 6 I abandoned the effort to defend the literature of Christendom and came to the conclusion that a people that so scorned all word mongering could not have any literature. I was soon disabused of the idea. One day after my education had advanced into the final stage of its earlier course, and my loyalty to the race had been tested in many ways, my pro-parents paid me accompany them to the production of a new book. After what I had heard in the depreciation of literature such as I had been accustomed to in Europe, I was somewhat startled at this invitation. But they said nothing to explain the anomaly, although they knew well the nature of the discussion I had had with Thairiel. I had thought that during my long residence in the island and in my countless flights over it I had come to know every public institution existing on it. But I was mistaken again. In our course we chose a direction that for a space was one I had several times taken. But soon we bent out of the usual track up Lyle Roma and turning one of its eastern spurs, made for a deep valley which was concealed from view except to voyagers towards the sunset. Here we found the air filled with wings and airships streaming onwards. It was a beautiful sight, this navy of the sky fleeting across the snows of Lyle Roma or winnowing the depths of the azure. We had been on the adjoining coasts of the island and had not to strike far upwards in order to reach our destination. So the air fleet moved far above us, most of it having to round the heights of the gleaming mountain. Nothing could surpass the grace with which they took their way through the heaven, now to this point, now to that, and after a time I could hear the movement of their wings, like the rustle of silken sails. When gazing dreamily upwards I had allowed myself to drop too near the earth and in order to reach the goal of our flight exactly I had to take another long rise. Thereafter my gaze was bent earthwards on a still more beautiful sight beneath me. A broad valley narrowed coastwards to a deep gorge and mountain words into a rift in the rocks. The river which had sculpted this singular amphitheater had been deflected by an artificial channel into the center of force, but was allowed at times to sweep its old bed free of the debris of rocks and vegetation. Up each side vibrated in the air, tear upon tear of their automatic rests, enough to accommodate a nation. All lay open to the sky, yet there was a subdued light down in the hollow of the veil that soothed the eyes tired with the gleam of the blue and snow above, and this twilight deepened into gloom towards the head and the exit of the valley. Only in the afternoon, as the sun westered, it shot its level rays through the chasm at the entrance and mellowed the gloom even of the ravine at the upper end with its golden light, and at sunset the concentration of the many-colored rays through the gorge had a striking effect upon the whole amphitheater. It was as if a theatrical artist were lighting and up for some supernatural scene. The afternoon sunlight indeed soon revealed to our eyes, as we settled on the slopes, an immense stage that shot out of the ravine on the mountainside. It was, I could see, the natural theater of the island, cut out by other than human powers, and from side to side the gentlest whisper would carry, yet without recoil, while the sound of the moving stage, as it rolled forth, rose along the tears and without break or repercussion died away into the open sky above our heads. It must have been here, I thought, that the architects of limanorn buildings had learned the acoustic secrets of nature. Never a sound was lessened or confused in passing to the farthest corner of any of their vast halls. Nor was it from any mechanical contrivance underneath the roof, but simply from the shape of the enclosure. Nature had formed this valley into a perfect theater, in the highest tier of which not one listener could miss the smallest sound. Yet by a singular contrivance by means of which a globe of verlinium was kept over the stage every sound was tenfold magnified lest the merest whisper should escape, built every ear had at hand a margal, which would soften sounds that carried too loudly to the ear. Another strange effect of this aerolinium shell was that it magnified to the eye everything upon the stage a hundredfold. It acted as a powerful microscope, so that each spectator was far nearer to the inner structure of any object than mere human eye power could bring him. We had not long to wait for the purpose of these preparations. There entered upon the stage two figures that underneath the globe seemed gigantic beside the bodies of limanorn men and women. They had limanorn outlines, but transmuted into something more ethereal than odd I had seen. There was a grace of form and a beauty of face beyond any of those around me on the slope of the hill. And even to my eyes, untrained and limited as they were in their powers, there was a transparency in the tissue of their bodies which revealed the movements of their organs. I saw their hearts pulsate and the currents of blood move quicker or slower along their veins as they walked or stood still. We could even watch the effect of their emotions in their systems and excited or tranquil movement of thoughts in the tissues of their brains. The impulses that traveled along their nerves from brain to hand or foot, and the reports that kept journeying from the various senses to the nerve centers, seemed all to be made plain to us, and seemed the work of a magician, so marvellous was it, so far above mere human achievement. But still greater marvels were to follow. These two beings or automata or moving shadows of beings, or whatever they might be, enacted a scene, the significance of which I comprehended only after many days of thought. My immediate impressions and my subsequent conclusions and knowledge have so amalgamated that it is difficult to separate the two elements. These two beings were chosen friends, the compliments of each other, with tendencies and tastes and loves all in unison. Such perfect fitting of nature to nature was as not yet to be found even in Lymanora. Thought sprang to thought, and emotion to emotion, and yet there was a spontaneity and origination in both that made each a separate fountain of life and action. How independent the characters and powers, and yet how mutually adapted. The scene was meant to picture a friendship that was a true and perfect marriage. The two had grown year by year closer in harmony till at last the mutual sympathy had culminated in a yearning to see an individuality that would combine the best peculiarities of each and perpetuate the combination. We could see the thought flame into a passion in the two systems, and then we could hear the friends talk around the longing till it grew definite, into a common project. We saw them gather the materials needed for the formation of the body. With intricacies of furnace and crucible and machinery they molded these into the skeleton of a man, flawless and strong in every part. They tried every bone with numberless tests till they found it all to their satisfaction. Then they started on the cartilages that kept the bones in place or moved them, giving permanence and life to each as they made it, by the magnetism they communicated to it. Tissue by tissue they build up the internal organs, modeling them with loving care on those they sought play beneath their own eyes, and testing them to see that they performed their functions perfectly. What delicate artistic energy they spend upon the upper tissues of the body, upon the brain and ear and eye. Each created and developed the quality loved and admired in the other. There was nothing they admitted to make the new being complete and happy in all his functions. On the minute nerves and tissues they worked under powerful microscopes, and the minutia of every sense and organ and function were examined and tested again and again, with the same magnifying power turned on them. The figure they made, most noble and symmetrical in proportions and outlines, the face they made as beautiful as human face could look. The stuff in which they worked was ethereal in its texture and constituents. It was difficult to discern it with our senses, even under the great magnifying globe. It seemed to be an air of some product of the ether, for it flowed underneath their guiding fingers almost invisible, and the result was a body more transparent than their own. It was a marvel of refinement and strength combined. They experimented on every limb and sense, every nerve and muscle and tissue, and they corrected every defect in it before they reached the final act. At last the work was completed to their satisfaction, and they braced themselves for the most exhausting task of all. How were they to make this image a living creature? I smiled as I thought of the impossibility of what was evidently before them. Yet they seemed perfectly calm in their preparation for the final endeavour. Only there was a subdued volcanic energy in their systems that seemed to show that they considered it a task almost superhuman. They encouraged each other, and we could see them infuse new magnetism into their bodies by means of machinery of great power. Their faces were filled with the glow of a rapturous appeal to heaven. They were putting themselves into connection with some being they adored invisible to us, some impalpable fountain of life. They took the hands of the image they had formed, and raised it. They placed it between them, so that it should be in the path of all energy that passed from one to the other. They laid their hands upon its head and nerve centers, and at the same time the pleading rapture on their faces rose almost to trance. Their spirits seemed to go out of them. They looked like to in a dream. A faint flush came upon the cheeks of the image between them and died out. Again their souls seemed to return to full consciousness, and the rapture drew upon their faces. Again the signal of life dawned on the countens of the image. Throb by throb they gave their own souls to his, meantime dried from some fountain of life and spirit unseen by us. Slowly the eyelids rose, and the lips moved. There was true life in the image. The three walked as in a trance, yet with the joy of creation pulsing through them. The child of their imagination was like both, yet independent, and more beautiful to look upon. Love broke through the new being and theirs in wild pulsations. The three awoke to a new life, and then the scene vanished, and I seemed to have but dreamed. Yet there was the deep valley with the sunset rays shooting through it, and up the slopes rested thousands of flesh and blood, lime and orange, beside me. A few thoughts, and I knew that it was no dream. Was it magic? I could not believe that such a people would indulge in mere trifling with life and the powers above life. My spirit of inquiry stirred my guardians, and I soon knew from them that this was the first publication of a new book, called Human Sculpture. The deep valley with its apparatus was at the theater of fruition, where every imaginative foresight was first put into a form that would appeal to the whole people. It was called Lumiefa, or the display of pioneering. Their literature was all science, and that the science of the future. Romancing about the past or the present seemed to this utilitarian people waste of the noblest faculty of man, shameful squandering of imaginative wealth on that which is not. Their retrospection for its own sake, without reference to subsequent advance, was thought by them the most pernicious of madnesses. They diagnosed it as a kind of ethical blindness that could neither see, the right, nor do it. The state of peoples who looked at nothing but the past with admiration was one of the lowest circles of their inferno. Another was that of nations that saw nothing good outside of themselves and their immediate surroundings. In such unprogressive national or racial attitudes they saw all the evils of inbreeding. The weaknesses and intellectual and moral disease of the past grew despotic in their power over the human system, till they came to seem the only virtues. Even what had once been virtues grew inveterate and routine, or monstrous and overpowering in their excess. The past served only as the soil for the better growths of the future, and an exhausted soil became barren, if not poisonous, for all but weeds, or growths that needed and deserved no attention or cultivation. To spend imagination on the past therefore was to them a crime against the future. What was dead and needed invention to bring before the mind again was better in its grave. A literature that turned back to the past for its progress clogged the wheels of progress, unless it belonged to a race that had fallen back centuries behind the natural advance of the world. For a progressive nation to give of its best for the resurrection of a dead past was to confess a strain of barbarism in it, and to prophecy its own rapid decay. The imagination was the faculty of the future. It had its eyes set in front and not behind like a memory. It was meant to investigate the horizon before us, and to interpret the lights and shadows thrown from below the rim of vision, and not to look back, whether with regret or adoration, over the region that humanity had beaten hard with its weary footing. The future is infinite. The human past covers but a few centuries, and a narrow track through them. It is not for want of scope that the faculty of fruition is driven back on the ground already troddened. It is through a grievous and incurable malady, the malady of redder pluperfection, that twists the face round to the back of the neck, and rots or petrifies the tissues of the brain and the heart. They counted it the saddest of all spectacles on earth to see a race. By its nature be rapidly progressive, waste its highest energies in retracting again and again the footsteps of its own ancestry, or of the ancestry of some other race. Nothing would persuade them to permit any study of the past that was not meant to be wholly relevant to the future. They tended to be, I thought, as negligent of the value of history and historical study, for, as our western commonplace goes, history repeats itself, and however new and ameliorative an age may be, it may obtain lessons, and still more warnings from ages past. Their literature was all of the future. There were two of the largest families of the race devoted to it, and their numbers were ever being recruited by adoption into them of scions of others, who revealed exceptional imaginative faculty. They had the generalized training of the island, but their particular training was more completely specialized than that of any other family. Nothing was amended that would tend to make them of imaginational compact or to give them such ease in their command of language as would bring them to the exact word without effort. Next to these points in their education stood tutelage in all that pertained to scenic art and music, for they had to give their ideas a staging that would at once appeal to the imagination of the whole people. Lumiefa was in their province, and the literary form into which they were to put their communications as to the future had to be as perfect as it could be in their language, exactly expressing all they had to convey, and at the same time appealing to the ear by its melody and harmony. As far as histronic art was allowable in the island, they were the artists. Whilst the linguistic conventions of the people they were the leaders and suggestors in the making of words, and in the choice of words made. They had, I could see, the finest heads in the community. The brow was broad, full, and shapely. The eyes were large and yet deeply set under the brows, and the base of the skull was of great width, every section of the brain that had to do with imaginative and poetic power was well developed. Yet their faces and features showed no difference from the common limonoren type. They had no more beauty or regularity of outline. It was clear that all children of a certain shape of skull and development of brain were selected for training and adoption by these two families whenever they needed recruits. From the first, the youth of these two families were educated in the sciences of the day in order that they might know what gaps in knowledge had to be filled and what laws should guide and limit their imaginative prospecting. For the literature they produced is science and embryo. Science lays the foundations of literature, and literature prepares the way for science. These families, by their imaginative production based on all that is already known, pioneer the scientific investigators into the new regions of the future. They keep in touch with the leaders of science and act as allies to them, finding out the track of what these are trying to discover or invent, and suggesting methods of supplying their wants or reaching their aims. They provide working hypotheses for scientists to apply and test and they map out roads for the whole race into darkness of the unknown or the twilight of the half conjectured. Thus their literature is fiction, for tentative fiction they hold is the only unstagnant truth. The productions of the pioneering families have all to be submitted to the national test. What the race disapproves of is promptly cancelled and forgotten. What meets with the approval of the elders or of the leaders of any one of the sciences is handed over to them for experimentation, even though it should not attract the rest of the people. What strikes the fancy of the nation as a whole is adopted as the map and guide of the future. It is the sacred book of the time, and the citizens study it daily for the purpose of reaching the goal it sets before their life. But every new age antiquates one or more of these sacred books. For the region they have mapped out in the future is reached and traveled over, the advance they anticipate is made, the ideal they paint is realized and rapidly becoming commonplace. It puzzled me for a time to guess what they did with their superseded books, knowing as I did how superfluous they counted all researches into the past and all imaginative pictures of the present. My question, as usual, was not long unanswered. I was shown the library of antiquated fiction in the Valley of Memories. It was used in the very earliest stages of education. The children read the books or heard them in order to see, when they reached years of maturity, what the race had come from and how much it might yet advance, together enthusiasm from the spectacle of the progress made, and to learn lessons for their own future. Beyond childhood and early youth, every minute was counted lost that was not spent on the future and its possibilities. For a man or woman of mature years, all forms of antiquarianism were counted idleness. They never permitted themselves to lay too much stress on any sacred book or to adore it too passionately, however much they might be guided by it for a time, for they knew from experience that it would soon be worked into the nature of the race and the system of the individual, and another would take its place. The sacred book of today was bound to be transcended to-morrow. The four sites and ideals of this year would become truisms of next. The real desecration, they thought, was to rest too many ages over sacred book, its precepts unworked into the life, its pictures and ideals unrealized, to adore its words and deny its spirit by failing to advance beyond its point of view. A buck who long held sacred is a charge of stagnancy and barbarism against a race, and an insult to its intelligence. It proves that the civilization has become stereotyped, or worse, retrospective, to eat, to sleep, to fall prostrate before a dead ideal, to propagate and die, sum up the ultimate duties of existence at its highest level. Every book was sacred to the Lymanorans which threw light upon the track ahead into the darkness, and so long as it still gave light where light was needed, it remained sacred. Whenever its light became the common daylight around the race, and especially if they had to look backwards in order to see its waymarks, then it was promptly committed to the Valley of Memories. Not a moment was wasted on its precepts after they had become the laws of everyday existence. They had known from their own history what a terrible engine of oppression a book might be when once it had become antiquated without losing the adoration of the people. Its prophecies, which had become mere tales of the past, had to be projected again into the future by mystic interpretation. Its precepts, embodying the spirit of a generation long dead, had to be galvanized into life by a casuous tree, and innumerable methods had to be extorted from its over-strength text to prevent the human mind moving non-past its own stage of morality and civilization. How many ages in their own history did their ancestors live with their dead? Into the warmest feelings of their hearts had the grave clothes of the past intertwined, and what tortured a love and the noblest feelings, what bloodshed and horrors it cost them to be able to stand off from their dead authority and to look at it with unpraised mind. It had become part of their best selves, and it seemed like suicide to cast it from them and relegate it to its true home, the graveyard of the past. That long experience was burned into their natures, and to lay too much stress on any new book or idea gave them an instinctive pang. They could not bear to linger over it, once the light had died out of it, and its leading had become a highway mark for the passerby. To utter or admire the obvious or common place was counted one of the gravest offenses against the common wheel. It awakened a look of pity in the eyes of the listener, as for one who was smitten with an incurable disease. A repetition of the offense would lead to drastic measures with the victim. He was hailed before the medecists, and his system was minutely examined for the source of the malady, and for weeks he was kept under medical supervision. No labor or watching or remedial pain was spared till the source of the offending was scourged out of the Constitution of the Sufferer. As a rule it was found on investigation that the infection had come from some book whose spirit and precepts had become incorporated in the past of the race, and could give no more vitality to it. It was good enough for children and youth, who were passing through the primitive stages of development, to them it was fresh and new for a time, and was even the source of life and vigour. But once out of the valley of memories the men and women who could read it, with any pleasure, were considered unhealthy and atavistic, and were sent to hospital for treatment. The symptoms of the malady of the commonplace were well known and most patent. Loquacity, fondness for confidential communications and mysterious suggestions under solemn conditionings, or even ulcer of silence, bustling idleness, feeble smiles of impenance superiority, jocular dogmatism, assumption of wisdom, and excessive vanity. If the disease had not been so infectious and stealthy in its spread it would never have been treated so seriously and so promptly, for it was seldom malignant, in its earlier appearances at least, only when it became morbid, and took the shape of injured feeling at unrecognized genius, resulting at times in jealousy and slander, or conspiracy and rebellion, or when it grew masterful and acquired a sense of its own infallibility and omnipotence, resulting generally in petty spite and persecution, was there any deadly virus in it. It was its epidemic character that made it most formidable, and necessitated a system of moral quarantine. Special precautions were taken in permitting the use of the sacred books of the past, and of antiquated or superseded ideas. They were only useful for teaching the young reverence for great thoughts and great thinkers, and for leading the mature to estimate their own achievements modestly, when they saw the rapid and equation of even the most striking books. One evil that arose from the study of past literature, the overvaluation of literary work, they tried to obviate. They placed noble deeds on the same footing with noble words and thoughts, and saw that they were as carefully recorded and described. It was the duty of the young to report, and give permanent form to, anything that was done greatly. With their enthusiasm made more glowing by their ignorance and inexperience, they acted as the historiographers of the race. The youth of a family went with the elders whenever any difficulty offered itself, and with their recording instruments—innocence, and linocence, and idrolens. They took flying pictures, electrographs, and reports of the scene for depositing the Valley of Memories. If any emergency arose and was nobly met when the youthful remembrancers were not present, they wrote the annals of it, none the less, and reproduced its scenes in moving representations after interviewing all who witnessed the deed. There was as much inspiration as people held, in a great action as in a great book, provided it illumined the darkness of the road ahead of them. For to them the true test of greatness and inspiration was the power of fore illumination, or of stimulus to progress. Whatsoever flashlight over the unknown in front must have come from a higher point of view than their own immediate surroundings. Word or deed it was to them all the same, if it had this divine characteristic, the one that was worthy of chronicling and preserving the other. But they ceased to look upon it as a source of stimulus to action as soon as it failed to throw light upon their future, or to hold up an ideal that they had not yet attained. Inspiration, like all other things and beings in the universe, was progressive. No idea or deed, no word or book, could be permanently inspired. And the quicker a race progressed, the sooner it sterilized its sacred thoughts and deeds. All noble human advance was a process of de-inspiration. A step upwards makes the climber capable of looking down upon the previous point of vision, and of looking up for a still higher, and to gaze downwards is to encourage retrogression. Whosoever or whatsoever caught the first gleam of a peak above them was to them inspired. But it was the duty to reach that peak in their march upwards as soon as possible, and once it was reached, where was the inspiration? It was itself far below with the age that supplied it. Some new deed or thought or book was certain to take the place of that which had for a time been considered sacred. And if that did not come, then woe to the race! Progress must stop and darkness must close in on their pure-blind leaders, who in order to retain their dominance must elevate the past, immediate or distant, into a divinity, and its best book into an oracle. After a time so obscured do the pages of this book become with cobwebs of interpretation, that at last they must spin new cobwebs out of their intestines. The dread of light from without becomes a horror. If a new teacher or prophet should come, down with him into the dust, his teachings are false, for they agree not with the devotion-cobweb book. If a reformer sees light above and ahead, he is banned as a messenger of hell. And what he sees is nothing but a diabolic marsh light. All through the ray spread the awful diseases of spiritual inbreeding, inability to distinguish the true from the false, love of delusion, unwholesome and insane pursuits and ends, and the madness of cruelty and intolerance. Nothing but fierce revolution could save a race from such a plight. And the germs of revolution must come from without, themselves and without the world. PAYONERING PART I Imagination, corrected by racial instinct in the assemblies of all, was the seeker for four gleams of what was to be. And a people that had organized his civilization into a disciplined advance was not likely to leave its scouts and vanguard unorganized. This destiny was largely in the hands of those who went before it into the night, or who ascended the heights above it, and told of the region to be transversed next, and the best routes through it. There was no service that needed so much the best powers of the race and its best organization. Into the pioneering families were gathered their most powerful imaginations. For imagination is the only clairvoyant of the faculties. It can see what lies below the horizon of knowledge, it can forecast the world as it might be, and as it is to be, and it can draw the human mind onwards by the splendors of this forecast. This people had early realized the symboling nature of the faculty, and the great part of it might play in their devotion to progress, and they resolved to save it from all waste. They refused to have it become the mere slave of luxury or of popular amusement, such as they saw it was in most other civilized nations. Even where conjured up the past in magnificent literary pictures, what else was it then the pander to tastes and habits that were overworn, the encomiasced of deeds that had better be buried in oblivion? It frequented the palaces of kings and licked the dust off their feet, or it played the buffoon to the indolent, sensuous crowd. At rare times it isolated itself, and heedless of the babbling world that offered it so many prizes, it wrestled with the powers of darkness and ignorance. But what could a poor recluse do against the infinite night? If it were to help the forward march of humanity, it must be disciplined and organized to a definite aim. All other peoples have left imagination to struggle for itself. This people recognized it as the most unschooled and shiftless of the human faculties, whilst they felt it to be the most divine and fullest of promise. They determined that amongst them it should lose its reeling gate and wandering aimless eye, and become the pioneer of their march swanwards. Instead of fixing its eye on the past or on the favors of the great, it should skirmish before the main army into the region of the unknown. It should report on the difficulties and the enemies to be met, and map out the world as it was to be. What would be thought of the shipmaster who let the keenest eye of his crew lounge round the ship, looking into the pockets of his comrades, and making them laugh, or lean over the stern watching the track left behind, if darkness and cloud and a broken sea ever lay on the horizon ahead? What else were the nations doing with their look-out faculty, imagination, but allowing it to waste itself on providing amusement for the luxurious, or on figuring the problem of the past? It was one of the first duties of the Lyman-Ornn elders, after the great series of purgations of the race, to organize and develop the imagination they had in their midst. They had observed that there were two great types of uses of the faculty. One was short of vision, and could see with great distinctness the regions that were hidden in twilight, immediately in front of them. The other was farsighted, and could describe the features of wide regions that lay in darkness under the horizon. There happened to be amongst them two families distinguished from all others by their great imaginativeness, and from each other by pre-eminence in one of these two kinds of imagination. The task therefore was easy. It only needed care in disciplining the members of these to the main purpose of the race, in developing the faculty of each, and in recruiting their numbers from the most imaginative children of other families. The Lumiamo, or pioneers of the immediate, were recruited chiefly from the scientific and technical families, for their duties like most of all in supplying hypotheses for experimentation, in suggesting methods of solving difficult problems, and in tracing the out-paths that invention should take. Invention, in fact, was what they were oftenest engaged in. But there was a subordinate function. That was, however, of equal importance for the forward movements of the race. It was to take the far-reaching conceptions of the other imaginative family, and show how they could be attained by the civilization, and means they already had. They accepted the scientific ideas and apparatus of the time as they were, and out of them and their development, they engineered a highway through the intervening twilight, to the ideal that the Frolamiomo, or pioneers of the distant, had pictured and set up ahead of the race. I had not known of this division of pioneering work when I flew back from the marvelous spectacle in the Valley of Futuritions. As I thought over it, I became more and more skeptical of the realisability of the scene. It had the inconsecution and absurdity of a dream. I said to Thairiel, where was the possibility of ever substituting artificial for natural propagation of the race? It was completely out of the line of evolution, and could lead to nothing but what was unnatural and evil. They could modify nature to an indefinite extent I knew, but what was the use of attempting to supersede nature? And suppose it were possible to supersede it in this respect, where would be the advantage? They could already modify and guide nature so as to produce the type of children they desired for the progress of the race. What more was needed? Thairiel gave no answer. Partly because she thought that the elders were more capable of answering. Partly because she knew that the publication of the book on human sculpture was by no means finished. Next day my sense of community with the immediate yearning and aim of the limanorans drew me unconsciously to Lumaipha again, and on my way the streaming wings through the sky showed me that my impulse was not purposeless. There was a general movement towards the same goal. Soon the whole amphitheater was filled from height to hollow, with spectators enriched in color by the rays of the afternoon sun. I had scarcely settled in my rest and surveyed the scene when I knew that all eyes were fixed on the hollow of the valley. The platform had again run out with a globular magnifier covering it. But the succession of scenes upon it was almost too swift for my observation, untrained as I still was in my senses, and a certain confusion still rests over the spectacle in my memory. Many of the links in the chain were so amazing as to bewilder me, and yet the general purpose and effect of the scene as a whole rise above the confusion in my mind. I knew before it was done that it was a complete answer to my questions and skepticism. The Lumiamo were enacting the various stages in the evolution of the race which would connect its actual state with the possibility of artificial human propagation. The scene enacted what they had long been able to do, the production of animal tissue of all kinds, even the most subtle nerve was spun, and under their microscopes they could examine it like a rope. Another showed animal creation at work on the combination of tissue into one of the lower types of animal. One after another in a long series we saw creative power rise in its ambitions and efforts through the animal creation up to the human. But the most striking scene was to come. It was the application of the newly discovered biometer to the search for the principle of life. We saw the creative artists investigate with the instrument plant after plant and animal after animal, and fail in their attempts to isolate it or produce it. They modified the biometer in innumerable ways. Then we saw them fly through the atmosphere and set the new life-measuring apparatus afloat in space. After repeated attempts, ever pulling the felina back empty, they at last showed by the joy on their faces that they had attained the goal of their quest. In the delicate test tubes of their new biometers was found something that kept agitating their indicators. Soon they had it in their laboratories and were experimenting with it. Again and again they gathered it from the vacuum above the atmosphere. At last by means of it they were enabled to find it in the plants around them and in the animals of the surrounding islands. A series of scenes as amazing showed how they came at the discovery of the principle of soul by means of the psychometer. Step by step, and each step I came afterwards to feel, represented a limonor and generation. They traced it back to its secret. Most of all they were aided in their researches by investigations outside of the atmosphere. There they captured in the tubes of their psychometers the form of energy that constituted human soul, and in their laboratories they were able to study it at leisure. For long I felt that these pictures of the future were unlikely to be realized. Yet the steps in the process were so gradual, and the scene representing each so vivid, that I came in after years to accept it as well within the range of limonor and possibilities. For I realized at last how far into the future imagination could pioneer, and what a vast number of ages one of these predictive dramas would cover. My sense of time was crude and weak during my earlier years in the island, and it was difficult for me to appreciate the passage of cosmic periods, such as were often implied in the scenes representing the publication of a book by the Fraulu Miyamo. I afterwards listened to the book of human sculpture itself, as it uttered itself from a loud sounding linnessan or reproducer of speech. This amaton reader had the long strip of irillinium constituting a limonoran book fed into it off the cylinder on which the book was kept rolled. It gave the sound and every intonation of the author's voice, so that there was no difficulty in following his every thought as it found expression. I never came to be able to read those books on the irillinium rolls themselves under a microscope, as the limonorans could, and preferred to use my hearing instead of my eyes. There was no possibility of ambiguity if I listened to the words as they came hot from the thinker's own lips. A new and more esoteric kind of book tended to supersede this at a later period. It consisted of an electrogram of the author's thoughts, as they developed and shaped themselves, flashed onto long-moving strips of labrimore or electricity sponge by his active magnetic sense. This placed in an idrosan or electrograph affected the furlough of the receiver, so that he followed the whole process of thinking. Such a permanent record of creative thought in its process of creating was of majorless value to such a people as this, for every economy of time and intelligence meant a quickening of their march into the nobler future. But for many ages the effort of electrographing the thought was too much except for the most powerful of mature creative minds, and that of receiving the flash of the electrogram through the furlough was within the capacity of none but those who had developed their magnetic faculty to great refinement of power. The book of human sculpture was the first of the recent imaginative productions that I became acquainted with. Thayeriel and I joined a party of youth who under the guidance of our pro-parents, were to listen to it as it sounded through the linocene in the valley of Lumeifah. Hour after hour we followed the melodious periods as they echoed up the slopes. At brief intervals on the rocky curtain at the head of the gorge there would flame out for several minutes a moving picture of the scenes we had witnessed the inaction of on the stage. And a still more striking illustration of the text of the book was a magnetic communication to our minds of the originating impulse which molded each thought and scene in the imagination of the author, and the creative enthusiasm he felt as each idea burst in all its light upon his soul. By the time we had finished the book we knew its whole conception and history, its purpose, and its probable effect upon the civilization. It answered all my questions and rooted out all my skepticism. The whole object of their unending labors was to take command of nature by finding out her secrets and abridging her processes so as to make them serviceable to their advance. I felt how absurd had been my objections, for where would this people have been if they had left nature to herself? What else was barbarism but leaving nature to herself so that the more cruel animal part of her became dominant? Nature included an infinite range of gradations of energy and life from what we call dead matter to the subtle and elevated organizations that fill space and evade the finest perception of our senses. Within her own system are to be found many of those, from the debris of our bodily tissues and organs, to the noblest thought we can conceive. The precept to let nature alone is fraught with inextricable ambiguity. And if we let the myriad natures within us fight it out, it is not difficult to see which would have dominance, for it's easier to level down than to level up. Every interference with the lower nature in order to bring it under the sway of the higher. Every new mastery of our system as a whole by our creative thought is a step upwards in the scale of existences. Three-fourths of the process of human propagation belong to the sphere of our lower nature, so that civilized men and women were ashamed to speak of it, and tended to become gross in course if they did freely speak of it. Every act seemed to drag them back again to the level of the animals, and it took them years of effort to drive the thoughts and traces of it into oblivion. They had, as a people, painfully fought their way up out of the sloth of passion, and mastered the emotions that tended to overbalance them by their excess, and to plunge them back again into it. Guard themselves as they might by all kinds of precautions, and spiritualize the act as they never tried to do. This necessary recurrence never failed to embrute the nature for a moment, whilst it still kept open a path for retrogression. To shut out this possibility of redescent into the beast would be one of the greatest services to their race. As useful for their advance would the command for human propagation be in another direction, the only fear of deterioration that still haunted them arose from Atavism. Nature still had a trek of returning on her own footsteps. The child of the noblest pair had at times traces of far-back ancestry resurgent in evil or retrogressive traits, and it wasted the time and best energy of parents and pro-parents to obliterate these. In every germ lay dormant the potentialities of its whole ancestral past, and any one of them might assert itself as master during the dim, unguided life of gestation. With all their precautions something evil might still lurk in the systems of the young to develop in full maturity of life. But if they molded every tissue and organ and faculty for themselves, this retrogressive tendency that nature treasures up in every German child would disappear. There would be nothing to watch or obliterate in the immature. A still greater economy of time and labor would result in the abridgment of the earlier processes of education. Education, it is true, never ceased throughout life. But the education of the mature was self-conducted. The citizen was his own schoolmaster, and his surroundings were his instruments and assistants. That of the earlier stages used up the labor and wisdom of two other personalities. For the long period of discipline they were ever on watch and guard, lest the past lay in the youthful nature should suddenly rise and master it. For all education is a wrestle with the superseded past, which becomes evil as soon as it grows superfluous or obstructs further advance. Every form of vitality that has played its part on the stage of existence leaves it with reluctance. It clings to the new, that it may have a little more of life, and impedes its advance. The obsolete most survives in the tissues of the young and immature, and to educate is to struggle with the obsolete or obsolescent. The labor and thought needed to make the struggle and in the success of the new and progressive have never been understood so well by as many as the elders of the Lymanorans. No effort of their civilization was so exhausting as the educative. To enter on parenthood or pro-parenthood made them pause. For all acknowledged that the assumption of this duty was the greatest sacrifice a man or woman could make for the progress of the race. They knew that for half a century their individual vigilance could never cease, and that the strain would come on all their faculties, and not one or two alone, as it would in most of the other duties they owed to the race, even invention or discovery. Whatsoever would commute or abolish this heavy service to the nation was sure to be welcomed. So vast an amount of the best time and wisest ability of the island would be set free, that it would be difficult to calculate the acceleration of progress it would affect. All this and a thousand other considerations passed through my mind, as I listened to the book of human sculpture and drank in its inspirations. The doubts that its dramatic publication had left in me were all laid. I now knew that this would be a new sacred book, which would hold up for ages and ideal for limonora to struggle towards. This book of human sculpture made clear to me the meaning and purpose of another publication that I soon witnessed. It was the book of asexuality, which showed us dramatically how sex and its results belonged to a lower and more physical stage of personal development. It revealed to us the nature of the beans that flit through sidereal space just outside the caniver senses, centers of energy less inert and more ethereal than any terrestrial creatures. Into them flows more freely than it flows into us the divine energy that is above all. Out of themselves they give as freely to their fellows as they receive. They need no such inequality and unstable equilibrium as sex to teach them such bounteous benignity. Living in the precincts of the fountain of life as they do, not imprisoned within local and temporal limits, but free to move whether they will and to drink unstintingly of supernal existence, they know how essentially all nobler life consists in free bounty, the more of themselves and their energy they give, the higher the energy they receive in its place. Sex is only the root beginning of this higher law, the principle of antagonism to stagnation, of giving lavishly in order to have room for receiving from higher sources. It supersedes and antagonizes the law of parasitism, which governs the crude beginnings of life on a new world. The lower microscopic creatures that live a famished jichun life in space ready to pounce upon any orb their souls encounter, propagate by mere self-division. They have nothing to give. A new star cooling down on its surface sufficiently for life to settle on is their great opportunity. There they may parasite and feed to their hearts content, propagating by the myriad every infinitesimal fraction of time. And as long as they live in such primeval luxury, they never move one step higher in life. Over supply of food, indeed all luxury, damns a being to stagnancy. The full-fed parasite is unprogressive, and though multiplying teamingly is practically sterile, his generations are on a level with himself. He is immortal by mere fission. The only function of his life is to grab, till his gettings make him too big for his microscopic unity, and he has to break up. In the higher stages of life, even in human life, this infecunity attaches in the same way to luxurious living, whilst the sycophant is sterile of purpose and existence. All take and no give is a monstrosity above the lowest bacterial life. The more of dependence or flattery there is in a people, the lower their natures. A tyranny is the lowest political organism, and the tyrannies of the worst is the socialistic, for there there is no inequality to antagonize and overcome the lethargy of parasiteism. Even when bacteria begin to fill the pinch of scantity nutrition or malnutrition, they start on a new career, and show the first traces of an advance in life. They incline to give as well as receive, and here are the primeval beginnings of sex. Ill-fed bacteria tend to propagate by means of special cells or spores. Instead of steeping themselves in food till they burst, they now begin to nurse within their systems a germ, to which they give of their best till it is able to launch out for itself. They cease to reproduce by fission, and reproduce by spore formation. This is the first step upwards on the long road to human morality. The beginnings of sex are the beginnings of unlikeness of individuals, and the beginnings of unstable equilibrium and overflow of energy from one being to another. This is the organization of the policy of give in a new star, ultimately meant to drive out, after a world-long struggle, the antagonistic policy of mere get. Sex first introduced into our world the eagerness of one being to give of its best for the good of another being. Conjugal love in the human era is the first noble form of sexuality, and parental love is it still nobler offshoot. The development of parenthood is the nail of sexuality, for it is a new and higher phase of the policy of give, and antiquates the mere mutuality of sexual love. It gives all its expecting not in return, and into the place of the energy that has gone out of it flows an energy that is near the divine, and raises towards the divine. It is at this point that sex becomes a lower stage, seeming almost to mingle with brute life. Out of it must humanity struggle in order to progress. In the spirit there is no sex. This I had heard as a meaningless echo from the wise lips in the West. Now I saw its significance. The higher the more spiritual we become, the less we permit sex to dominate, and the less difference there is between the sexes. It was in the world of imagination and intellect that the first idea of equality of the sexes arose. And the more intellectual a people became, the less it insisted on the difference between man and woman. Emphasis on sex in a civilized people was a sure sign of approaching decay. For the goal towards which the human race is advancing is asexual. Not that it will be the main characteristic, but it is the most striking compared with our present phase of being. The more highly organized existences that fill space and hoover just outside the range of our grosser senses have reached this stage in which the stimulus of sex, or even of parenthood, is no longer needed in order to save the benignant instincts from dying out. And the higher a center of energy climbs in the scale of existence, the more does it become to overflow into other centers, to give of its highest and best. What we call life, or the spontaneous rejection of stagnancy, begins on its lowest fringe with a tendency to take all and give none with appetite. Below this are inert centers of energy that resist all receiving as well as all giving, that exist only in persisting, in keeping what they have and what they are. This stage is usually called dead matter in contrast to energy, although it consists of nuclei of energy as truly as any living creature. Between the two stages of mere keep and mere take seems to lie a great gulf fixed, but there are minute evidences of transition to be found all through nature. We ourselves, the human race, form the transition from the stage of take all to the stage of give all, and sex is the chief impetus to progress in the earlier history of human evolution. Parenthood takes its place in the upper levels, where the human is rapidly approaching the super sensuous. The very fact that our nature being so heterogeneous and complex reveals that we are making for something higher, and, as our appetites imply, a stage behind us, in which our systems were fitted for nothing but taking, so are loves. Our benevolences, our self sacrifices, point forward to a stage in which the whole of existence will consist in giving. I remember, whenever an average man in Europe quoted the phrase, it is more blessed to give than to receive. He meant it as a jest, or in a sinister sense. Even the priest, when he had to preach the doctrine as one of the foundations of his religion, had incredulity in his heart, if not in the smile on his lips, as he spoke the words. Amongst the Lymanorans it was a truism that was implied in all conduct and need never be explicitly stated. And the book of asexuality revealed the inner and scientific significance to me. The highest state of any center of energy in the cosmos was to be eagerly, lavishly, and perpetually giving out of its best. For thus was it ever kept in unstable equilibrium, towards which flowed higher and higher energies from centers above it. Thus it kept its life unstagnant and immortal. That which only received, and was eager only to receive, suffered the maladies of the luxurious, soon reached its utmost capacity, and fell into stagnancy and decay. Above the human rolls the hierarchy of sexless, super-sensuous beings, who peopled infinite space. But into their ranks rolls the human by means of struggle, by means of the affluence of their energy into others, by means of sex, and still more of parenthood. The purpose of sex is to attain to the higher asexuality. Not that monasticism is good for the human race. It is, on the contrary, the greatest of evils in the sexual stage of progress. It counts as wicked and harmful that which alone prevents self-absorption and the beginning of decay and death. Sex is the provision of nature for drawing the animal outside of itself, so that may introduce into its generations the seeds of development. It makes it as a center of energy field need of others, centers, to which it may give, from which it may receive. It is her chief means of keeping any vital center from falling back into stagnancy and the desire of stagnancy. And as long as man is still animal, sex and its resultant parenthood must continue to play the main part in development. To attempt to reach asexuality before the animal is ejected from his system is to balk progress and to invite stagnancy and decay. The book of asexuality showed how the family must remain the unit and lever of advance till sex should be superseded by individual creation. Then friendship or the bond of contrast in community will take the place of the bond of heredity, or of that bond which is based upon sexual passion. The mutual choice will be completely rational and in the will of the choosers. There will be nothing instinctive or immediate or unconscious about it. It is indeed one of the indignities of this present sexual stage of evolution that we are thrust on in spite of ourselves, that we have little command over the stimulus that is urging us on the road of progress. The Lymanorans got rid of some of this indignity inasmuch as the elders and wise men took command of the instinctive sex and bent it in the direction of their own line of advance. In other peoples, and especially in the West, it stumbled blindly on, led sometimes by the love of youthful beauty, sometimes by the love of money, sometimes by the necessities of position and diplomacy, most frequently by ambition and the love of power or social influence, seldom or never by the deliberate intent of producing noble posterity. As a consequence, retrogression in health, physique, morality, or intellectual power was seen in all ranks far oftener than progress. Over the whole there might be a slight advance in centuries, but in most families it was one generation forward and the next back. This people had by their purgations become the assistance of nature, and since the era of the exilings they had wisely piloted sex to serve the highest purposes of evolution. The young were still driven half blindly by the sting of sex, and might by chance accelerate progress, but the elders without revealing their art wisely controlled the instinct, and by the governance of proximity and opportunity, companionship and circumstances, amongst the immature made it the guardian and keeper of past advance, and the prompter of still renewed advance. The final step was pictured by this new imaginative book, The Suppression of Sex and the Deliberate Creation of Posterity. This would relieve the elders of their anxious task of matchmaking and put into the hands of the pairs themselves the control of parental instinct and the power of improving their posterity. Even as it was, I could see, from the axems and postulates of this book of asexuality, and the impressions it made on my friends and companions, that the sex instinct was already to a large extent under the control of those whom it impelled. It had become, like their appetite for food, saturated with intellect and deliberation. It was no mere gold that drove them, on in the dark, stumbling towards some object that would gratify the passion. They knew its physiological and psychological working, and understood how the destinies of the race waited upon the wisdom or folly of its guidance. Not even the youngest of them would allow it the caprice and perverse whimsicality that was considered its native prerogative in the West. The passionate whim of the moment for a gray eye or so was no more to them than toothache or the pangs of indigestion, an aberrancy from healthy nature, to be checked and healed as soon as possible. I found that I was far in the rear of their advance in respect to love. My Western heroics and amorous transports were discounted and yet curiously watched as the antiquated manners of an age long gone by. Nothing grave so keen a shock to my self-approvals as the smile that played upon the face of Thairiel, when I first broke into the raptures of adoration for her, which are the natural expression of passionate love in my native Europe. Romeo and Julietism had been consecrated by centuries of the traditions of Christendom as the true attitude and conduct of lovers. And here was I, only fulfilling the instinct and bursting into the appropriate transports of passion, reigned in by what I thought at first the cynicism of my Juliet. The smile would have been cynical on the lips of a young European in Amorata. In Thairiel it was no more than the amused recognition of manners which she had laughed at in studying the ancient history and literature of the island, as if I had seen a comrade in the commonness of European daily life adopting the language and attitude of Homeric or Oceanic heroes. I grew ashamed of the amorous adores of the West, and when I felt the tendency to erotic adultery come upon me I kept it to myself. Even then I knew that I was centuries behind my Lymanoran co-evils in the rational guidance of the sexual instinct. Nothing brought this so clearly to my mind as the reception of the book of asexuality. During its dramatic publication I looked round to see the shock of unnatural innovation on the faces of the audience, or the shrieking of modesty, or the sense of outraged religious or traditional instincts. But there was none of these to be found there. The ideal was accepted at once as the proper and possible goal of the race, and the book was treasured amongst the sacred literature of the time. It soon flashed upon me, too, as I frequented Lumeifah, that their art had all a far higher purpose than I had conjectured from my European experience. It was not meant merely to stir or to satisfy the sense of beauty and harmony, but to implant in the emotions and the imagination the love of the future and the passion for rising in the scale of existence. I grew ashamed to think that I had attributed to this wonderful people the frivolity and even loneliness of aim that I had so often seen in European art. Here was a drama that the West had not even a conception of. At its best the stage of Europe professed to educate by representing heroic scenes from the past, by evolving from them lessons for the audience, and by stirring their enthusiasm for great deeds of history or myth. In its commonest mood it reproduced in mimic form some scene or action from contemporary life. At its worst it was but a pander to the survivals of a gross and animal past. What I now thought of as the limanorn stage was wholly occupied with the future, so far as it was a possible evolution from the present. The noblest ideal that the imagination of the race could shape was brought dramatically before the people that their thoughts and ambitions might be fixed on something beyond themselves. For this high purpose and not for luxury or personal enjoyment, their sculpture and painting and music had been developed, and the newest discoveries and inventions of science had been brought to their aid. There was no objection to what gave pleasure, but to spend the thought and effort of the fully developed human mind on that alone was, they held, a degradation. Strenuous endeavor towards a higher and better future was the note that characterized their pursuits. But if they could add attractiveness to the prosecution of the aim the task was all the easier. If they could make the path ahead beautiful and pleasant so as to decoy the reluctant senses onwards, the pace would be all the more swifter. Even with this high aim I could not understand how this people, who loathe all pretense, could condescend to their dramatic art, for on this stage of Lumeifah were members of their community representing in their persons what they were not and could not be for many ages. And I had heard them often decry the hysteronic art as one that encouraged in the actors a habit of delighting in mere semblance and superficial show, a habit that is the basis of hypocrisy and deceit, whilst the love of mimicry and pageantry, I had been led to believe, had vanished from the island at one of the last brigations of the race. The seeming contradiction was afterwards explained. As one of the necessary steps in my initiation into the privileges and duties of the mature citizen, I was led behind the scenes. Through the gore at the upper end of the valley I passed into a great hall that seemed to me a combination of museum and workshop. Here were the youth of the Lumeamo and the Fra Lumeamo at work upon automata and the elaborate machinery that would guide their motions. Had I kept a distance from them as they worked, I would have thought that the play of human sculpture was being again enacted. Such exact reproduction of the human system were the figures that grew under their hands. In one section stood thousands of what I would have called statues, which had served in the publication of former books. In another the puppets were going through dramatic scenes by way of experimentation, and in many the illusion was complete. I should have said that human beings were talking and acting. In others there was some imperfection, and there one could see that they were all mere fountachini galvanized into life. In a third section the tissues and parts that were to make mimic men and women were being manufactured. The workers and artists could draw on remla for as much force as they needed, whilst the advice of the scientific families was at their command. The machinery of the great workshop was bewildering in its complexity and refinement. The finest tissue or nerve of the human brain could be here imitated so that under a microscope I would have said it was part of a living body. After all it was only the acting of marionettes that I had seen upon the stage in the valley. But it was greatly aided by another department where the pioneering families cultivated the art and science of illusions. They could imitate the human voice at any point in the valley measured to the fraction of an inch. They could reproduce any scene of history, of contemporary existence, or of future-ative fiction so exactly, making it so full of the lights and shadows of life and of the developments of all advance that none of the senses unaided by the reasoning and analytic faculties could assert that the men and women were not living and that their actions and words were not real. Even the electric sense could be deluded by the impulses manufactured by these machinists and delusionists. It would take the magnetic thrills it received for genuine enthusiasm and sympathy from the mind of a man or from a crowd. This department was even more important than the factory of puppets, for it made the play of the marionettes look still more human on the stage. After all it was not the puppets themselves I had watched with such breathless excitement, but a mere illusory picture of their proceedings. The illusion was far more lifelike than the play of the marionettes themselves. So much stress did they lay on stirring the imagination and emotions of the race in favor of the ideals of the future, that half the work of these two families consisted in the dramatic publication of their books. The next sacred book I saw produced in Lumiefa would have of itself persuaded me that this people could have nothing to do with the astronic art or any art that would encourage the habit of pretense and show in the individual nature. It was called the Book of Human Transparency, and described the various methods by which the inner working of the human brain could be made patent to limonor and senses. The tissues could be clarified. The significance of every fiber and nerve could be made familiar to all as an essential part of their education. The eye, the ear, and the furla could be made more subtle and acute in their perceptions, till at last they were able to tell in a moment everything that was proceeding beneath the skull and within the heart. What was done slowly and painfully by the medical elders with the help of their instruments, their hypnotic powers, and the interpretation of dreams, every man would be able to do instantaneously and without extraneous aid, exceptional wisdom, or occult powers. The general drift of a neighbor's emotions was known to everyone through his magnetic senses, but not the particular intention or thought. This would be known only after the long course of training and development mapped out in the Book of Human Transparency. One of the chief ethical purposes that had in recent times been fixed in the mind of the community was to eject from the human system all elements and processes that were offensive to the finer feelings and senses. Everything in fact that a man or woman might be ashamed of or wish to conceal. The new Book of the Time aimed at extending this to the operation of thought and emotion. To get clear of the waste products of the mind in a way that would be inoffensive to others was an ideal they had not yet been able to entertain. They had learned with as much pain and self-denial the habit of concealing the crude processes of thought that led to what is worth saying or doing. It was one of the things they were most ashamed of in looking over the history or the memorials of their far past to see the vast amount of the raw digestion of thought and the refuse of emotion that was made public and even put into literature meant to be permanent. Most of the orations and magazine articles, and ultimately most of the books that had been produced in past ages, were much the same as if the stomach and intestines of the speaker or writer had been atomized and laid open with all their offensive processes to the gaze of spectators. One of the most beneficent events in their later history had been a conflagration in their valley of memories, for it had wiped out of existence the libraries and art accumulations of many centuries, of which they had come to be ashamed. They could not understand the long past stage of their civilization, in which men, and especially young men, had been so proud of displaying the mere debris of their worst and crudest processes of thought. It had actually been the case that most of the literature and art had been produced by youths under fifty years of age, who had not yet begun to appreciate the difference between the processes of thinking and the results of thinking, and one of the most extraordinary features of that period was that the most applauded literary and artistic productions, those that were supposed to be, most distinctively, the outcome of what they called genius, were the work of boys and girls, mere children under twenty-five years of age. Nature's that should still have been in the nursery for many a year were stimulated to address the public and seek applause with work that was merely tentative and disciplinary. The result was that, on the one hand, one half of the most original and promising minds racked themselves to death years before they should have faced life. Whilst on the other, a juvenile ideal was set before literature and art, and boys and girls became their chief audience and most powerful arbiters. They felt hardly ashamed of that singular stage in their development, and were glad to have accidental fire come to their assistance in huddling its products out of sight. One of the first instincts they evolved after the series of brigations was the desire to conceal within their minds what was crude or mere process in thinking, and still more what was mere waste-product and refuse of the mind. Instead of being eager to speak out or publish all that came into the thoughts bad or good, they grew shy of public exhibition of their projects and schemes, till they had been shaped by long years of thinking and experimenting, and criticised and checked by the caution and wisdom of their fully matured nature. Publication became the last resort of the mature and old instead of the first ambition of the young, so afraid were they of exhibiting what might be crude or offensive. Even in the given take of conversation and social intercourse they preferred long periods of silence to the utterance of truisms in common places. The trivial and conventional in speech, as in life, was what they appored, as revealing an intellectual nature on the road back to the infertility and childishness and barbarism, the elaborate mechanism of thought whizzing round without connection with what represents work. But now the book of human transparency proposed as an ideal to eject from the system every process of thought and feeling that they might blush to let others see. If the nature was made transparent then, would it become a self-preserving instinct to develop their natures in this direction? Everything crude or false or offensive that might begin to show itself in their minds, would at once be suppressed before it got headway, instead of having to be slowly reasoned out of existence with the aid of the moral instincts. This accomplished the race would be able to take another great leap forward. The advance of their processes of thought and feeling to the level of former results of them would give them a higher point of view from which to look forth into the future.