A MODERN UTOPIA
aged to give them a full development, in art, philosophy, invention, or discovery. Certain general conditions presented themselves as obviously reasonable:—to give every citizen as good an education as he or she could acquire, for example; to frame it so that the directed educational process would never at any period occupy the whole available time of the learner, but would provide throughout a marginal free leisure with opportunities for developing idiosyncrasies, and to insure by the expedient of a minimum wage for a specified amount of work, that leisure and opportunity did not cease throughout life.
But in addition to thus making poietic activities universally possible, the founders of this Modern Utopia sought to supply incentives, which was an altogether more difficult research, a problem in its nature irresolvably complex and admitting of no systematic solution. But my double told me of a great variety of devices by which poietic men and women were given honour and enlarged freedoms, so soon as they produced an earnest of their quality; and he explained to me how great an ambition they might entertain.
There were great systems of laboratories attached to every municipal force station at which research could be conducted under the most favourable conditions; and every mine, and indeed almost every great industrial establishment, was saddled under its lease with similar obligations. So much for poietic ability and research in physical science. The World State tried the claims of every living contributor to any materially valuable invention, and paid or
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