The social theorists of Utopia, my double explained, did not base
their schemes upon the classification of men into labour and
capital, the landed interest, the liquor trade, and the like. They
esteemed these as accidental categories, indefinitely amenable to
statesmanship, and they looked for some practical and real
classification upon which to base organisation. [Footnote: In that
they seem to have profited by a more searching criticism of early
social and political speculations than our earth has yet undertaken.
The social speculations of the Greeks, for example, had just the
same primary defect as the economic speculations of the eighteenth
century--they began with the assumption that the general conditions
of the prevalent state of affairs were permanent.] But, on the other
hand, the assumption that men are unclassifiable, because
practically homogeneous, which underlies modern democratic methods
and all the fallacies of our equal justice, is even more alien to
the Utopian mind. Throughout Utopia there is, of course, no other
than provisional classifications, since every being is regarded as
finally unique, but for political and social purposes things have
long rested upon a classification of temperaments, which attends
mainly to differences in the range and quality and character of the
individual imagination.
This Utopian classification was a rough one, but it served its
purpose to determine the broad lines of political organisation; it
was so far unscientific that many individuals fall between or within
two or even three of its classes. But that was met by giving the
correlated organisation a compensatory looseness of play. Four main
classes of mind were distinguished, called, respectively, the
Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, and the Base. The former two are
supposed to constitute the living tissue of the State; the latter
are the fulcra and resistances, the bone and cover of its body. They
are not hereditary classes, nor is there any attempt to develop any
class by special breeding, simply because the intricate interplay
of heredity is untraceable and incalculable. They are classes to
which people drift of their own accord. Education is uniform until
differentiation becomes unmistakable, and each man (and woman) must
establish his position with regard to the lines of this abstract
classification by his own quality, choice, and development....
The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality embraces a
wide range of types, but they agree in possessing imaginations that
range beyond the known and accepted, and that involve the desire to
bring the discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge and
recognition. The scope and direction of the imaginative excursion
may vary very greatly. It may be the invention of something new or
the discovery of something hitherto unperceived. When the invention
or discovery is primarily beauty then we have the artistic type of
Poietic mind; when it is not so, we have the true scientific man.
The range of discovery may be narrowed as it is in the art of
Whistler or the science of a cytologist, or it may embrace a wide
extent of relevance, until at last both artist or scientific
inquirer merge in the universal reference of the true philosopher.
To the accumulated activities of the Poietic type, reacted upon by
circumstances, are due almost all the forms assumed by human thought
and feeling. All religious ideas, all ideas of what is good or
beautiful, entered life through the poietic inspirations of man.
Except for processes of decay, the forms of the human future must
come also through men of this same type, and it is a primary
essential to our modern idea of an abundant secular progress that
these activities should be unhampered and stimulated.
The Kinetic class consists of types, various, of course, and merging
insensibly along the boundary into the less representative
constituents of the Poietic group, but distinguished by a more
restricted range of imagination. Their imaginations do not range
beyond the known, experienced, and accepted, though within these
limits they may imagine as vividly or more vividly than members of
the former group. They are often very clever and capable people, but
they do not do, and they do not desire to do, new things. The more
vigorous individuals of this class are the most teachable people in
the world, and they are generally more moral and more trustworthy
than the Poietic types. They live,--while the Poietics are always
something of experimentalists with life. The characteristics of
either of these two classes may be associated with a good or bad
physique, with excessive or defective energy, with exceptional
keenness of the senses in some determinate direction or such-like
"bent," and the Kinetic type, just as the Poietic type, may display
an imagination of restricted or of the most universal range. But a
fairly energetic Kinetic is probably the nearest thing to that ideal
our earthly anthropologists have in mind when they speak of the
"Normal" human being. The very definition of the Poietic class
involves a certain abnormality.
The Utopians distinguished two extremes of this Kinetic class
according to the quality of their imaginative preferences, the Dan
and Beersheba, as it were, of this division. At one end is the
mainly intellectual, unoriginal type, which, with energy of
personality, makes an admirable judge or administrator and without
it an uninventive, laborious, common mathematician, or common
scholar, or common scientific man; while at the other end is the
mainly emotional, unoriginal man, the type to which--at a low level
of personal energy--my botanist inclines. The second type includes,
amidst its energetic forms, great actors, and popular politicians
and preachers. Between these extremes is a long and wide region of
varieties, into which one would put most of the people who form the
reputable workmen, the men of substance, the trustworthy men and
women, the pillars of society on earth.
Below these two classes in the Utopian scheme of things, and merging
insensibly into them, come the Dull. The Dull are persons of
altogether inadequate imagination, the people who never seem to
learn thoroughly, or hear distinctly, or think clearly. (I believe
if everyone is to be carefully educated they would be considerably
in the minority in the world, but it is quite possible that will not
be the reader's opinion. It is clearly a matter of an arbitrary
line.) They are the stupid people, the incompetent people, the
formal, imitative people, the people who, in any properly organised
State, should, as a class, gravitate towards and below the minimum
wage that qualifies for marriage. The laws of heredity are far too
mysterious for such offspring as they do produce to be excluded from
a fair chance in the world, but for themselves, they count neither
for work nor direction in the State.
Finally, with a bold disregard of the logician's classificatory
rules, these Utopian statesmen who devised the World State, hewed
out in theory a class of the Base. The Base may, indeed, be either
poietic, kinetic, or dull, though most commonly they are the last,
and their definition concerns not so much the quality of their
imagination as a certain bias in it, that to a statesman makes it a
matter for special attention. The Base have a narrower and more
persistent egoistic reference than the common run of humanity; they
may boast, but they have no frankness; they have relatively great
powers of concealment, and they are capable of, and sometimes have
an aptitude and inclination towards, cruelty. In the queer phrasing
of earthly psychology with its clumsy avoidance of analysis, they
have no "moral sense." They count as an antagonism to the State
organisation.
Obviously, this is the rudest of classifications, and no Utopian has
ever supposed it to be a classification for individual application,
a classification so precise that one can say, this man is "poietic,"
and that man is "base." In actual experience these qualities mingle
and vary in every possible way. It is not a classification for
Truth, but a classification to an end. Taking humanity as a
multitude of unique individuals in mass, one may, for practical
purposes, deal with it far more conveniently by disregarding its
uniquenesses and its mixed cases altogether, and supposing it to be
an assembly of poietic, kinetic, dull, and base people. In many
respects it behaves as if it were that. The State, dealing as it
does only with non-individualised affairs, is not only justified in
disregarding, but is bound to disregard, a man's special
distinction, and to provide for him on the strength of his prevalent
aspect as being on the whole poietic, kinetic, or what not. In a
world of hasty judgments and carping criticism, it cannot be
repeated too often that the fundamental ideas of a modern Utopia
imply everywhere and in everything, margins and elasticities, a
certain universal compensatory looseness of play.