DAVID SHILLAN
BIOTECHNICS
THE.
PRACTICE OF SYNTHESIS
IN THE WORK OF
PATRICK GEDDES
Sixteenth
Foundation Lecture
I972
New Atlantis Foundation
BIOTECHNICS
The name Geddes
has made three impacts at different times upon the minds of British people.
There was Jenny Geddes who threw a stool at the head
of the preacher in St. Giles' Cathedral, 1637. There were the brothers Sir Audand and Sir Eric Geddes,
chiefly associated with axing civil servants, though one of them wrote a
remarkable book. And there was P.G.‑Sir Patrick Geddes
(who might, incidentally, have sympathised with both the stool‑throwing
and the axing, though his own methods were different) whose thought and
activity have had far more effect than many people realise‑though many
would recognise some of it as found in the influential books of Geddes' devoted follower Lewis Mumford.
Such words as 'conurbation' and 'megalopolis' are to be heard or seen almost
daily now. but those who can trace these words to
their origin in Geddes are still few.
Sir William Holford,
then President of the Town Planning Institute, said at the Geddes
Centenary in 1954 'The Greek epigram on
Plato is applicable to him: "Wherever I go in my mind I meet Geddes coming back".
Another professor at that time compared him to Leonardo da Vinci, and in 1924 he had been called 'a modem Michaelangelo'. He has also been compared to Aristotle.
This is clearly very odd, and we shall have to try and unravel it.
For much of the factual
background of this lecture I am of course, as all interested must be,
particularly indebted to the published work of Amelia Defries,
Philip Boardman, and Philip Mairet. I have talked
with many of the dwindling number who knew him personally. I remember vividly
how, when I spoke of Geddes to the late Sir Patrick
Abercrombie (whose post‑war plans for
It is of particular interest
for our series of New Atlantis Foundation lectures that it was this many‑sided
but elusive thinker and man of action, Sir Patrick Geddes,
who was invited by Dimitrije Mitrinović,
the Founder of the New Atlantis, to be the first President of the New Europe Group,
which came into existence in the years immediately after the General Strike of
1926. They had met in 1916, according to Mr. Philip Mairet,
who brought them together because of the immense importance he attached to them
both; and Mitrinović constantly drew attention
to the significance and potentialities of Geddes' way
of looking at man in society and in nature.
Geddes, for his part, was stimulated and
interested by what he found in this group, and in a letter of 1931 wrote
'I have been particularly stirred
up by your society‑the most helpful and exemplary I've come across in
And in another letter he
stressed how much he saw the need for the kind of psychology (principally that
of Alfred Adler) which had been the study of the founders of the New Europe
Group.
It might be possible‑as
indeed happens among the various relevant groups of specialists‑to look
on Geddes as the father of town‑planning, or as
a notable biologist, or as a sociologist with a strong practical bent, or as
one of the leading British exponents of Anarchism. In fact he was all of these.
Sir Williarn Holford quotes
Israel Zangwill as saying, after a visit to Geddes: 'Obviously it is his architectural faculty that has
saved him; there stand the houses he has built, visible, tangible, delectable,
a concrete proof that he is no mere visionary’.
By training he was primarily a
biologist‑though he had walked out of the department of botany at
'To begin with botanists, even
at their dryest and worst, they were more reasonable
than they seemed, and more practical also, for "all knowing is
classifying".
'The herbarium of Linaeus‑of dried plants, well arranged and labelled‑and
his System of Nature is the first great landmark in the modem history of the
Natural Sciences, botany and zoology.
'How many people think twice
about a leaf? Yet the leaf is the chief
product and phenomenon of Life: this is a green world, with animals
comparatively few and small, and all depending upon the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live
by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of the coins. Whereas the world is mainly
a vast leaf‑colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere
mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness
of our harvests. Moreover, the
leaves made the coal: coal is but plant‑life fossilized; and hence the
coal-miners are the modem masters of Energy.
Not so long ago these men were literally sold with the mines‑they
were thus actually serfs, if not slaves, until the 19th century; but now, in
the twentieth, they are claiming a directive share in the energy they set
loose. From the fossil-leafage which they deal with, has come the past
industrial revolution, and now is threatened another.
. . .
.
'The Germans, like the machine
and money worshippers at home‑for this Darwinism is really an economic
theory‑say the world is one of "tooth and claw"; but there were
some of us who had tried also to "consider the lilies, how they
grow". I sincerely believe that the author of that saying knew and meant
what he was saying, and that as literally as we do!
. . .
.
'You see, the Catholic reads
this verse, so he cuts the lilies, and puts them on the altar; then the
Protestant comes along and throws them out! That is too much as yet the history
of Christianity. But this very science
of Botany, in which both types of would‑be Christians have seen so
little, is left alone in its centuries of endeavour seriously to obey this
counsel, to consider the lilies and find out how they grow. See here how tall. and strong this one is growing, seeming to be using all its
energies for itself. But next see how
this one is going through a conversion, for there are the buds; and this one in
bloom is now living for its species‑flowering magnificently, and so also
now only fully individualizing itself in blossom. And its “purity” is the very
opposite of the sexless misunderstandings of the past. It is the fullest
splendour and frankness of sex in nature, naked and not ashamed.
. . .
.
'Turning now to philosophy in
general, we may be thankful for Bergson, his ideas
and outlook. For from it we may look back on the great war
as a culminating dispute between the German philosophers of the state, and the
French philosophers of Freedom and Life, in the course of which their audiences
fought, as audiences so often used to do in the debates of old. Yet what is Bergson's Elan Vital but an
appreciation of how flowers grow? Our older theories were more of how
artificial flowers got put together, or how anglers' flies were dressed:
mechanical beautiful, no doubt, but not real flowers or flies!
'Here in this garden the
collection is small as gardens go; for we keep nothing here which will not
actively grow. Some, as you see, grow here till they make a
wilderness‑but this, too, is "life more abundantly".
Thus, too, you can see in the garden outside, how Bergson's
doctrine of "Duration" is an escape from thought of time as
mechanically told by the clock, to appreciation of the phase and quality of
growth to which each living thing has come.
'But growth seems slow: and
people are all out for immediate results, like immediate votes or immediate
money. A garden takes years and years to grow‑ideas also take time to
grow; and while a sower knows when his corn will
ripen, the sowing of ideas, is as yet, a far less certain affair.'
This may be enough to suggest
the manner of his thinking. But the biological, the organic, can be traced much
further, in the application of his thought to civic planning‑the growth
of cities to be seen as comparable to other forms of life ‑and to
sociology, where his triad of PLACE‑WORK‑FOLK is explicitly related
to the biological triad of ENVIRONMENT-FUNCTION-ORGANISM.
One further extract from his
lecture may be added here:
'Madame Montessori has shown
how writing and arithmetic can be far more rapidly taught than at present,
still more all subjects of vital interest, and so of education proper. Instead,
then, of starting with the three "R’s" we substitute the three
"H's” ‑Heart, Hand and Head‑for in that order they develop. 'But
the mistaken and perverted order is still prevalent, and still authoritative;
and beginnings like Madame Montessori's, or our own at the Outlook Tower -of
course with its complemental Inlook
‑are still far too few.
‘People laugh at Madame
Montessori's sense‑training: but it has to go farther yet. The eye is
predominantly important for this intellectual life (do you see?) and the ear
for emotional appeal (He that hath ears to hear‑). Odour is deeply
related to memory, and taste to good taste, and thus to character; and touch to
realism and sympathy. The muscular sense
is related to mathematics and also to music: and the orientation sense is
related to morals and character “steady” and "well‑balanced",
"giddy" or "unbalanced", as we commonly say. And as senses are thus
deeply related in life, so with our ideas, our whole personality and powers.
'Hence we must cease to think
merely in terms of separated departments and faculties, and must co-relate
these in the living mind; in the social life as well ‑indeed, this above
all. Thus emotional education involves
Re‑religion, and this Re‑politics, of which civics is the best
beginning. Intellectual education
involves general and sensory, imaginative and artistic education: Re‑education,
Re‑creation, and thus Re‑construction and the conception of Culture
in its literal sense, of "to cultivate". Thus, then, we are reaching
a re‑classification of our ideas and our ideals with them. Each science
is thus associated with its related arts and crafts, from simple occupations to
complex ones.
An illustration to the
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b. { Biology { Psychology |
{Hygiene & Medicine
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'In such ways again we come to
see that material and spiritual becomes at one! Ethics and politics thus unite
into Etho‑Polity, which, despite all discouragements
and setbacks and appearances to the contrary, is none the less the coming
polity. So with
education, not merely with bio‑psychology; but psycho-biology, the sound
mind maintaining the sound body.
And so with art inspiring industry, and developing the sciences
accordingly. Beyond the attractive yet
dangerous apples of the separate sciences the Tree of Life thus comes into
view'.
Anticipation of changes which
have since entered into University thinking will not be missed here. Geddes strongly
attacked the departmental separatism of university organisation. It may be seen
as a late fruit of this thinking that the first of the new wave of British
Universities after the last
From the brief outline and
extracts given, we can begin to see the wholeness of this man's many-sided
activities, in fields which are often considered as quite unrelated. And when
we remember that one of the greatest spokesmen of anarchism, Prince Kropotkin (who has been described as one of the two saints
of the nineteenth century) was also a biologist, we find a clue to that much mis-understood way of thinking, in the idea of natural
growth 'from the roots up' and natural relationships of units into colonies of units,
as against centralism and any form of imposition of order from above.
As Geddes
put it:
'Go back to Nature and life; to
the Soil and its resources; to the Home and its sacred immemorial associations;
to the true city, which reconciles all the elements of a rich and genuinely
human existence. Then federate your Cities into a State, every part of which
enjoys Home Rule, is itself a living organism, and no longer a mere duct
feeding the Capital or the Capitalist, whose aims are more money or more pleasure.
Oppose to the "predatory" Empires the land that nourishes its
people'.
He would have seen and wished
for the Europe of the future to be not a market based on a few nations only,
but a complex multiple federation of regions, and of guilds both industrial and
cultural ‑a grand enlargement of that Central European country,
Switzerland, which happens to have evolved what is perhaps the best political
constitution, but incorporating also the healthy rural‑urban,
agricultural‑industrial balance and the cultural creativity of the
ancient Greek 'city State'.
The city for Geddes was the essence‑the place not merely of the
market and the parliament or palace but also the cathedral and the
university. In this sense he envisaged a
radiant and healthy equality between the regions of our own country, none
dominating, none unhealthily over-specialized (as our own industrial areas
unfortunately became during the first Industrial Revolution).
The detailed application of
this vision was carefully worked out by an admirable geographer who was one of
our own Patrons, the late Professor C. B. Fawcett, in his book 'Provinces of
England', published in 1919 and re-issued in 1960.
Problems of Welsh Nationalism
and Scottish Nationalism would fall into place if Fawcett's twelve Provinces of
England, or something very like them, were fully realised‑as would
problems of nationalism everywhere if Geddes'
'Devolution, in Federation' and 'Federation in Devolution' were carried out on
every plane‑political, economic and cultural.
He had of course, particular
reason for his awareness of these issues and their underlying realities. His wise father, Captain Geddes,
was bilingual in English and Gaelic, and when the family moved from Ballater to Perth young Patrick had the stimulus and
educational advantages of a fine small city at the very hub of Scotland, a rich
and varied natural environment, and a father who knew perhaps instinctively
that the most lasting educative experiences might be those of activity in
making things grow in the garden. His walks and rambles showed young Geddes the determining nature of the lie of the land and
its resources, and he saw the skills of the different craftsmen and artisans
arising from the nature of their work but then reflecting back on it to change
even the environment. '
To take a telling example in
which Geddes showed the way but failed to win the
support that might have avoided years of bloodshed and suffering‑the case
of Cyprus‑where he tackled a problem arising from the Armenian refugees
who had escaped persecutions in the
By his actions in
May I now try to put simply and
clearly what are the underlying concepts of Geddes'
approach to the problems of man in his environment ‑ admitting all the risks attendant upon simplification.
Every human being, wherever
located, is in a threefold relationship to existence, and it is this. He is related to his environment by its
situation, whether north, south, east, or west by longitude and latitude;
whether in frigid, temperate, or torrid zone; whether near an inland sea or the
great ocean or deep in one of the great land masses; whether on rich arable or
bare rock, in scrub or in forest. This
is his economic dimension. Secondly, he is related to those other human beings
who share the same environment, and possibly also others, more distant, who do
not. This is his political dimension.
But wait, you may say, what if he is Robinson Crusoe? The answer is that
the lack of fellow-humans is just as much a feature of his political situation
as the complications that arise from their presence. Thirdly, there is still
part of his life unaccounted for, when we have paid full attention to the
economic and the political. It is what
is going on m his own mind and heart about it all, and about the thought and
feeling of his predecessors. Some would
describe this third dimension as his relation to God, others as his relation to
values‑but however we conclude about that, he has this cultural dimension.
Now the sciences of the first
two are geography and economics, and of the third is anthropology. They give us the techniques of studying‑Geddes' monosyllabic triad of PLACE, WORK, FOLK. In fact he
relates Place to geography and to politics‑as our constant need to refer
to maps about the affairs of
Then there is another way of
working 'from the ground up' which Geddes has shown.
He called it ‘the valley section’, and showed how you start up in the hills,
where rivers are born, and you will find, as you go down to the sea, the
following basic human types: the miner, the woodman, the hunter, the shepherd,
the poor peasant, the farmer, the fisherman.
This sounds perhaps a tame enumeration‑but Geddes
builds up on each a fascinating delineation of typological characteristics,
entirely concrete and richly illustrated both by individuals and by cultures
and civilizations. It is one of the most
stimulating parts of his sociology‑far removed from the number-crunching
of a great deal of what goes under the name of sociology in these computerized
days. The richness of Geddes' insights into the organic connections all the way
from the environment to the culture is an outstanding example of synthesis.
This scheme of the valley
section shows the concreteness of his thinking, as well as of his
inventiveness. It has often been told
how when his health broke down through overwork on biological research in
They led to a series of
diagrams of ever increasing comprehensiveness culminating in the
superimposition of four of these nine-fold figures upon a fourfold plan derived
from Auguste Comte; so that starting from Place, Work
and Folk we end up with a morphological attribution of the Nine Muses.*
Trouble with his eyes had this
effect, so well stated by Philip Mairet: 'Baulked of
further insight into the microscopic aspects of life, he turned to the
macroscopic organizations of whole cities, societies, and regions'.
It is a mark of the exceptional
quality of Geddes' thinking that it shows this
characteristic‑often a mark of genius: the essentials of it are present
from the beginning, not gradually acquired as a result of possibly random
experience. I have three of the earliest
pamphlets and among the earliest publications of Geddes,
dating from 1884 and 1888. One is on an
economic subject, one is on a political subject, and
one on a cultural subject, thus representing the three hypostases of life. In 'Principles of Economics' this young
biologist in 1884 (it was in fact a lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh)
says:
'When we add up the aesthetic subfunctions of all "necessary" ultimate
products, and add to this the vast quantity of purely aesthetic products, we
see how small the fundamental element of production has become in relation to
the superior, and reach the paradoxical generalisation that production, though
fundamentally for maintenance, is mainly for art.'
In 'Co-operation versus
Socialism' (1888), where he stays near this theme but is of course primarily
concerned with the political question of how to organise this aspect of life,
he says:
'No theory of consumption
exists at all'
and
recommends that we
'begin
with the study of the consumption of wealth'.
He has this to say about a
problem which is very much upon us today:
'So long as the workman who
strikes so readily for a rise or against a fall of wages submits patiently to
the increasing unwholesomeness of his material surroundings or resents all
outlay on their amelioration, it cannot be said that the realities of wealth
have as yet been really discerned behind their symbols by either capitalist or
labourer.'
Indeed this is not just one of
our current problems, but two: strikes and pollution. Geddes'
concern about the end-products of life, what we do with our earnings and our
opportunities shows in the third of these early pamphlets, 'Every Man his own
Art Critic', also of 1888. In the course of this very comprehensive essay, in
which he writes of the clash between the Hellenic and the Hebraic ideals, Geddes says:
'The strife had still to fall
to its present level in the "hardly human abjection" of our modem
city...'
Thirty-four years later, in
another very rare pamphlet‑this one a more substantial publication
reprinted from 'The Indian Journal of Economics'‑we find him, under the
title 'Essentials of Sociology in relation to Economics', showing how the facts
of Place, Work, and Folk‑Environment, Function, and Organism ‑are
studied through their sciences of Geography, Economics, and Anthropology. This threefold analysis and synthesis is to
be found in the work of Frédéric Le Play as 'lieu,
travail, famille'; but, as we shall see, Geddes did not leave Le Play's work where he found it. In this same document we find Geddes' statement of the foundations of sociology in the
work of Auguste Comte (who invented the word). Comte
[*See Ninth Foundation Lecture 'The Order of Mankind as seen by Auguste Comte' by David Shillan.]
sees a basic distinction between the temporal and the spiritual,
which shows very clearly in his fourfold analysis of essential social
types. As transmitted by Geddes this appears in square form against an equilateral
cross, with upper left PEOPLE, lower left CHIEFS, lower right INTELLECTUALS,
and upper right EMOTIONALS. In Geddes this diagram is
not static; it corresponds to his own nomenclature of ACTS, FACTS, DREAMS,
DEEDS which because of the arrows down, across, up, and then across again,
appears to be in a state of constant motion.
What in fact Geddes was doing went much further than this, because in a
masterly synthesis of the work of the two great but otherwise separate French
masters he combined this essentially theoretical sociology of Comte with the
highly practical invention of the engineer Le Play‑which was to get at
the facts by seeking them out right into the home of the worker, through the
medium of the family budget. Le Play
thus became the originator of modem statistical survey methods in sociology
(though, as Miss Gladys Mayer has pointed out, an early form of statistical
survey was known even in Roman and Egyptian times) and Geddes
had nothing against this.
One of Geddes'
sociological insights which has borne fruit is his
analysis of the Industrial Revolution into two quite distinct phases. Borrowing neatly from the terms of archeology he called Palaeotechnic
the period of the first coal, iron and steam revolution ‑characterized by
massiveness and a rather crude and not very efficient display of power, often
accompanied by ugliness and squalor.
This was succeeded by the Neotechnic‑characterized
by electrical power and the use of glass and light alloys in construction, thus
leading to clearer and brighter buildings and also the freedom to create
industry wherever it could usefully fit, and not only close to the coalfields
or with access to them. Lewis Mumford in his classic
study 'Technics and Civilisation' showed the need for
identifying a much earlier period of technology, which from antiquity had made
use of the natural elements of wind and water to provide power. This dawn of technology he appropriately
called Eotechnic. Geddes may have
failed to look back as far as this, or to see the need for classifying it as a
separate period, which it is, but his eye was very much upon the future. He saw us well into the Neotechnic
period, but to him this, like the Palacotechnic was
only a bridge. What he was pressing
towards was the Biotechnic age‑the time
when life values should predominate over money or any other purely material
valuation. Moreover this would signalise
the predomination of living thought over the dry intellectualism associated
with the Neotechnic period. Beyond or perhaps synonymously with the Biotechnic he saw the Eutechnic‑spelled
with Eu- by analogy with the spelling he always used
for Eutopia, for he pointed out that Sir Thomas More
left it to us to decide whether we should move towards Outopla
(No-place) or Eutopla (Fair-place). And in this last Geddes
firmly believed. He considered it
practical to work for 'Eutopia now'.
Geddes had
the happiest touch with words, and found ways of using them that counteracted
any tendency for them to go dead. He
used 'politography', 'politogenics',
and 'eupolitics'; and in a famous passage on the
decline and fall of cities he said:
'In all the great cities ‑
especially the great capitals‑
One can
only comment‑see
Mention of More's
'Utopia' reminds us of another excellent illustration of Geddes'
practical effectiveness when he could get his own way. Every time we go along the
To recall briefly how Geddes, with immense dynamism, started to carry his ferment
of ideas into practice we have to go back to the beginning of the century. His
way was to seize an opportunity and turn it into an example. Andrew Carnegie had left some of his vast
fortune for the improvement of his native town of
This is an example of what the
late Prof. Fleure in a lecture to us before the New
Atlantis Foundation was set up, called Geddes'
'teaching by action'. That work is still going on today, and the results are
worth seeing. Then he opened people's
eyes to the wonderful heritage of
The
Geddes'
contribution to educational thought and practice is a big enough subject for a
lecture in itself.
Here I will refer only to his influence on the teaching of geography,
which has been completely transformed in the last half century, and to his
successful advocacy of survey methods as part of school work. This has many applications, and Environmental
Studies are now a recognised feature in schools. In one branch of more advanced geographical
work Geddes has stimulated the studies of 'Human
Geography', particularly pioneered by the French, and his is one of the first
voices to call for the study of the Earth as the Home of Man. The idea of 'Tracing
History backwards' by taking. the children, say, to the Parish Church,
and getting them to think and ask questions of how it came to be there and to
have acquired its various architectural features, is another example of a
'subject' revivified by Geddes' influence.
The Land Utilisation Survey of
England was carried out with very considerable help from school children under
the directly Geddesian leadership of the late Sir
Dudley Stamp. In the field of higher
education two major features stand considerably to his credit; halls of residence, and (really Geddes'
invention) summer schools‑two features which we take so much for granted
that we do not usually think where they came from.
It is perhaps worth recalling
that Professor Frederick Soddy co-discoverer with Rutherford of the possibilities
of atomic energy and winner of the Nobel Prize for his discovery of isotopes ‑left
his modest fortune not to the furtherance of chemical science, nor that of
monetary reform (to which he had devoted the last part of his life) but to
regional studies on the Place‑Work‑Folk lines developed by Geddes. And today we
have the Frederick Soddy Research Fellowship in Geographical Sociology at the
Geddes' last
main activity was in connection with a very special university hall of
residence, the Collège des Ecossais,
which he established at the
It may be of interest to recall
here what was said about him by Rabindranath Tagore:
'What so strongly attracted me
in Patrick Geddes when I came to know him in
One of the greatest setbacks of
Geddes' life was the loss of the ship, sunk by the
raiding cruiser '
'There is no doubt we are at
the making of a new science, a finer geography, a more concrete and vital
history‑a more real interpretation of human life, and this in all its
aspects, from economic to psychological and ethical! '
A loss from which he never
quite recovered was that of his son Major Alisdair Geddes. described as 'the best
observer in the British Army'. Then came an even more crushing blow. His wife and constant working partner died.
Later Geddes
did marry again, but his last years, though actively devoted, mostly to the
developments of Montpellier, seem to have been saddened by his bereavements
together with a realisation that so relatively little out of all that he was
offering would be taken up and carried into effect, and that men were going on
blindly in their old ways towards what might be another cataclysm.
Do we look on him, then, as in
the end a failure? It must be apparent
from what has been said that I do not take this view. Even if he sometimes failed to get himself
properly understood and sometimes perhaps expected too much, the failure is on
the side of those who did not take him seriously enough and quickly enough. If we face the question of whether the modem,
new, world is still accessible to Geddes' approach
and methods, the question is more difficult to answer. I cannot do better than
quote two short extracts from that wise man and human scientist the late Sir
John Russell, giving his farewell lecture to the Le Play Society, which Geddes had founded:
'So the towns expand and
factories increase: people become more and more urban; more and more of the
countryside is swallowed up. The late 20th Century townsman can have little
sense of the original natural environment but only of an urban setting for his
place of work, and a suburban setting for his house which is much the same
everywhere though the designers of the modem new towns try to retain something
distinctive of the natural features. The
influence of the town on its environment spreads far outside its boundaries.
'In a broad way one can say
that the old Le Play-Geddes formula ‑Place,
Work, Folk‑ is still valid as the basis of sociological study. But the changes in place and work are so
rapid that they have insufficient time to exert their full impact on the folk
before they are superseded by some new change that may have quite different
impacts. Chance and change have always been busy, but never as busy as now, and
they will be busier than ever in the future.'
We may see Geddes
as directly in the great line of Carlyle, Ruskin, and William. Morris, whose
influence has been so profound and so far-reaching.
More of a practical man than either Carlyle or Ruskin though less of a writer
than both, he seems to come nearer to Morris.
Though less of an artist than Morris he perhaps avoids the touch of
naivety which marks Morris' involvement in politics, great and noble though
this was. Geddes
never loses sight of the whole human problem but he does not look for solutions
(or even the beginning of solutions) on one level, such as the political,
alone.
His own criticism of Carlyle,
Ruskin, and Morris, much as he respected them, was that they were too
romantic. His own scientific and
technical sureness in fact make him an even more effective champion than they
were against the Leviathan that was already threatening us.
Time is lacking now to speak of
Geddes' work with the Sociological Society, but this
has left us books and articles by the Branfords and
others.
A synthesized statement of Geddes' mature counsel was published by the New Europe
Group in the 'Thirties' and re‑issued for his centenary celebrations in
I954. You may find it in what was probably the original source of William
James' famous statement about 'The moral equivalent of war':
'In
order to be ready for the New Order: The things we are to leave behind us are
the selfishness of individualism and the present system of industrialism. Secondly, the centralisation which has
destroyed local life almost everywhere in Europe, sacrificing everything to the
tyranny of the great capitals and culminating in the State worship which is
seen at its worst and strongest in Berlin. And, thirdly, the abstract
intellectualism divorced from life and action. unhistorical
and unprogressive. a culture
of mummeries, not of growing and changing human minds.
'For this we are to substitute
a new culture which is to be historical. looking back to beginnings and on to
ideals; one that sees in the last century's great discovery of evolution no
mere mechanical process of combative physical egoism, but a force in which
altruistic impulses play their part as well as egoistic, and the struggle for
individual existence rises into the culture of existence as a member of a
community.
'And, above all, we are to
substitute for the worship of capitals and the State a revived dry and regional
life, rejoicing in variety, unashamed of provincialism, co-operating in
friendly rivalry towards a rich growth of national life. This ideal can never be achieved where the
State has seized upon the control of education and imposed an organised cult of
State worship upon what should be the free and manifold spiritual life of a
nation.' There follows the paragraph I
have already quoted about building up a federation. He continues:
'Let the great teaching bodies
and first of all the universities come into touch with life under its various beneficient activities.
Break up the monopoly of
'The churches have their duty,
also, which regards, and in the best annals of the past never neglected, the
consecration of men's earthly life, here and now, to spiritual holiness. You must begin with "place, work,
folk", and go on to "polity, culture, art". Never divorce these from one another, as men
did m the 19th century; or if you do, the "place", will become
hideous, the "work" slavery, the "folk" degenerate, the
"polity", despotism, the "culture", vanity, the
"art" vicious.
'You have brought your analytic
genius to a stage where it acts as pure destruction, and is exploding mankind by
means of its scientific achievements into a horror that has no name. Try now
synthesis. The world of beauty has perished, or is perishing under your
devilish inventions. Build it up again out of life, by the spirit, as the city
of
'For this make free use of the
public credit for social investments; but don't pay the tribute called
"market rate of interest"; create the credit against the new social
assets, charge it with an insurance rate and a redemption rate, and pay the
bankers a moderate commission to administer it through their system of
interlocking banks and clearing-houses; the present unacknowledged use of the
public credit by bankers must be recognised and regulated, and private profit
must be subordinated to the new communitary uses.
'And eschew the despotic habit
of regimentation !
Whether by Governments, Trusts, Companies, Tyrants, pedants or police;
try the better and older way of co-ordination expanding from local centres
through city, region, nation and beyond; so may the
spirit of fellowship express itself, instead of being sterilised by fear. crushed by administrative machinery or perverted by
depression. Again and again resist the political temptation to centralise all
things in one metropolitan city; seek to renew the ancient tradition of
Federation between free cities, regions, dominions.
'Encourage the linkages of
labour and professional associations across international frontiers; it is
these that can quicken the unity of Western civilisation and bring forth its
fruits of concord. Further, let our
imperial bureaucrats cease from their superior habit of instructing the
Orientals and try and learn from them.'
Let the following passage
provide our conclusion.
'Summing
up: Aim at making individuals more socialised and commodities more
individualised. To that end, let schools subordinate books to
out-door observation and handicrafts; let teachers draw the matter and the
method of education from the life and tradition of their pupils' own region, as
well as from the history and culture of mankind at large. Let universities seek first for synthesis in
the civic life around them;
and only thereafter in the pages of philosophy. Above all, let governing bodies learn, if not
from the Churches, at least from the psychological and social sciences, the
distinction between temporal and spiritual powers, and cease to play the double
role of Pope and Caesar.'
Boardman, Philip. 'L'Oeuvre éducatrice
de Patrick Geddes';
Defries, Amelia: 'The
Interpreter Geddes'; Routledge,
1927.
Geddes,
Patrick (ed. Tyrwhitt): 'Cities in Evolution'. revised
edition, Williams & Norgate, 1949.
Mairet.
Philip: 'Pioneer of Sociology';
Tyrwhitt, Jacqueline: 'Patnick Geddes in
Extracts
from Geddes' farewell Lecture and from Tagore are quoted by kind permission of Routledge
& Kegan Paul Ltd.
Extract
from Geddes' letter quoted by kind permission of Lund
Humphries Ltd.
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