Civics: as Applied Sociology by Patrick Geddes
page 84 of 142 (59%)
page 84 of 142 (59%)
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individuals, their activities, their place itself. Thus (the more
plainly the more the community is a simple and an isolated one, but in appreciable measure everywhere and continually) there have obviously arisen local turns of thought and modes of speech, ranging from shades of accept and idiom to distinctive dialect or language. Similarly, there is a characteristic variety of occupational activity, a style of workmanship, a way of doing business. There are distinctive [Page: 73] manners and customs--there is, in short, a certain recognisable likeness, it may be an indefinably subtle or an unmistakably broad and general one, which may be traced in faces and costumes, in tongue and literature, in courtesy and in conflict, in business and in policy, in street and in house, from hovel to palace, from prison to cathedral. Thus it is that every folk comes to have its own ways, and every town its own school. While the complex social medium has thus been acquiring its characteristic form and composition, a younger generation has been arising. In all ways and senses, Heredity is commonly more marked than variation--especially when, as in most places at most times, such great racial, occupational, environmental transformations occur as those of modern cities. In other words, the young folk present not only an individual continuity with their organic predecessors which is heredity proper, but with their social predecessors also. The elements of organic continuity, which we usually think of first of all as organic though of course psychic also, are conveniently distinguished as the _inheritance_--a term in fact which the biologist seeks to deprive of its common economic and social senses altogether, leaving for these the term _heritage_, material or immaterial alike. This necessary distinction between the inheritance, bodily and mental, and the heritage, economic and social, obviously next requires further |
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