One finds the clue to this lapse in Tiphaigne de la Roche’s Giphantia, a sketch of what was and what is and what will be, and in particular, an inquiry into the “Babylonian” mode of life. The author of Giphantia tells a parable about Sophia, the incarnation of Wisdom, who rejects the offers of the spendthrift, the merchant, the soldier, and the student, and accepts the suit of a diffident fellow who had retired in solitude to the country, to spend his days like a cultivated gentleman. One remembers the way in which Montaigne spent his declining years; one remembers Voltaire; and one sees how deeply the ideal of Robinson Crusoe--a cultivated Robinson Crusoe, surrounded with books and beyond the reach of any king and court--colored the deepest aspirations of this period. Rousseau, writing about the corrupting influence of the arts and sciences, and Chateaubriand, seeking the noble savage in the American wilderness and finding him in his own bosom--these men struck the dominating note of the eighteenth century. In a society that was already painfully artificial and “arranged” the institutes of Lycurgus and Utopus must have seemed as repressive as those of Louis XIV. So almost two centuries pass before we find any fresh regions to explore in Utopia. 2 The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and those of the later men of the Renascence, arose, as I have pointed out, from the contrast between the possibilities that lay open beyond the sea and the dismal conditions that attended the breakdown of the town economy of the Middle Age. Like Plato’s Republic, it attempted to face the difficult problem of transition. In the course of the next three centuries the adventure of exploring and ransacking strange countries loses its hold upon men’s imagination; and a new type of activity becomes the center of interest. The conquest of alien countries and the lure of gold do not indeed die out with this new interest; but they are subordinated to another type of conquest--that which man seeks to effect over nature. Here and there, particularly in Great Britain, untrained men “with a practical turn” begin to busy themselves with improving the mechanical apparatus by which the day’s labor is done. A retired barber, named Arkwright, invents a spinning frame, a Scotchman named MacAdam discovers a new method of laying roads; and out of a hundred such inventions during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a new world comes into existence--a world in which energy derived from coal and running water takes the place of human energy; in which goods manipulated by machinery take the place of goods woven or sawed or hammered by hand. Within a hundred years the actual world and the idola were transformed.