But there have been few regions, few social orders, and few people in which the adjustment has not been incomplete. In the face of perpetual difficulties and obstructions--the wind and the weather and the impulses of other men and customs that have long outlived their use--there are three ways, roughly, in which a man may react. He may run away. He may try to hold his own. He may attack. Looking around at our contemporaries who have survived the war, it is fairly evident that most of them are in the first stage of panic and despair. In an interesting article on The Dénouement of Nihilism, Mr. Edward Townsend Booth characterized the generation born in the late eighties as suffering a complete paralysis of will, or else, “if any initiative remains to them, they emigrate to Europe or the South Sea Islands, or crawl off into some quiet corner of the United States--but most of them continue where they were stricken in a state of living death.” Speaking more generally, running away does not always mean a physical escape, nor does an “attack” necessarily mean doing something practical “on the spot.” Let us use Dr. John Dewey’s illustration and suppose that a man is denied intercourse with his friends at a distance. One kind of reaction is for him to “imagine” meeting his friends, and going through, in fantasy, a whole ritual of meeting, repartee, and discussion. The other kind of reaction, as Dr. Dewey says, is to see what conditions must be met in order to cement distant friends, and then invent the telephone. The so-called extrovert, the type of man who has no need for utopias, will satisfy his desire by talking to the nearest human being. (“He may try to hold his own.”) But it is fairly plain that the extrovert, from the very weakness and inconstancy of his aims, is incapable of contributing anything but “good nature” to the good life of the community; and in his hands both art and invention would probably come to an end. Now putting aside the extrovert, we find that the two remaining types of reaction have expressed themselves in all the historic utopias. It is perhaps well that we should see them first in their normal, everyday setting, before we set out to explore the ideal commonwealths of the past. More or less, we have all had glimpses of the utopia of escape: it is raised and it collapses and it is built up again almost daily. In the midst of the clanking machinery of a paper factory I have come across a moving picture actress’s portrait, stuck upon an inoperative part of the machine; and it was not hard to reconstruct the private utopia of the wretch who minded the levers, or to picture the world into which he had fled from the roar and throb and muck of the machinery about him. What man has not had this utopia from the dawn of adolescence onwards--the desire to possess and be possessed by a beautiful woman?