party politics we are often reminded how directly continuous are the
rivals with puritan London, with royalist Oxford; but still more is this
the case throughout the history of thought and action, and the intenser
the more plainly; for it is in his highest moments of conviction and
decision that the Puritan feels most in sympathy with the law or the
prophets of Jerusalem, the scholar with Athens; or that the man of
action--be he the first French republican or the latest
imperialist--most frankly draws his inspiration from the corresponding
developments of Paris. It is a commonplace of psychology that our
thought is and must be anthropomorphic; a commonplace of history that it
has been Hebraomorphic, Hellenomorphic, Latinomorphic, and so on by
turns.

This view has often been well worked out by the historian of inventions
and discoveries, of customs or laws, of policies or religions, as by the
historian of language or the fine arts. What we still commonly need,
however, is to carry this view clearly into our own city and its
institutions, its streets and schools and homes, until either in the
private spending or public voting of the smallest sum we know exactly
whether we are so far determining expenditure and influence towards
enlarging, say, the influence and example of renascent Florence in one
generation or of decadent Versailles in another. There is no danger of
awaking this consciousness too fully; for since we have ceased
consciously to cite and utilise the high examples of history we have
been the more faithfully, because sub-consciously and automatically,
continuing and extending later and lower developments.


E--CITIES, PRESENT AND FUTURE