In looking at the community through the Regional Survey, the investigator is dealing with a real thing and not with an arbitrary idolum. In so far as the local community has certain elements in common with similar regions in other countries, or has absorbed elements from other civilizations, these things will be given their full value, instead of being disregarded because they weaken the identity of the local community with that precious myth, the National State. The greater part of the data that is thus brought to light may be plotted on a map, graphically presented in a chart, or photographed. In Saffron Walden, England, there is an admirable little museum devoted to such an exhibition of its region; and in the Outlook Tower, at Edinburgh, there used to be a library and an apparatus of exhibition by which one could begin at the point where one was standing and work outwards, in thought, to embrace the whole wide world. Knowledge that is presented in this fashion is available so that whoever runs may read; it has every feature, therefore, of popular science as it is purveyed in the cheap newspaper and magazine, whilst it remains real science and is not presented as something that verges from a miracle to a superstition. The knowledge embodied in the Regional Survey has a coherence and pithiness which no isolated study of science can possibly possess. It is presented in such a form that it can be assimilated by every member of the community who has the rudiments of an education, and it thus differs from the isolated discipline which necessarily remains the heritage of the specialist. Above all, this knowledge is not that of “subjects,” taken as so many water tight and unrelated compartments: it is a knowledge of a whole region, seen in all its aspects; so that the relations between the work aspect and the soil aspect, between the play aspect and the work aspect, become fairly simple and intelligible. This common tissue of definite, verifiable, localized knowledge is what all our partisan utopias and reconstruction programs have lacked; and lacking it, have been one-sided and ignorant and abstract--devising paper programs for the reconstruction of a paper world. Regional survey, then, is the bridge by which the specialist whose face is turned towards the library and the laboratory, and the active worker in the field, whose face is turned towards the city and region in which he lives, may come into contact; and out of this contact our plans and our eutopias may be founded on such a permanent foundation of facts as the scientist can build for us, while the sciences themselves will be cultivated with some regard for the human values and standards, as embodied in the needs and the ideals of the local community. This is the first step out of the present impasse: we must return to the real world, and face it, and survey it in its complicated totality. Our castles-in-air must have their foundations in solid ground. 5