Once we have weathered the storm, it is dangerous to remain in the utopia of escape; for it is an enchanted island, and to remain there is to lose one’s capacity for dealing with things as they are. The girl who has felt Prince Charming’s caresses too long will be repulsed by the clumsy embraces of the young man who takes her to the theater and wonders how the deuce he is going to pay the rent if they spend more than a week on their honeymoon. Moreover, life is too easy in the utopia of escape, and too blankly perfect--there is nothing to sharpen your teeth upon. It is not for this that men have gone into the jungle to hunt beasts and have cajoled the grasses and roots to be prolific, and have defied, in little open boats, the terror of the wind and sea. Our daily diet must have more roughage in it than these daydreams will give us if we are not to become debilitated. In the course of our journey into utopia we shall remain a little while in these utopias of escape; but we shall not bide there long. There are plenty of them, and they dot the waters of our imaginary world as the islands that Ulysses visited dotted the Ægean Sea. These utopias however belong to the department of pure literature, and in that department they occupy but a minor place. We could dispense with the whole lot of them, bag and baggage, in exchange for another Anna Karenin or The Brothers Karamazov. 5 The second kind of utopia which we shall encounter is the utopia of reconstruction. The first species represents, the analytical psychologist would tell us, a very primitive kind of thinking, in which we follow the direction of our desires without taking into account any of the limiting conditions which we should have to confront if we came back to earth and tried to realize our wishes in practical affairs. It is a vague and messy and logically inconsequent series of images which color up and fade, which excite us and leave us cold, and which--for the sake of the respect our neighbors have for our ability to add a ledger or plane a piece of wood--we had better confine to the strange box of records we call our brain. The second type of utopia may likewise be colored by primitive desires and wishes; but these desires and wishes have come to reckon with the world in which they seek realization. The utopia of reconstruction is what its name implies: a vision of a reconstituted environment which is better adapted to the nature and aims of the human beings who dwell within it than the actual one; and not merely better adapted to their actual nature, but better fitted to their possible developments. If the first utopia leads backward into the utopian’s ego, the second leads outward--outward into the world.