orderly world? We have passed our first Utopian now, with an
answered vague gesture, and have noted, with secret satisfaction,
there is no access of dismay; we have rounded a bend, and down the
valley in the distance we get a glimpse of what appears to be a
singularly well-kept road....

I submit that to the modern minded man it can be no sort of Utopia
worth desiring that does not give the utmost freedom of going to and
fro. Free movement is to many people one of the greatest of life's
privileges--to go wherever the spirit moves them, to wander and
see--and though they have every comfort, every security, every
virtuous discipline, they will still be unhappy if that is denied
them. Short of damage to things cherished and made, the Utopians
will surely have this right, so we may expect no unclimbable walls
and fences, nor the discovery of any laws we may transgress in
coming down these mountain places.

And yet, just as civil liberty itself is a compromise defended by
prohibitions, so this particular sort of liberty must also have its
qualifications. Carried to the absolute pitch the right of free
movement ceases to be distinguishable from the right of free
intrusion. We have already, in a comment on More's Utopia, hinted at
an agreement with Aristotle's argument against communism, that it
flings people into an intolerable continuity of contact.
Schopenhauer carried out Aristotle in the vein of his own bitterness
and with the truest of images when he likened human society to
hedgehogs clustering for warmth, and unhappy when either too closely
packed or too widely separated. Empedocles found no significance in
life whatever except as an unsteady play of love and hate, of
attraction and repulsion, of assimilation and the assertion of