Victor Verasius Branford

“ The scientific community is a democratic organisation, not a hierarchic one. Its high priests are just those members of the community who have themselves done most to forward the progress of their science. Every high priest of geography, as of every science, is, in quite a literal sense, a slave of every investigator who is working in that particular field, or a related one. ”

“ If we define a university as a degree-granting institution, then there are over 700 universities in the United States of America. It is the aspiration of every American city to possess its own university. The university is, in a sense, the cathedral—a somewhat truncated one doubtless—of the American city, and every citizen is unhappy until his city gets what he conceives to be its full complement of culture, in the possession of a university. ”

“ It is the real though unexpressed ambition of every young scientist to become an "authority." In the many graduated stages towards this consummation there is one of special significance. If the young observer steadily continues his observations and interpretations, and faithfully compares his results with the records of science, he will find that he steadily progresses towards a climax. He will some day catch a moment or a mood, a phrase or a happening, in the fleeting movement of things, which will thrill him with an emotion intenser than any he has before experienced. ”

“ If science cannot direct us, we must direct science. All life is growth, and science understood as a spiritual phase of racial life, a mood of humanity, may, like other spiritual growths, be trained and guided, within limits. Here as elsewhere the essential condition of guidance is the presence of an ideal and a moral impulse toward it. It is the contention of this paper that the ideals of science, always implicit, are now actually in process of being explicitly formulated, and that these ideals give promise of a policy of city development. ”

“ As the boy sometimes grows into the man, the cosmic scientist may grow into the humanist one. He no longer observes the phenomena of nature as a mere series of sequences and co-existences following each other in endless succession; he looks upon nature as a reservoir of resources for the use of man. He seeks out the potencies of nature, foresees their possible developments, and conceives his ideals of human life in terms of the optimum expression of known potencies. ”

“ In this arrested development of most individual scientists is doubtless to be found an explanation of the slow evolution of the humanist or sociologist sciences.
If we understand by spiritual power a set of established beliefs, like Judaism, Mohammedanism, Romanism, that influence conduct and determine the mode of life, then we must say of science that it is an incipient rather than an actual spiritual power. In this sense there are sciences but no science. ”

“ The city in its evolution is of course a natural phenomenon; but within the city, the barriers between man and nature are numerous and formidable. Amongst the dwellers in cities, it is probable that the only persons who are in habitual contact with nature are mothers and poets. To the mother the infant is an embodiment and epitome of all the potencies of nature. The baby, as has been well said, is a bundle of potencies. Its development through adolescence to maturity is the realisation of its potency for evolution or for degeneration. ”

“ He sees the crust of the earth everywhere in section, from the lowest and oldest rocks up through the superimposed geological strata, to the superficial deposits which wind and rain, storm and sunshine, snow and frost, disintegrate for the making of soil, on which the flora of the world fix themselves and feed, region by region, and across which the fauna of the world move and make their tiny marks and scratches. He sees the surface of the globe changing from day to day, season to season, age to age, epoch to epoch. ”

“ To imagine the resources of geographical science we must think not only of its accumulated documents, instruments, and aptitudes, but also in a still higher degree of the spiritual forces that pervade and animate this universal organisation, this world-extensive community of similar minds. And any one who is learned enough to master the symbolism of geography, to consult the files of the periodical publications is, if not a full brother, yet a novitiate of this universal fraternity. ”

“ This sort of scientific magic transformed coal into power to make cheap goods for the consumption of cheap labourers, and the cheap labour then applied itself to coal to produce more power to make more cheap goods for the consumption of still cheaper labourers, and so on indefinitely. This ever-extending series of transformations evidently reaches its culmination in the growth of an ideal city like East London, which so magnificently surpasses all other cities in its accumulated reservoir of cheap labour. ”

“ Which amongst all these are the Secular orders of science, and which the empirical survivals of a pre-scientific age? To answer that, we must first ask what is the special vision of the world which animates the biologist? and further, we must ask what militant groups are there whom this vision stimulates into practical activity? The biologist, like other scientists, has his cosmic and his humanist mood. In the former he sees an endless chain of developing life beginning he knows not how or why, and tending he knows not whither. ”

“ To the railway engineer, science is a means of transmuting the energy of coal into cities and citizens. It follows that his policy of city development—or, as one should rather say, urban expansion—leans to the erection and multiplication of lofty chimney stacks. The ideal citizens, pictured in the carbonaceous logic of his occupation, are stokers and chimney-sweeps. It requires little observation and less historic insight to verify the affirmation, that urban expansion in the nineteenth century was largely determined by the unavowed but real ideals of a coal civilisation. ”

“ It is clear that what the American railway reformer understands by a city is not a city at all, but a Town—ie. in the admirably correct and concrete phraseology cited, it is a "jobbing centre." To the list of the urban "conveniences," the Chamber of Commerce standard adds, churches, schools, newspapers, and saloons. And the progress in civic ideals is signal. For churches, schools, newspapers and saloons are institutes of culture; and are seen to be the lower institutes of culture only when contrasted with Cathedral and University, with Scientific Society and Art Museum as higher ones. ”

“ There is perhaps no more representative type of American civilisation, and also, therefore, of the dominant phase of the contemporary western world, than the American railway engineer. He is the true Viking of the times, and is already on the way to plant his forges, and open his lines of communication all round the margin of the Pacific Ocean. What is the conception of a city in the mind of the American engineer? ”

“ To the scientist of the physical or biological group it appears as much and as little a matter of professional obligation to acquire the language of the sociological group as to acquire that of the Hottentots, What then amid this apparent confusion and disruptiveness of science is the inquiring citizen to do if he wishes to know the bearing of science on citizenship? The answer of science, as of every other spiritual power, is that there is only one way to know the doctrine, and that is to lead the life. ”

“ The truth, to be sure, is that it is the presence of functional institutions of the highest spiritual type, whether or not we call them University and Cathedral, that differentiates the city from the town. It follows that the civic policy of our Secular sociologists—if we have any—must be concerned with the city as itself a cultural potency, and with the whole body of citizens as individuals responsive to the creative influences of the spiritual ideals, active or latent, in drama and poetry, in art and music, in history and science, in philosophy and religion. ”

“ But the geographer is himself a man and a citizen, and as geographer he still has his humanist or idealist mood. Viewed in his humanist or idealist mood, the world drama undergoes for the geographer a profound change. The perspective changes from the cosmic to the human focus. The typical river valley, which is the essential regional unit of the geographer, is no longer a mere fold of the earth's crust in its endless and aimless cycle of changes, but is conceived as the realisation of a great purpose. ”

“ The high priest of geography, as of other sciences, is not differentiated by sartorial insignia, by definitive status, or by obsequious designation, but is generally recognisable by certain personal characteristics—by the world light that shines from his eyes, by the nobility of his countenance, by his threadbare coat, and usually, it must be confessed, by the baldness of his head. In the common phrase of every-day life he is known as an "eminent scientist" ”

“ If we look round us amongst our contemporaries, we should most of us have to search far before finding an individual whose life and conduct are unified by science. Notable examples are, to be sure, numerous in history—such as Lavoisier and Condorcet, Helmholtz and Pasteur, Darwin and Clifford, and, if it is permissible to cite living scientists, Berthelot and Haeckel, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. ”

“ How far may we accept a certain vague popular sentiment which attributes city rank to a town that possesses a university? That, to be sure, would be a criterion of civic status unrecognised by, and unknown to, the lawyer and the politician. But universities are not institutions that appeal to juristic and political minds. ”

“ To put it most briefly, the method of science differs from the method of other orders of thought in the necessity for arranging the various stages of investigation in such a way that two possibilities are always open. In the first place, it must be possible for every member of the scientific fraternity, present and future, to retrace and repeat every vital step in any and every investigation, from simple concrete observation right up to the largest generalisation. ”

“ Now the soil and the vegetation which cover its floor, the beds of coal, iron, sand, and limestone which underlie its surface, the forests which clothe its slopes and shelter its animal world, the metalliferous deposits of its mountain sides, the river which from source to sea invites to locomotion, all these are seen to be but energies and instruments awaiting for their orchestration the tuning hand and the idealising mind of man. ”

“ It is safe to assert that his "Social Geography" will, more fully than ever before, demonstrate the continuity and correlation between, on the one hand, the destructive action of man on the surface of the planet, and on the other, the historical and the contemporary facts of human degeneration and civic degradation. But it will also, unless the work belies the character of its author, demonstrate also with unique experience and conviction a continuity of ascent from geographical science to the loftiest aspirations of social idealism. ”

“ There are those who tell us, that there is no proper science of society because there are no known sociological laws. Others go still further, and say that the nature of human society is such that no social laws are discoverable, that there is no science of human society, that sociology not only does not, but never will exist. ”

“ And in the most beautiful and noblest of human beings he sees a form which, by taking thought, the whole race may reach and surpass. To the biologist the city is thus no mass of mere inorganic structures, but a group of organic beings which individually pass away but racially abides, continues and develops towards a definite ideal or degenerates to its opposite. And the ideal of the city is therefore to the biologist the full realisation of racial potency. Who amongst biologists are stimulated into activity by this vision of civic potency? ”

“ In other words, he has been initiated into the fraternity of science, and for the first time he is, and feels himself to be, no longer a mere novice, but a full brother of the community.
It is clear we are here in the presence of a psychological phenomenon known in another walk of life as Conversion. In science it is known as the discovery of new truth. It may be a truth which is of the most trifling importance in relation to the total body of ordered knowledge which we call science. ”

“ Pancras to Nottingham in a luxurious restaurant car may imagine that the Midland Railway is designed and administered for his benefit and comfort. But that is an illusion of the unreflecting citizen. The truth is, that the luxurious restaurant car is itself a bye-product of the coal traffic. In the eyes of the representative railway engineer the cities of England are, primarily just the terminal yards of the collieries; and the citizens themselves, according to his ethical scheme, rank in status and civic worth in proportion to the capacity of their respective factory furnaces. ”

“ For above and beyond the physical group of sciences, the race has conquered or is conquering for science higher domains. Immediately above the physical sciences is the biological group. Here, who are the Regulars and who the Seculars? It is not difficult to see the regular type in anatomist and taxonomist, in physiologist and œcologist, in embryologist and palæontologist, in ontogenist and phylogenist. These, or some of them, are doubtless strange names, unfamiliar to the public, even to that small section of the public which enjoys a classical culture. ”

“ In the former, the cosmic mood, the scientist feels a relatively slight interest in the human race and its doings. There are so many more impressive phenomena in the field of observation! Are there not one hundred thousand species of beetles compared with a single species of man? The entomologist bulks larger in science than the sociologist, simply because the boy is father to the man. The scientist in his cosmic mood is a stereotyped, a perpetual boy. ”

“ If the inquiring citizen was fortunate enough in his youth to commence a career of travel and exploration, by frequent truancy from school, then, doubtless, he acquired habits of observation which later on became disciplined into a scientific temperament. Doubtless in that happy case he is thoroughly familiar with the resources of geography. But most of us grew up into respectable citizens uninspired by that fear of the school-master which is the beginning of science. ”