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Occasionally his hand flies out with a fluttering gesture of illustration. Him you must imagine as sitting at a table reading a manuscript about Utopias, a manuscript he holds in two hands that are just a little fat at the wrist. The curtain rises upon him so.
Monasticism itself was the throwing off of innumerable Utopias, without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, as was proved recurrently after corrupt epochs, a strange secret of getting poor quickly; a mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind of revolution in the crusading time caught Francis in Assissi and stripped him of his rich garments in the street.
Man without a part in history is nothing. For this reason Fascism is opposed to all the abstractions of an individualistic character based upon materialism typical of the Eighteenth Century; and it is opposed to all the Jacobin innovations and utopias.
The fertilising conflict of individualities is the ultimate meaning of the personal life, and all our Utopias no more than schemes for bettering that interplay. At least, that is how life shapes itself more and more to modern perceptions. Until you bring in individualities, nothing comes into being, and a Universe ceases when you shiver the mirror of the least of individual minds. Section 3
'And here I must admit that I learned very little of drains and bells and modes of conveyance, and the like conveniences, during my time in this real future. In some of these visions of Utopias and coming times which I have read, there is a vast amount of detail about building, and social arrangements, and so forth.
In the midst of a corrupt and self-seeking age, he was unselfish and pure; and while many uttered pretty sentiments of philanthropy, and devised fanciful Utopias for the transfiguration of the human race, he went to work with his hands and purse as well as with his heart and head, and created a home and happiness for unhappy and unfortunate people in one of the loveliest and most fertile spots in the western world.
At the same time, he treated with supreme contempt the ideas and hopes of the Reform party. In his mystic republic only was to be found, he affirmed, the principle of unity, the ideal formula of actual progress. This theory was the idol at whose shrine he offered sacrifice. His followers were also his fellow-worshippers, and he was their high priest. They were fascinated by his brilliant utopias.
A modern Utopia differs from all the older Utopias in its recognition of the need of poietic activities one sees this new consideration creeping into thought for the first time in the phrasing of Comte's insistence that "spiritual" must precede political reconstruction, and in his admission of the necessity of recurrent books and poems about Utopias and at first this recognition appears to admit only an added complication to a problem already unmanageably complex.
In these prophesied Utopias everybody is painfully good and clean and happy, and all the work is done by electricity. There is somewhat too much electricity, for my taste, in these worlds to come.
In the case of Lyons, the revolution maker was at work; in the case of Paris, "The working class," says Marx, "did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple. After the 18th of March some such men turned up, and in some cases contrived to play preeminent parts.
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