Limanora the island of progress
politician vanished. Where every man was taught to be a law to himself,
legislation had no place. The problems of most inchoate civilisations
had gone into exile with all the isms that were proposed to solve
them, and all the charlatans that proposed their solution. Patriotism
was now, like breathing, the organic and unconscious process of every
mind, and not the exception upon which anyone could plume himself. No
longer was it the safety of the country, or the continuance of the
race, or the sustenance or justice or criminality of part of the people
that demanded conscious effort, but the advance of the human system in
all. To propose and argue legislative schemes for the benefit of any
section of the race would have been accounted immorality, if it had
not been taken as a symptom of atavism or mental disease. A hospital
was the certain fate of anyone who indulged in political projects or
political eloquence; the old virtue had passed beyond the stage of
obstructiveness and vice, and had become one of the tests of insanity.
This disease of politics rarely appeared except amongst the youthful
and immature and the methods of driving out the evil spirit had
recently grown scientific and unfaltering. The old plan of exiling, it
was now felt, had become cruel and pitiless. For in recent generations
the pace of evolution in the race had so quickened that now even its
laggards and the breakers of its moral law were centuries ahead of the
most advanced citizens of the most advanced nations on the face of the
earth; and no longer could they, if expatriated, find any to consort
with. They would have to live with men who, in their eyes, were vicious
and criminal. Noola had been the last to be exiled; the system was
finally abandoned as inhumane and unscientific; and science soon found
methods of treatment that were prompt and efficient in their cure of
all such mental diseases.
My final instance of the old virtue grown vice is of a different kind.
It belonged more to the intellectual sphere than to the practical, and
seemed to me at first rather a mistake than a defect of the nature. It
was the common error of taking a verbal originality or advance for a
real, a mere change of name for a change in essence. In the old times
it had been counted as a great merit to a man, if he manufactured a
new nomenclature for any wide spread phase of civilisation, and so
gave the race the sensation of dealing with something novel. Some of
the greatest heroes of philosophy and science in the pre-purgation
ages of the island had owed their fame to the substitution of fresh
phraseology for what had grown outworn and trite, and most of the
great writers had done nothing more for their fellows than re-illumine
a linguistic world fallen dull and dark. Men grow sick of ideas that
have worn the same verbal dress for a generation or more, and hail as a
discoverer and benefactor anyone who tricks them out anew; they delight
in feeling them to be familiar old friends, whom they have to make no
mental effort to know. Even to dye the old garments in new imaginative
tints is a service they will not readily forget; whilst the great
discoverers and pioneers of the human race have had years or ages of
oblivion according to the newness and difficulty of their ideas and the
distance beyond the common horizon they have looked into the future.
The Limanorans of old, like most other men, abhorred having to think
out again their creeds and ideas, and especially having to reform them;
and so they stood out lustily against every real advance proposed, and
shouted it down as irreverence or blasphemy in overturning the old
barriers and old altars. The maker of a new nomenclature and the tinter
of the old phraseology pandered to this intellectual indolence.
One of the most striking results of the new point of view after the
great purgation was the transformation the fame of these old scientists
and philosophers and writers suffered. They began to be execrated as
dealers in illusions, as men who fed the passion of the human race
for stagnance or retrogression to monstrous proportions. They were
thrown down from their lofty pedestals, and cast into oblivion for
their sins against truth and reality. To seduce men from the pursuit
of truth by mere verbal jugglery was now counted no mere mistake, but
a heinous offence against morality. To take as a real discovery what
was but a new name or set of names revealed a vicious obliquity of
mental vision, that needed attention from the ethical physicians. This
was especially easy in the domain of ethics, and the Limanorans were
constantly on their guard against the delusion of accepting a change of
nomenclature as a moral advance. The elders carefully reviewed every
stage of progress, lest it should have been in words and phrases. This
was the main purpose of the Manora and of the Imanora, and every month
linguistic councils were held to revise the language, and to throw out
any fallacies and illusions it might harbour. Every new nomenclature
and phraseology was searched and probed, and torn off the ideas that
they were meant to express, in order to see if there was anything new
underneath them. Delusion, they had resolved, they would have nothing
to do with in any shape or form. For delusion blinded the eyes to the
route they were taking, and made them march in a circle or back over
the old roads under the belief that they were advancing to what was
new. It was the greatest foe to true progress, and any man who fell
into it revealed vicious tendencies, which needed the ministrations of
the physicians and nurses in the ethical sanatorium. To take verbal
ingenuity for true pioneering was the most grievous offence against the
future of the race.
The great standard and test of morality was progress. How far will
an act or habit aid the true development of the race? This was the
crucial question in Limanora; and in order that it might be answered
satisfactorily and easily by any member of the community, the council
of elders was careful to accommodate the ideals of the race to every
advance made. It had been a rare thing in their history to change or
add to the cardinal instincts of morality. But this they knew was by no
means impossible; and indeed they were buoyed up with the hope that the
moral cosmos was still to open up new marvels like the physical cosmos,
that in fact the two would ultimately be found to be one when looked
at from the final and divine point of view. There was the strongest
conservatism in the ethical phase of life; for it is the last, highest,
and most complex development of vitality. The lower we investigate in
the animal world, the more revolutions and transformations we see the
individual go through, the more enslaved is it to circumstances, to
locality, to season, to the moment. The higher we go, the greater we
find the conservatism, and at the same time the greater the origination
and the adaptability. In man these two conflicting powers grow stronger
side by side as he advances in civilisation. He retains features and
forms that are outworn and useless longer than most of the higher
animals; and yet he originates and adapts himself and his surroundings
with far more ease and swiftness. In ethics, his last evolution, the
conservatism dominates the origination and the advance, obscures them
or makes them simulate its own features, and produces the belief that
the final maxims and cue of morality have been reached from the first.
Ethical progress has naturally been slow, and it is only the student of
vast periods of history and of many nations and races who becomes fully
persuaded that there has been any change in the point of view. Because
there is not complete transformation, as in the case of the minuter
and lower animals, it is assumed that there is no evolution, and that
morality and conscience have remained fixed quantities, from the
beginning of historic times at least. And the close bond between ethics
and religion has assisted this dominant and delusive conservatism in
its task. Each great step in ethical evolution has been claimed by
religion as its own, and as resulting from its own special revelation
from heaven.
The Limanorans were quick to recognise that morality must be subject to
growth and development, not only in the individual, but in the race,
and that man must gain higher ethical points of view as he progresses.
They knew that many of the finest impulses and inspirations towards
progress, and especially ethical progress, had come from beyond the
earth and the earth’s atmosphere. But that any age or race could have
caught the ultimate ethical light from the central sun of the cosmos
seemed to them after their experience the height of absurdity. There
could be no spiritual eye trained and developed enough to receive it.
As the bodily eye of man is capable of taking in only a limited range
of rays of light, whilst an immense range of them above and below its
faculty either blind it or pass unnoticed, so his spirit at any given
stage of its development can understand and accept ethical ideas only
within certain limits; but, as it progresses, it is able to see beyond,
and appreciate ideas that were non-existent to it before. There is
as much difference between the ethical comprehension of the modern
Limanoran and that of the most highly civilised European as between
that of the latter and the savage’s, or as between the savage’s and the
pig’s; and if they could have brought themselves to believe that they
had attained the fullest and the final light upon morality, the thought
would have struck their very hearts to stone.
It was this that kept them from formulating their morality or ethics in
any definite code. They knew that a code would soon petrify morality
and itself become a fetich ignorantly worshipped, and, gathering to it
through the ages the self-interest of its officials and the irrational
devotion of its worshippers, attain a despotism that could never be
broken or controlled. A code issues in a series of prohibitions which
become a boundless slavery, and prohibitions develop the sense of
rights which dominates and obscures all sense of duties; this keeps men
hanging between savagery and true civilisation. The growing dominance
of duty with its complementary obscuration of rights is the first
symptom of the approach of rapid ethical progress. To insist on one’s
rights imprisons the soul in the living sepulture of selfishness. To
think of one’s duty is to admit the self-revealing and future unmisting
light of self-sacrifice. Once prohibitions become the order of the day,
especially in a limited community, the spirit of intolerance is abroad;
every man yearns to confine his neighbour and put him in moral and
intellectual leading strings. The origin and meaning of the “Thou shalt
nots” are forgotten; the spirit of them dies rapidly, and the letter
binds and petrifies the souls that must obey them. Progress in ethics
is finally stopped, and it is accepted as a law of nature that there
never was any development of conscience and never can be any other
ethical point of view. Moral stagnance is taken as the rule of human
life, and nothing short of a new impulse from spheres outside the world
can liberate the race, thus blinded, from its vicious circle of thought.
Advance of the human system to higher points of view is in Limanora
the moral test and standard of actions and conduct. In all that is,
nothing has ever died, nothing is dead; what seems dead and fixed for
ever in permanent form is suffering change as truly as the flitting
aurora of the north; the rock, that seems the same in our old age as
when we saw it in infancy, is in process of transformation no less
than we ourselves are; it is made up of particles that are groups of