The social theorists of Utopia, my double explained, did not base
their schemes upon the classification of men into labour and
capital, the landed interest, the liquor trade, and the like. They
esteemed these as accidental categories, indefinitely amenable to
statesmanship, and they looked for some practical and real
classification upon which to base organisation. [Footnote: In that
they seem to have profited by a more searching criticism of early
social and political speculations than our earth has yet undertaken.
The social speculations of the Greeks, for example, had just the
same primary defect as the economic speculations of the eighteenth
century--they began with the assumption that the general conditions
of the prevalent state of affairs were permanent.] But, on the other
hand, the assumption that men are unclassifiable, because
practically homogeneous, which underlies modern democratic methods
and all the fallacies of our equal justice, is even more alien to
the Utopian mind. Throughout Utopia there is, of course, no other
than provisional classifications, since every being is regarded as
finally unique, but for political and social purposes things have
long rested upon a classification of temperaments, which attends
mainly to differences in the range and quality and character of the
individual imagination.
This Utopian classification was a rough one, but it served its
purpose to determine the broad lines of political organisation; it
was so far unscientific that many individuals fall between or within
two or even three of its classes. But that was met by giving the
correlated organisation a compensatory looseness of play. Four main
classes of mind were distinguished, called, respectively, the
Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base. The former two are
supposed to constitute the living tissue of the State; the latter
are the fulcra and resistances, the bone and cover of its body. They
are not hereditary classes, nor is there any attempt to develop any
class by special breeding, simply because the intricate interplay
of heredity is untraceable and incalculable. They are classes to
which people drift of their own accord. Education is uniform until
differentiation becomes unmistakable, and each man (and woman) must
establish his position with regard to the lines of this abstract
classification by his own quality, choice, and development....
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