Science and Citizenship
that of the Hottentots, What then amid this apparent confusion and disruptiveness of science is the inquiring citizen to do if he wishes to know the bearing of science on citizenship? The answer of science, as of every other spiritual power, is that there is only one way to know the doctrine, and that is to lead the life.
V
The scientific quality of citizenship can only be apprehended through the scientific conception of the city. And the first question which science asks about the city is—What is it?
What is a City? Legal and political definitions we have, but seemingly no scientific ones as yet. Now legal and political definitions, whether of cities or other social phenomena, are, as it were, ready-made articles of common usage, alike popular and recondite. To the majority of scientists—that is to say, those arrested at the mechanical stage of scientific thought—such definitions are alternately meaningless mysteries to be scoffed at, or shibboleths naively adopted by these scientists themselves, whenever social action is unavoidable or social thought demanded. On the other hand, there is a small but ever-increasing number of scientists, who push on through the world of form with which the mathematical sciences deal, onwards through the world of matter with which the physical sciences deal, and thence through the world of organic life with which the biological
12
