ment of the material, non-living and
non-thinking elements in the problem--the buildings, their geographical
position, their age, their fitness for past and present life, and the
distinctive local features that are evolving or retrogressing with the
multiplication of some trades and industries and the decline of others
in each area that is studied; (2) the change in the quality of the
citizens themselves through racial, educational, and other factors,
noting how far ideals are altering, not only in the mass of individuals
taken as a whole, but also by examining the changing outlook in every
trade and profession. With these two parallel lines of investigation to
study, we could then determine how far environment--social and
climatic--how far racial and individual characteristics have been
powerful in the moulding of the fabric around us.

With these two lines of study to our hands, we could predict the
vitality, the growing power, and the future possibilities of the social
life of which we are a tiny though not an insignificant part; we could,
knowing something of the response that we make to that which surrounds
us, form some estimate of how the future ages will develop, and, knowing
the [Page: 127] intensity of the different national desires for progress
_and the causes which are likely to arouse such desires_, we could
realise what will stimulate and what will retard all that is best in our
civic life.

PROFESSOR EARL BARNES (in moving a vote of thanks) said:

For years I have been accumulating a debt of obligation to Prof. Geddes
for ideas, suggestions, and large synthesis of life, and it gives me
special pleasure to voice the feeling of this meeting concerning the
paper read to us this afternoon. To me, as an American, it is especially
interesting to hear this presentation of life as an organic whole. Life
is but a period of education, and if there is nothing behind this
present moment of life it is all extremely insignificant. To an
American, who has lived at No. 1067 in 63rd Street, Philadelphia, and
at No. 1718 in G Street, in Washington, it is profoundly interesting to
think of the possibility of a man's so living that his whole existence
shall be significant, so that the realities of his world, geographical,
geological, and material, and all that long development of humanity
through the historic past--that all these things will be really and
truly significant to him. Prof. Geddes has himself shown us that is