Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes

“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 ENVIRONMENTFUNCTION—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,