Limanora the island of progress
new impulse, sweeping through the ether, has stirred men in each race,
whose enthusiasm, or, as it is commonly called, inspiration, awakens
the spirit of progress in the era.
Conservatism is the native or fundamental attitude of every being, the
tendency to make the rest of the adjacent world give way that it may
perpetuate its existence or that of its brood. Selfishness is thus the
very texture of life, and it is difficult to see how it can engender
its opposite, self-sacrifice. The sexual and the parental instincts
are the crude material of the latter. But the fire of thought and
enthusiastic impulse is needed to refine this material into a love that
stretches beyond the immediate object of these instincts and takes in
the interests of the race and last of all those of mankind; something
higher and more alien to the instincts of man is demanded for the
comprehension of his nobler development. In the valley of memories
was shown me at one stage of my education a complete elucidation of
the prehistoric phases of evolution; first came the struggle for life
amongst the innumerable claimants for the mastery of the new earth,
those elementary forms that, coming out of space, will settle on any
world new or old that they may encounter, the advanced organisations
seeking only orbs well-fitted for their progress. Across the geological
ages I could see this competition raising the minute cells of the
primeval creatures into elaborately organised beings. I saw sex save
the new existence from the dominion of mere brute appetite. But from
outside the world came the transformation which made it the saviour of
man, the ultimately dominant animal upon the sphere. This transformed
instinct expanded by slow steps love of children into love of race,
then into philanthropy, at first bland and crude and often unreal in
the presence of the old sensual and family love, but finally strong and
noble and able to embrace the progress of man as a spirit. The last
stage overleapt the prehistoric, and came to be limited, except in rare
and isolated instances, to Limanora. Enlightened philanthropy, I could
see, held the attempt to reform all mankind as vain as to convert the
lower animals into the human form and nature. Once more I went back
into Fialume and studied the panorama of evolution, and I recognised
the full meaning of it; the great impulses upwards and forwards had
come from outside the world, and chiefest of all the longing to evolve
a human nature to which death would be but an insignificant step
from life to life, and which would recognise in itself more and more
affinity to the highest life of infinite space.
But this section of Fialume only gave a bird’s-eye view of the
elevation of life upon the earth. None were allowed to linger after
they had drawn from it the lesson and the force it could give them
for marching forward. Minuter study of the past might lead their
youth to think ignobly of life and to accept “Might is right” as its
fundamental maxim. Nature, as seen amongst the ravening beasts or
amongst the naked cruelty and injustice of primitive men, might be
taken by them as dominant through all human evolution. If any history
was to be studied minutely, it was only the more recent history of
their own race, where the old laws of nature that were opposed to
justice and charity and self-sacrifice have been sublimated and
transcended, where new senses have opened gateways for a new knowledge
which would once have been called supersensible. What could this people
learn from the study of lapsed civilisations, that had risen out of
childish savagery only to fall back again? The sole aim of these was
happiness, and this ever degenerated into the pursuit of pleasure,
ending sooner or later in brutal selfishness. It had been one of the
earlier instincts from their post-purgation life, that they have least
happiness who think most of it. Happiness, or even pleasure, might
be made at times the test of successful actions and pursuits; but it
never should be made an aim in itself. Higher civilisations were less
happy than savagery or barbarism; their advances in commerce and even
in science only added more consciousness of misery to the many, and
more eagerness for new luxury to the few. Most civilisations, as they
advance, merely add to the desires and thus more effectually enslave
human nature to locality and time. The newer types produce no greater
intellects, no greater imaginations, than those that have lived and
fallen, whilst their masses have greatly receded in happiness and in
simplicity of virtue. The changes of what is commonly called progress
only bring new evils that have to be cured, and the energetic minority
who have produced the changes and suppose themselves to benefit by
them at first refuse to see the evils, and after a time are driven to
attempt their cure by drastic remedies which bring universal ruin all
the quicker.
The Limanoran horizon was too rapidly widening to allow of more than
the most cursory survey of the degenerate past or of the contemporary
present, even had it been to their interests to study them more
minutely. Their own future was expanding in so many directions as to
demand all their energies. World after world, star after star, universe
after universe, were revealing their character and stage of development
to Limanoran science. New marvels every year impressed upon them the
wisdom of avoiding all denial and scepticism with regard to what
imagination or faith should suggest, of holding neutrality towards all
that was unprovable or even contrary to their knowledge of the laws of
nature. They ventured only in the safe track of facts, whence they shot
their flashes of conjecture into the dark. But from past experience
they learned to distrust denial or even scepticism in regions where
knowledge could not venture yet. Imagination had been found a trusty
pioneer, and one of their recent books held out the hope that before
long the suggestions of faith might be but the messages which flew
through the ether over what might be called a cosmic telegraph, and
that, where these touched the souls of the noblest, they came from the
central spirit of the cosmos.
Already they were far on the way along several lines towards such a
consummation, and modifications of their ooloran or sonarchitect had
been employed in many channels of cosmic investigation. They had long
ago conjectured that the earth’s atmosphere, acting as a gigantic
ooloran, gathered the sound-waves that travelled through space and
used them to shape the things of the earth, as they came into being;
and recent discoveries had almost turned the conjecture into fact.
Sometimes the vibrations came from an inchoate or a degenerate world;
and then, as in the earlier or saurian stage of animal life and
development, the terrene creatures took monstrous shape under the
resonator of the atmosphere. Sometimes they came from orbs that knew
only beauty and grace of form; and then, as when the plants and trees
and flowers and shells of the earth were branching into new species,
few terrestrial things but fell into graceful moulds. And now, having
struck this far-reaching and fundamental thought, they turned it to
noble use. They produced a huge modification of the ooloran which would
fix upon the shape of a flower or fern or shell, and translate it into
the music that had originally moulded it. Nothing earthly but would
yield to them through this reversed sonarchitect the sonant or other
vibrations that had at first shaped it. Step by step this new art which
interpreted the moulding influences of the universe advanced into an
organised and scientific division of the duties of the race. Step by
step it mastered the harmony of form, and gave the people the music
that rang through interstellar space at the shaping of the beautiful
things of the world.
A great book of the time showed how far the art could go in leading
their religion from the silent to the sonant form. There were
vibrations throughout the cosmos that came from no one of the worlds
or their inhabitants. They emanated from the centre of all existence,
whence they had mysteriously moulded the spirits of great reformers and
sages; they were the voice of God ringing down through the aisles of
creation. It was now not only possible, but within the limits of the
practicable, to find by the aid of one of their new sonarchitects the
cosmic harmonies that had moulded the souls of the great enthusiasts
and sages of the world. They might translate the voice of God into the
vibrations that would appeal, if not to their ear, to their higher
and more recent senses. The seemingly fantastic groupings of stars
would send into their minds the divine secret guiding their movements.
Nearer and nearer would they creep under the great dome of heaven to
the centre of energy, whose voice these vibrations were. True religion
though this might be, never would they consent to fix it in creed or
ceremonial. On and on must their art of musical sonarchitecture go,
keeping pace with their ever-advancing science, but never reaching
finality in interpreting the voice of God.
Nothing in fact could be nearer to what other men call religion than
Limanoran science; it was never weary of listening to the voice of
God in the cosmos and ever looked upwards and onwards to a wider and
loftier creation. It refused to look back, unless the retrospect was
to assist its march forward. Every discovery was the truest act of
devotion, a step nearer to the centre of being; and anything that
would obstruct such discoveries or the advance they stimulated was
retrogressive, a sin against the being who was drawing all things into
the path of development. Fixity of beliefs was the surest obstruction
to progress, and, along with all superstition, the grossest immorality.
There was no evil inherent in matter or any of the lower forms of life.
Evil lay in returning to one of these after knowing and fulfilling
something higher. It is this against which the human spirit girds
when its lower elements at death go back into the grave. For, the
Limanorans held, matter is not to be rigidly divided from spirit as
something contrastive and antagonistic. They saw none of the strict
divisions in nature that Western science and philosophy knew, arranging
terrene things into matter and spirit, man and beast, and cosmic things
into God and the world. Matter was vital and moving, as spirit was,
though not in the same degree. Animals were ever on the same path of
evolution as man was, though most species of them were far behind most
of mankind. The worlds were the speech of God, methods of manifesting
Himself and of making His lower manifestations evolve into higher.
There were gradations throughout the cosmos, and the boundaries between
them were difficult to discern.
Man is the highest grade that man knows definitely; for human
personality is the amalgam of the knowing and the known. The animal
as higher than the vegetable knows the world as separate from itself,
but it does not know or study itself as a world apart; nor can it
be conscious of the general being or purpose of the universe. Man
is the first animal on earth, so far as we know, that has gained
self-consciousness, and, through self-consciousness, a glimmering
vision of what God might be. Only by love of retrogression or sin can
this higher element in him return into the ocean of decay again. The
other parts and elements of his system have to suffer reformation like
exhausted worlds, in order that they may rise higher than they have
been.
This was one direction their science took in finding its way towards
the highest of all grades of being. But it had other lines of as truly
religious investigation. For example, it had found as it proceeded more