Civics: as Applied Sociology
by
Patrick Geddes
Part 2 out of 3
upon which Mr. Stuart-Glennie and other sociologists have so ably
insisted. The fundamental importance of these initial factors of region
and occupation to all studies of races and types, of communities and
institutions, of customs and laws, indeed of language and literature, of
religion and art, even of ideals and individualities, must be my excuse
if I seem to insist, in season and out of season, upon [Page: 61] the
services of Le Play as one of the main founders of sociology; and this
not only _(a)_ on account of his monographic surveys of modern
industrial life--those "Monographies Sociales" from which our current
economic studies of the condition of the worker, of the family budget,
etc., descend--but _(b)_ yet more on account of his vital reconstruction
of anthropology (albeit still far from adequately realised by most
anthropologists) through his renewed insistence upon the elemental
rustic origins of industry, family types, and social organisation alike,
from these simplest reactions of man in his struggle for existence in
varied and varying environment.
It does not suffice to recognise, with many economists, hunting,
pastoral and agricultural formations, as states _preliminary_ to our
present industrial and commercial, imperial, and financial order of
civilisation. This view, still too commonly surviving, is rather of
hindrance than help; what we need is to see our existing civilisation as
the complex struggle and resultant of all these types and their
developments to-day. So far, therefore, from leaving, as at present,
these simple occupational types to the anthropologist, or at best giving
him some scant hospitality within our city museum, we are learning to
see how it is at one time the eager miner, or the conservative shepherd,
or at another the adventurous fisher or hunter who comes concretely upon
the first plane of national, imperial or international politics, and who
awakens new strife among these. We not only begin to see, but the
soldier frankly tells us, how the current sports of youth, and the
unprecedented militarism of the past century, are alike profoundly
connected with the hunting world. Hence the hope of peace lies not only,
as most at present think in the civilised and civilising development of
international law, or of culture intercourse, excellent though these
are, but also in a fuller and complete return to nature than has been
this recent and persistent obsession of our governing classes with the
hunter world almost alone; in short, in adding the gentler, yet wider,
experiences of the naturalist, the sterner experiences of other
occupations also. Nor does such elementary recognition of these main
social formations content us; their local differentiations must be noted
and compared--a comprehensive regional survey, therefore, which does
justice to each local variety of these great types; speaking henceforth
of no mere abstract "hunter," but of the specific hunting types of each
climate, and distinguishing these as clearly as do our own milder
sportsmen of deer-forest and the turnip field from themselves and from
each other. After such needed surveys in detail, we may, indeed must,
compare and generalise them.
Similarly for the pasture, the forest. Every tourist in this country is
struck by the contrast of Swiss towns and cities with our own, and notes
[Page: 62] too that on the Swiss pasture he finds a horde of cattle,
while in Scotland or Yorkshire he left a flock of sheep. And not only
the tourist, but the historian or the economist too often fail to see
how Galashiels or Bradford are developments of the wool hamlet, now
familiar to many in R.L. Stevenson's native Swanston. Again, not only
Swiss wealth, but Swiss character and institutions, go back essentially
to the high pasture and the well-filled byre. That this rich Swiss
cow-pasture rests on limestone, and the poor Scottish sheep-grazing upon
comparatively unmouldering and impermeable gneiss, is no mere matter of
geologist's detail; it affords in each case the literal and concrete
foundation-stone of the subsequent evolution of each region and
population, and this not only in material and economic development, but
even in higher and subtler outcomes, aesthetic, intellectual and
moral.[4] It is for such reasons that one must labour and re-labour this
geographic and determinist aspect of sociology, and this for no merely
scientific reason, but also for practical ones. Nowhere perhaps have
more good and generous souls considered how to better the condition of
their people than in Swiss, or Irish, or Scottish valleys; yet it is one
main reason of the continual failure of all such movements, and of such
minds in the wider world as well, that they do not first acquaint
themselves with the realities of nature and labour sufficiently to
appreciate that the fundamental--I do not say the supreme--question is:
what can be got out of limestone, and what can be got out of gneiss?
Hence the rare educative value of such a concrete sociological diagram
and model as was the Swiss Village at the Paris Exposition of 1900, for
here geographic and economic knowledge and insight were expressed with
artistic skill and sympathy as perhaps never before. Only as similar
object-lessons are worked out for other countries, can we adequately
learn, much less popularly teach, how from nature comes "rustics," and
from this comes civics. But civics and rustics make up the field of
politics; they are the concrete of which politics become the
abstract--commonly the too remotely abstract.
[4] For a fuller justification of this thesis as regards Switzerland,
see the writer's "International Exhibitions," in _International
Monthly_, October, 1900.
For final illustration, let us descend to the sea-level. There again,
taking the fisher, each regional type must be traced in his contribution
to his town. Take for instance the salmon fisher of Norway, the whaler
of Dundee, the herring-fisher of Yarmouth, the cod-fisher of
Newfoundland, the coral fisher of the AEgean; each is a definite varietal
type, one developing or at least tending to develop characteristic
normal family relations, and corresponding social outcomes in
institutions; in which again the appropriate qualities and defects must
be expressed, even as is the quality and twist of the hemp in the
strength of the cable, or as is the chemistry and the microscopic
structure of the alloy in the efficiency of the great gun. [Page: 63]
Our neighbouring learned societies and museums geographical, geological
and the rest, are thus avowedly and consciously so many winter shelters
in which respective groups of regional surveyors tell their tales and
compare their observations, in which they meet to compare their
generalisations from their own observations made in the field with those
made by others. So it must increasingly be for this youngest of
societies. We may, we should, know best our Thames valley, our London
basin, our London survey; but the progress of our science implies as
increasingly varied and thorough an inquiry into rustic and civic
regions and occupations and resultants throughout the whole world
present and past, as does the corresponding world survey with our
geologic neighbours.
I plead then for a sociological survey, rustic and civic, region by
region, and insist in the first place upon the same itinerant field
methods of notebook and camera, even for museum collections and the
rest, as those of the natural sciences. The dreary manuals which have
too long discredited those sciences in our schools, are now giving place
to a new and fascinating literature of first-hand nature study.
Similarly, those too abstract manuals of civics which are at present
employed in schools[5] must be replaced by concrete and regional ones,
their abstract counsels of political or personal perfection thus also
giving place to a corresponding regional idealism which may then be
supplemented from other regions as far as needs demand and circumstances
allow.
[5] For a fuller review of these, compare the writer's "City
Development," in _Contemporary Review_, October, 1904.
C--GEOGRAPHICAL DETERMINISM AND ITS DIFFICULTIES
To interpret then our tangle of ideas, both of the city and its
citizens, let us now bring more fully to our transverse valley sections,
and to each occupation separately, the geographical view-point which we
have found of service to elucidate the development of towns and cities
upon its longitudinal [Page: 64] slope. But this is neither more nor
less than the method of Montesquieu, whose classic "Esprit des Lois"
anticipates and initiates so much of that of later writers--Ritter,
Buckle, Taine, or Le Play. Once more then let their common, or rather
their resultant, doctrine be stated in terms expressing the latest of
these more fully than the first. Given the region, its character
determines the nature of the fundamental occupation, and this in turn
essentially determines the type of family. The nature and method of the
occupation must normally determine the mode of its organisation, e.g.,
the rise and character of a specialised directive class, and the nature
of these occupational chiefs as contrasted with the people and with each
other. Similarly, the types of family tend to develop their appropriate
types of institutions, e.g., for justice, guidance, and of course
notably in response to social environment as regards defence or attack.
Thus at this point in fact we seem to be pressing upon the student of
sociology the essential argument of geographical and evolutionary
determinism, in fact inviting him to adopt a view, indeed to commit
himself to a method, which may be not only foreign to his habits, but
repugnant to his whole view of life and history. And if able advocacy of
this determinist view of society for at least the past five generations
has not carried general conviction, why raise so controversial a
suggestion, in the guise too of a method professing to harmonise all
comers? Yet this is advisedly done; and as no one will deny some civil
importance to geographical factors, let patience be granted to examine
this aspect of the city's map and shield, and to get from it what it can
teach, under the present assurance to the philosophic and idealist
critic that his view of other factors, higher and deeper, as supreme in
human life, and therefore in city making, will not be forgotten, nor
excluded from consideration when we come to them. All that is really
insisted upon here is that if anything of naturalistic method of
evolutionary conception is to be permitted at all, we must obviously
proceed from this simple towards the more complex, and so begin with it
here and now.
It is the appropriate slope or steppe, the needful rainfall, that
conditions the growth of grass, this which conditions the presence of
herds or flocks, and these again which determine the very existence of
shepherds. These granted then, not only do the pastoral arts and crafts
arise, but the patriarchal type and family develop, and this not only
with their hospitality and other virtues, with their nomadic tendencies,
at any rate, their unfixed land-tenure, very different from the
peasant's, but their slow and skilful [Page: 65] diplomacy (till the
pasture is bared or grown again, as the negotiator's interests incline).
The patriarch in his venerable age, the caravaneer in his nomadic and
exploring youth, his disciplined maturity, thus naturally develop as
different types of chief and leader; and it is therefore not until this
stage, when all is ready for the entry of Abraham or Job, of Mohammed
the camel-driver, or Paul the tent-maker, that any real controversy can
arise between the determinist and his opponent, between the democratic
and the great-man theories of history, towards which these respectively
incline.[6] And at that stage, may not the controversy stimulate a
fruitful analysis? After all, what is the claim of free-will but to
select among the factors afforded by a given set of circumstances? And
the utmost stretch of determinism to which geography and civics may lead
us obviously cannot prove the negative of this. But whether the
psychologic origins of new ideals be internal to the mind of genius, or
imparted by some external source, is a matter obviously beyond the scope
of either the geographer or the historian of civics to settle. Enough
surely for both controversialists if we use such a means of tabulating
facts as to beg the question for neither view; and still better if we
can present the case of each without injustice to either, nay, to each
with its clearness increased by the sharp edge of contrast. If the
geographical determinist thesis on one hand, and its ethical and
psychological antithesis on the other, can thus clearly be defined and
balanced, their working equilibrium is at hand, even should their
complete synthesis remain beyond us.
[6] A fuller study, upon this method, of the essential origins of
pastoral evolution, and of its characteristic modern developments, will
be found in the writer's "Flower of the Grass," in _The Evergreen_,
Edinburgh and Westminster, 1896. See also "La Science Sociale,"
_passim_, especially in its earlier vols. or its number for Jan. 1905.
D--NEED OF ABSTRACT METHOD FOR NOTATION AND FOR INTERPRETATION
Not only such general geographical studies, but such social
interpretations as those above indicated have long been in progress:
witness the labours of whole schools of historians and critics, among
whom Montsquieu and his immediate following, or in more recent times
Buckle and Taine, are but the most prominent; witness the works of
geographers like Humboldt, Ritter, Reclus, or of developmental
technologists like Boucher de Perthes and regional economists like Le
Play. The main lines of a concrete and evolutionary sociology (or at
[Page: 66] least _sociography_) have thus been laid down for us; but the
task now before us, in our time, in such a society as this--and indeed
in such a paper as the present one--its that of extracting from all this
general teaching its essential scientific method, one everywhere latent
and implicit, but nowhere fully explicit, or at least adequately
systematised.
It is in fact only as we can agree upon some definite and orderly method
of description that our existing literature of social surveys can be
adequately compared or new ones co-operatively undertaken. Hence the
importance of discussions of scientific method such as those who have so
largely occupied our first volume. Yet, I submit, here lies the means of
escaping from these too abstract (and consequently too static)
presentments of the general methodology of social science into which
sociologists are constantly falling; and to which must be largely
ascribed the prevalent distaste for sociology so general in this
would-be practical-minded community in which we find ourselves, as
indeed also the comparative unattractiveness of our studies to the body
of specialist scientific workers, not even excepting those within what
we consider sociological fields.
The history of each science, be it mathematics or astronomy, botany,
zoology or geology, shows us that it is not enough to have the
intelligent observer, or even the interpretative thinker with his
personally expressed doctrine. This must be clearly crystallised into a
definite statement, method, proposition, "law" or theory, stated in
colourless impersonal form before it is capable of acceptance and
incorporation into the general body of science. But while astronomer and
geologist and naturalist can and do describe both the observational
results and their general conceptions in literary form, requiring from
the ordinary reader but the patience to master a few unfamiliar terms
and ideas, they also carry on their work by help of definite and orderly
technical methods, descriptive and comparative, analytic and synthetic.
These, as far as possible, have to be crystallised beyond their mere
verbal statement into formulae, into tabular and graphic presentments,
and thus not only acquire greater clearness of statement, but become
more and more active agencies of inquiry--in fact, become literal
_thinking-machines_. But while the mathematician has his notations and
his calculus, the geographer and geologist their maps, reliefs and
sections, the naturalist his orderly classificatory methods, it has been
the misfortune and delay of political economy, and no small cause of
that "notorious discord and sterility" with which Comte reproached it,
that [Page: 67] its cultivators have so commonly sought to dispense with
the employment of any definite scientific notations; while even its
avowed statisticians, in this country especially, have long resisted the
consistent use of graphic methods.
I submit, therefore, for discussion, as even more urgent and pressing
than that of the general and abstract methodology of the social
sciences, the problem of elaborating a concrete descriptive method
readily applicable to the study and comparison of human societies, to
cities therefore especially. To do justice to this subject, not only the
descriptive labours of anthropologists, but much of the literature of
sociology would have to be gone through from the "Tableau Economique" of
the Physiocratic School to the "Sociological Tables" of Mr. Spencer, and
still more fruitfully to more recent writers. Among these, besides here
recognising specially the work of Mr. Booth and its stimulus to younger
investigators, I would acknowledge the helpful and suggestive impulse
from the group of social geographers which has arisen from the
initiative of Le Play[7], and whose classification, especially in its
later forms[8], cannot but be of interest and value to everyone whose
thought on social questions is not afloat upon the ocean of the abstract
without chart or bearings.
[7] La Nomenclature Sociale (Extrait de La Revue, "La Science Sociale,"
Dec. 1886) Paris, Firmin-Diact, 1887.
[8] Demoulins, La Science Sociale d'apres F. Le Play 1882-1905;
Classification Sociale, "La Science Sociale," Jan. 1905.
Yet with all respect to each and all these classifications and methods,
indeed with cordially acknowledge personal obligation and indebtedness
to them from first to last, no one of these seems fully satisfactory for
the present purpose; and it is therefore needful to go into the matter
afresh for ourselves, though utilising these as fully as we can.
E--THE CITY-COMPLEX AND ITS USUAL ANALYSIS
In the everyday world, in the city as we find it, what is the working
classification of ideas, the method of thought of its citizens? That
the citizens no more think of themselves as using any particular
sociological method than did M. Jourdain of talking prose does not
really matter, save that it makes our observation, both of them and it,
easier and more trustworthy.
They are speaking and thinking for the most part of [Page: 68] People
and of Affairs; much less of places. In the category of People, we
observe that individuals, self and others, and this in interest, perhaps
even more than in interests, commonly take precedence of groups.
Institutions and Government are, however, of general interest, the state
being much more prominent than is the church; the press, for many,
acting as the modern substitute for the latter. In the world of Affairs,
commerce takes precedence of industry, while sport runs hard upon both.
War, largely viewed by its distant spectators as the most vivid form of
sport, also bulks largely. Peace is not viewed as a positive ideal, but
essentially as a passive state, at best, of non-war, more generally of
latent war. Central among places are the bank, the market (in its
financial forms before the material ones). Second to these stand the
mines then the factories, etc.; and around these the fixed or floating
fortresses of defence. Of homes, that of the individual alone is
seriously considered, at most those of his friends, his "set," his
peers, but too rarely even of the street, much less the neighbourhood,
at least for their own sake, as distinguished from their reaction upon
individual and family status or comfort.
This set of views is obviously not easy of precise analysis of exact
classification. In broad outline, however, a summary may be made, and
even tabulated as follows:--
THE EVERYDAY TOWN AND ITS ACTIVITIES.
PEOPLE AFFAIRS PLACES
(a) INDIVIDUALS (a) COMMERCE (a) MARKET, BANK, etc.
(Self and others). INDUSTRY, etc. FACTORY, MINE, etc.
SPORT.
(b) GOVERNMENT(S) (b) WAR (b) FORT, FIELD, etc.
Temporal and Spiritual and Peace
(State and Church). (Latent War).
Next note how from the everyday world of action, there arises a
corresponding thought-world also. This has,
[Page: 69] of course, no less numerous
and varied elements, with its resultantly complex local colour; But a
selection will suffice, of which the headings may be printed below those
of the preceding scheme, to denote how to the objective elements there
are subjective elements corresponding--literal reflections upon the
pools of memory--the slowly flowing stream of tradition. Thus the
extended diagram, its objective elements expressed in yet more general
terms, may now be read anew (noting that mirror images are fully
reversed).
PEOPLE AFFAIRS PLACES
"TOWN" (a) INDIVIDUALS (a) OCCUPATIONS (a) WORK-PLACES
(b) INSTITUTIONS (b) WAR (b) WAR-PLACES
"SCHOOLS" (b) HISTORY (b) STATISTICS AND (b) GEOGRAPHY
("Constitutional") HISTORY
("Military")
(a) BIOGRAPHY (a) ECONOMICS (a) TOPOGRAPHY
Here then we have that general relation of the town life and its
"schools," alike of thought and of education, which must now be fully
investigated.
Such diagrammatic presentments, while of course primarily for the
purpose of clear expression and comparison, are also frequently
suggestive--by "inspection," as geometers say--of relations not
previously noticed. In both ways, we may see more clearly how prevalent
ideas and doctrines have arisen as "reflections upon" the life of
action, and even account for their qualities and their defects--their
partial truth or their corresponding inadequacy, according to our own
appreciative or depreciative standpoint. Thus as regards "People," in
the first column we see expressed briefly how to (a) the individual
life, with the corresponding vivid interest in biography, corresponds
the "great man theory" of history. Conversely with _(b)_ alone is
associated the insistance upon institutional developments as the main
factor. Passing to the middle column, that of "Affairs," we may note in
connection with _(b)_ say the rise of statistics in association with
the needs of war, a point connected with its too empiric character; or
note again, a too common converse weakness of economic theory, its
inadequate inductive [Page: 70] verification. Or finally, in the column
of "Place," the long weakness of geography as an educational subject,
yet is periodic renewal upon the field of war, is indicated. We might in
fact continue such a comparison of the existing world of action and of
ideas, into all the schools, those of thought and practice, no less than
those of formal instruction; and thus we should more and more clearly
unravel how their complexity and entanglement, their frequent
oppositions and contradictions are related to the various and warring
elements of the manifold "Town" life from which they derive and survive.
Such a fuller discussion, however, would too long delay the immediate
problem--that of understanding "Town" and its "School" in their origins
and simplest relations.
F--PROPOSED METHODICAL ANALYSIS
(1) THE TOWN
More fully to understand this two-fold development of Town and School we
have first of all apparently to run counter to the preceding popular
view, which is here, as in so many cases, the precise opposite of that
reached from the side of science. This, as we have already so fully
insisted, must set out with geography, thus literally _replacing_ People
and Affairs in our scheme above.
Starting then once more with the simple biological formula:
ENVIRONMENT ... CONDITIONS ... ORGANISM
this has but to be applied and defined by the social geographer to
become
REGION ... OCCUPATION ... FAMILY-type and Developments
which summarises precisely that doctrine of Montesquieu and his
successors already insisted on. Again, in but slight variation from Le
Play's simplest phrasing _("Lieu, travail, famille")_ we have
PLACE ... WORK ... FOLK
It is from this simple and initial social formula that we have now to
work our way to a fuller understanding of Town and School. [Page: 71]
Immediately, therefore, this must be traced upward towards its
complexities. For Place, it is plain, is no mere topographic site. Work,
conditioned as it primarily is by natural advantages, is thus really
first of all _place-work_. Arises the field or garden, the port, the
mine, the workshop, in fact the _work-place_, as we may simply
generalise it; while, further, beside this arise the dwellings, the
_folk-place_.
Nor are these by any means all the elements we are accustomed to lump
together into Town. As we thus cannot avoid entering into the manifold
complexities of town-life throughout the world and history, we must
carry along with us the means of unravelling these; hence the value of
this simple but precise nomenclature and its regular schematic use.
Thus, while here keeping to simple words in everyday use, we may employ
and combine them to analyse out our Town into its elements and their
inter-relations with all due exactitude, instead of either leaving our
common terms undefined, or arbitrarily defining them anew, as economists
have alternately done--too literally losing or shirking essentials of
Work in the above formula, and with these missing essentials of Folk and
Place also.
Tabular and schematic presentments, however, such as those to which we
are proceeding, are apt to be less simple and satisfactory to reader
than to writer; and this even when in oral exposition the very same
diagram has been not only welcomed as clear, but seen and felt to be
convincing. The reason of this difficulty is that with the spoken
exposition the audience sees the diagram grow upon the blackboard;
whereas to produce anything of the same effect upon the page, it must be
printed at several successive stages of development. Thus our initial
formula,
PLACE ... WORK ... FOLK
readily develops into
FOLK
PLACE-WORK WORK FOLK-WORK
(Natural advantages) (Occupation)
PLACE
This again naturally develops into a regular table, of which the [Page:
72] filling up of some of the squares has been already suggested above,
and that of the remaining ones will be intelligible on inspection:--
PLACE FOLK WORK-FOLK FOLK
("Natives") ("Producers")
PLACE-WORK WORK FOLK-WORK
PLACE WORK-PLACE FOLK-PLACE
So complex is the idea of even the simplest Town--even in such a rustic
germ as the "farm-town" of modern Scottish parlance, the _ton_ of
place-names without number.
The varying development of the Folk into social classes or castes night
next be traced, and the influence and interaction of all the various
factors of Place, Work, and Family tabulated. Suffice it here, however,
for the present to note that such differentiation does take place,
without entering into the classification and comparison of the protean
types of patrician and plebeian throughout geography and history.
G--ANALYSIS CONTINUED.--(2) THE SCHOOL
Once and again we have noted how from the everyday life of action--the
Town proper of our terminology--there arises the corresponding
subjective world--the _Schools_ of thought, which may express itself
sooner or later in schools of education. The types of people, their
kinds and styles of work, their whole environment, all become
represented in the mind of the community, and these react upon the
individuals, their activities, their place itself. Thus (the more
plainly the more the community is a simple and an isolated one, but in
appreciable measure everywhere and continually) there have obviously
arisen local turns of thought and modes of speech, ranging from shades
of accept and idiom to distinctive dialect or language. Similarly, there
is a characteristic variety of occupational activity, a style of
workmanship, a way of doing business. There are distinctive [Page: 73]
manners and customs--there is, in short, a certain recognisable
likeness, it may be an indefinably subtle or an unmistakably broad and
general one, which may be traced in faces and costumes, in tongue and
literature, in courtesy and in conflict, in business and in policy, in
street and in house, from hovel to palace, from prison to cathedral.
Thus it is that every folk comes to have its own ways, and every town
its own school.
While the complex social medium has thus been acquiring its
characteristic form and composition, a younger generation has been
arising. In all ways and senses, Heredity is commonly more marked than
variation--especially when, as in most places at most times, such great
racial, occupational, environmental transformations occur as those of
modern cities. In other words, the young folk present not only an
individual continuity with their organic predecessors which is heredity
proper, but with their social predecessors also. The elements of organic
continuity, which we usually think of first of all as organic though of
course psychic also, are conveniently distinguished as the
_inheritance_--a term in fact which the biologist seeks to deprive of
its common economic and social senses altogether, leaving for these the
term _heritage_, material or immaterial alike. This necessary
distinction between the inheritance, bodily and mental, and the
heritage, economic and social, obviously next requires further
elaboration, and with this further precision of language also. For the
present, let us leave the term heritage to the economist for the
material wealth with which he is primarily concerned, and employ the
term _tradition_ for these immaterial and distinctively social elements
we are here specially considering. This in fact is no new proposal, but
really little more than an acceptance of ordinary usage. Broadly
speaking, tradition is in the life of the community what memory is for
its individual units. The younger generation, then, not only inherits an
organic and a psychic diathesis; not only has transmitted to it the
accumulations, instruments and land of its predecessors, but grows up in
their tradition also. The importance of imitation in this process, a
matter of common experience, has been given the fullest sociological
prominence, by M. Tarde especially.[9] Thanks to these and other
convergent lines of thought, we no longer consent to look at the
acquirement of the social tradition as a matter requiring to be imposed
upon reluctant youth almost entirely from without, and are learning anew
as of old, with the simplest and the most developed peoples, the
barbarians and the Greeks, to recognise and respect, and, if it may be,
to nourish the process of self-instruction, viewed as normal
accompaniment of each developing being throughout the phases of its
[Page: 74] organic life, the stages of its social life. Upon the many
intermediate degrees of advance and decline, however, between these two
extremes of civilisation, specific institutions for the instruction of
youth arise, each in some way an artificial substitute, or at least a
would-be accelerant, for the apprenticeship of imitation in the school
of experience and the community's tradition, which we term a school in
the restricted and pedagogic sense. This whole discussion, however, has
been in order to explain and to justify the present use of the term
"School" in that wide sense in which the historian of art or
thought--the sociologist in fact--has ever used the term, while yet
covering the specialised pedagogic schools of all kinds also.
[9] Tarde, "L'imitation Sociale," and other works.
Once more, then, and in the fullest sense, every folk has its own
tradition, every town its school.
We need not here discriminate these unique and characteristic elements
to which the art-historians--say of Venice and of Florence, of Barbizon
or Glasgow--specially attend from those most widely distributed ones, in
which the traditions and schools of all towns within the same
civilisation broadly agree. Indeed, even the most widely distributed of
these--say from Roman law to modern antiseptic surgery--arose as local
schools before they became general ones.
Similarly for the general social tradition. The fundamental occupations
and their division of labour, their differentiation in detail and their
various interactions up to our own day, at first separately considered,
are now seen to be closely correlated with the status of woman; while
all these factors determine not only the mode of union of the parents,
but their relation to the children, the constitution of the family, with
which the mode of transmission of property is again thoroughly
interwoven.
H--TOWN AND SCHOOL COMPARED
"TOWN" FOLK
WORK
PLACE
SURVEY
CRAFT-KNOWLEDGE
"SCHOOL" CUSTOM
We may now summarise and tabulate our comparison of Town and
School,[10] and on the schema (p.75) it will be seen [Page: 76]
that each element of the second is printed in the position of a
mirror-reflection of the first. This gives but the merest outline, which
is ready, however, to be applied in various ways and filled up
accordingly. A step towards this is made in the next and fuller version
of the scheme (p. 77). It will be noted in this that the lower
portion of the diagram, that of School, is more fully filled up than is
the upper. This is partly for clearness, but partly also to suggest that
main elements in the origins of natural sciences and geography, of
economics and social science, are not always so clearly realised as they
might be. The preceding diagram, elaborating that of Place, Work, Folk
(p. 75), however, at once suggests these. Other features of the
scheme will appear on inspection; and the reader will find it of
interest and suggestiveness to prepare a blank schedule and fill it up
for himself.
[10] For the sake of brevity, an entire chapter has been omitted,
discussing the manifold origins of distinct governing classes, whether
arising from the Folk, or superimposed upon them from without, in short,
of the contrast of what we may broadly call patricians and plebeians,
which so constantly appears through history, and in the present also.
These modes of origin are all in association respectively with Place,
Work, and Family, or some of the various interactions of these. Origin
and situation, migration, individual or general, with its conflict of
races, may be indicated among the first group of factors; technical
efficiency and its organising power among the second; individual
qualities and family stocks among the third, as also military and
administrative aptitude, and the institutional privileges which so
readily arise from them. Nor need we here discuss the rise of
institutions, so fully dealt with by sociological writers. Enough for
the present then, if institutions and social classes be taken as we find
them.
These two forms of the same diagram, the simple and the more developed,
thus suggest comparison with the scheme previously outlined, that of
People, Affairs, Places (p. 68), and is now more easily reconciled
with this; the greater prominence popularly given to People and Affairs
being expressed upon the present geographic and evolutionary scheme by
the ascending position and more emphatic printing (or by viewing the
diagram as a transparency from the opposite side of the leaf).
In the column of People, the deepening of custom into morals is
indicated. Emphasis is also placed upon the development of law in
connection with the rise of governing classes, and its tendency to
dominate the standards previously taken as morals--in fact, that
tendency of moral law to become static law, a process of which history
is full.
GOVERNING
=========
=========
CLASSES
=======
=======
^
|
FAMILY TYPES
============
----------------------------------------------
INDUSTRIES
==========
----------
----------------------------------------------
(FOLK-PLACE)
REGION (WORK PLACE) ------------
====== ------------ (TOWN)
| ======
|
V
--------------------------------------------
|
V
SURVEY ("SCHOOL")
====== ==========
!--LANDSCAPE (CRAFT-TRADITION)
-----------------
(FOLK-LORE)
?--TERRITORY -----------
|
|
V
---------------------------------------------
|
V
[NATURAL [APPLIED [SOCIAL
-------- ======== =======
SCIENCES] SCIENCES] SCIENCES]
--------- ========= =========
|
|
V
-------------------------------------------
| CUSTOMS
V -------
MORALS
======
GEOGRAPHY ECONOMICS ------
--------- ========= &
LAWS
====
====
In the present as in the past, we may also note upon the scheme the
different lines of Place, Work and Folk on which respectively develop
the natural sciences, the applied or [Page: 78] technical sciences, and
finally the social sciences, and the generalising of these respectively.
Thus, as we see the popular survey of regions, geography in its literal
and initial sense, deepening into the various analyses of this and that
aspect or element of the environment which we call the natural
sciences--but which we might with advantage also recognise as what they
really are, each a _geolysis_--so these sciences or geolyses, again, are
tending to reunite into a higher geography considered as an account of
the evolution of the cosmos.
Again, in the column of School, corresponding to Work, we have the
evolution of craft knowledge into the applied sciences, an historic
process which specialist men of science and their public are alike apt
to overlook, but which is none the less vitally important. For we cannot
really understand, say Pasteur, save primarily as a thinking peasant; or
Lister and his antiseptic surgery better than as the shepherd, with his
tar-box by his side; or Kelvin or any other electrician, as the thinking
smith, and so on. The old story of geometry, as "_ars metrike_," and of
its origin from land-surveying, for which the Egyptian hieroglyph is
said to be that of "rope stretching," in fact, applies far more fully
than most realise, and the history of every science, of course already
thus partially written, will bear a far fuller application of this
principle. In short, the self-taught man, who is ever the most fertile
discoverer, is made in the true and fundamental school--that of
experience.
The need of abbreviating the recapitulation of this, however, sooner or
later develops the school in the pedagogic sense, and its many
achievements, its many failures in accomplishing this, might here be
more fully analysed.
Still more evident is this process in the column of Folk. From the
mother's knee and the dame's school of the smallest folk-place, the
townlet or hamlet, _ton_ or home, up to the royal and priestly school of
the law of ancient capitals, or from the "humanities" of a mediaeval
university to the "Ecole de Droit" of a modern metropolis, the series of
essential evolutionary stages may be set down. Or in our everyday
present, [Page: 79] the rise of schools of all kinds, primary,
secondary, higher up to the current movement towards university
colleges, and from these to civic and regional universities, might again
be traced. The municipalisation of education is thus in fact expressed,
and so on.
Leaving the schools in the main to speak for themselves of their
advancing and incipient uses, a word may be said upon the present lines.
As a first and obvious application of this mode of geographic study of
cities appears the criticism, and; when possible, the amendment of the
city's plan, the monotonous rectangularity of the American city, and the
petty irregularity more common in our own, being alike uneconomic and
inartistic because ungeographic, irrational because irregional. With the
improvement of communications, the physicist's point of view thus
introduced--that of the economy of the energies of the community--is
only beginning; the economy of fuel, the limitation of smoke and fogs
being symptoms of this and pointing to a more economic organisation of
industrial activities generally. But this next carries with it the
improved efficiency of the producers themselves, with whom, however, the
standpoint changes from the mere economisation of physical energies to
the higher economy of organic evolution. The convention of traditional
economics, that the productive capacity of the actual labourer is the
sole concern of his science, thus gives place to what is at once the
original conception of economics and the evolutionist one, viz., that
the success of industry is ultimately measured neither by its return in
wealth of the capitalist nor in money wages of the labourer, nor even by
both put together, but in the results of industry upon the concrete
environment, the family budget, the home, and the corresponding state of
development of the family--its deterioration or progress. The
organisation of industrial groups or of representative institutions
found conducive to the well-being and progress of these prime civic
units, the families, may now be traced into its highest outcome in city
government. The method of analysis and graphic statement thus outlined
may be shown to be even capable of useful application towards the
statement of the best [Page: 80] arguments of both progressive and
moderate parties in city politics.
Passing from Politics to Culture. Culture, the needs of this also become
clearer; each community developing a similar general series of culture
institutions, from the simplest presentation of its geography,
landscape and architecture, to the complex development of industrial,
technical and scientific instruction; and for provision also for the
institutions of custom and ethic in school, law, and church. Just as
place, occupation, and family are intimately connected in the practical
world, so their respective culture institutions must more and more be
viewed as a whole. Civic improvers will find their ideals more
realisable as they recognise the complex unity of the city as a social
development of which all the departments of action and thought are in
organic relation, be it of health or disease. The view of theoretic
civics as concrete sociology, and of practical civics as applied
sociology may be more simply expressed as the co-adjustment of social
survey and social service, now becoming recognised as rational, indeed
in many cities being begun.
I--DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOOL, AND ITS REACTION UPON TOWN
The reactions of the School upon the Town are observed in practice to be
of very different values;--how are these differences to be explained?
From the very first the school is essentially one of memory, the impress
of the town-life, even at its best and highest individual quality and
impressiveness, as in the work of a great master, the observation and
memory of which may long give his stamp to the work of his followers.
The fading of this into dullness, yet the fixing of it as a convention,
is familiar to all in arts and crafts, but is no less real in the
general lapse of appreciation of environment. Most serious of all is the
fixation of habit and custom, so that at length "custom lies upon us
with a weight heavy as death, and deep [Page 81] almost as life." This
continual fixation of fashionable standards as moral ones is thus a
prime explanation of each reformer's difficulty in making his moral
standard the fashionable one, and also, when his doctrine has succeeded,
of the loss of life and mummification of form which it so speedily
undergoes.
Of conventional "education," considered as the memorisation of past
records, however authoritative and classic, the decay is thus
intelligible and plain, and the repetition of criticisms already
adequately made need not therefore detain us here.
For this process is there no remedy? Science here offers herself--with
senses open to observe, and intellect awake to interpret. Starting with
Place, she explores and surveys it, from descriptive travel books at
very various levels of accuracy, she works on to atlas and gazetteer,
and beyond these to world-globe and "Geographie Universelle." With her
charts and descriptions we are now more ready for a journey; with her
maps and plans we may know our own place as never before; nay, rectify
it, making the rough places plain and the crooked straight; even
restoration may come within our powers.
Similarly as regards Work. Though mere empiric craft-mastery dies with
the individual, and fails with his successors, may we not perpetuate the
best of this? A museum of art treasures, a collection of the choicest
examples of all times and lands, will surely raise us from our low level
of mechanical toil; nay, with these carefully observed, copied,
memorised, and duly examined upon, we shall be able to imitate them, to
reproduce their excellencies, even to adapt them to our everyday work.
To the art museum we have thus but to add a "School of Design," to have
an output of more and less skilled copyists. The smooth and polished
successes of this new dual institution, responding as they do to the
mechanical elements of modern work and of the mechanical worker-mind,
admitting also of ready multiplications as patterns, ensure the wide
extension of the prevalent style of imitating past styles, designing
patchwork of these; and even admit of its scientific reduction to a
definite series of grades, which imitative youth may easily pass onwards
from the age of rudest innocence to that of art-knowledge and
certificated art-mastery. Our School of Design thus becomes a School of
Art, a length a College, dominating the instruction of the nation, to
the satisfaction not only of its promoters, but of the general public
and their representatives, so that annual votes justly increase. Lurking
discontent may now and then express itself, but is for practical
purposes negligible.
[Page: 82] The example of art accumulation and art instruction is thus
naturally followed in other respects. For the commercial information of
the public, varied representative exhibitions--primarily, therefore,
international ones--naturally suggest themselves; while so soon as
expansion of imperial and colonial interests comes upon the first plane,
a corresponding permanent Exhibition is naturally instituted. But when
thus advancing commercial instruction, we must also recognise the claims
of industry in all its crafts and guilds, and in fact the technical
instruction of the community generally. Hence the past, present, and
promised rise of technical institutes upon increasing scales of
completeness.
In the rise of such a truly encylopaedic system of schools, the
university cannot permanently be forgotten. Since from the outset we
have recognised the prime elements of the school in observation and
memory, the testing of these by examinations--written, oral, and
practical--however improvable in detail, must be fairly recognised, and
the examining body or university has therefore to be adopted as the
normal crown of our comprehensive educational system. Teaching, however
is found to be increasingly necessary, especially to examination, and
for this the main field left open is in our last column, that of People.
Their lore of the past, whether of sacred or classical learning, their
history, literature, and criticism, are already actively promoted, or at
any rate adequately endowed at older seats of learning; while the
materials, resources, conditions and atmosphere are here of other kinds.
Hence the accessibility of the new University of London to the study of
sociology, as yet alone among its peers.
Hence, beside the great London, maritime, commercial and industrial,
residential and governmental, there has been growing up, tardily indeed,
as compared with smaller cities, yet now all the more massively and
completely, a correspondingly comprehensive system of schools; so that
the historic development of South Kensington within the last half
century, from International Exhibitions of Work, Natural History Museums
of Place onwards to its present and its contemplated magnitude, affords
a striking exemplification of the present view and its classification,
which is all the more satisfactory since this development has been a
gradual accretion.
Enough then has been said to show that the rise of schools, their
qualities and their defects, are all capable of treatment upon the
present lines; but if so, may we not go farther, and ask by what means
does thought and life cope with their defects, especially that fixation
of memory, even at its best, that evil side of examination and the like,
which we often call Chinese in the bad sense, but which we see arises so
naturally everywhere?
[Page: 83] J--FROM "SCHOOL" TO "CLOISTER"
The preceding view is, as yet, too purely determinist. The due place of
ideals, individual and corporate, in their reaction upon the function
and the structure of the city, and even upon its material environment,
has next to be recognised. For where the town merely makes and fixes its
industry and makes its corresponding schools, where its habits and
customs become its laws, even its morality, the community, as we have
just seen, sinks into routine, and therefore decay. To prevent this a
twofold process of thought is ever necessary, critical and constructive.
What are these? On the one hand, a continual and critical selection
among the ideas derived from experience, and the formulation of these as
Ideals: and further, the organisation of these into a larger and larger
whole of thought; in fact, a Synthesis of a new kind. This critical
spirit it is which produced the prophets of Israel, the questioning of
Socrates, and so on, to the journalistic and other criticism of life
to-day. The corresponding constructive endeavour is now no mere School
of traditional learning or of useful information. It is one of science
in a new and reorganised sense; one of philosophy also, one of ideals
above all.
As from the Schools of the Law, as over against these, arise the
prophets, so from the technical and applied sciences, the descriptive
natural sciences, should arise the scientific thinkers, reinterpreting
each his field of knowledge and giving us the pure sciences--pure
geometry henceforth contrasted with mere land surveying, morphology with
mere anatomy, and so on; while instead of the mere concrete encyclopaedia
from Pliny or Gesner to Diderot or Chambers, vast subjective
reorganisations of knowledge, philosophic systems, now appear.
Similarly, the mere observations of the senses and their records in
memory become transformed into the images of the poet, the imagery too
of the artist, for art proper is only thus born. That mere imitation of
nature, which so commonly in the graphic arts (though happily but rarely
in music) has been mistaken for [Page: 84] art, thus modestly returns to
its proper place--that of the iconography of descriptive science.
Thus from the Schools of all kinds of knowledge, past and present, we
pass into the no less varied Cloisters of contemplation, meditation,
imagination. With the historian we might explore the Cloisters of the
past, built at one time from the current ideals of the Good, at another
of the True, at another of the Beautiful; indeed, in widely varying
measures and proportions from all of these. How far each of these now
expresses the present, how far it may yet serve the future, is
obviously a question of questions, yet for that very reason one
exceeding our present limits. Enough if in city life the historic place
of what is here generalised under this antique name of Cloister be here
recognised; and in some measure the actual need, the potential place be
recognised also. Here is the need and use, beyond the fundamental claims
of the material life of the Town, and the everyday sanity of the
Schools, with all their observations and information, their commonsense
and experience, their customs and conventions, even their morals and
their law, for a deeper ethical insight than any rule or precedent can
afford, for a fuller and freer intellectual outlook than that which has
been derived from any technical experience or empiric skill, for an
imagery which is no mere review of the phantasmagoria of the senses. In
our age of the multiplication and expansion of towns, of their
enrichment and their impoverishment, of the multiplication and
enrichment of schools also, it is well for the sociologist to read from
history, as he then may more fully see also around him that it is ever
some fresh combination of these threefold products of the
Cloister--ideal theory, and imagery--emotional, intellectual,
sensuous--which transforms the thought-world of its time.
The philosopher of old in his academic grove, his porch, the mediaeval
monk within his studious cloister's pale, are thus more akin to the
modern scientific thinker than he commonly realises--perhaps because he
is still, for the most part, of the solitary individualism of the hermit
of the Thebaid, of Diogenes in his tub. Assuredly, they are less removed
in essential psychology than their derived fraternities, their [Page:
85] respective novices and scholars, have often thought. It is thus no
mere play of language which hands on from the one to the other the
"travail de Benedictin," though even here the phrase is inadequate
savouring too much of the school, into which each cloister of every sort
declines sooner or later, unless even worse befall.
The decay of the cloister, though thus on the one hand into and with the
school, may also take place within itself, since imagination and ideal
may be evil, and theory false. That examples of all these decays abound
in the history of religion, of philosophy, of art also, is a commonplace
needing no illustration. Nor should the modern investigator think his
science or himself immune to the same or kindred germs in turn.
K--THE CITY PROPER
Now, "at long last," we are ready to enter the city proper. This is not
merely the Town of place and work and folk, even were this at their
economic best. It is not enough to add the School, even at its
completest; nor the cloister, though with this a yet greater step
towards the city proper is made. For though this is not itself the City,
its ideals of human relations, its theory of the universe and man, its
artistic expression and portrayal of all these, ever sooner or later
react upon the general view and conduct of life. Hence the Academe of
Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle, the mediaeval cloister and the modern
Research Institute, have been so fertile, so creative in their influence
upon the city's life, from which they seemed to be retired. Hence it is
ever some new combination of the threefold product of the
cloister--ideal, idea, and image--which transforms the world, which
opens each new epoch. Each new revelation and vision, each system of
thought, each new outburst of poetry and song, has moved the men of its
age by no mere mechanical pressure of economic need or external force,
by no mere scholastic instruction, but in a far subtler way, and into
new and unexpected groupings, as the [Page: 86] sand upon Chladon's
vibrating plate leaps into a new figure with each thrill of the
violinist's bow.
Instead of simply developing our morals from custom, and therefore
codifying them into law as in the school they are now boldly criticised,
as in part if not in whole, hindrances to a better state of things. As
this becomes more and more clearly formulated as an ideal, its ethic
transcendence of convention and law not only becomes clear, but the
desire for its realisation becomes expressed. This may be with all
degrees of clearness of reason and vividness of imagery, yet may remain
long or altogether in the plane of literature, as has Plato's Republic
or More's Utopia--standard and characteristic types of the cloister
library as we may call it, one of inestimable value to the world in the
past, and perhaps in our time needed as much as ever to help us to see
somewhat beyond the output of the busy presses of town and school. Yet
our ideal, our "Civitas Dei," "Civitas Solis," need not remain
unrealised: it may be not only seriously planned towards realisation, as
was Platonopolis of old, but bravely founded, as has been done in cases
without number, from the ancient world to modern communities, by no
means wholly unsuccessful. Though in our great industrial towns, our
long settled regions, such new departures seem less easy, the
principle remains valid--that it is in our ideal of polity and
citizenship, and in our power of realising this, that the city proper
has its conception and its birth. Again, instead of simply deriving our
thought from experience we now project our clarified thought into action
and into education; so that from cloister of philosophy, and from its
long novitiate of silence, there grows up the brotherhood of culture,
the culture city itself. Similarly in art, we no longer imitate nature,
nor copy traditional designs. Art proper appears, shaping bronze and
marble into images of the gods, and on a burnt and ruined hill-fort
renewing the Parthenon. In general terms, instead of simply adjusting,
as in the school, our mental picture to the outward facts, we reverse
the process; and with a new art conception, be it good or bad, we
transform the outward world, like wax under the seal. Thus from the
[Page: 88] cloister and chapel of the musician, the studio-cell of the
artist, the scriptorium of the poet, comes forth the architect,
remodelling the city around his supreme material expression and home of
its moral and material reorganisation, its renewed temporal and
spiritual powers. Of this, the city proper, the Acropolis of Athens, the
Temple of Jerusalem, the Capitol and Forum of Rome are classic and
central examples, and in the mediaeval city, pre-eminently the
cathedral; though beside this we must not forget the town house and its
belfry, the guild houses, the colleges, the great place, the fountains,
the city cross, and if last, still best if good at all, the streets and
courts and homes. Returning once more to the history of educational
development, we have here a means of unravelling the apparently
perplexing history of universities. For the university past or present
has but its foundations in the school, with its local and its general
tradition, whatever may be the accordance of these with well-ascertained
fact, its true novitiate can only be afforded in the cloister of
reflection and research, of interpretation and synthesis; while for its
full development it needs the perpetual renewal of that generous social
life--that inspiring intercourse "of picked adolescents and picked
senescents"--which has marked the vital periods of every university
worthy of the name.
Realisation in
ACROPOLIS }
CATHEDRAL } CITY
UNIVERSITY }
(EU)-POLITY
^
| CULTURE
| ^
Rise towards |
Formulation | ART
and Realisation, Rise through ^
through |
{ Politics { Action Rise to
{ Church Militant { Education expression
^ ^ ^
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | "IMAGERY"
| | AESTHETICS
| | (Beautiful)
SOCIAL. ECON. POL. "IDEAS"
^ SYNTHETICS
| (True)
"IDEALS"
ETHICS
(Good) Criticism, Selection,
Re-synthesis, in
HERMITAGE
ACADEME
CLOISTER, etc.
In summary then, to the town has been added the school, with its
advantages, its increasingly obvious limitations also, which it is for
the cloister to remedy--even the advantages of the barrack finding a
main element of its claim in this no less than in its professed training
as regards citizenship. But here also it is for few to remain, albeit
free for each to return at will. Ideals, to survive, must surely live,
that is, be realised; hence for full life one needs "to meditate with
the free solitary; yet to live secular, and serve mankind."
TOWN | CITY
FOLK | POLITY
|
WORK | CULTURE
|
PLACE | ART
-----------------------------+--------------------------------
SURVEY | IMAGERY
|
KNOWLEDGE | IDEAS
|
MORALS | SOC. ECON.
| IDEALS
LAW | ETHICS
SCHOOL | CLOISTER
L--THE CITY COMPLIED: TOWN, SCHOOL, CLOISTER, AND CITY PROPER
In course of this fourfold analysis, it is plain that we have reached
the very converse--or at all events the [Page: 90] complement--of that
geographical determinism with which we started, and that we have
returned to a view corresponding to the popular one (of "People,
Affairs, Places," p. 69), which we then set aside for the reasons given.
The "great man theory" of history, at best less crudely stated, thus
reappears; in short, to the initial thesis we have now the distinct
antithesis. It is time, therefore, to bring these together towards the
needed synthesis. Hence to the page (p. 77) on which was summarised the
determinist view of Town and School, we now require the complemental
statement upon page (p. 87) of Cloister and City proper. Nor must we be
content, with too many controversialists hitherto, to keep in view only
one at a time; but by folding back the pages of print between these two
half-schemes, as the book lies open, to take in both together.
We may thus finally compress the essentials of this whole paper into a
simple formula--
TOWN | CITY
|
FOLK | POLITY
|
WORK | CULTURE
| | ^
PLACE | | | ART
-----------------|----|----|----------------------
LORE | | | IMAGERY
v | |
LEAR | IDEA
|
LOVE | IDEAL
|
SCHOOL | CLOISTER
or most briefly--
| TOWN | CITY ^
| -------+--------- |
v SCHOOL | CLOISTER |
[Page: 91]--noting in every case the opposite direction of the arrows.
The application of this formula to different types of town, such as
those already indicated in the former instalment of this paper (Vol. I.,
p. 107) or in the present one, will not be found to present any
insuperable difficulty. It must, however, be kept clearly in view that
the city of each day and generation subsides or decays more or less
completely into the mere town anew, as the cloister into the schools.
The towns and cities of the world are thus classifiable in terms of
their past development and present condition.
Summary
Condensing now this lengthy, yet compressed and abbreviated series of
analyses into a single page of summary, we may briefly define the main
aspects and departments of civics from the present point of view. First
then, comes the study of civics as fundamentally (and ever anew) an
orderly development--at once geographic, economic, and anthropologic in
its nature--a survey of place, work, and folk--and these not merely or
mainly as broken up into the fine dust of censuses and statistics, nor
even of the three too separate sciences above named, but as a living
unity, the human hive, the Town.
Corresponding to this objective and organic life we reorganise its
fundamental subjective life. This is fundamentally, and ever partially,
the record and reflex of the life of the hive, the Town: of all its
general and particular environment and function, its family type and
development; and however overlaid by imported culture or by decayed
ideals, it is fundamentally expressed in local knowledge, in craft
tradition, in kinship and its associated kindness, in habits and
customs, and their developments up to morals and laws. Simple terms
corresponding to place, work, and folk, are hard to find; say, however,
till better be suggested, that in close relation to the maternal arms in
which general social thought and its utmost pedagogic developments
alike begin, it is place-lore, work-lear, and folk-love, which are the
essentials of every [Page: 92] School.[11] That existing educational
machineries may not adequately recognise these is not of course the
question here.
[11] The use of _lore_ as primarily empirical, and derived from the
senses, it is traditional; it is well therefore to restrict it to this,
and to revive the old word _lear_, still understood in Scotland in these
precise senses--intellectual, rational, yet traditional, occupational
also.
These three terms, lore, lear, and love are thus well related to their
respectively deepening levels of sense, intelligence and feeling; and
their respective relation is thus more plain to the imagery, the theory,
and the idealism above defined as the essentials of the Cloister. The
psychology of the processes of poetic, philosophic and spiritual
awakening and renewal is in these days being approached anew, both from
the individual and social side, but cannot here be entered upon.
Finally and supremely arises the City proper--its individuality
dependent upon the measure and form in which ideals are expressed and
harmonised in social life and polity, ideas synthetised in culture, and
beauty carried outwards from the study or chamber of the recluse into
the world of art.
Practical conclusion
The investigation of the City thus tends towards the practice of
citizenship. Thus social survey prepares for social service, as
diagnosis towards treatment and hygiene; and these react fruitfully upon
our knowledge and understanding anew. Beyond social observations, and
the needed observatories for making them more adequately, we need social
activities and the laboratories for preparing them, or at least the
leavens of them; or, again, in happier phrase, at once simple and more
synthetic, we need some shelter[12] into which to gather the best
[Page: 93] seed of past flowerings and in which to raise and tend the
seedlings of coming summers. We need definitely to acquire such a centre
of survey and service in each and every city--in a word, a Civicentre
for sociologist and citizen.
[12] Without forgetting the many institutions and workers in almost all
departments of the field of civics, the rise of definite surveys and of
scientific groupings like this Society, without ignoring also the many
admirable workers and institutions of social endeavour, and their
progressive integration into Social Unions, Institutes of Service, and
the like, I may be permitted to press for the need of uniting both
types, the scientific and the practical, into a single one--a civic
museum and active centre in one. Of this type, my own Outlook Tower at
Edinburgh is, so far as I am aware, the earliest beginning; and, despite
its rudimentary condition, may thus serve to suggest a type of
institution which will be found of service alike to the sociologist and
the citizen.
M--THE HISTORIC CITY-COMPLEX
The criticism may have already arisen in the reader's mind that the
"Town" and "School" of our analysis are by no means so simple as we have
assumed them. Our surveys of antique towns ever disclose the material
survivals, at least the vestiges, of the cloister or the acropolis of
the past, of its cathedral or its forum. The processes of our
industries, in what is now their daily artisan routine, include, repeat,
condense, what were yesterday or longer ago living inventions, each
instinct with Promethean fire. The hackneyed ornament of our homes was
once glowing with beauty, radiant or dark with symbolism. So it is for
our everyday customs and institutions, and so for living languages; our
own, perhaps, most of all. These, of course, are facts made familiar by
investigators of all orders, from the scholar and antiquary of old, the
historian and philologist of yesterday, to the geographer or the
sociologist of our own time: witness Mr. Spencer's masterly treatment of
their main results. How, then, shall we correlate this process of all
things growing old with the analysis of cities above attempted? In other
words, how shall we interpret the course of their historic evolution,
their renewed growth and decay, progress and degeneracy, their present
condition, crowded with residues of the past, with those potentialities
which our outline discloses? This is the more necessary since this
fourfold analysis applies in principle to all human groupings from the
simplest village to the Eternal City. To this, indeed, we have in
principle already traced it, onwards from our primitive valley section
with its humble hamlets, its fundamental occupations. Returning then to
our main diagram, with its four-fold analysis of the City so soon as we
have completed this, and [Page: 94] carried its progress up to the level
of city life proper, we must next turn over the leaf and begin a new
page, with place and work and folk once more. This simplest of acts
expresses with graphic significance the very process of history; for in
closing our diagram page its "Cloister" has been folded down on the
"School," our cathedral and forum, our "City" proper upon the "Town."
Thus it is that the ideals and the achievements of one day and
generation and city are ever melting away, and passing out of sight of
the next; so that to the joy or sorrow of the successors the new page
seems well nigh bare, though ever there comes faintly through some image
or at least blurred suggestion of the fading past. Hence each page of
history is a palimpsest. Hence our modern town, even when yesterday but
prairie, was no mere vacant site, but was at once enriched and
encumbered by the surviving traditions of the past; so that even its new
buildings are for the most part but vacant shells of past art, of which
now only the student cares to trace the objective annals, much less
penetrate to the inner history. So for the decayed Renaissance learning
of our schools, for the most part so literally dead since the
"Grammarian's Funeral"; and so, too, for the unthinking routines, the
dead customs and conventions, and largely too the laws and rituals of
our urban lives. Hence, then, it is that for the arrest and the decay of
cities we have no need to go for our examples to the ancient East. These
processes, like those of individual senility and death, are going on
everywhere day by day.
Upon the new page, then, it is but a complexer "Town" and "School" anew:
we have no continuing City. This too commonly has existed at its best
but for the rare generation which created it, or little longer; though
its historic glories, like those of sunset and of after-glow, may long
shed radiance and glamour upon its town, and linger in the world's
memory long after not only these have faded, but their very folk have
vanished, their walls fallen, nay their very site been buried or
forgotten. Upon all these degrees of dying, all these faint and fading
steps between immortality and oblivion, we may arrange what we call our
historic cities. Obviously in the [Page: 95] deeper and more living
sense the city exists only in actualising itself; and thus to us it is
that the ideal city lies ever in the future. Yet it is the very essence
of this whole argument that an ideal city is latent in every town. Where
shall we in these days find our cloistered retreats to think out such
ideals as may be applicable in our time and circumstances: the needed
kinetic ethics, the needed synthetic philosophy and science, the needed
vision and imagery and expression of them all?
N--THE EVILS OF THE CITY
Disease, defect, vice and crime
I have spoken little of town evils, and much of town ideals, primarily
for the reason that even to recognise, much less treat, the abnormal, we
must know something of the normal course of evolution. Hence, the old
and useful phrase by which physiology used to be known, that of "the
institutes of medicine." Sociology has thus to become "the institutes of
citizenship."
Often though philanthropists forget this, diagnosis should precede
treatment. The evils of the city, by the very nature of our hypothesis,
demand special survey, and this no less thoroughly than do the normal
place and work and industry. It is only our most permanent intellectual
impulse, that of seeking for unity, which excuses the cheap unitary
explanations so often current; as, for instance, that social evils are
mainly to be explained by intemperance, as for one school of reformers;
by poverty or luxury, for a second and third; by Tammany or other form
of party government, by socialism or by individualism for yet others;
that they are due to dissent or to church, to ignorance or to the spread
of science, and so on almost indefinitely--doubtless not without
elements of truth in each!
Yet let me offer as yet another explanation of civic evils, this more
general one--distinguished from the preceding by including them all and
more--that not only is our "Town" in itself imperfect, but the other
three elements we have been characterising as school, cloister and city,
are yet more imperfect, since disordered, decayed, or undeveloped anew.
It is because of each and all of these imperfect realisations of our
civic life, that the evils of life sink down, or flame out, into these
complex eruptions of social evils with which our human aggregations are
as yet cursed.
Hence, to those who are struggling with disease and pain, with ignorance
and defect, with vice, and with crime, but for the most part too
separately, it is time to say that all these four evils are capable of
being viewed together, and largely even treated together. They are not
unrelated, but correspond each as the negative to that fourfold
presentment of ideals we have hitherto been raising. To this ideal unity
of healthy town, with its practical and scientific schools of all kinds,
with its meditative cloister of ethical and social idealism, of unified
science and philosophy, of imagination and drama, all culminating in
the polity, culture, and art which make a city proper, we have here the
corresponding defects in detail.
The evils of existing city life are thus largely reinterpreted; and if
so more efficiently combated; since the poverty, squalor and ugliness of
our cities, their disease and their intemperance, their ignorance,
dulness and mental defect, their vice and crime are thus capable not
only of separate treatment but of an increasingly unified civic hygiene,
and this in the widest sense, material and moral, economic and idealist,
utilitarian and artistic. Even the most earnest and capable workers
towards civic betterment in these many fields may gain at once in hope
and in efficiency as they see their special interests and tasks
converging into the conception of the city as an organic unity, and this
not fixed and settled, nor even in process of progress or degeneration
from causes beyond our ken, but as an orderly development which we may
aid towards higher perfection, geographic and cultural alike.
Our modern town is thus in a very real sense, one not hopeless, but as
hopeful as may be, a veritable purgatory; that is a struggle of lower
and higher idealisms, amid the respective expressions and outcomes of
these. Indeed, in our own present [Page: 97] cities, as they have come
to be, is not each of us ever finding his own Inferno, or it may be his
Paradise? Does he not see the dark fate of some, the striving and rising
hope of others, the redemption also?
The supreme poetic utterance of the mediaeval world is thus in great
measure, as each thoughtful reader sees, an expression of impassioned
citizenship and this at one of the golden moments of the long history of
city life. This expression--this exiled citizen's autobiographic
thought-stream--is resumed at every level, from youthful home and local
colour, from boyish love and hopes, from active citizenship and party
struggle, to the transfiguration of all these. Hence these mystic
visions, and these world ambitions, temporal and spiritual; hence this
rise from cloistered faith and philosophy into many-sided culture; hence
the transformation of all these through intensest symbol-visions into
enduring song.
Am I thus suggesting the _Divina Comedia_ as a guide-book to cities?
Without doubt, though not necessarily for beginners. Yet who can see
Florence without this, though we may pack below it Baedeker and Murray?
Or who, that can really read, can open a volume of Mr. Booth's severely
statistical Survey of London, with all its studious reserve, its
scientific repression, without seeing between its lines the Dantean
circles; happy if he can sometimes read them upward as well as down?
O--A CIVIC SYMBOL AND ITS MEANING
But such books of the city, whether of the new and observant type, from
Baedeker to Booth, or of the old and interpretative Dantean one, are too
vast and varied to keep open before us. Even the preceding open page of
diagram is complex enough with its twofold, indeed four-fold city; and
we are called back to our daily work in the first of these divisions,
that of the everyday town. Since its subjective aspects of school and
cloister may fade from memory, its higher aspect also, that of city
proper, how can we retain this fourfold [Page: 98] analysis, and how
test if it be true? Take then one final illustration; this time no mere
logical skeleton, however simple or graphic, but an image more easily
retained, because a concrete and artistic one, and moreover in terms of
that form of life-labour and thought-notation--that of current
coin--which, in our day especially, dominates this vastest of cities;
and hence inherits for the region of its home and centre--"the Bank"
which has so thoroughly taken precedence of the town-house and
cathedral, of the fortress and palace--the honoured name of "City." The
coinages of each time and place combine concrete and social use with
statements of historic facts; and they add to both of these a wealth of
emblematic suggestions: but that is to say, they express not only their
town, and something of its _school_, but much of its thought also, its
_cloister_ in my present terminology.
So before me lies an old "bawbee" of my own home city. On one side
stands the hammerman at his anvil, below him the motto of his guild,
"_Non marte sed arte_." Here then the industrial "Town" and its "School"
express themselves plainly enough, and precisely as they have been above
defined. But on the other side spreads the imperial double eagle; since
Perth _(Bertha aurea)_ had been the northmost of all Rome's provincial
capitals, her re-named "Victoria" accordingly, as the mediaeval herald
must proudly have remembered, so strengthened his associations with the
Holy Roman Empire with something of that vague and shadowy historic
dignity which the Scot was wont to value so much, and vaunt so high. On
the eagle's breast is a shield, tressured like the royal standard,
since Perth was the national capital until the "King's Tragedy" of
1457; but instead of the ruddy lion the shield bears the lamb with the
banner of St. John, the city's saint. This side, too, has its motto, and
one befitting an old capital of King and Commons, both in continual
strife with the feudal nobles, "_Pro Rege, Lege, et Grege_." Here then,
plain upon this apparent arbitrarily levised trifle, this petty
provincial money-token, this poor bawbee, that is, this coin not only of
the very humblest order, but proverbially sordid at that, we find
clearly set down, long generations ago, the whole [Page:99] four-fold
analysis and synthesis of civic life we have been above labouring for.
For what makes the industrial Town, what can better keep it than
strenuous industry at its anvil? How better express its craft school,
its local style and skill, its reaction too upon the town's life in
peace and war, than by this Hal o' the Wynd by his forge? Nay, what
better symbol than this hammer, this primitive tool and ever typical
one, of the peaceful education of experience, form Prometheus to Kelvin,
of the warlike, from Thor to modern cannon-forge? Turning now from Town
and School to Cloister, to the life of secluded peace and
meditation--from which, however, the practical issues of life are ever
renewed--what plainer symbol, yet what more historic or more mystic one
can we ask than this of the lamb with the banner? While of the
contrasted yet complemental civic life of fullest, broadest action, what
expression like the Roman eagle--the very eyes of keenness, and the
spreading wings of power?
So rarely perfect then is this civic symbol, that I must not omit to
mention that it has only come to my notice since the body of this paper,
with its four-fold analysis of cities as above outlined, was essentially
finished. Since it thus has not in any particular suggested the
treatment of cities here advocated, it is the more interesting and
encouraging as a confirmation of it. It is also to my mind plain that in
this, as in many other of our apparent "advances in science," and
doubtless those in social studies particularly, we are but learning to
think things anew, long after our forefathers have lived them, even
expressed them--and these in their ways no less clear and popular than
can ever be ours. That we may also again live them is once more
curiously expressed by the same symbol; for its re-appearance is due to
its having been appropriately revived, in a fitting art form, that of
the commemorative and prize medal of the local arts and crafts
exhibition, held in the new Public Library, under civic auspices. Little
scrutiny of this last sentence will be needed to see the four-fold
completeness of the civic event which it describes.
For just as we have seen on the old coin the hammerman [Page: 100] and
his motto answer to the town and school; so now on its reissue to the
renascent local arts and crafts, with their commemoration in this
library. And as the greater motto, that of widest policy, corresponds to
the cloister of reflection and resolve, so we note that this new impulse
to civic betterment is associated with the new library--no mere
school-house of memory, but also the open cloister of our day. Finally,
note that this impulse is no longer merely one of aesthetic purpose, of
"art for art's sake," nor its execution that of a cultured minority
merely; it announces a re-union of this culture and art with the civic
polity. What fitter occasion, then, for the striking of a medal, than
this renewal of civic life, with municipal organisation and polity, art
and culture, renascent in unison. That such events are nowadays far from
exceptional is so true that we are in danger of losing sight of their
significance. Yet it is amid such city developments that the future
Pericles must arise.
We thus see that our analysis is no mere structural one, made
post-mortem from civic history; but that it applies to the modern
functioning of everyday life in an everyday city, so soon as this
becomes touched anew towards cultural issues. Furthermore, it is thus
plain that civic life not only has long ago anticipated and embodied our
theories of it, but once more outruns them, expressing them far better
than in words--in life and practice. In this way the reader who may most
resent these unfamiliar methods of exposition, alternately by abstract
diagram or concrete illustration--which may seem to him too remote from
ordinary life and experience, perhaps too trivial--may now test the
present theory of the city, or amend it, by means of the ample
illustrations of the processes and results of social life which are
provided by his daily newspaper, and these on well-nigh all its fields
and levels.
Note finally that it is the eagle and lamb of temporal and spiritual
idealism that form the "head" of this coin, the craftsman and anvil but
the modest "tail." The application is obvious.
Thus even numismatics revives from amid the fossil [Page: 100] sciences.
For from this to our own common coinage, or notably to that of France,
America, Switzerland, etc., the transition is easy, and still better to
that of the noblest civic past, both classic and mediaeval. Without
pursuing this further here my present point is gained, if we see, even
in the everyday local details of work and people, the enduring stamp,
the inextinguishable promise, of the flowering of our everyday
industries and schools into worthier ideals than they at present
express, and of the fruition of these in turn upon nobler heights of
life and practice. It expresses the essential truth of the popular view
of the city; that in terms of the formula--People ... Affairs ...
Places--above referred to (page 69). It also explains the persistent
vitality of this view, despite its frequent crudity, and lack of order
in detail, in face of the more scientific treatment here at first
employed, that in the elementary geographic order--Place ... Work ...
People. For though this objective order be fundamental, it is the
complementary subjective evolution which throughout history has ever
become supreme; so that our scheme must combine the outward geographic
presentment with the inward psychological one. This may be graphically
expressed by changing the order of presentment from that used
hitherto:--
Town | City City | Town
-------------------- to ----------------------
School | Cloister Cloister | School
P--FORECAST OF CITY DEVELOPMENT. SPECIAL AND GENERAL
The dual and four-fold development of the city, as above sketched, is by
no means far advanced in most of our present towns or cities, which have
obviously but scanty expression of the ideas shadowed forth for the
modern equivalents of cloister and cathedral, of academe and acropolis.
But this is to say that such towns, however large, populous and rich
according to conventional economic standards, are to that extent small
and poor, indeed too often little better than cities by courtesy. Yet
their further development, upon this [Page: 102] four-fold view of civic
evolution, though in principle the same for each and all, has always
been, and let us hope may always be, in large measure an individual
(because regional) one. For if each human individuality be unique, how
much more must that of every city?
In one concrete case, that of Dunfermline, I have already submitted
definite suggestions towards the realisation of the civic Utopia, and
even architectural designs towards its execution,[13] so that these may
at any rate suffice to show how local study and adaptive design are
needed for each individual city, indeed for every point of it. It is
thus, and thus only, that we can hope to have a city development truly
evolutionary, that is, one utilising the local features, advantages, and
possibilities of place, occupation, and people. Of course, it is needful
to supplement these by the example of other cities; but it is no less
needful to avoid weighting down the local life with replicas of
institutions, however excellent elsewhere, if really irregional here.
With the re-awakening of regional life in our various centres, and of
some comprehension of its conditions among our rulers, they will cease
to establish, say, a school of mines in Piccadilly, or again one of
engineering and the like in South Kensington. The magistrates of
Edinburgh have long abandoned their old attempt to plant mulberries and
naturalise silk culture upon their wind-swept Calton Hill; albeit this
was a comparatively rational endeavour, since a population of Huguenot
refugee silk weavers had actually come upon their hands.
[13] Cf. the writer's "City Development," Edinburgh and Westminster,
1904.
Similarly, it is plain that we must develop Oxford as Oxford, Edinburgh
as Edinburgh, and so on with all other cities, great or small--York or
Winchester, Westminster or London. And so with Chelsea or Hampstead,
with Woolwich or Battersea. Has not the last of these grown from a mere
outlying vestry, like so many others, into a centre of genuine vitality
and interior progress, indeed of ever-widening interest and example; and
all this in half a generation, apparently through the sagacious
leadership--say, rather the devoted, the [Page: 103] impassioned
citizenship--of a single man? And does not his popular park at times
come near giving us a vital indication of the needed modern analogue of
cathedral and forum? Civic development is thus no mere external matter,
either of "Haussmannising" its streets, or of machine-educating its
people; the true progress of the city and its citizenship must alike
grow and flower from within albeit alive and open to every truly
fertilising impulse from without.
Yet since national interests, international industry, commerce,
science, and therefore progress are nowadays and increasingly so
largely one, may we not in conclusion foresee something at least of the
great lines of development which are common to cities, and generalise
these as we are accustomed to do in history? Witness the Classical,
Mediaeval, and Renaissance types to which historic cities
preponderatingly belong, and within which we group their varied
individualities, as after all of comparative detail.
Here then it is time to recall the presentment of ancient, recent and
contemporary evolution already outlined in the part of this paper
previously read (Vol. I, p. 109), dealing with the historic survey of
cities. We have now to face the question, then postponed, indeed left in
interrogation-marks--that of seeking not indeed sharply to define the
future order of things, yet in some measure to discern such elements of
progress as may be already incipient in the existing order, if not yet
largely manifest there. Such elements may be reasonably expected to grow
in the near future, perhaps increasingly, and whatever be their rate of
growth are surely worthy of our attention.
Contemporary science, with its retrospective inquiries into origins in
the past, its everyday observation of the present, is apt practically to
overlook that the highest criterion and achievement of science is not to
decipher the past, nor record the present, not even to interpret both.
It is to foresee: only thus can it subserve action, of which the present
task ever lies towards the future, since it is for this that we have to
provide. Why then should not Comte's famous aphorism--"_Voir pour
prevoir, prevoir pour pourvoir_," become applicable in our civic studies
no less than in the general social and political fields to [Page: 104]
which he applied it? In navigation or engineering, in agriculture or
hygiene, prevision and provision alike are ever increasing; yet these
are no mere combinations of the preliminary sciences and the fundamental
occupations, but obviously contain very large social elements.
It is proverbially safe to prophesy when one knows; and it is but this
safe prediction which we make every day of child or bud, where we can
hardly fail to see the growing man, the coming flower. Yet do not most
people practically forget that even now, in mid-winter, next summer's
leaves are already waiting, nay, that they were conceived nine months
ago? That they thus grow in small, commonly unnoticed beginnings, and
lie in bud for a period twice as long as the summer of their adult and
manifest life, is yet a fact, and one to which the social analogies are
many and worth considering.
While recognising, then, the immense importance of the historic element
of our heritage, renaissance and mediaeval, classic and earlier;
recognising also the predominance of contemporary forces and ideas,
industrial and liberal, imperial and bureaucratic, financial and
journalistic, can we not seek also, hidden under all these leaves, for
those of the still-but-developing bud, which next season must be so much
more important than they are to day? It is a commonplace, yet mainly of
educational meetings, to note that the next generation is now at school;
but how seldom do we recognise its pioneers, albeit already among our
own contemporaries? At any rate we may see here and there that their
leaven is already at work.
In this respect, cities greatly differ--one is far more initiative than
another. In the previous paper (vol. I, p. 109), we saw how individuals,
edifices, institutions, might represent all past phases; these,
therefore, often predominate in different cities sufficiently to give
its essential stamp. Why then should we not make a further survey and
seek to see something of the cities of the future; though we may have to
look for these in quarters where at first sight there may seem as yet
scanty promise of flower?
[Page: 105] To recall an instance employed above, probably every member
of this Society is old enough to remember incredulous questionings of
whether any good thing could come out of Battersea. Again, how few, even
in America, much less than in Europe, a few years ago, forsaw the rapid
growth of those culture-elements in St. Louis, of which the recent
World-Exposition will not have been the only outcome?
Only a few years earlier, it was Chicago which, for New England no less
than for the Old World, seemed but the byword of a hopelessly
materialised community. So Birmingham or Glasgow has won its present
high position among cities in comparatively recent times; so it may now
be the turn of older cities, once far more eminent, like Newcastle or
Dundee, to overtake and in turn, perhaps, outstrip them. But all this is
still too general and needs further definition; let us attempt this,
therefore, somewhat more fully, in the concrete case of Glasgow.
Q--GLASGOW AS TYPICAL OF CIVIC TRANSITION--FROM "PALEOTECHNIC" TO
"NEOTECHNIC"
My own appreciation of the significance of Glasgow was first really
awakened over twenty years ago by William Morris, who in his vivid way
pointed out to me how, despite the traditional culture--superiority of
Edinburgh, Glasgow was not only the Scottish capital, but, in his view,
in real progressiveness the leading and initiative city of the whole
United Kingdom. And this for him was not merely or mainly in its
municipal enterprise, then merely in its infancy--although he expressed
this development in the phrase "In London, people talked socialism
without living it; but in Glasgow, they were socialists without knowing
it!" Despite all the ugliness which had so repelled Ruskin, the squalor
which moved Matthew Arnold to the fiercest scorn in all his writings,
Morris's appreciation arose from his craftsman's knowledge and respect
for supreme craftsmanship. The great ships building upon the Clyde were
for him "the greatest achievement of [Page: 106] humanity since the days
of the cathedral-builders," nay, for him actually surpassing these,
since calling forth an even more complex combination and "co-operation
of all the material arts and sciences" into a mighty and organic whole;
and correspondingly of all their respective workers also, this being for
him of the very essence of his social ideal.
For these reasons he insisted, to my then surprise that the social
reorganisation he then so ardently hoped for "was coming faster upon the
Clyde than upon the Thames": he explained as for him the one main reason
for his then discouragement as to the progress of London that there East
and West, North and South, are not only too remote each from the other,
but in their occupations all much too specialised--there to finance,
there to manufactures, or here to leisure, and so on; while on the Clyde
industrial organisation and social progress could not but develop
together, through the very nature of the essential and working unity of
the ship.
Since Morris's day, a local art movement, of which he knew little, has
risen to eminence, a foreign critic would say to pre-eminence, in this
country at least. Since Ruskin's savage response to a Glasgow invitation
to lecture--"first burn your city, and cleanse your river,"--a new
generation of architects and hygienists have not a little transformed
the one, and vigorous measures have been taken towards the purification
of the other. That the city and university pre-eminently associated
with the invention of the steam-engine, and consequently with the advent
of the industrial revolution throughout the world, should, a century
later, have produced a scarcely less pre-eminent leader of applied
science towards the command of electricity is thus no isolated
coincidence. And as political economy, which is ever the theory
corresponding to our phase of industrial practice, and there some of
its foremost pioneers, and later its classical exponent, Adam Smith
himself, so once more there are signs at least of a corresponding wave
of theoretic progress. Students of primitive civilisation and industry
have now long familiarised us with their reinterpretation of what was
long known as the stone age, into two very distinct [Page: 107] periods,
the earlier characterised by few and rough implements, roughly used by a
rude people, the second by more varied tools, of better shape, and finer
edge, often of exquisite material and polish. We know that these were
wielded more skilfully, by a people of higher type, better bred and
better nourished; and that these, albeit of less hunting and militant
life, but of pacific agricultural skill, prevailed in every way in the
struggle for existence; thanks thus not only to more advanced arts, but
probably above all to the higher status of woman. This distinction of
Paleolithic and Neolithic ages and men, has long passed into the
terminology of sociological science, and even into current speech: is it
too much then, similarly, to focus the largely analogous progress which
is so observable in what we have been wont to generalise too crudely as
the modern Industrial Age? All are agreed that the discoveries and
inventions of this extraordinary period of history constitute an epoch
of material advance only paralleled, if at all, in magnitude and
significance by those of prehistory with its shadowy Promethean figures.
Our own advance from a lower industrial civilisation towards a higher
thus no less demands definite characterisation, and this may be broadly
expressed as from an earlier or _Paleotechnic_ phase, towards a later or
more advanced _Neotechnic_ one. If definition be needed, this may be
broadly given as from a comparatively crude and wasteful technic age,
characterised by coal, steam, and cheap machine products, and a
corresponding _quantitative_ ideal of "progress of wealth and
population"--towards a finer civilisation, characterised by the wider
command, yet greater economy of natural energies, by the predominance of
electricity, and by the increasing victory of an ideal of qualitative
progress, expressed in terms of skill and art, of hygiene and education,
of social polity, etc.
The Neotechnic phase, though itself as yet far from completely replacing
the paleotechnic order which is still quantitatively predominant in most
of our cities, begins itself to show signs of a higher stage of
progress, as in the co-ordination of the many industries required for
the building of a ship, or in the yet more recent developments which
begin to renew for us the conception of the worthy construction of a
city. As [Page: 108] the former period may be characterised by the
predominance of the relatively unskilled workman and of the skilled, so
this next incipient age by the development of the chief workman proper,
the literal _architectos_ or architect; and by his companion the rustic
improver, gardener and forester, farmer, irrigator, and their
correspondingly evolving types of civil engineer.
To this phase then the term _Geotechnic_ may fairly be applied. Into its
corresponding theoretic and ideal developments we need not here enter,
beyond noting that these are similarly of synthetic character; on the
concrete side the sciences unifying as geography, and on their more
abstract side as the classification and philosophy of the
sciences,--while both abstract and concrete movements of thought are
becoming more and more thoroughly evolutionary in character.
But evolutionary theories, especially as they rise towards
comprehensiveness, cannot permanently content themselves with origins,
or with classifications merely, nor with concentrating on nature rather
than on man. Nature furnishes after all but the stage for evolution in
its highest terms; of this man himself is the hero; so that thus our
Geotechnic phase, Synthetic age (call it what we will) in its turn gives
birth to a further advance--that concerned with human evolution, above
all subordinating all things to him; whereas in all these preceding
industrial phases, even if decreasingly, "things are in the saddle and
ride mankind." This age, now definitely evolutionist in policy, as the
geotechnic was in theory and in environment we may term the _Eugenic_.
For its theory, still less advanced, the term _Eupsychic_ may complete
our proposed nomenclature.
Thus then our conception of the opening future may be increasingly
defined, since all these apparently predicted phases are already
incipient among us, and are thus really matters of observed fact, of
social embryology let us say; in short, of city development.
In summary, then, the diagram of the former instalment of this paper
(vol. 1, p. 109)
ANCIENT ||
Primitive | Matriarchal | Patriarchal ||
RECENT ||
Greek and Roman | Mediaeval | Renaissance ||
CONTEMPORARY ||
Revolution | Empire | Finance ||
INCIPIENT
? ? ?
[Page: 109] has thus its interrogations filled up. Omitting the
left-hand half, that generalised as Ancient and Recent in the above
diagram, so as to give more space to the Contemporary and Incipient
phases, these now stand as follows:--
CONTEMPORARY || INCIPIENT
Revolution | Revolution | Empire ||Neotechnic | Geotechnic | Eugenic
To elaborate this farther would, of course, exceed my present limits;
but I may be permitted to say that long use of this schematic outline,
especially of course in more developed forms, has satisfied me of its
usefulness alike in the study of current events and in the practical
work of education and city betterment. I venture then to recommend it to
others as worth trial.
R--A PRACTICAL PROPOSAL--A CIVIC EXHIBITION
How shall we more fully correlate our theoretic civics, i.e., our
observations of cities interpreted as above, with our moral ideas and
our practical policy--i.e., our Applied Civics. Our ideals have to be
selected, our ideas defined, our plans matured; and the whole of these
applied; that is realised, in polity, in culture, and in art. But if
this be indeed the due correlation of civic survey and civic service,
how may we now best promote the diffusion and the advancement of both?
At this stage therefore, I venture to submit to the Society a practical
proposal for its consideration and discussion; and if approved, I would
fain hope for its recommendation to towns and cities, to organisations
and to the public likely to be interested.
Here then is my proposal. Is not the time ripe for bringing together the
movements of Civics and Eugenics, now here and indeed everywhere plainly
nascent, and of setting these before the public of this country in some
such large and concrete ways, as indeed, in the latter subject at
least, have been so strongly desiderated by Mr. Galton? As regards
Civics, such have been afforded to America during the summer of 1904 by
the Municipal Section of the St. Louis Exhibition; in [Page: 110]
Dresden also, at the recent Towns Exhibition; and by kindred Exhibitions
and Congresses in Paris and elsewhere.
All these have taken form since the Paris Exposition of 1900, with its
important section of social economy and its many relevant special
congresses. Among these may be specially mentioned here as of popular
interest, and civic stimulus, the _Congres de L'Art Public_; the more
since this also held an important Exhibition, to which many Continental
cities sent instructive exhibits.
Other exhibitions might be mentioned; so that the fact appears that in
well-nigh every important and progressive country, save our own, the
great questions of civics have already been fully opened, and vividly
brought before their public, by these great contemporary museums with
their associated congresses.
With our present Chairman, the Rt. Hon. Charles Booth, with Canon
Barnett, Mr. Horsfall, and so many other eminent civic workers among us;
with our committee and its most organising of secretaries, might not a
real impulse be given in this way by this Society towards civic
education and action?
Let me furthermore recall the two facts; first, that in every important
exhibition which has been held in this country or abroad, no exhibits
have been more instructive and more popular than have been (1) the
picturesque reconstructions of ancient cities, and the presentment of
their city life, and (2) the corresponding surveys of the present
conditions of town life, and of the resources and means of bettering
them.
Even as a show then, I venture to submit that such a "Towneries" might
readily be arranged to excel in interest, and surpass in usefulness, the
excellent "Fisheries," "Healtheries", and other successful exhibitions
in the record and recent memory of London. The advantages of such an
exhibition are indeed too numerous for even an outline here; but they
may be easily thought out more and more fully. Indeed, I purposely
abstain for the present from more concrete suggestion; for the
discussion of its elements, methods, plans, and scale will be found to
raise the whole range of civic questions, and to set these in freshening
lights.
[Page: 111] At this time of social transition, when we all more or less
feel the melting away of old divisions and parties, of old barriers of
sects and schools, and the emergence of new possibilities, the continual
appearance of new groupings of thought and action, such a Civic
Exhibition would surely be specially valuable. In the interest, then, of
the incipient renascence of civic progress, I plead for a Civic
Exhibition.[14]
[14] Since the preceding paper was read, it is encouraging to note the
practical beginnings of a movement towards a civic exhibition,
appropriately arising, like so many other valuable contributions to
civic betterment, from Toynbee Hall. The Cottages Exhibition initiated
by Mr. St. Loe Strachey at Garden City, and of course also that
admirable scheme itself, must also be mentioned as importance forces in
the directions of progress and propaganda advocated above.
Of such an exhibition, the very catalogue would be in principle that
_Encyclopaedia Civica_, into which, in the previous instalment of this
paper (vol. I, p. 118) I have sought to group the literature of civics.
We should thus pass before us, in artistic expression, and therefore in
universal appeal, the historic drama of the great civic past, the
mingled present, the phantasmagoria and the tragi comedy of both of
these. We should then know more of the ideals potential for the future,
and, it may be, help onward some of the Eutopias which are already
struggling towards birth.
DISCUSSION
The Chairman (THE RT. HON. CHARLES BOOTH) said:
I feel always the inspiring character of Professor Geddes' addresses. He
seems to widen and deepen the point of view, and to widen and deepen
one's own ideas, and enables us to hold them more firmly and better than
one can do without the aid of the kind of insight Professor Geddes has
given into the methods of his own mind. I believe that we all hold our
conceptions by some sort of tenure. I am afraid I hold mine by columns
and statistics much underlined--a horrible prosaic sort of arrangement
on ruled paper. I remember a lady of my acquaintance who had a place for
everything. The discovery of America was in the left-hand corner; the
Papacy was in the middle; and for everything she had some local
habitation in an imaginary world. Professor Geddes is far more ingenious
than that, and it is most interesting and instructive and helpful to
follow these charming diagrams which spring evidently from the method he
himself uses in holding and forming his conceptions. That it is of the
utmost value to have large conceptions there can be no doubt--large
conceptions both in time and place, large conceptions of all those
various ideas to which he has called our attention. By some means or
other we have to have them; and having got them, every individual,
single fact has redoubled value. We put it in its place. So I hope that
in our discussion, while we may develop each in his own way, the mental
methods we pursue, we may bring forward anything that strikes us as
germane, as a practical point of application to the life of the world,
and especially anything having an application to the life of London. I
would make my contribution to that with regard to a scheme that has been
explained to me by its originator, Mrs. Barnett, the wife of Canon
Barnett of Toynbee Hall. The idea concerns an open [Page: 113] space
which has recently been secured in Hampstead. It is known to you all
that a certain piece of ground belonging to the trustees of Eton College
has been secured, which extends the open space of Hampstead Heath in
such a way as to protect a great amount of beauty. The further proposal
is to acquire an estate surrounding that open space which has now been
secured for ever to the people, and to use this extension to make what
is called a "garden suburb." It is a following out of the "garden-city"
idea which is seizing hold of all our minds, and it seems to me an
exceedingly practical adaptation of that idea. Where it comes in, in
connection with the address we have just heard, is that the root idea is
that it shall bring together all the good elements of civic life. It is
not to be for one class, or one idea, but for all classes, and all
ideas--a mixed population with all its needs thought for and provided
for; and above everything, the beauty of those fields and those hills is
not to be sacrificed, but to be used for the good of the suburb and the
good of London. I hope that out of it will come an example that will be
followed. That is a little contribution I wish to make to the discussion
to-day, and if I can interest any one here in forwarding it, I shall be
exceedingly glad.
MR. SWINNY said:
Towards the close of his lecture, Professor Geddes remarked that the
cities of America inherited a great part of their civilisation from
Greece and Rome and the Europe of the Middle Age. I believe that thought
will lead us to consider the point whether this geographical survey
should precede or follow a general historical survey. Now, if we
consider that a river valley in England, with the towns in that valley,
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