Professor Geddes, in replying to the discussion, said he entirely agreed
with the point made by Mr. Swinny, and he should just like to correct
what he had said in his lecture by reference to what he meant by a civic
museum. In Edinburgh, he had in his museum a large room, with a
geographical model [Page: 118] of the old town with its hill-fort, and
so on; and he hung round this maps and diagrams of historical and
geographical details. On the opposite side of the room, he had a symbol
of the market-cross, which stood for the centre of its municipal life,
of its ideals and independence of environment. Around it was grouped
what represented the other side of the city; and here he might answer
another point, and say that they could never settle the great
philosophical controversy of determinism and free-will. They would
always incline when young to the novel of circumstance, and later, to
the novel of character, but they should always feel that life was a game
of individual skill with interfering circumstances. These diagrams of
his were only the page split. On the one side, he meant to push to the
extreme the idea that the place makes us, and on the other side, that we
make the place. 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. Pointing to a drawing of the old Scotch
bawbee, Professor Geddes said it was not a very dignified symbol of the
coinage of the world, but let them mark how it had on the one side the
hammerman at his work, with his motto "_Beat deus artem_," and, on the
other side, a larger legend, with the eagle of the empire and the lamb
of Saint John.
To return to his civic museum: the room below the one he had described
was the larger museum for Scotland, and in the room below that, again,
the museum for England, Ireland and America, the whole English-speaking
world--not the Empire only. And the whole stood on a museum and library
representing that larger evolution of the occidental civilisation which
showed them they were merely children of the past. Professor Geddes
pleaded for museums in which every city displayed its own past and
present, but related itself to the whole of Europe and the whole
occident.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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