Campanella with his dream of powerful mechanical inventions, in which he had been anticipated by Leonardo, and Bacon with his sketch of scientific institutes--with these two utopians we stand at the entrance to the utopia of means; that is to say, the place in which all that materially contributes to the good life has been perfected. The earlier utopias were concerned to establish the things which men should aim for in life. The utopias of the later Renascence took these aims for granted and discussed how man’s scope of action might be broadened. In this the utopians only reflected the temper of their time; and did not attempt to remold it. As a result of our preoccupation with the means, we in the Western World live in an inventor’s paradise. Scientific knowledge and mechanical power we have to burn; more knowledge and more power than Bacon or Campanella could possibly have dreamed of. But today we face again the riddle that Plato, More, and Andreæ sought to answer: what are men to do with their knowledge and power? As we skip here and there through the Utopias of the next three centuries, this question gets more deeply impregnated in our minds. CHAPTER SIX How something happened in the eighteenth century which made men “furiously to think,” and how a whole group of utopias sprang out of the upturned soil of industrialism. CHAPTER SIX 1 There is a gap in the Utopian tradition between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth. Utopia, the place that must be built, faded into no-man’s land, the spot to which one might escape; and the utopias of Denis Vairasse and Simon Berington and the other romancers of this in-between period are in the line of Robinson Crusoe rather than the Republic.