Unfortunately, it has become a habit to look upon our idola as particularly fine and exalted, and as representing the better side of human nature. As a matter of fact, the myths which are created in a community under religious, political, or economic influences cannot be characterized as either good or bad: their nature is defined by their capacity to help men to react creatively upon their environment and to develop a humane life. We have still to recognize that a belief in these idola is not by itself a creditable attitude. Even quite base and stupid people are frequently governed by ideals; indeed, it is the ideals that are in many cases responsible for their baseness and stupidity. Neither is the habit of responding to idola any evidence of rational thought. People respond to “ideas”--that is, to word-patterns--as they respond to the stimulus of light or heat, because they are human beings and not because they are philosophers, and they respond to projections, to idola, for the same reason, and not because they are saints. Our myths may be the outcome of rational thought and practice or not; but the response to these myths is not perhaps more than ten times in a hundred the result of following the processes of reason from beginning to end. We must think of our idola as a sort of diffused environment or atmosphere, which differs in “chemical content” and in extension with each individual. Some of these idola have so uniformly taken possession of men’s minds in a particular age that they are as much a part of the environment a baby is born into as the furniture of his house. The sociologists who follow Émile Durkheim have called a certain part of these idola collective representations but they are wrong, I believe, when they limit these “representations” to savage or ignorant groups for they are an important part of every civilized person’s luggage. Parallel with The Story of Mankind and with The Story of Utopias, which I have just told, it would be amusing to write The Story of Mankind’s Myths. This work, however, would require the scholarship and industry of another Leibniz, and all that I wish to do here is to put together the chief social myths that have played a part in Western Europe and America during the modern period, to contrast these idola with the utopias of the past and the partial remedies for the present, and to suggest the bearing of all this upon any new departures we may be ready to make. In selecting these idola--The Country House, Coketown, the Megalopolis--I have been forced to gauge their strength and test their quality very largely by their actual results in the workaday world, and it is a little hard to purify them from the various institutions, old and new, in which they are mixt. Yet with all this taint of actuality, these idola are scarcely as credible as the Republic and it will help matters a little to realize that we are still within the province of utopia, and may exercise all the utopian privileges. 2