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

‘In such ways again we come to see that material and spiritual becomes at one! Ethics and politics thus unite into Etho-Polity, which, despite all discouragements and setbacks and appearances to the contrary, is none the less the coming polity. So with education, not merely with bio-psychology; but psychobiology, the sound mind maintaining the sound body. And so with art inspiring industry, and developing the sciences accordingly. Beyond the attractive yet dangerous apples of the separate sciences the Tree of Life thus comes into view’.

Anticipation of changes which have since entered into University thinking will not be missed here. Geddes strongly attacked the departmental separatism of university organisation. It may be seen as a late fruit of this thinking that the first of the new wave of British Universities after the last War, Sussex, abolished the idea of departments from the start.

From the brief outline and extracts given, we can begin to see the wholeness of this man’s many-sided activities, in fields which are often considered as quite unrelated. And when we remember that one of the greatest spokesmen of anarchism, Prince Kropotkin (who has been described as one of the two saints of the nineteenth century) was also a biologist, we find a clue to that much misunderstood way of thinking, in the idea of natural growth ‘from the roots up’ and natural relationships of units into colonies of units, as against centralism and any form of imposition of order from above.

As Geddes put it:

“Go back to Nature and life; to the Soil and its resources; to the Home and its sacred immemorial associations; to the true city, which reconciles all the elements of a rich and genuinely human existence. Then federate your Cities into a State, every part of which enjoys Home Rule, is itself a living organism, and no longer a mere duct feeding the Capital or the Capitalist, whose aims are more money or more pleasure. Oppose to the “predatory” Empires the land that nourishes its people’.

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He would have seen and wished for the Europe of the fuse to be not a market based on a few nations only, but a cong