BOOKS OF THE DAY
Atlantis Re-Explored
An Unknown Land. By Viscount Samuel. (Allen and Unwin. I2S. 6d.) BACON'S New Atlantis, as we all ought to know, was an account of a large island called Bensalem, somewhere in the Pacific, with many extremely admirable characteristics. Since we had to choose between Bacon's own statements describing the place and his secre- tary's comment that it wa3 " a fable," men of experience naturally believed-the secretary. But it appears we were wrong. A friend of Lord Samuel, who does not wish his name to be known, believed Bacon himself, devoted his life and fortune to a search for Bensalem, and, by resolutely examining some three million square miles of the less frequented parts of the Pacific, discovered it. This book is an account of the civilisation which he found. It is a fascinating story, and every reader will be glad to read Lord Samuel's guarantee of its authenticity : " I have no hesitation in giving the assurance that the account is no less reliable than if I had written it myself." The reason that Bensalem has remained so long unknown is that, like the City in Plato's Laws, it has practised a policy of deliberate isolation, though, as Bacon already knew, it has made a practice of sending out disguised " missioners " to collect any information from the inferior contemporary civilisations that might be of interest or, in rare cases, possibly of use. The immense superiority of the Bensals started from a comparatively simple discovery, namely, that if the sutures of the human skull, instead of being allowed to solidify in early childhood, are deliberatly kept open, the human brain has considerable powers of growth. Our brains are all skull-bound ; the Bensals keep the sutures open and allow the brain to grow.
One of their first reforms was to review the whole mass of what passed for human knowledge and reject enormous accumulations of rubbish, much as the scholars of the Renaissance swept away the pseudo-science of the Middle Ages. The process was called " the Sieve," and the result left, after due sifting, The Gist. This increase of brain-power, combined with the great reduction of the lumber that the brain has to carry, has naturally produced valuable results. In physical science the advance is immense. The Bensals know how to utilise the forces of the atom and the ocean tides ; the enormous
resources of power thus obtained have enabled them to supply free to the whole population not only water, light, heat and electricity, but ultimately all of what we call " articles of commerce."- The process of shopping is very different from what our housewives experience in 1942. You go with an electric go-cart to carry things and then choose what you like. You take back to the shop articles you are tired of, notably works of art which you would like to change. Labour has been so immensely reduced, or at least trans- ferred to machines, that a universal nine hours a week of public service suffices for all needs. The rest of their time people devote to what are called " secondaries," that is, shat art, craft or study happens to interest them.
This addition to their brain-power has, one is glad to see, an ethical and humanising effect. They do kill animals for food, but they anaesthetise them first. They never kill for pleasure. They seem never to quarrel and have little jealousy or ambition. There is no evidence of any increase in their artistic or imaginative powers ;
but their philosophy, so far as Lord Samuel's friend was capable of describing it, seems greatly developed and in many ways different from ours. One of the truths accepted in Volume I of The Gist is the fact that the Universe existed many millions of years before man was evolved upon earth. Consequently any metaphysic which starts from the human mind is false. But three discoveries—which we
should not dare to call more than hypotheses—are regarded by them as epoch-making. First, they hold that all kinds of physical energy, including gravity, are manifestations of a single force, and this leads
them to maintain a belief in an all-pervading ether. (This, I think,
would have not displeased Herbert Spencer.) The second great discovery is that matter is not only perishing but being created continuously. The third, that, so far from any Monism, either materialist or idealist, being at all necessary, it is obvious that both mind and matter exist, and indeed parallel to the all-pervading ether there is an all-pervading " mental ambience." Some points here seemed to the visitor hard to understand.
On the other hand their religion, to which they are much attached, is extremely like that of the Victorian Broad Church, and their moral sentiments practically identical with those of Victorian Liberals. Which confirms the bold conviction already held by many readers of The Spectator that the people of that time had much to
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