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

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 Mitrinovié, 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 Mitrinovié 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 London’.

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 William 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 Edinburgh University after only one week. He spent some time under the great Huxley at the Royal School of Mines (now part of Imperial College) and after rebelling at the formalism of the examination system he succeeded after a year in getting into a course in biology. In his first attempt at research, encouraged by Huxley, he proved the famous professor wrong. Huxley was generous enough to publish this paper with credits to his pupil. Geddes did some work at Kew Gardens, had a look at the Science Department at Cambridge and did not like it, thought of going to work in Germany, but accepted a post as demonstrator at University College, London, where he

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