ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the role which men's visions of a possible and more desirable future play in the development of a culture. Utopias may be seen from many points of view, as projections from individual experience; as sterile blueprints, too narrow to confine the natural varieties of the human mind for very long, as when they are lived out by small cult groups who pare and mold the individuals born within them to a confining and crippling mode. Reduction to fear and pain gives men a common basis of the unbearable which can be elaborated, a nightmare peopled with Sisyphus endlessly rolling his stone and Tityus in agony. The imaginative capacities of young children, initially part of the processes of growth and evolution, as Edith Cobb has phrased it, are then one source to which one must turn.
