Science and Citizenship
work towards the realisation of the corresponding ideals? In reply, little can be said at the close of an already prolonged paper. The sociologist in his naturalist mood sees the city as successive strata of wreckage and survivals of past phases in the endlessly-changing antics of a building and hibernating mammalian species. In his humanist mood he sees—somewhat dimly, it must be confessed—the city as the culminating and continuous effort of the race to determine the mastery of its fate, to achieve a spiritual theatre for the free play of the highest racial ideals. In short, the cities of the world are in this view but processes of realising the spiritual potency of the human race. They are the true homes of Humanity. And it is just here that science—whose mission it is to fulfil, and not to destroy—reveals to us the germ of truth in the popular sentiment, which insists that the essential characteristic of the city resides in the University and the Cathedral. The truth, to be sure, is that it is the presence of functional institutions of the highest spiritual type, whether or not we call them University and Cathedral, that differentiates the city from the town. It follows that the civic policy of our Secular sociologists—if we have any—must be concerned with the city as itself a cultural potency, and with the whole body of citizens as individuals responsive to the creative influences of the spiritual ideals, active or latent, in drama and poetry, in art and music, in history and science, in philosophy and religion. The most comprehensive,
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