and sturdiness of body and mind, but partly also,
it is to draw the minds of the Samurai for a space from the insistent
details of life, from the intricate arguments and the fretting effort to
work, from personal quarrels and personal affections and the things of
the heated room. Out they must go, clean out of the world..."
These passages will at least serve to present the Samurai idea and the
idea of common Rule of conduct it embodied.
In the "Modern Utopia" I discuss also a lesser Rule and the modification
of the Rule for women and the relation to the order of what I call the
poietic types, those types whose business in life seems to be rather to
experience and express than to act and effectually do. For those things
I must refer the reader to the book itself. Together with a sentence
I have put in italics above, they serve to show that even when I was
devising these Samurai I was not unmindful of the defects that are
essential to such a scheme.
This dream of the Samurai proved attractive to a much more various
group of readers than the New Republican suggestion, and there have been
actual attempts to realise the way of life proposed. In most of these
cases there was manifest a disposition greatly to over-accentuate
organization, to make too much of the disciplinary side of the Rule and
to forget the entire subordination of such things to active thought and
constructive effort. They are valuable and indeed only justifiable as
a means to an end. These attempts of a number of people of very
miscellaneous origins and social traditions to come together and work
like one machine made the essential wastefulness of any terrestrial
realization of my Samurai very clear. The only reason for such an Order
is the economy and development of force, and under existing conditions
disciplines would consume more force than they would engender. The
Order, so far from being a power, would be an isolation. Manifestly the
elements of organization and uniformity were overdone in my Utopia; in
this matter I was nearer the truth in the case of my New Republicans.
These, in contrast with the Samurai, had no formal general organization,
they worked for a common end, because their minds and the suggestion of
their circumstances pointed them to a common end. Nothing was enforced
upon them in the way of observance or discipline. They were not
shepherded and trained together, they came together. It was assumed
that if they wanted strongly the
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