The crowning pleasure of the Utopian is the cultivation of the mind;
and the leisure hours of the people, as well as the professional
scholars, are spent in the lecture hall and the study.
10
Such are the goals for which the Utopians direct their social order.
These values are, I need scarcely point out, rooted in the nature of
man, and not in any set of external institutions. The aim of every
Utopian institution is to help every man to help himself. When we put
the matter in these bald phrases, what More brings forward seems weak
and platitudinous. Behind it all, however, is a vital idea: namely,
that our attempts to live the good life are constantly perverted by our
efforts to gain a living; and that by juggling gains and advantages,
by striving after power and riches and distinction, we miss the
opportunity to live as whole men. People become the nursemaids of their
furniture, their property, their titles, their position; and so they
lose the direct satisfaction that furniture or property would give.
To cultivate the soil rather than simply to get away with a job; to
take food and drink rather than to earn money; to think and dream and
invent, rather than to increase one’s reputation; in short, to grasp
the living reality and spurn the shadow--this is the substance of
the Utopian way of life. Power and wealth and dignity and fame are
abstractions; and men cannot live by abstractions alone. In this Utopia
of the New World every man has the opportunity to be a man because no
one else has the opportunity to be a monster. Here, too, the chief end
of man is that he should grow to the fullest stature of his species.
CHAPTER FOUR
How the new Humanism of the Renascence brings us within sight of
Christianopolis; and how we have for the first time a glimpse
of a modern utopia.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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