By a reconstructed environment I do not mean merely a physical thing. I mean, in addition, a new set of habits, a fresh scale of values, a different net of relationships and institutions, and possibly--for almost all utopias emphasize the factor of breeding--an alteration of the physical and mental characteristics of the people chosen, through education, biological selection, and so forth. The reconstructed environment which all the genuine utopians seek to contrive is a reconstruction of both the physical world and the idolum. It is in this that the utopian distinguishes himself from the practical inventor and the industrialist. Every attempt that has been made to domesticate animals, cultivate plants, dredge rivers, dig ditches, and in modern times, apply the energy of the sun to mechanical instruments, has been an effort to reconstruct the environment; and in many cases the human advantage has been plain. It is not for the utopian to despise Prometheus who brought the fire or Franklin who captured the lightning. As Anatole France says: “Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first city.... Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.” Our physical reconstructions however have been limited; they have touched chiefly the surfaces of things. The result is that people live in a modern physical environment and carry in their minds an odd assortment of spiritual relics from almost every other age, from that of the primitive, taboo-ridden savage, to the energetic Victorian disciples of Gradgrind and Bounderby. As Mr. Hendrik van Loon pithily says: “A human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human being with the mind of a sixteenth century tradesman.” The problem is fundamentally a human problem. The more completely man is in control of physical nature, the more urgently we must ask ourselves what under the heavens is to move and guide and keep in hand the controller. This problem of an ideal, a goal, an end--even if the aim persist in shifting as much as the magnetic north pole--is a fundamental one to the utopian. Except in the writings of the utopians, and this is an important point to notice in our travels through utopia, the reconstruction of the material environment and the reconstitution of the mental framework of the creatures who inhabit it, have been kept in two different compartments. One compartment is supposed to belong to the practical man; the other to the idealist. The first was something whose aims could be realized in the Here and Now; the other was postponed very largely to the sweet by-and-bye. Neither the practical man nor the idealist has been willing to admit that he has been dealing with a single problem; that each has been treating the faces of a single thing as if they were separate.