Sir Patrick Geddes

“ If sociology is ever to vindicate itself as an art, it must be able to analyse and explain the present, and to some extent at least to cast the horoscope of the future. It must feel its way through all the tangled labyrinths of city life, and show us where we have arrived and whither we are going. But this is exactly the part of Professor Geddes' Applied Sociology where he becomes most vague and unsatisfactory. ”

“ I should like each worker and thinker to have and to know his place in the scheme of civic improvement; and I think it perfectly possible for every man to know what it is that he is trying to do, what contribution it is that he ought to give to that joint life which is called here civics, which is the life of a city and the life in the city. One man cannot possibly concentrate it all in himself. Within a society such as the Sociological Society a general scheme is possible in which each individual and each society shall play its acknowledged and recognised part. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Geography shapes our shells from without, and the spirit of our particular community shapes it from within. History tells us how it has been shaped in the past, Art tells us how it should be shaped in the future. Professor Geddes, in fact, envisages our civic shell as becomes a brilliant biologist, who also happens to be a man of historic imagination, ethical impulses, and aesthetic perceptions. For the human shell is not merely geometrical and architectural, like those of apian or beaverish communities ”

“ He sees London as "fundamentally an agglomeration of villages with their surviving patches of common around a mediaeval seaport." This is accurate vision; but when he discerns "even in the utmost magnificence of Paris, say, its Place de l'Etoile, its spread of boulevards, but the hunter's tryst by the fallen tree, with its radiating forest rides, each literally straight," I cannot help suspecting the over-ingenuity of a prolific intellect. The view of London as a growth from embryos, and the view of Paris as the outcome of atavistic instinct, belong to different planes of scientific thinking. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In America there are several very beautiful cities. No one can ever forget Washington, which is truly a garden city. No money is spared in America to beautify and healthify (excuse the barbarism) the habitations of the thousands. A beautiful city is an investment for health, intellect, imagination. Genius all the world over is associated, wherever it has been connected with cities, with beautiful cities. To grow up among things of beauty ennobles the population. But I should like to see Prof. Geddes extend his projects for Dunfermline to the population itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It has always seemed to me that there is room for good work by some committee, or some body of men, who would be voluntary guardians of the city's well-being, who would make it their business to acquire all that knowledge which Professor Geddes has just put before us in terms so enchanting, and would use all the ability that they possess in order to lead the minds of the community towards the cultivation of the best and highest ideals in civic life. ”

“ Representative government fails to yield all that its inventors hoped of it, simply because it is so tolerably representative of its majorities; and there is thus great truth in the common consolation that our municipal governments, like larger ones, are seldom much worse than we deserve. Each social formation, through each of its material activities, exerts its influence upon the civic whole; and each of its ideas and ideals wins also its place and power. ”

“ I have elaborated this example of the panoramic aspect of Old Edinburgh as a widely familiar instance of the method of literal survey with which social and civic studies may so conveniently begin; and I press the value of extending these even to the utmost elaborateness of photographic survey: in my view, indeed, a sociological society has at least as much use for a collection of maps, plans and photographs as of statistics, indeed scarcely less than one of books. Of course, in all this I am but recalling what every tourist in some measure knows ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Enough for the present, if it be admitted that the practical man in his thought and action in the present is mainly the as yet too unconscious child of the past, and that in the city he is still working within the grasp of natural conditions.
To realise the geographic and historic factors of our city's life is thus the first step to comprehension of the present, one indispensable to any attempt at the scientific forecast of the future, which must avoid as far as it can the dangers of mere utopianism. ”

“ To those of us who are hopeful of improvement by eugenics it is pleasing to note that Mr. Booth—somewhat unlike Mr. Kidd in his well-known "Social Evolution"—is optimistic in his conclusion that "on the whole it may fairly be expected that concurrently with a rising standard of health we may see a fall in birth-rate as well as death-rate, and thus have no cause to fear, as the result of better sanitation, that the largest natural increase in population will ever be contributed by the lowest class." So the heritage of the city may grow not only in quantity but also in quality. ”

“ Civics, as the applied sociology of each individual and each body of interests, has but begun to be dreamed of; and before it can be properly developed it is desirable, if not necessary, that the general public should know something more than at present both of the historic development of the "civic" idea, and of the psychology of aggregations as differentiated from the psychology of the individual. Not until we can make "the man in the street" a conscious citizen, instead of a political automaton, shall we be able to enlist his sympathies with "Civics" ”

“ London may be left out of the question. Still a province rather than a city in the strict sense, wanting what, in the view of the early master of political science, was an essential of the true city, that it could "easily be overseen," with a vast floating population, it will be some time before it can be dealt with as an organic whole. But the rulers of such communities as Manchester and Newcastle and York ought long ago to have realised, much more than has been done, that they are not so much brick and mortar, so much rateable area, so many thousands of people fortuitously brought together. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There was one point that the lecturer made which, I think, might be a fit and fruitful subject for discussion. He said that we were the product of the city. To a great extent that is undoubtedly true; but on the other hand, he advocated an improvement in the conditions of environment, to be brought about by our own endeavours. Therefore, the city can be shaped and made by us. What, then, is the exact value to be given to the seemingly contradictory doctrines that the individual is the product of the city and also that the city is the product of the citizen? ”

“ 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. ”

“ By what process do men struggle towards the selection of their ideals? They find themselves within the grasp of their environment, their whole heritage of culture, of good and ill, the whole tradition of the past; but they must select certain elements of these—the elements that seem to them good, and so they might escape from the manner of the city. ”

“ 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. ”