This section gives little insight into the educational system but is rather devoted to the achievements of their learned men. In the remarks about abstract speculation and fantastical learning, More pretends to treat the absence of such learning among the Utopians as a weakness in their intellectual development, but his satirical intention is evident enough. It is not the Utopians being ridiculed, but the type of learning, a kind of logical acrobatics practiced by the scholastics, which Bacon later called the “cobwebs of learning.” Likewise, in revealing the skeptical attitude of the Utopians toward astrology, he shows them turning their backs on Medieval beliefs and adopting a distinctly modern point of view.
