ISBN none listed, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-14339

O, Wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in 't!
--Shakespeare.

"Man's vision of a better world has been a sustaining and dynamic force in his history from earliest times. The dream of a perfect society can be found in such diverse writings as the epic of Gilgamesh -- the ancient Sumerian legend known as early as 3000 B.C., Plato's Republic , Shakespeare's Tempest (as illustrated by the lines quoted above), Robert Burton's 'Preface of Democritus Junior' in The Anatomy of Melancholy , and, more recently, W.H.Hudson's Crystal Age .

"The concept of 'Utopia' (a word coined by Sir Thomas More in the early sixteenth century) gradually became synonymous with Never-Never Land for many writers and readers. It has, in many quarters, inspired as much adverse as favorable response. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four and Huxley's ironically titled Brave New World both describe an age that is far from idyllic. Nevertheless, as Mrs. Eurich points out in her introduction, 'Man has always had his Isle of the Blest, his Elysian Fields, Hesperides, or Garden of Eden, the Golden Age of the past or the Millennium to come...

"'Utopias are models for mimesis usually timed for the future, and the best of them may well have influenced many readers. We do not claim them to be formative to civilization except as they are related to ideals affecting man's behavior and giving him new aims. Instead, it is our intent simply to trace the course -- the evolution -- of some of man's most vital beliefs recorded in utopian literature. To see this development in historical perspective necessitates the survey of early utopian societies: their foundation in idealism, the methods recommended for achieving the ideal, and the answers given for man's problems'.

"Although many utopias have been analyzed from social, economic, and political points of view, Mrs. Eurich's is the first study to concentrate on the role of science in providing the anticipated blessings. Focusing on the seventeenth century, she discusses, among others, Campanella, Andreae, Bacon, Hartlib, Cowley, and Glanvill, pointing out the uses that they made of the science of their day in the ideal societies that they were describing. 'As we live in the world they visualized', she writes, 'we may smile at their naïveté but we must respect their vision, still wondering perhaps why the world does not seem to us quite as perfect as they thought it would be'." [jacket blurb, US hbk, 1967]