 Preface of Lymanora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kirk Ziegler, Lake Placid, Florida. Lymanora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevin. It was long before our strange guest could be induced to continue his narrative. He had seemed to hesitate as he approached the close of his sojourn in the outer islets of the Archipelago. He several times postponed the story of his exit from it in the projectile, and for months he left his history hanging in the air, and the strange coffin in which he had been confined executing his parabolic from his yacht. There was some excuse for his delay, for the winter had fled, and the birds and the flowering trees around us gloried again in song and color. He grew restless as the days lengthened, and could not bear to settle in our shelter by the fjord. All that we saw of him for months was his occasional flight from precipice to precipice above the somber green of the bush. It was as easy for him to fled from knoll to knoll as it was for us to leap a ditch. He had regained his old bird-like gate, that to us was noiseless. What he fed on came to be a puzzle, for he seldom joined us now in our meals, and the old semi-transparency came into his face. Weeks and weeks together none of us would see him. Where he went we knew not, nor had we the heart to follow him and trace his whereabouts. Now and again he would join one or another of us at our work, and indicate the direction in which we should tunnel or dig for the richer layers of wash-dirt. His instinctive sense of the presence of gold beneath the surface of the earth seemed to us in our blind-groping miraculous. We never found him mistaken in his indications, but we felt it a kind of desecration to ask him to condescend to such base and trivial pursuits as the research for wealth. At times his absence was so prolonged that we thought he had vanished back to the ring of mist once he had come. But a great storm always brought him to our huts again. The summer waned into autumn and the days began to narrow down. Blasts from the south grew keener, and his flight from us was more circumscribed. We saw him almost daily. When the winter nights began he gave himself up again to memory. He drew towards us in sympathy, and there were, in his narrative, fewer and fewer reserves. His English became fuller and more exact, though time and again he stumbled over thoughts too subtle to transfuse into so rough and materialistic a language. Our own interpretations of his descriptions must often have been mistaken. We are certain, and many passages we have had to omit because of manifest ambiguity or mistiness of expression. GODFREE SWEVEN END OF PREFACE CHAPTER ONE OF BOOK ONE THE OUTER OR MATERIAL CIVILIZATION OF LIMONORA THE ISLAND OF PROGRESS BY GODFREE SWEVEN THIS LIBERAVOX RECORDING IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN MY AWAKENING I opened my eyes to a world no feature of which I could recognize. Everything around me was of the most dazzling beauty. The walls and vaulted roof of the room where I lay gleamed like mosaic work of lit jewellery. The floors were duller, and yet shone with a colored radiance like that in a dew-belled meadow under the light of the slant-rayed four-noon sun. The light broke up in innumerable points and corners of the roof into a magnificent display of prismatic colors moving and changing every minute. Yet, with all the marvelous iridescence, there was sufficient shade in the vault and walls to check the fiery oppression of the sun. I had dreamt of such fairy palaces, but the dream had never been abortive or glanced off into something hideous or appalling. Here the architecture was unlike anything I had seen, upon earth as a dream, and yet it had a grace that no dream had ever caught. Nor did I know the material of which this room was formed. It seemed like ice, yet was never changed by the fire of the sun. It was capable of being molded into the most delicate lacework, and yet could be made as massive as marble walls of eastern palaces that were built for both pleasure and siege. It was in portions as transparent as glass and in others frosted with wondrous pictures. And how were those countless domes and arches and aberrescent columns produced with such ease? How were those airy galleries hung? How were those fragrant fountains poised so nicely that an infant's finger seemed capable of overturning them? Even the gently moving curtains had the same crystalline character as the walls, now frosted as by the artist of our winter mornings, again goldenly dim or rainbow-hued. There was a spaciousness that reminded me of the collinated aisles of our great cathedrals. Was I resting in one of the temples of the island? Was I being consecrated for sacrifice? And yet the dainty warm nooks, the close-hung curtains, and graceful tapestries so broke the awen loneliness of the place as to make me feel that it was a chamber for a solitary. And I could look out upon the fields and forests and the far-stretching sea, for every wall had in it some transparency that with its landscape looked like a picture framed in the frosted tracery around it. I seemed never to reach the limit of these varied perspectives and distances. I sank back exhausted on my perfumed couch, then slowly recovered by aid of the sweetness that met my every sense. The fragrance that filled a room was like that of the finest garden flowers, and kept changing from one lovely variety to another, never clawing the sense. Around two, from unseen sources, floated sweet music that now swelled into a chorus and fell again into angelic softness. Then a new sensation came to me. With every breath I seemed to draw in a subtle nourishment and stimulation to my senses, every minute added to the renewal of my strength. And to increase my delighted bewilderment I gradually felt a new sense appeal to. Every nerve in my body seemed exhilarated, and I felt capable of heroic actions. Some magnetic influence was reigned towards me through the atmosphere, and adornment electric faculty seemed to be awakened in my mind and in my body, producing the effect of intoxication without its stupor or the numbing of the moral powers. It was like a beautiful dream without the helplessness of the dreamer. I felt no delirium or voluptuous languor from the excitement of the senses. It all led to spiritual vigor that would have made the body its prompt ally. My renewed energies turned my mind to my strange surroundings. I wondered where the beings were who had built this wondrous palace, and were now doubtless playing upon my senses. Was it all a dream, and had I never been shot into the sea with nula? It seemed as if my inmost thoughts were at once communicated to my watchers, for from some direction, out of some niche or doorway I had not noticed, moved softly a figure, that, in its muscular breadth, large head and springy gait reminded me of nula. Upon the face a smile shone out of unfathomed depths of thought and sympathy, and yet the lips were close as if to forbid speech. It was enough to rest and gaze at the beautiful expression of the face with its intensity of love and pity in the eyes. But the features had not that symmetry of outline which we call beauty in Europe, and the form was not divinely tall. The whole of the attraction lay in the upper ring of the soul into the face. It was like gazing into the limpant waters of a lake. I tried to give speech to my emotions, but the hand rose gently to the lips in a gesture that commanded silence, then waved over me, and as I looked I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. I knew not how long I had been unconscious, for when I spoke I seemed to be a new man. Every faculty tingled with energy, health glowed through my tissues. I wandered from niche to niche, from arcade to recess. I climbed the lofty galleries and raised the curtains, shaking the sweet perfumes from them as they swung in the air. I ran from transparency to transparency with the delight of a child, and gazed through each at the ever-varying landscapes that stretched outwards to the sea. Music, distant and entrancing, floated around me in the air, with variations and cooling bars of silence, so that it made a subtler, ether, circumambient rather than a definite impression on the senses. Under such conditions what could I not do in life? I remembered the old weariness and despair that used to cling around me like a shirt of Nessus, even in the morning when I was refreshed with sleep, and the clogging humours that used to retard my most generous or most energetic action. In my former life I had moved in a clammy, viscous medium that dragged back my most eager faculties. Now I was billed of air and stirred lightly as air. What was it that had accomplished this strange transformation? I had not felt so in the other islands of the archipelago or even on its seas. I had not been so exhilarated at my first awakening. How had this great change come about? Or was it but momentary, to pass away like other intoxications and leave exhaustion and ache? I began to be puzzled and to feel the return of the thought that it was perhaps only a dream after all. How was I to test the matter? Surely I could not have thought aloud, yet here from somewhere or other was moving across the floor the figure that had appeared after my first trance. I was so awestruck by the noiseless flash of the approach that I could make no sign of welcome. What could I say to a being who came so near to what we consider in the old world the supernatural? As soon as my thoughts touched upon the state of my mind and the circumstances that surrounded me, my host, should I call him so, appeared. And, through my senses, I thought, had acquired preternatural acuteness, not a sound had I heard of his entrance or of his footsteps across the chamber. He seemed to know the perplexity of my thoughts again, for he advanced with so area grace that my eyes were resonated by the ease of the motion. And his words came almost like music. I scarcely considered what he was saying. So beautiful were the tones and manner in which it was said. Come, and I shall tell you what has occurred, was what I understood. It was in the primary or simplest vocabulary of Lymanora, the vocabulary that Nula had taught me. He led me by a covered but transparent way into a vaulted chamber, that seemed to the other as a cathedral to a chapel, for it was pillored and galleried and isled with the most transcendent art. But I was too interested in the story he had to tell to give way to my passive enjoyment of the scene. He motioned me to ascend with him a platform that rose above us in a lofty recess at one brightly sunlit corner of the building. I saw him lean back and feared that he would fall to the floor, but with his motion the rich mosaic of the platform opened, and a rest rose to meet his body which was of the same alabaster-like texture as the curtains and seemed to shape itself to every curve and bend of his figure. He stretched out his hand towards me, and before I knew what he had done I was resting in an attitude not far from the upright, on a soft machine like his own. He showed me how to control this by a knob under my right hand, and then together we flew to the ceiling and back, wheeled round, swung gently in the air, or remained still. It moved like a thing of life in sympathy with every desire. A slight change of the position would relieve any part of the body and yet leave all the rest supported. Any kind of motion was accomplished on changing the screw that lay in the knob. I afterwards investigated the mechanism, and was amazed at its simplicity. A few levers, cunningly mastering all the various combinations of motion, turned on or off by the force needed for the necessary changes. After a few hours experience of it I could find no comparison in nature but the couch of air on which the albatross seems to rest as it moves. I afterwards found that a nice management of compressed air was the secret of this wonderful rest that was neither couch nor chair. As soon as we ceased to use it, it disappeared us suddenly as it had risen. This accounted for the complete absence of the furniture that impedes free motion in our European houses, and made me think as I awoke in my chamber of our great cathedrals with their free floor space. There, in mid-air, we lightly hung as if resting on wings. He seemed to know my anatomy and the points of greatest pleasure in any attitude, and controlled both machine rests with such adroitness that we swung hither and thither, changing slowly from the recumbent to the erect attitude or back again. Finding every few minutes a different point of view of the chamber or of the landscapes that could be seen through the walls. But I soon grew oblivious to the beauty that stole through every sense. My whole consciousness was absorbed in watching the play of the intelligence on his face and listening to his narrative. I missed many of the links in his story, even though he contrived to put most of it into the primary and secondary vocabularies, and where he was compelled to go beyond them, put so much of his thoughts into his features that I could almost have gathered it from them. But I saw the drift of the story, and when it was over, pieced the fragments together and found, when afterwards I knew the language and the civilization better, I had missed little of the real meaning. I give it, then, as if it were his own words, although my intelligence seemed to stumble at every step in it. You wonder at your hospitable reception, but you will not wonder when you know the change in the condition of our knowledge since Nula was exiled. He was unhurt by the ricochet of the missiles on the beach. In the darkness they were ill-aimed, and though they struck in sand, they were shattered by the impact and recoiled from the shingle underneath. He disentangled himself from the wreck and rescued you. But soon the watchers by the storm-con were down on the beach and carried you to our house, whilst they led your comrade to another. You were examined by the wise men and the medical families. Your faculties and emotions and tendencies were all tested, and their various strengths measured by means of the different kinds of cerebrometers whilst you slept. Since Nula was exiled a hundred years ago, our knowledge of the brain and the nerves and their various functions has been applied in the most practical way to the art of living. Every curve and convulsion of the controlling instrument of the body has its value and meaning tabulated. Every action, thought, and emotion has had its physical symbol and locality fixed, and the minutest change in the strength of any one of these points in the brain or in the nervous system can be discovered by applying one of the cerebrometers. You will know what these are some day, but it is enough to say that they can measure, by means of a delicate apparatus controlled by electricity, the amount of force that exists in any living tissue. There is a separate kind for each portion of the brain and each nerve section of the trunk, and it will move only when near that portion, or any living tissue that has similar properties and powers. Our own magnetic sense, which has greatly developed since Nula's banishment, can roughly gauge the relative strengths of the various faculties and emotions in any man, and it is deeply thrilled when any thought or passion is energizing in his nature. But it cannot accurately measure the strength, as these instruments can. We can absolutely trust them in testing the character of any human being. Nula fully expected to be thrust back, unless he came across his own relations and friends, to whose pity and sympathy he might appeal. He trembled in alarm when he was led to the chamber in which he was to be tested. But it was found that, though his humanity had not progressed in the lines or with the rapidity that the Lymanorans have developed since his departure, all the atavistic taint had disappeared from his nature, and the weak elements of his system, love, pity, tenderness, sympathy, had greatly strengthened. He could no longer by any possibility sight with the warlike and revengeful in human nature. But even if he had only kept the evil qualities in abeyance, in the state they showed before his exile, we should have let him in, for with his strong desire to keep pace with our advance and his regret for his retrogression, he would have gladly submitted himself to our new creative surgery. Our increased knowledge of the functions and constitution of the brain and nervous system enables us to reduce or excise any portion that interferes with the development of the individual. And we can also stimulate or retard the activity of any part by placing the patient in any of our medicated atmospheres specially adapted to his circumstances and making him breathe in the element required by his system. Nula is now supremely happy in the confidence that he is allowed to remain. Every defect in his system has been tested and measured, and he knows how far he has fallen behind our race. He would have accepted any conditions, and in order to overtake us is willing to enter upon a new education, the abbreviation of the slow and painful advance of many ages into the hurried pace of a few years. He wishes, though 300 years of age, to become a child again and return to his first century. But his long and painful self-discipline in Brulee has shortened the process and he will soon be able to keep step with his old comrades. He will be aided in every way by the wise men, some of whom will give their best wisdom and energies to him. All the physical arts we have will be brought into play to shorten his term of probation, our creative surgery and medicine, our magnetic arts for the development of tissue and nerve, our magnetic arts for the development of the senses, and our ethical arts for the development of the spiritual sensitiveness. For yourself he has pleaded, and though our wise men have recognized that you are thousands of years in the rear of our civilization, and have confirmed their recognition by scientific measurement of the forces and elements in you, they have consented to let you remain and to take your education in hand. It seems an almost impossible task to contract thousands of years into tens, but they do not despair, for our system of education has already accomplished this for children born amongst us, and you have a nature peculiarly open to our educational influences. You have first of all the passion for progress as strongly in you as in any of ourselves, and this is the prime essential for our ethics and civilization. To it all other passions must yield. From it flows all that subdues the material world, and gives dominance to the spirit, and makes for righteousness. But with it often go pride and arrogance. In you was found strongly developed the desire to treat all good men as equals, whatever difference of capacity or position or positions might seem to separate them from you. Had you had even the slightest tinge of contemptuousness or hotour in you, you would have been sternly repelled. To condemn is the mark of an incurably savage nature, a nature incapable of true knowledge of itself and of its relations to life. From these two desires come purity of thought and life, the love of peace, respect for the rights of others and reference for what is fine in personality, and absolute transparency of nature. This last we ever take into the shortest and truest test of a progressive character, the love of truth and simplicity, complete harmony of word and act with the inmost thought. As long as a man or a nation lacks this there can be no real advance. What seems advance is but a mirage of fame or glory. Accuracy of vision and of provision is the first condition of true progress. It was one of the first things that Nula saw in you, and the first reason he urged for your retention. And you had no desire to conceal your thoughts, so closely did they tally with your life. You had an overwhelming passion for truth and for the truthful. There was no need to distrust his assertions for we all felt how genuine he had become, and even sick and unconscious as you were. Our magnetic sense told us that his description of you was correct. But it has become the custom to test scientifically the nature of every inhabitant of our island every week, and also at every crisis in his nature or in the history of the community, in order that any incipient defect may be at once remedied, and that drastic applications may never be needed. A complete survey of your character and faculties and corporeal system was the first step towards your admission into the community. Everything had to be known, in order that your education should be mapped out. And the cerebrometers gave us a favorable report of you. Your body and your working faculties are far in the rear of ours. You lack the transparency of tissue, etherality of motion. The material sight of you is earthly and ponderous. These elements of retrogression we shall never be able to eject wholly from your system. But we shall be able to modify them. And in your children and your children's children the body will keep pace with the spirit. The forwardness of your emotions, of your soul, is what has drawn us to you. You love the ideal and imaginative more than any but one section of our community. And you have an inter-mixture of the finer spiritual elements such as we have either lost or never had amongst us. We hope to graft your nature upon one of the divisions or castes of our race, and so produce in the next generation a variety that we need. Your retention has thus been justified by the highest morality of our civilization. We never take any step without reference to the ultimate aims of our progress, so to improve the breed that our posterity may feel nearer to the highest life in the universe. Your education has indeed already begun. We have assumed from your highly disciplined and progressive spirit that you would be willing to submit to those medical methods that shorten the already abbreviative process of education. It is true that these make an enormous drain upon the physical strength for a time, and we prefer the ordinary spiritual methods of training. But you have gained from the open-air employments in which you have passed your life great stores of bodily health and vigor. You are still but a child. The period of childhood and tutelage extends with us to the thirtieth, sometimes to the fiftieth year, that of youth to beyond the hundredth. At the time that other men are preparing to die the natural death of old age, we are just beginning to feel what it is to live. And from some ancestral cause you are developed beyond your years in some of our ethical lines. You have reached a humility before the living forces of the universe which is the primary mark of the true governor of the world. How you have attained so rare a virtue amidst the pretentious barbarity of civilization it is not easy to conceive. The worldliness and arrogance inherent in the earth, though there are not signs wanting that they feel the approaching triumph of its true heirs and mask as the meeker virtues. In older times they were not ashamed to show themselves as they really were, for those were the days of glorified highwaymen who seized the throne of the world. Conquest is nothing but successful brigandage on a large scale, veneer it over with diplomacy and historical fame, as you will. But for centuries there has been an easy feeling abroad that the humble must come to their rights some day, and so the gilded brigands have allied themselves with the religion of the meek and despised, that they may hoodwink mankind into acquiescence in their ancient dishonesty. We banished all the makings of monarchs, aristocracies, and great men at the purifications of our people. We could see no difference between these and the worst criminals except one of degree. We measured their skills and brains by the rough, unscientific methods we used to have, and found in them almost no difference from those of murderers and thieves, and comparing them with the skulls of savages and of our own far back ancestry. We found that in the case of both heroes and criminals, the cause of their likeness to each other was their recoil upon the footsteps of the past, and away from the line of human progress which leads towards harmony with higher laws of the universe. Happily for you every trace of such arrogance and contempt and ambition is absent from your system. You have nothing merely memetic in you. You live unashamed and truthful in presence of all that the world is capable of being. It is one of the surest signs of fear of threatening annihilation that a species has to simulate the appearance or the modes of life of another. Hypocrisy in the human race, like mimicry in the kinds of animals and plants, is the brand of feebleness and the omen of coming decay and subjugation. We used truth and sincerity as one of the most inward tests of a strong and healthy nature. In the olden days, as in all large and mixed civilizations, it was difficult to distinguish the imitation virtue from the real, and when it was discovered it was easy to pardon it and even accept it as a virtue amid the universal effort at simulation. But when we had swept out the survivals of primitive and savage times and the atavistic returns to them, we found that every need of mimetic virtue had disappeared. The slightest taint of unreality or falsehood in any of our community is as offensive as carrion. We rise in a body and have it removed. And we have as keen an enjoyment of sincerity and truthfulness. Your loyal character at once attracted us to you. We felt that all germs of moral disease would lose their virulence within its influence, as germs of physical disease lose theirs in sunshine. The strain on my attention had been extreme as I tried to follow his explanations. It was not merely the words that were unfamiliar, but the very manner of the thoughts. I had not felt how exhausted my tissues were growing or how soothing was the influence of the perfumes and soft music. I had been deeply moved by the joy of my acceptance by the strange community and by the profound truths woven into the fabric of its civilization. Imperceptibly the mist of dreams stole over me. I was not even conscious of the gesture of his hand. I thought that I had fallen back again into the darkness of Western civilization, and yet that my Lymanurian guardian was silently hovering around me, protecting me amid the horrors of the reality. I seemed to be present at a court scene, where the monarch and his ableist statesmen and soldiers were welcoming a hero back from a victorious campaign that had added a great province to the kingdom. There were shouting and hooses without, whilst within strains of triumphant music alternated with bowings and ceremonies from the gorgeously robed officials. In some strange way I thought that it was I who was being lauded. Conscious of the millions of thousands left dead upon my battlefields, I loved it all. For by some soul magic, perchance my Lymanurian influence, the hearts of eulogists and courtiers were late bare before my eyes. All, there was not an exception, black with envy and designings. The king himself was sick of me and my honors, even as he showered them on me. I saw the pitfalls and intrigues prepared for me. I saw the whole mass of humanity, both lacquered and tattered, that was now cheering, hiss and groan at me as I fell, and I turned away from the applauding crowd and looked into the homes of my dead soldiers, and I heard the weeping and despair of the widow with her orphans and the mother bereft of her children in their prime. Here the depths of sorrow surfaced too. What was there to my credit in the book of time? Then with sudden transformation I saw the crowd swaying like billows before the wind. Every inch of space on the floor of the vast cathedral was filled with an adoring multitude, tears falling from the eyes of every upturned face. What could not be done with a mass of humanity so filled with passion for the highest. None too large for the bolted aisles and nave for the tremulous thunder of the anthem. It seemed as if the dome of the sanctuary would open and the deity would reveal himself to his wrath suppliance. Then the music tied away, and silence magnetized the people and drew down the influence of heaven upon them. And it was I that was in the pulpit, seeming a feeble and sinful thing beside this divinely inspired multitude. Could I do ought but still their quivering hearts? With sudden impulse my voice rang out in the cadences of the great organ as I raised their thoughts to the cross over the altar where hung the one who was rejected and despised of men. I painted the poverty and neglect and scorn of the life of the man of sorrows. They wept as I bent their thoughts to the weary mission of this spirit amongst men, and his despair as he saw them turn in contempt from him. The death of torture that marked the clothes of his sojourn here was as nothing to the crucifixion of the spirit that he bore each day, from the cold neglect or the supercilious snare with which his message was met. None but lowly fisherman would accept his divine teachings, and never a murmur issued from his lips. Heart broken and martyred in soul the crown of thorns was a fit close to his career. I seemed to hold the great assemblage in the hollow of my hand. The sound of weeping rose, while with love and adoration they gazed on the crowded agony as it hung on the cross. Then I blessed the people and left the pulpit, my heart hard and dry within me, when an alien sound broke upon my ear from the farther end of the great isle. A commotion rose, and before many minutes the whole mass of worshippers had joined in the passionate discord. There was a conflict about some center that was moving upwards from the door. Before I could regain the pulpit, a bruised and bleeding body had been raised above the sea of heads upon a cross against one of the huge pillars. A cry of execration rose upon the whole church. It was useless to attempt interference, for my voice could not be heard in the tumult. In a few minutes the insults and buffettings had accomplished their work. The wounded, bleeding head sank upon the breast of the figure on the cross. His spirit had fled. It was a preaching reformer of the town, who was accounted a madman for his enthusiasm. He had fallen into some controversy and had shown his opponents the gross and material nature of their worship, insulting to a deity who was pure spirit. He had prophesized the downfall of all their gorgeous churches and ceremonials, and the substitution of silent reverence within the temple of the heart. They had taken his prophecy as an insult to the Christ and his church. Fleeing to the sanctuary to be safe from the furious attack of the crowd, they had followed him and with a few hurried words had enlisted the worshippers within against the blasphemer. And this had been the result. As I looked at the bloodstained features, there seemed together round the head a halo of light as of a crown of thorns. I was struck with a strange resemblance and glancing back at the altar, saw the faces were the same. This passionate devotion to a dead Christ had found him in living form and had crucified him again. I was appalled at the thought of all the centuries having passed for naught. Not one step upward had been made. No nearer were the multitude to recognizing their Saviour when he came in the form of a living man. There seemed to be nothing to live for, if this were the end of the agonizing toil of the ages. How sweet it was when I woke to find it was but a dream, and I was not in Christendom but in Limonora. I was alone, but there was the sense of comradeship around me. I found afterwards that the wise men of the medical caste had been electricizing portions of my brain as I lay asleep. It was the beginning of my education, which was to go on, even in sleep, molding dreams that should modify my whole nature. Perhaps the most important part of the growth of the spirit is during the hours of rest, when the past or future may enter the vacant mind. My imagination had been sent out on its travels into my past and had found its way into the heart of Western ambitions and hypocrisies. Thus the white men had perceived by their electric sense the dreams that had oppressed me, and they drew from them the master sorrows of my past. Half of the success of education depends upon the most intimate knowledge of the history of the soul to be educated, a knowledge more intimate than the soul itself can have, else the educator will be alarmed and defeated by the surprises of survivals or resurrections. It is not the history of the mere incidents of life, of even spiritual life, from birth that is needed, but the unrecorded history of the mental and emotional tissues of a countless ancestry. And no annals could reveal this so well as the dream flashes of the night. They are brief as the tremors of lightning, but they illuminate a midnight world, a glimpse of which is as great as an inspiration. Night is the confessional of the unknown, sleep unburies the dead, dreams kaleidoscope the vanished past. These are three of their world-old sayns, which were striking at first, but after I knew their exact science of somnology became as commonplace to me as they were to the Lymanorans. This science, like all their sciences, was practical and but the other side of an art. It was one of the most helpful auxiliaries of education. It had classified all types of dreams and found the inner test of truth in them. Though seemingly capricious, to these medical wise men not a dream occurred but had its significance in the life of the individual, they could touch any section of the brain tissue into dream activity during sleep by means of their magnetic and electric probes and stimulators. They could feel by their own electric sense all that was flashing through the corridors of sleep and with their electrographs could take an exact image of every portion of the dream. Dreams, they held, made men children again, with their souls upon their skins, so absolutely transparent did they render the nature, so free from convention and the mask of policy. And what was best of all, the shadows of the past, at times of the primeval past, answered to their call and played upon the mind during sleep. We are such stuff as dreams are made of, was a scene of our own far-seeing dramatist which often came into my mind as I looked into their somnology. Into the making of our bodies and our brain tissues go elements from all the ages of our human and animal past, ages beyond the reach of history or speculation. They enter subtly into the tissue of our life, though we are all unconscious of the process. And these elements are the stuff that goes to the making of dreams as well. But in the dream world there is no central personality, no will to control or transform, no mask to wear, no power to conceal. We are often times ashamed of our dreams because they are so unconsciously naked in their savagery or even animality. Nor is it an uncommon or unnatural thing that dreams foreshadow incidents in the afterlife of the individual, for they bring into play elements in his nature that he has never been conscious of and whose existence he would stoutly deny. Then, when the favouring circumstance or set of conditions brings these elements into action, he is startled to remember how close the long-forgotten dream had come to the unimagined reality. If only he had known how much it had meant, as it entered on the theatre of sleep and then vanished, he might have been forewarned and have avoided the opportunity for its reappearance on the stage of life. And the Lymanoran medical sages had taken advantage of this prophetic provision of nature. They systematically tested every fiber and cell of the brain of each individual they had to educate and develop, and without hesitation or error found out every possibility of his nature. They tested and tabulated the results of every electric stimulus and every dream that followed it, and by this means had a complete natural victory of all his ancestral past. No revolution could happen in the state of any Lymanoran, nothing of what we meant by conversion. It has sometimes been said in the science of the West that there are two brains or physical organs of soul in every man, and this explains the strange actions and reactions, conversions and recoils that so often occur in life. But it is far truer that there are 200 brains in every man, and that his brain is composed of elements out of all his ancestry, even his far back animal ancestry, and it all depends on the stimulus which of those brains or ancestral brain elements will come uppermost. The Lymanorans had millions of sun pictures of their own exiles and of the various peoples of the rest of the world in innumerable attitudes and situations, and with expressions on their faces unconsciously worn, and they could point out in each the predominating animal. In going over the memories of the men and women I had known, I could recall times when the look of some animal had come out strongly on their faces. I had had, to my misfortune, much acquaintance with the serpent nature, the most predominant in an unwisely progressive civilization like that of Western Europe, where convention and custom and law become the opportunity and the mask of characters fallen far into the rear of progress. When laggard natures are not monasticized and prevented from breeding, a progressive people get overrun with hypocrisy. Under convention and custom and law, they take shelter and there is no power that can drive them out. The finer phases of civilization, industry, art, learning, speculation, morality, religion, become their nesting ground. At last the serpent nature is accepted as the type, provided there is not too fatal a sting in it. The religious legends mirror this serpent-like development. The serpent is the spirit of evil which caused their degeneration from the God-like. The serpent they see everywhere, even when it has disappeared from their own land. Their greatest successes in any sphere are by means of serpent-like subtlety, whilst they still profess to worship the ideal of truth and candor abandoned by them in the far past. In practice it is the qualities of the serpent they embody and develop. In theory they worship its foe and conqueror. The Lymanoran sages explain this reappearance of animal natures in human civilizations and individuals by showing how the elements of all exist in infinitesimal germ in the most primitive form of animal life. As this crept up the scale, certain elements grew stronger and led to new species still retaining the others in subordination. At each higher and higher division of the vital way the elements became more vigorous and more distinct in their characteristics. It is therefore traces of the higher animals that are most apt to appear in man. And the only means of ridding these of their retrogressive influences to make the newer and higher spiritual qualities more dominant. The first rule of a civilization that means to advance in reality and not in mere appearance is to monesthesize the altivistic natures and prevent them from handing on their retrogressions to posterity. The second is to encourage only the higher and more spiritual features of those that remain. It took many months to examine and catalog my powers and tendencies. I often awoke unconscious or with a confused recollection of the dreams they had stimulated and recorded. The first few were most distinct and seemed to follow me when I wake with the reality and perspective of life. But I could not interpret them. They seemed fanciful and capricious, and when I puzzled over them yielded nothing. And yet, when I saw my dream confession and autobiography, I was startled with the truth of its great features. Thoughts that I had never uttered to mortal ear were there. Words that had been spoken in the secrecy of confidence far off in my village home were recorded. Actions light and insignificance had their due place, and seemed to have new and infinite meaning in their new setting. So circumstantial were the ideals of much of my past life and character that I could not but accept the rest as absolute truth. And what a strange array of facts it was. Parts of my immediate ancestral history I knew. More I had conjectured. Some I could never have guessed at. But here it was spread out as on a map. With every new advance or retrogression any progenitor had accomplished or suffered. I seemed to see my inner nature photographed and by the light of a magic lantern. At first, when I saw it stand out in detail after detail in lifelike truthfulness, I felled in the presence of some supernatural power. But when I came to know the methods they had employed, it seemed as simple as a child's puzzle. Every conclusion had been reached in the most scientific way. All the minutia of every dream had been faithfully recorded and microscopically examined. Then they were tabulated and compared with the most untiring industry. And out of the shapeless mass had come by the logical methods or dream-tests that declare unquestionable truth. They're brilliant, but by no means reckless. Imaginations did the rest, evolving order and likeliness out of seemingly barren and confused facts. It is true, they did not make any attempt at the chronology of the past. They had been able only to group the facts in great spaces of time and in a certain order of development. Their minute knowledge of the evolution of life, and especially of human life, gave them the framework for this grouping. I was astonished at the quickness of their work, when I considered the fullness of the natural history of my mind and character. It seemed as if they should have taken years and not months to investigate with such care every atom and cell of the tissue of my brain. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of Lymanora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Swevan This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. SLEEP, REST, AND FLIGHT I could not but surrender myself into the hands of men whose wisdom seemed to approach omnescence, and this I was the more inclined to do that I felt, instead of exhaustion from their operations on my brain during sleep, the greatest sense of exhilaration I had ever experienced in my life. They acted on the principle of giving complete rest to one set of nerves and tissues by stimulating the others. They could produce the deepest sleep in all the brain and nerve centers by gathering the life energy that remains during sleep into one minute point, which they stimulated by magnetism. They smiled at the clumsy methods of resting that western civilization had adopted, the awkward unyielding beds in chairs and sofas, and the wasteful and futile attempts at exercise that were meant to give rest. Ages ago they had banished dancing and all corabantic amusements as extravagant waste of tissue, destroying a hundred cells or nerves for every one that they saved or invigorated. All frantic and violent exercise encouraged the animal part at the expense of the Progressive. It mangled and rinsed the delicate tissues of the brain and the heart, and sent the currents of sustenance into the muscles and bones of the legs and arms. The writing and hunting and athletics of the aristocracies only helped the animal to persist, and clearly identified their ancestry with the concrete nomad hordes that swept down on the peaceful plains and destroyed primitive civilizations. Exercise, they held, should help, on the one hand, to increase the store of energy to be transformed into the higher elements, and on the other to rest the spiritual forces and faculties. Rational rest was one of the great secrets of the prolongation of life. There was a latent passion in living things for rest, and this rose to its highest in man. To bulk it was to shorten the careers of all the powers, and they had set themselves to understand this passion and the methods for its satisfaction as one of the first duties of an advancing people. They knew that there never could be any complete rest for a living system short of death. Even in the soundest sleep the functions proceeded, though feebly, and there was a misty consciousness of existence, else it would lapse into annihilation. They realized that they must provide for many gradations of rest between the edge of death and the borderland of full activity, nor should any portion or element of the human system go long without its period of rest and its period of exercise. On these principles they built their methods of alternating rest and activity, all duly subordinated to their great aim, the advance of the higher nature. The only reason for muscular pursuits was that the intellect and the imagination might be relaxed and the higher energy reinforced. Even the loftiest thought resulted in certain waste products, that, if left to accumulate, would soon clog and stifle it. This waste must be carried off by repulsive exercise of the lower and more physical organs. All the lower elements which remain to mingle with those of a higher plane after they cease to be needed as regenerators of energy grow at once poisonous and must be removed by exercise. For many months I occupied one of their beds, half hammock, half framework, made of soft, flexible stuff that looked like metal, yet yielded like down. These beds were hung not only at the four corners, but along the two sides, so that the body lay in a kind of groove, yet, by a second series of rests, the material was kept from contact with the sides of the body or from any pressure upon it. Within this groove was laid an air cushion of still softer and more elastic material, which fitted itself to every irregularity of the body and to its various changes of position. The pillow was of the same soft network, and so shaped as to fit the head. I afterwards found that through the whole fabric of the pillow passed a mild current of positive electricity that drew the energy from the nerve centers of the head and soothed every tissue to rest. The framework of the lower portion of the bed was charged with the mildest currents of negative electricity, and thus the circulation and the life were kept up, however deep might be the sleep. The sense of exhilaration and replenished stores of energy with which I rose each morning was enough to make me enamored of life. Day by day I grew lighter in step and seemed to walk and rest on air. It was the grosser particles of my system that were being drawn from it by this nightly process of rest. I gained energy and lost weight, till I felt I could soon rise on wings. I noticed before long that I had acquired the tripping, elastic gait that I had remarked in NULA. My movements and footfall came to leave almost no impression on my senses, and I could have played the ghost with appalling effect in the superstitious atmospheres of my native land. I did not seem to grow much smaller in bulk, yet in a year or more I must have weighed one-half of what I did when I arrived. Whether they applied some other, de-gravitating process to my bones and tissues besides the magnetic sleep I never ascertained. But they had the power of reducing their own weight considerably in a few moments. It seemed as if their bones were hollow like those of birds, for I could lift even the largest of them with my one hand, and they had some reserve store of an element lighter than air in their bodies, which they could increase and distribute over their system at will. When they were asleep I found I could raise them as lightly as a feather. But when awake they could, whether by muscular effort or by some other process of their bodies, prevent me lifting them even the fraction of an inch from the ground. They seemed able at a thought to increase their weight tenfold, and though they had wonderful strength of muscle, I am certain that was not all, for I observed they made little use of it on such occasions. It can be easily imagined, then, how little friction of the body there was during sleep. Indeed they never moved whilst resting, for there was no need of relieving the tension of any part. I enjoyed still more another kind of rest they had. It was half chair, half bed, and consisted of an incline of the softest netting made out of their usual metal and in such a way that the body could not collapse when loosed in sleep. Even pleasanter was the swing sleep. Here a huge magnet kept the supple incline gently swaying whilst at the same time it drew the blood from the head. The float rest was as pleasing. In this the head rested on a floating pillow whilst two air cushions stretched along one side of the body and supported it on a network held between them. But the most complete of all rests was that in which the lime and orange were supported in the air by a cloud of sweet sanded and wholesome gas blown from innumerable jets with steady power, electric fences kept it from spreading into the atmosphere around. I never reached that power of reducing myself in weight so that I could enjoy this rest. It needed fine skill of poise to climb into this bed and remain there, and I was ever afraid of falling. The same physical incapacity prevented me from reaching the most graceful and soothing of all their combinations of exercise and repose. This was the wing rest. I had often seen the albatross, as it followed in the wake of our yacht, swoop down and float up the curves of the wind without apparent effort, its broad wings motionless but for occasional adaptation, like sails, to the changes in the strength or direction of the breeze. I had never expected to see human beings master this bird power over the air, but it became the commonest sight in the breezes of the dawn and the sunset to see old and young of both sexes in limonora fasten great wings to their arms and feet, and charging their small winged engines with new stores of energy, sail up underneath the chameleon clouds, and float hither and thither like spirits of the storm. This was part of their night's rest and their morning's exercise, and they used to descend from it with height and color in their cheeks and the look of profound repose in their eyes. The long training they had had from youth in the management of their wings and engaging the force and current of the winds had made their skill and knowledge habitual, if not instinctive. They could shut their eyes and rest their intelligence as they floated up and down the levels of the breeze. Their wings seemed to be at peace. I can't find no analogy in my own experience for their delight in the swift curving movement but my youthful enjoyment of skating before the wind for miles over clear ice. It was a gladness merely to watch them sport amid the rays of the growing or lessening sun. Often would they time their movements to some rhythm and flash through intricate evolutions like rooks in the evening air. Again half of them would fold their wings and be borne by the other half with a speed and lightness almost as great as when flight was unburdened. All mere earthly amusements and exercise had ceased when the secret of flight had been mastered. For generations their biologists, anatomists, and physicists had studied the wing power of animals with a view to the practical mastery of it for the Lymanorans themselves. Their chief guide towards the analysis was the study, not of the birds or insects, but of the bat. They measured the force of the strongest chest muscles that enabled it to move its wings with such rapidity. This could be done to a nicety by means of their refined instruments for gauging latent power, whether in tissue or nerve or muscle. They calculated the number of beats it could make in a minute. They measured the spread of the wings and the weight of the body. Thus they came to an almost constant equation of wing power to size and weight. The physicist and mechanic were then called in, but they would have been helpless without the new metal, Irelium, and their power of concentrating great power into small space. This metal was extracted by a process from common earth, but could also be found pure some miles down in the earth. It was perhaps the first essential to the rapid advance of their civilization because of its extreme lightness and strength, and still more its wonderful flexibility and elasticity when mixed with certain proportions of other substances. It could be made into the most delicate membrane, fine as gauze and yet tough and resistant as leather. It formed the material of their most massive engineering works, and of their lightest draperies and garments. Nothing could surpass its adaptability to all purposes of civilization. It was out of this that they were able to make their wings which seemed so fragile and yet could bear the force of the wildest storms. It would stand stiffly on its framework against the strongest pressure, and yet could be expanded balloon-wise from within. The only means of disabling these wings was perforation by a hard, sharp point. This could never occur in the air except from the beak of a bird, and then they could still use their spread as a parachute to break their descent. Another quality this metal had was its transparency, and their flight was somewhat concealed from the sight of gazers below by the color they took from their atmospheric surroundings. It was difficult to distinguish them from a floating cloud or a darker patch of gray or blue sky. The wings could be easily folded or expanded, so flexible was the material, and when the limon-orans landed from their flight, scarcely a minute past before the huge sails, framework and all, had been furled and had disappeared in the ordinary outline of their bodies. And these bodies differed as much as their natures from those I had been accustomed to see. They were short and squat, and this, with their broad chests, great heads and long arms, would have led Europeans to call the limon-orans gnomes. Muscles and bones that in other men had been of little importance had grown into what we should have called abnormal size and strength. But after I had met the power of their eyes and felt the beauty of the natures that shone in their faces, their bodies seemed to me the normal garment of the highest human spirits, and I came to understand the high purpose of every change they had about in their forms and features. Without their broad chests they could never have had such expansible lungs or such powerful heart-action essential to easy flight, as well as to the lightning sweep of their thoughts and energies and the rapid advance of their civilization. The pulse could be seen in many parts of the body, it was so strong, and its beats were twice as frequent as in my own. The great heat of the summer was to them little inconvenience. They could thrust their arms into what seemed to be boiling water without shrinking, and they could bear a degree of cold far below the lowest temperature I had ever felt, for the high temperature of their bodies made them capable of enduring far greater extremes of climate than any race I had ever known or heard of. But their breathing was much less frequent than mine. They seemed to take in enormous drafts of air at each inspiration and to retain stores of it in their system. They continued at their ease in difficult atmospheres and exertions long after I had begun to pant and gasp for breath. The spaces within their bodies that had once been wholly filled with the organs of digestion and discharge had evidently been largely utilized for their marvelous expansion of lungs and heart. Another purpose that their huge chest served was to bear the strain of the great muscles that controlled their arms, and of the powerful engines that, strapped onto them, gave the strong and swift beat to their wings. Their arms were molded on lines of similar strength, for they had to bear the strain of the forward stroke of the wing, whilst also having to manipulate by means of the long and sinewy fingers its great folds in the backward sweep. And, when more expanse was needed during calmer weather, or when resting in the sky, the arms had to thrust out and to bear long rods that in their turn bore expansions of the wings like studying sails of a ship. The thumb of each hand was kept free for the management of their breast and shoulder engines, and it had become, by exercise, more vigorous and more flexible than the ordinary human thumb. In each arm pit was carried a small engine that could be used either as a subsidiary to the Great Breast Engine, or for the partial or complete furling of the wings. Beside it was a storage battery, in which could be generated by the movements of the arm more electricity to supply the central power, thus enabling them to extend their flight through long periods. If they became tired they could expand and inflate their wings with a gas made much warmer by the heat of their bodies than the surrounding atmosphere, then throwing themselves on their backs they could rest or rise in the air as on a balloon. In slow or ordinary flight, or when the wind was not high, they could steer themselves rudely by manipulating the outer folds of their wings with their fingers. But if they wished to fly swiftly, or in some other direction than the wind would bear them, they could push out a tail-like membrane of air lineum from between the feet and move it hither and thither by the sinewy power of the heels. The great toe of each foot was also much developed by long use for stretching out and managing the wings. It had become more like a thumb capable of seizing and manipulating cords or membranes. It was this added to the lightness of their bodies that gave them their springy gait and made them seem when they walked as if they scarcely touched the ground. They could skim like a bird close to the earth by using only the outer folds of their wings and the tip of the great toe for propulsion. Much though my weight was reduced and ardent though I was in my attempts to come up with their mastery over the air, I was seldom able to do more than quicken my pace in running and rise in short, clumsy, labored flights on their wings like a callow nestling fallen from its nest. I was soon exhausted by my efforts, even when aided by my ultimately deaf management of the breast engine and the older engines, for my lungs were short of compass, my heart soon beat too rapidly for the strength of its tissue, and my arms and fingers and great toe soon grew weary of the work they had to do. Nothing but the selection and adaptation of my ancestry could have made me capable of progressing physically to their level. Their past had been a rapid and deliberate process of adjustment to new and higher ideas of life, one of the main aims of this new mode of locomotion in order to give them command of a sphere that other men had abandoned to the birds and insects, for it was but one of the corollaries of the great purpose of their existence, which was to master or eject the grosser elements of their system, that they might rise into a more ethereal or spiritual life. By the power of flight they seem to gain independence of the earth, greater freedom of movement, and an approach to that frictionless, untrammeled motion through limitless space which thought gives a foretaste of. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 of Lymanora, the Island of Progress by Godfrey Sweven This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Hermitry was one of their best methods to achieve complete solitude. One of the early discoveries of this people in the art of progress was that where men were too much or too long together, they confirm each other's faults and clog advance. The weaker and more superficial ambitions get the mastery and force energy into mistaken directions. The risk of this grew less as the individual grew older, for he receded farther and farther from the ancestral stages of life through which he must pass in youth and early manhood, and he came to have less desire and less need for intercourse with his fellows. Complete love of solitude and capacity for solitude were two of the signs of the perfecting of the individual life. Thereafter death, the rending of the veil that divides the scene from the unseen, was the most natural step in development and scarcely needed effort. They held solitude as much one of the essentials of noble life as society, and the latter needed no stimulus. By nature and beginnings man was a social animal, but only some strong impulse would make him seek the companionship of his own thoughts. The final triumph of life was to be able to be confidently alone, to stand with the highest man can think and feel against the herded universe. Under the stimulus of the more physical and primary passions it is the universal instinct to flock together. The baser the more destructive feelings are gregarious. To ensure periods of solitude for each member of the community, every man and every woman had a separate house, as soon as the powers were mature. One of the horrors of the past out of which they had come was the intrusion of friends and relatives every hour of the day, and the irritating sense of the continually watchful eyes of servants or slaves. Only by seeking the wilds could one find real solitude. In all human communities there are endless opportunities for social intercourse, opportunities for solitude are artificial. Life was changed in limonora with the view to allowing and securing as frequent and as long solitudes as were constant with the progress of the race. On the most prominent point of every house there was the representation of two climbing flowers, and if these hung drooping, colorless, and apart, everyone knew that the occupant desired seclusion. If they flushed with rolls, stood up to the sun, and twined around each other, then it was known that human converse was permissible, if not desired. There was indeed sufficient magnetic communion of spirit among all the people to touch into life at intervals the love of that definite and open intercourse so native to the human system. This inborn social faculty might be trusted to prevent the love of loneliness from severing all ties. There were daily public duties that brought everyone into the knowledge and sight of his fellow men, the rota of physical exercise at the center of force, the flight drill, the general meeting of the community, and the medical review, and every day and almost every hour of the day communion of spirit could go on in the magnificent baths, in the halls of recuperation, and in the valley of memories. There was no lack of occasion to draw the Lymanorans together. But the other duty to the higher self was sacredly guarded and fostered, especially in the earlier stages of life. One of the greatest blunders they had to correct in their former civilization had been gregarious education. Large families had been one of the consequences of a half-developed humanity, more akin to the animal world than to the spiritual. The lower a living thing is in the scale of life, the more prolific it is, the more devoted to the mere function of keeping a species alive. Unicellular organisms perpetuate their existence by continual fission. Micros become massive in their effects by the countless myriads each is capable of producing. The higher the organization, the less is the energy that can be spared for generation, and the more capable is the offspring, when matured, of ensuring its own survival, of rising above and managing the laws of nature. Civilization has not advanced far when it acts by masses and needs masses to keep it going. Then mere subsistence and procreation are the only purposes and functions of most life. To feed, to reproduce, to die. That is their history. The Lymanorans look back to that stage of their development with a shutter, so far in the mess and darkness of animalism did it seem. Now one man of them was more able to do battle with nature and her fecundity and her catastrophes than a hundred thousand of that golden time, and not one hundred thousandth of the generative power was needed. Then but a poor fraction of the life energy could be given up to education. The offspring had to be trained in masses or have no training at all. The parents were too busy earning the means of life to mold their families, and had too many children to give heed to the character of the individual. All the offspring were handed over to professional trainers, who managed them in the mass, and who had to work by the methods of nature with its myriad children through the law of the survival of the fittest. They had to be handled like armies, and the stricter the discipline, the better the result was supposed to be. And where the people were counted in masses and moved in masses the better it undoubtedly was for the survival of the state. Schools and universities were a necessity of that far back stage of civilization. They were the drill sergeants of civil life, dragooning the young and their ideas into accordance with the prevailing and accepted type. Too much independence of character or thought or manner would have broken the ranks and endangered the existence of the common wheel. But the chief purpose of life on the world, the progress of the species, was ignored in this notion to mere persistence of the species. All variant germs and elements that nature supplies in every individual it brings forth were smoothed down or annihilated into uniformity. The type persisted from century to century unchanged. Only by stealth or by audacity did any new or alien elements succeed in modifying the species, and when it did succeed the modification was often retrograde as progressive. Therefore, in order to be secure from variation, public opinion punished all habits that would lead to independence of character or thought or feeling. As soon as the great exilings had been completed, the Lymanorans recognized that the best chance of swift progress was the selection and preservation of the finest variants in their character and thoughts. They therefore abolished the profession of teacher, that manufacture of uniformity, and all schools and universities, hot beds of convention, worship of antiquity, and retrogression. They by no means abolished education. They recreated it, intensified it, and made it the chief function of the community. The whole time and energies of the parents, or as the case might be, of pro-parents who were given up for a period from fifty to seventy years to the training and molding of each child. Nothing was left to nature or haphazard, and every new tendency or faculty that was discovered in the pupil was recorded and reported to the Council of Sages. It was discussed by them, and if judged to be hostile to the progress of the race, the parents were assisted in eradicating it. If manifestly progressive, every means was taken to make it grow. If doubtful in its results, it was submitted to the community, and their instincts soon brought them to a decision. Thus it was that their world was being continually renovated. Never was an idea or method of action rejected simply because it was new. Every opportunity of advance was seized and tested. Every suggestion of a new direction of progress was investigated and followed out till it was seen to be impracticable. And, to prevent emphasizing the old and outworn or reviving the past, the young were isolated from one another, for as the embryo records in its growth the stages of animalism through which terrestrial life has passed upwards from the unicellular to the complex human organization. So the immature periods that come between infancy and full manhood record human development, prehistoric as well as historic. The long ages of primitive utility and presence of the powers of nature are abbreviated into the helpless years of infancy. Prehistoric savagery shows itself in various traces in the rebellious, adventure-loving, omnivorous phase of boyhood. The first stages of civilization appear in the early years of puberty, its later stages in the approach to full manhood. The imperfect past ever springs up like weeds amid the growth of the new life and will choke it if encouraged. And nothing, they held, gave such persistence to the evils and imperfections of the past, thus appearing in early life as the gregariousness of youth. Nothing had done so great a wrong to the race, or had so hindered its progress as their former education system with its schools and universities. To throw men in the immature stages of their life into close intercourse was to confirm their immaturities, to encourage a atavism, to make the past tyrannize over the future. As long as their old system continued, their civilization was enslaved to the times that were gone, and imagination deified the world as it had been. Next to their exiling policy their educational reform was one of the most important starting points of their new and swiftly progressive civilization. I was astonished at the length and frequency of my isolations during the period of my training. For years I saw few or none but the two pro-parents to whose care I had been handed over, even after I'd been introduced to other sections of the community. In the process of my advance toward liminore inhabits and powers, I was often left for days together with my own thoughts, and yet in the presence of some supervising power that seldom made itself definite to any of my senses or even to my mind. Throughout these intervals of solitude I felt continual suggestion of noble thought and emotion come to me from my surroundings, the divine music that rang so softly and variedly amid the silences, the deep meaning of the arts that filled every corner of my life, the magnetic energy that raid forth from unknown centers upon my spirit. The finest impulses of my nature became dominant in me at these times, and grew in strength. I came to recognize the power that such solitude gave to character. Without it I should have inclined to become the echo of my tutors, even though they were ever impressing upon me the necessity of thinking and acting for myself. They were so noble, so far above the men and women I had met or heard of or read of that it was a hard task not to fall down and worship them. Once I had the misfortune to question the benefits of prolonged seclusion, I urged the praises of friendship so common in the literature of my country and spoke with great fervor of the pleasures of social intercourse, the keen emulation on the path of development it stirred, and the white influence which the finest characters had. I painted in glowing colors all that refined society might become, the witty Parisian saloons of the eighteenth century, the artistic circles in the fifteenth century Italian republics, the brilliant association of thoughtful men in some of the London literary sets of the nineteenth century. What could be nobler than such intellectual brilliancy of intercourse as that is recorded in the biographies of the great men and beautiful and refined women of the West. Then I turned to the happiness of children and youth together in the gardens or woods or on the shores of the ocean, and their sadness when they moped alone in their rooms or at their books. Companionship was the very life of childhood and youth. Did not solitary musings even in maturity produce morbid self-introspection. The intercourse, even with superiors and elders, was somewhat unwholesome for the young spirit. It crushed spontaneity and naturalness and confidence in one's inner self. I worked myself up to a climax of eloquence, and thought that I had demolished all possibility of defense of their system. But I had succeeded only by ignoring the vices and weaknesses of society. These wise men quietly and almost unconcernedly took me behind the gaudy theatrical curtain of the world, and smiled to think how like their old social ideals had been to those I had described, and to see the same vanity and posturing in European refinement as in their own evil past. They mourned over my blindness of mind in failing to look through the most transparency at the tawdry vulgarities behind. Following it through many forms and stages of life, animaling human, they showed me the love social intercourse. Not the highest but the lowest emotional and moral level of a herd or circle to the natures and minds of its members ultimately reach, however lofty the aspirations of some of them may be. A company in which free utterance is the rule is soon mastered by base interpretation of the noblest lives, and it is to guard against the effects of this hydrostatic law of ethics that churches and temples have been erected. They're the awe of a higher power and the conventions of worship conceal the inevitability of the law, and save the shire natures for brief periods from the evil influence of the bold. The most masterful religions have always provided permanent refuges for the finer spirits who dread conflict with the unscrupulous wit or power of the world, and who know how in a struggle of speech or action or even pure thought the wielder of the fowler weapons wins. It has been the rule throughout civilized history that the greatest characters, if thickling to moral principle, at last withdraw into solitude partial or complete, and become the sages of the world. If they remain in action and succeed, the necessity for further success drives them to accept the moral level of the lowest they have to struggle with. For if immoral men of less intellectual power overcome them, defeat means to them ultimate exhaustion of the soul. Nothing bleaches the faculties and reduces them to the common level like failure after failure. However great a hero may be to begin with, success in action closes his moral career, whilst failure closes his intellectual. To die in his first great victory is the truest happiness that can befall him. In fact, the Lymanorans came ages before to see that all public life with its competitions and ambitions, social, artistic, political, military, meant the triumph of cunning or force. It meant the retrogression to the naked of savagery hidden underneath the gugaws of civilization. No real advance could be made by any form of humanity so long as its ablest spirits were drawn into the furious struggle for glory, in which the cruelest and most audacious cunning was bound to win. The founders of new religions and new philosophies have been strong spirits who saw the foul embryo before them in public life and shrank back from it. The first aim of the Lymanorans, when once they had rid themselves of their more degenerate brethren, was to abolish this contest of might and cunning, and turn their stronger spirits to the true progress of themselves and their race. And little difficulty was experienced in accomplishing this most fundamental reform. The island had been purged of the furiously ambitious, of all who longed for the naked, palestra of civilized savagery. They knew better than most men how much of the essence of life was competition, how necessary to all progress was the struggle for existence, how fundamental was the law of survival of the fittest. But they realized vividly that nature unguided often shows false directions, that the struggle may be in a myriad various arenas that differ greatly from one another in nobleness or baseness, that the law if left to itself might lead to the survival of the fiercest or cunningest or basest, according to the conditions that were to be fitted. The will of man could work on the conditions, so elevating the struggle and leading the law to a nobler issue. They did not, they could not, put an end to the struggle. What they did was to withdraw it from false grounds and false aims, and guard it from any appearance of the lower nature, sensuality, cunning, or force. The competitive energy in every Lyme and Noren's nature was bent towards his own future and the future of his race, and strove to surpass the past, if it were great and noble, and to cast it out, if it were base and threatened to reappear. To strive upwards, to help the whole people to progress, these were the aims that transformed the everlasting struggle and the ever-working law. This revolution in existence accomplished, and public life having in consequence vanquished. There ceased all need of social display, of conversational fireworks, and of tack in managing men either singly or in masses. The object of gregarious education disappeared at once. As long as the course and selfish struggle called public life was the highest sphere, they knew the youth had to be trained for it. Its methods and aims had to be adopted, and schools and universities were a necessity, as miniature reflections of the greater world. In order to succeed in life, they had to be rolled together and tumbled against one another like pebbles in a stream, till they had taken the conventional smoothness of outline and similarity of sheen. They had to learn to keep the wild beast in their hearts and the silk and curtier in their manners, to cloak untruth and hypocrisy in an appearance of brilliancy or wisdom. To make grasping selfishness seem almost divine love, and brutal cruelty and arrogance the most dazzling refinement. It was painful to read the flashy lies and stabs in the dark that went for wit, and the cruel intrigue and showy falsehood that went to the making of history in those old times. Even the friendship of the foremost was but a piece of acting. Little trust could be put in it. It served its purpose and was abandoned as soon as it failed to impress the dupes. Solitaries then seemed useless. Moping self-analysers. They made no history and they were soon forgotten. No parents could afford to let any one of their children thus lose his life. And, however gentle and meditative, he might be by nature, he must be thrust into the cruel struggle of school and university in order to acquire hardness and brilliancy, however virtuous and noble in purpose he had to prepare for the arena of polished scoundrelism. As soon as these conditions of competition ceased, education in masses had to cease too. It must be a miniature of the general life and a preparation for it. At a distance and in a haze it seems as if the immature in their sports were leading a life of primitive and heavy innocence, but innocence often accompanies untamed passion and fierce emulation. The appearance of simplicity comes from their ignorance of the advance of the world. Nothing did the Lymanorans so shudder at as the chance of perpetuating the methods and habits of this early and undeveloped stage throughout later life. What their associative education in former times had done for them was to confirm the vices of savagery under the gloved conventions that civilized life demanded and to destroy the simplicity forever. Solitary training under the supervision of sages, they soon found, had the reverse effect. It confirmed the naturalness and spontaneity and swept out the inclination to intrigue and arrogance and cruelty. There was a childlikeness in their natures that gave great beauty to their faces, and this they retained through the longest life and the most absorbing work. If there was one quality more than others which marked them as a race, it was their gentle and trustful outlook upon life, their naive candor of transparency of character, their simple wonder and delight over any new discovery or invention. They never grudged the quiet admiration any word or action deserved. They never assumed that tone of superiority or sophistication, which, coming as it does from envy, jealousy or malice, mars all praise or blame. They were children to one another in the limpidity of their life, and so their features, which had not often the attractions of regularity, had come to be transfigured by the single heartedness. However old and experienced and wise they might be, all possess this divine beauty of childhood. Sailors and back woodsmen, men who have to spend long periods of their lives in comparative solitude, away from the sophistications of crowded life, often reveal traces of this childlike beauty of nature and expression. And it was this particular educational system and its long intervals of solitary meditation that kept the Lymanoren children simple and ingenuous, till the day each vanished in the ether. What deprived these isolations of bitterness was that one never felt lonely or abandoned by his fellows during them. In a moment there could be communication in thought or magnetic sympathy with his dearest friends, and within a brief space they would be at his side. They often resisted the associative impulse, through fear that it might be but the return of the old immaturity in disguise, and they knew that friendship was ever at call, and that all true solitudes deepened the current of life. As I came to feel the spirit of their existence these arguments grew self-evident. I saw how all important to progress were these intervals of isolation. They had studied with the minutest care and ultimate shuddering the features of their old civilization, and they had found that the worst of them came from the associative principle in the training of youth. Atavism became their greatest horror. In the breast of every child born into civilized life an embryo savages born, and this had been vitalized and fostered by sympathy with what was savage in companions and schoolmates. Under their old school and university systems the age of training was that which corresponded to the military stage in the development of man, and boys were forever fighting, girls ever encouraging to fight. Emulation became fierce rivalry and hatred. A crude stage of the past was confirmed and perpetuated through life by constant association in the time of life that stood for it. That was why their leisure classes had so devoted themselves during peace to the wilder sports of the hunting stage of mankind, whilst they were ever itching for a war that their sons might distinguish themselves. That was why they had indulged so often in breaches of the marriage bond, and outraged the monogamy that they professed to revere. The minds of the youth had been inflamed by the free proximity of the sexes before the passions had been mastered, before the polygamous and un-moral stage of their career had been passed through. And education, instead of checking the perpetuation of these immaturities, encouraged it. Teachers had come to pride themselves in the development of the savage stages of boyhood and girlhood, and called the weaknesses by euphemistic names, pluck, pride, grace. The young men and women were taught to glory in them, and thus evil became eternal. In more primitive life there had been of necessity a wiser method of training. There were no large centers of population where their youth was massed in schools and universities. Families wandered or rested by themselves, and the hardships of existence ensured the survival of the few that were fittest. These few had, from their earliest years, to join their elders in their pursuits, and they learned in such society to pass rapidly through the primitive stages of man's development, emulating the skill of their betters and following them with modesty and reverence. In the later industrial and centralistic ages the youth had to be massed educationally, and by the mutual encouragement of sympathy came to glory in their immaturities as perfections, and desired to prolong the savage stage of their life into later years. They judged their elders by faults and atavistic standards, and so lost their modesty and reverence. It was also an occasional wave of lofty feeling issuing from some inspired poet or prophet that raised one generation above the preceding. For centuries and centuries they stood still or retrograded. Crimes were sanctified in war and politics. The evil past became a fetish. Impetuosity, anger, hatred, revenge, falsehood, lust were tricked out in the appeal of virtues, and made the aims and glories of the leisured. It was the associative method of education that produced such results. And, after the great purgation of the race, they were amazed to see how blind they had been. Would any civilized parents agree to send their child into the wilderness there to spend the educable period of life among savages, primitive in their instincts and habits, even if the savages had the most persuasive and influential missionaries amongst them who would change them in a few years into civilized beings. Yet this was what their ancestors had been doing when they concentrated youth in schools and universities. Never before the age of twenty-five were the Lymanorn youth allowed any freedom of social intercourse, and then only for brief periods and under the supervision of sages. And if there was any sign of adivism apparent in them at their first draft of social life, back they were sent into isolation, that their character might be strengthened, and the stage of peril passed. Even when socially enfranchised, their first companions had lived beyond their fiftieth year. By that boundary line it was held, all the risk of adivism had passed, and all the chances and possibilities of the character had been discovered and provided for. It was not till the seventy-fifth year that someone was supposed to be fit for parenthood. For then, though the faculties and power still went on improving even till death, most of them had reached the maturity of self-control and inter-subordination. Then reason had begun to be master, and all the stages of the development of man before the final purgation of the race had been traversed. Only a few years before this epic in their lives were they permitted to look into the deeper mysteries of existence. They thought it to be one of the strangest pieces of inversion, if not desecration, to place religious ideas as we did before the youngest. Nothing but evil could come of such an attempt. With the Lymanorans it was the final initiation into life to acquaint their grown men and women with the sublimest thoughts and doubts and emotions on the purpose of existence. It was the cobstone of their education. After all the field of knowledge had been traversed by them, and all the reverences had been instilled into them, the last reverence was revealed to them. Then and not till then were they capable of realizing its fullness. Communicated in childhood or early youth, before the powers were mature, before the animal and savage stages of development had been gone through, it could end only in gross familiarity or gross superstition. The noblest and most inward of thoughts and emotions would be misunderstood. What was it that had made their old religions so stagnant, so obstructive to all advance, but this mistaken principle of attempting to teach the holiest and deepest ideas to the young? It made their ancestors cleave to crude superstitions as if divine and refused to give up any item of their childish ideas of them. So thoroughly were the sources of our youthful impressions lost in the midst of the past that any connected with reverence seemed to come from the divine eternity beyond birth.