anything in a merely theoretical way; they felt that lecturing
and sermonising and the mere reading of history would give them no such
grasp of the vice and its evils as would living, acting things. The
idrovamolan with its telescopic, telacoustic, and telemagnetic powers
came to their assistance in this difficulty. By its help parents and