Thus, from the viewpoint of our present study, we may divide ethics into living and dead. Living ethics arise from needs and desires, stimulate an imaginative construction that becomes fixed in actions, habits and laws; they offer to men a concrete, positive ideal which, under various and often contrary aspects, is always happiness. The lifeless ethics, from which invention has withdrawn, arise from reflection upon, and the rational codification of, living ethics. Stored away in the writings of philosophers, they remain theoretical, speculative, without appreciable influence on the masses, mere material for dissertation and commentary. In proportion as we recede from distant origins the light grows, and invention in the social and moral order becomes manifest as the work of two principal categories of minds--the fantastic, the positive. The former, purely imaginative beings, visionaries, utopians, are closely related to poets and artists. The latter, practical creators or reformers, capable of organizing, belong to the family of inventors in the industrial-commercial-mechanical order. I The chimerical form of imagination, applied to the social sciences, is the one that, taking account neither of the external determinism nor of practical requirements, spreads out freely. Such are the creators of ideal republics, seeking for a lost or to-be-discovered-in-the-future golden age, constructing, as their fancy pleases, human societies in their large outlines and in their details. They are social novelists, who bear the same relation to sociologists that poets do to critics. Their dreams, subjected merely to the conditions of an inner logic, have lived only within themselves, an ideal life, without ever passing through the test of application. It is the creative imagination in its unconscious form, restrained to its first phase. Nothing is better known than their names and their works: The _Republic_ of Plato, Thomas More's _Utopia_, Campanella's _City of the Sun_, Harrington's _Oceana_, Fenelon's _Salente_, etc.[141] However idealistic they may be, one could easily show that all the materials of their ideal are taken from the surrounding reality, they bear the stamp of the _milieu_, be it Greek, English, Christian, etc., in which they lived, and it should not be forgotten that in the Utopians everything is not chimerical--some have been revealers, others have acted as stimuli or ferments. True to its mission, which is to make innovations, the constructive imagination is a spur that arouses; it hinders social routine and prevents stagnation.