Civics: as Applied Sociology eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 145 pages of information about Civics.

Civics: as Applied Sociology eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 145 pages of information about Civics.

Corresponding to this objective and organic life we reorganise its fundamental subjective life.  This is fundamentally, and ever partially, the record and reflex of the life of the hive, the Town:  of all its general and particular environment and function, its family type and development; and however overlaid by imported culture or by decayed ideals, it is fundamentally expressed in local knowledge, in craft tradition, in kinship and its associated kindness, in habits and customs, and their developments up to morals and laws.  Simple terms corresponding to place, work, and folk, are hard to find; say, however, till better be suggested, that in close relation to the maternal arms in which general social thought and its utmost pedagogic developments alike begin, it is place-lore, work-lear, and folk-love, which are the essentials of every [Page:  92] School.[11] That existing educational machineries may not adequately recognise these is not of course the question here.

[11] The use of lore as primarily empirical, and derived from the senses, it is traditional; it is well therefore to restrict it to this, and to revive the old word lear, still understood in Scotland in these precise senses—­intellectual, rational, yet traditional, occupational also.

These three terms, lore, lear, and love are thus well related to their respectively deepening levels of sense, intelligence and feeling; and their respective relation is thus more plain to the imagery, the theory, and the idealism above defined as the essentials of the Cloister.  The psychology of the processes of poetic, philosophic and spiritual awakening and renewal is in these days being approached anew, both from the individual and social side, but cannot here be entered upon.

Finally and supremely arises the City proper—­its individuality dependent upon the measure and form in which ideals are expressed and harmonised in social life and polity, ideas synthetised in culture, and beauty carried outwards from the study or chamber of the recluse into the world of art.

Practical conclusion

The investigation of the City thus tends towards the practice of citizenship.  Thus social survey prepares for social service, as diagnosis towards treatment and hygiene; and these react fruitfully upon our knowledge and understanding anew.  Beyond social observations, and the needed observatories for making them more adequately, we need social activities and the laboratories for preparing them, or at least the leavens of them; or, again, in happier phrase, at once simple and more synthetic, we need some shelter[12] into which to gather the best [Page:  93] seed of past flowerings and in which to raise and tend the seedlings of coming summers.  We need definitely to acquire such a centre of survey and service in each and every city—­in a word, a Civicentre for sociologist and citizen.

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Civics: as Applied Sociology from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.