Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes

the way from the environment to the culture is an outstanding example of synthesis.

This scheme of the valley section shows the concreteness of his thinking, as well as of his inventiveness. It has often been told how when his health broke down through overwork on biological research in Mexico, he temporarily lost his sight. His active brain used his fingers and he found them tracing out the simple grid pattern of the panes of his window. Imagine it starting in this simple way: three squares along and three down. He began to fill these squares with inter-related triads, in his mind’s eye. He became fascinated with squares—incidentally soon after this he became a good chess player. Then he made more, many more, such grids and elaborate variations on them by folding paper. He called these his ‘thinking machines’.

They led to a series of diagrams of ever increasing comprehensiveness culminating in the superimposition of four of these nine-fold figures upon a fourfold plan derived from Auguste Comte; so that starting from Place, Work and Folk we end up with a morphological attribution of the Nine Muses.*

Trouble with his eyes had this effect, so well stated by Philip Mairet: “Baulked of further insight into the microscopic aspects of life, he turned to the macroscopic organizations of whole Cities, societies, and regions’.

It is a mark of the exceptional quality of Geddes’ thinking that it shows this characteristic—often a mark of genius: the essentials of it are present from the beginning, not gradually acquired as a result of possibly random experience. I have three of the earliest pamphlets and among the earliest publications of Geddes, dating from 1884 and 1888. One is on an economic subject, one is on a political subject, and one on a cultural subject, thus representing the three hypostases of life. In ‘Principles of Economics’ this young biologist in 1884 (it was in fact a lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh) says:

“When we add up the aesthetic subfunctions of all “necessary”

ultimate products, and add to this the vast quantity of purely

aesthetic products, we see how small the fundamental element of production has become in relation to. the superior, and reach

*See illustration on page 24 and description on page 13.

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