[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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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