Second account: On the splendour of the combined order

Summary

To familiarise yourselves with the luxury I shall be describing, you should re-read Note A, on the organisation of the progressive Series, in order to understand how an order so contrary to our customs will give diametrically opposite results, and produce as much magnificence as our incoherent labours produce misery and anxiety.

Order of topics dealt with in the second Account

The splendour of the arts and sciences.

Entertainment and knight–errantry.

Combined gastronomy,

Considered

in its political sense,

it its material sense,

in its passionate sense.

The amorous policy for recruiting armies.

You may complain that this is confusing, because the division is a post-hoc one, as I observed of the first account.

You must not lose sight of the fact that, in order to put the wonders I shall describe into operation, the combined order will have the help of four new passions which we have little or no sense of in the civilised order, where everything is opposed to their development.

These passions, which I have named

10th. The intermeshing,

11th. The varying,

12th. The graduating,

13th. Harmonyism,

can only work freely in the progressive Series; and as we are not used to such delightful passions they will seem as new as love seems to young people when they experience it for the first time.

This view may not seem very comforting to those who have already spent their best years in the gloom of Civilisation, but they should take heart: these new pleasures will be for people of all ages, and their anticipation should not be a cause for despair except during the interval that must elapse until the foundation of the combined order.