The practice of spencerian science patrick geddes's biosocial program, 1876-1889

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Volumn 100, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 36-57

  Renwick, Chris ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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ARTICLE; EVOLUTION; HISTORY; HUMAN; SCIENCE; UNITED KINGDOM;

EVOLUTION; GREAT BRITAIN; HISTORIOGRAPHY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HUMANS; NATURAL HISTORY; SCIENCE;

EID: 67649227458     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/597574     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. Francis Galton, Memories of My Life (London: Methuen, 1908), p. 258;
2. and Galton, "Reminiscences of Herbert Spencer," in Karl Pearson, Life, Letters, and Labours of Francis Galton, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1914-1930), Vol. 3B: Characterization, Especially by Letters, and Index (1930), pp. 626-628, on p. 627. Huxley's frequently repeated punch line to this story can also be traced, however, to his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1870, where he used it as a description of science itself: "Address of Thomas Henry Huxley LLD, FRS, President," Report of the Fortieth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science Held at Liverpool in September 1870, 1871, pp. lxxiii- lxxxix, on p. lxxix.
3. Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970); Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1987); and Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap, 1982), p. 386.
4. For a typical presentation of Spencer as an apologist for social Darwinism see Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History (London: Cape, 2000), pp. 257-267. However, in his final book Gould backtracked somewhat on his earlier claims about Spencer when, in a discussion focused on an 1893 exchange between Spencer and August Weismann, he begrudgingly conceded that Spencer was someone who not only took part in serious biological debate but sometimes made points of scientific substance;
5. see Gould, The Structure ofEvolutionary Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap, 2002), pp. 197-208. For more on the relationship between Spencer and philosophers see Suzanne Cunningham, Philosophy and the Darwinian Legacy (Rochester, N.Y.: Univ. Rochester Press, 1996). As Jonathan Hodge has observed, it may be no historical accident that the name chosen by Moore and Russell for their new philosophical enterprise, "analytic philosophy," was the oppositional term to Spencer's lifelong project of "synthetic philosophy."
6. Talcott Parsons, The Structure ofSocial Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers, 2nd ed. (Glencoe, 1ll.: Free Press, 1949), p. 3. This second edition of Parsons's book is an entirely unrevised version of the original, which was published in 1937. In posing the question "Who now reads Herbert Spencer?" Parsons was quoting from the American historian Crane Brinton: Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London: Benn, 1933), pp. 226-227.
7. Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Mass./ London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1996);
8. and Ruse, "Adaptive Landscapes and Dynamic Equilibrium: The Spencerian Contribution to Twentieth-Century American Biology," in Darwinian Heresies, ed. Abigail Lustig, Robert J. Richards, and Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 131-150. Spencer's work has also been related to Wright's shifting balance theory by Jonathan Hodge; see his unpublished manuscript "Wright's Shifting Balance Theory in Its Original Context."
9. Gregory Radick, The Simian Tongue: The Long Debate about Animal Language (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2007), Chs. 5, 6;
10. on the relation of Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy to Hobhouse's project of liberal social reform see pp. 211-214. For more on Hobhouse's life and work see Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England, 1880-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979);
11. Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), esp. Chs. 3, 4; John E. Owen, L. T. Hobhouse, Sociologist (London: Nelson, 1974);
12. Harry Elmer Barnes, "Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse: Evolutionary Philosophy in the Service of Democracy and Social Reform," in An Introduction to the History ofSociology, ed. Barnes (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 614-653;
13. J. A. Hobson and Morris Ginsberg, L. T. Hobhouse, His Life and Work: With Selected Essays and Articles (London: Allen&Unwin, 1931);
14. and Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978).
15. Thomas Dixon, "Herbert Spencer and Altruism: The Sternness and Kindness of a Victorian Moralist," in Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy, ed. Greta Jones and Robert Peel (London: Galton Institute, 2004), pp. 85-124;
16. Dixon, The Invention ofAltruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press for the British Academy, 2008), esp. Ch. 5;
17. Naomi Beck, "The Diffusion of Spencerianism and Its Political Interpretations in France and Italy," in Herbert Spencer, ed. Jones and Peel, pp. 37-60;
18. Jones, "Spencer and His Circle," ibid., pp. 1-16;
19. and Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007). Francis's book is the first monograph-length intellectual biography of Spencer since J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution ofa Sociologist (London: Heinemann, 1971).
20. Herbert Spencer, "The Development Hypothesis" (1852), in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Longman&Roberts, 1858), pp. 389-395.
21. See also Spencer, Social Statics; or, The Essential Conditions to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed (London: John Chapman, 1851). Spencer's early writings are most easily available in Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative,3 vols. (London: Longman&Roberts, 1868 -1874), which includes the essays from the 1858 book.
22. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 5th ed. (London: Williams&Norgate, 1898), p. 285 (§97);
23. and Spencer, The Principles of Biology, 2 vols. (London: Williams&Norgate, 1864, 1867), Vol. 1, Pt. 5.
24. See esp. Spencer, Principles of Biology, Vol. 1, pp. 433-463 (§164-§168).
25. Herbert Spencer, The Factors of Organic Evolution (London: Williams&Norgate, 1887), p. 9. Regarding natural selection as the negative process for removing those unable to adjust to change see Spencer, Principles of Biology, Vol. 1, p. 435 (§159).
26. Spencer, Principles of Biology, Vol. 2, p. 508 (§377). As Thomas Dixon points out, the importance Spencer attached to ethics in evolution is underscored by the fact that when, in the late 1870s, he was worried that bad health might prevent him from completing the Synthetic Philosophy, he started work on The Data of Ethics rather than The Principles of Sociology, which was due to be published next. See Dixon, Invention of Altruism (cit. n. 7), p. 184.
27. For an extensive discussion of this debate between Huxley and Spencer see James Elwick, "Herbert Spencer and the Disunity of the Social Organism," History of Science, 2003, 41:35-72;
28. see also Freeden, New Liberalism (cit. n. 6), p. 95. For an excellent recent discussion of Spencer and his attitudes toward empire see Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (cit. n. 7), Ch. 17.
29. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Williams&Norgate, 1870, 1872);
30. Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London: H. S. King, 1873);
31. and Spencer, The Data of Ethics (London: Williams&Norgate, 1879). For more on Spencer and altruism see Dixon, "Herbert Spencer and Altruism" (cit. n. 7);
32. and Dixon, Invention of Altruism (cit. n. 7). For more on the military/industrial distinction see Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. (London: Williams&Norgate, 1896). On the end of the biological struggle for existence see, e.g, Spencer, Principles ofBiology (cit. n. 9), Vol. 2, pp. 507-508 (§377).
33. See, e.g., Marshall Stalley, ed., Patrick Geddes: Spokesman for Man and the Environment (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1972). Geddes is also frequently, though inaccurately, cited as the originator of the phrase "Think global, act local."
34. See Walter Stephen, ed., Think Global, Act Local: The Life and Legacy of Patrick Geddes (Edinburgh: Luath, 2004). Indeed, Geddes's left-wing stock rose during the mid to late twentieth century. The resurgence of interest in his work came primarily through his association with his greatest intellectual disciple-the American sociologist and architectural critic Lewis Mumford, whose writings, including The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), a volume in his Myth of the Machine series, were popular among American radicals during the Cold War.
35. See Chris Renwick and Richard C. Gunn, "Demythologizing the Machine: Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and Classical Sociological Theory," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2008, 44:59-76.
36. The exception is Gregory Radick and Graeme Gooday's biographical article in The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists, ed. Bernard Lightman, 4 vols., Vol. 2 (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2004), pp. 764 -768. Although Radick and Gooday describe Geddes as someone whose work was shaped by Spencer, their necessarily short article does not account for the way Geddes's intellectual outlook and scientific practice were deeply indebted to Spencer's evolutionary philosophy.
37. Famously, of course, Huxley believed that evolutionary mechanisms offered no explanatory power in human society-a point he first made clear in his 1871 essay "Administrative Nihilism," in T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays, 9 vols., Vol. 1: Method and Results (London: Macmillan, 1893), pp. 251-289. He and Spencer therefore disagreed vehemently over whether it was possible to relate the natural sciences to social and ethical processes.
38. See Peel, Herbert Spencer (cit. n. 7), pp. 151-153; and Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories ofMind and Behavior (cit. n. 2), pp. 313-319. Spencer and Huxley would have a serious falling out over these issues at the end of the 1880s. See Huxley, "The Struggle for Existence in Human Society" (1887), in Collected Essays, Vol. 9: Evolution, Ethics, and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1894), pp. 195-236.
39. Quoted by Philip Boardman, The Worlds of Patrick Geddes: Biologist, Town Planner, Re-Educator, Peace-Warrior (London: Routledge&Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 35 (Boardman does not cite his source). One can only speculate how it was that Geddes came to read Spencer at that exact moment in time, but it seems more than a coincidence that it was while working with Michael Foster, who was a Spencer devotee.
40. See Henrika Kuklick, "Fieldworkers and Physiologists," in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, ed. Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 158-180, on p. 167; and Gerald Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), p. 353 n.
41. Patrick Geddes, "Huxley as Teacher," Nature, 1925, 115:740-743, on p. 742.
42. Boardman, Worlds of Patrick Geddes (cit. n. 18), p. 35 (rereading Principles of Biology). As Adrian Desmond has explained, despite Huxley's reputation as "Darwin's Bulldog," he was a very different animal when teaching in his laboratory. Many of Darwin's ecological and population approaches lay outside the disciplinary norms of anatomy, and thus they were not studied in Huxley's classroom. Indeed, Huxley frequently left his students to make up their own minds on most evolutionary questions-stressing only, of course, his objection to the links made by thinkers such as Spencer between the natural and the social worlds.
43. See Adrian Desmond, Huxley: Evolution's High Priest (London: Joseph, 1997), pp. 70-71.
44. For Geddes's account of the importance to him of Huxley's early tutelage and patronage see Geddes, "Huxley as Teacher" (cit. n. 19). While Geddes came to reject most of Huxley's thinking about evolution, he always respected him as a model "man of science," in the sense described by Paul White in Thomas Huxley: Making the "Man of Science" (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003). For an extended discussion of this point see Chris Renwick, "Sex and the City: The Evolution of Patrick Geddes, 1874-1889" (M.A. thesis, Univ. Leeds, 2005).
45. Jan Sapp, Evolution by Association: A History ofSymbiosis (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 1-14.
46. Ibid., p. 10. In this sense, the debate between Huxley and Spencer about the organization of individual organisms, which has been studied by Elwick, complements my examination here of "symbiosis" between different organisms. See Elwick, "Herbert Spencer and the Disunity of the Social Organism" (cit. n. 13).
47. Patrick Geddes, "On the Nature and Function of the 'Yellow Cells' of Radiolarians and Coelenterates," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1880-1882, 11:377-396, on p. 378. Geddes's time in Roscoff and, later, Naples was in keeping with the late nineteenth-century trend for biologists to spend time at sites such as marine stations for the purpose of developing their skills and furthering their research.
48. See Lynn K. Nyhart, "Natural History and the 'New' Biology," in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 426-443.
49. Patrick Geddes, "Observations on the Physiology and Histology of Convoluta Schultzii," Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 1878-1879, 28:449-457, on pp. 450, 452, 453.
50. See also Geddes, "Chlorophylle animale et la physiologie des planaires vertes," Archives de Zoologie Expérimentale et Générale, 1879, 8:51-58.
51. Ernst Haeckel, Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda Radiaria), 2 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1862). For a recent study of the intellectual origins of and inspiration for Haeckel's radiolarian research
52. see Robert J. Richards, "If This Be Heresy: Haeckel's Conversion to Darwinism," in Darwinian Heresies, ed. Lustig et al. (cit. n. 5), pp. 101-130.
53. Geddes, "Nature and Function of the 'Yellow Cells' of Radiolarians and Coelenterates" (cit. n. 24), pp. 383, 387.
54. Patrick Geddes, "Further Researches on Animals Containing Chlorophyll," Nature, 1882, 25:303-305;
55. H. N. Moseley, "Researches on Animals Containing Chlorophyll" [letter], ibid., p. 338;
56. and Karl Brandt, "Uber das Zusammenleben von Algen und Tieren," Biologisches Centralblatt, 1881, 1:524-527.
57. Geddes, "Nature and Function of the 'Yellow Cells' of Radiolarians and Coelenterates" (cit. n. 24), pp. 391, 392. Geddes's comments on Brandt's research are contained in a postscript he added to his Ellis Physiology Prize-winning paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
58. Charles Darwin to Patrick Geddes, 27 Mar. 1882, Geddes Papers, National Library of Scotland, MS 10522, fol. 11;
59. and August Weismann, "Letter of Recommendation," in Patrick Geddes, University of Edinburgh, Chair of Botany: Letter of Application, etc. (Privately printed, 1888), p. 91. This application is held by the National Library of Scotland in the main stack.
60. Patrick Geddes, "Variation and Selection," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., 24 vols., Vol. 24 (Edinburgh: A.&C. Black, 1888), pp. 76-85;
61. and Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, "Evolution," in Chambers' Encyclopaedia, 10 vols., Vol. 4 (London/Edinburgh: W.&R. Chambers, 1889), pp. 477-484. There is some confusion as to whether the articles Geddes contributed to Chambers' Encyclopaedia were coauthored with Thomson. Boardman, Worlds ofPatrick Geddes (cit. n. 18), pp. 67-68, attributes them solely to Geddes;
62. Helen Elizabeth Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist and City Planner (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 80, to Geddes and Thomson. As is also the case with The Evolution ofSex (London: Walter Scott, 1889), the continuity with the themes and ideas of Geddes's earlier work but greater clarity in the writing strongly suggests coauthorship, with Thomson as the junior partner. It should also be noted that readers of Geddes and Thomson's work often felt that they could distinguish the two men's contributions. Indeed, Lewis Mumford remarked of his experience of reading Geddes and Thomson's Evolution (London: Williams&Norgate, 1911) that he "identified without difficulty the writer whose voice called [him]." Whereas Thomson "wrote in a supple English style," Mumford observed that Geddes's prose was "more crabbed and cryptic." "[Geddes's] was the audacity of an original mind," he wrote, "never content blindly to follow established conventions, still less fashions of the moment."
63. See Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford: The Early Years (New York: Dial, 1982), p. 145.
64. Geddes and Thomson, "Evolution," p. 483; Geddes, "Variation and Selection," p. 85; Geddes and Thomson, "Evolution," p. 484; and Geddes, "Variation and Selection," p. 85.
65. Geddes and Thomson, "Evolution," p. 479; and Patrick Geddes, Co-Operation versus Socialism (Manchester: Co-Operative Printing Company, 1888), pp. 9, 8. This approach to understanding evolution is one that Geddes used in all his writings on the subject, not just during the period considered here but throughout his career. The later and most complete expression of the many ideas discussed here can be found in Geddes and Thomson, Evolution (cit. n. 31), which is also notable for being the book that Lewis Mumford credited with sparking his interest in Geddes's work. See Mumford, Sketches from Life (cit. n. 31), pp. 144-145.
66. Geddes's best-documented engagement with Galton and his fellow eugenicists over the correct way to relate biological and social processes, as well as how to interpret society accurately in evolutionary terms, was at the British Sociological Society at the beginning of the twentieth century. See the many reports of the discussions of their work in Sociological Papers, 3 vols. (1904-1906), which subsequently became the Sociological Review.
67. See also R. J. Halliday, "The Sociological Movement, the Sociological Society, and the Genesis of Academic Sociology in Britain," Sociological Review, 1968, 16:377-398. As Steve Fuller has noted, however, Halliday's characterization of early British sociology as being dominated by three distinct groups-those centered on Galton's eugenics, Geddes's civics, and Hobhouse's ethical liberalism-misrepresents the extent to which there was a great deal of agreement between those factions on the role of biology in social explanation.
68. See Fuller, "A Path Better Not to Have Been Taken," ibid., 2007, 55:807-815. This point is underlined by Geddes's repeated references in Cities in Evolution-which was published in 1915 and is arguably his most famous work-to the role of eugenics in creating the "Eutopian" society he desired (this terminology and Cities in Evolution are discussed at greater length in the last section of this essay). By eugenics, however, Geddes had in mind measures such as contraception, which, as a practice that enables humans to seize control of their reproductive capacities, was part of the wide range of eugenical measures discussed by social reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of course, given the ideas and practices that we now associate with the term "eugenics," we do not often think of contraception as an important part of eugenics.
69. Francis Galton, "Hereditary Talent and Character," MacMillan's Magazine, 1865, 12:157-166, 318-327. The best of the many studies of Galton's life and work are Pearson, Life, Letters, and Labours of Francis Galton (cit. n. 1); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Sir Francis Galton and the Study of Heredity in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Garland, 1985);
70. Nicholas Wright Gillham, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001);
71. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Knopf, 1985); and Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (New York: Humanity, 1998).
72. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 17 n 1. A number of the methods of data collection that Galton either invented or developed in significant ways would later be taken up in the human and life sciences. The questionnaire, for example, has become a standard but controversial part of the psychologist's toolkit. For a historian of psychology's view of such issues see Raymond E. Fancher, Pioneers ofPsychology, 3rd ed. (London: Norton, 1996), pp. 216-245;
73. see also Gerald Sweeney, "Fighting for the Good Cause": Reflections on Francis Galton's Legacy to American Hereditarian Psychology (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2001). Galton's statistical innovations, including scaling and correlation, have been well documented. In addition to the treatments by his biographers cited in note 35, above,
74. see the work by the historians of statistics Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), Ch. 8;
75. and Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), Ch. 8.
76. Francis Galton, Natural Inheritance (London: Macmillan, 1889). Galton's arguments for the inheritance of artistic ability and tuberculosis, for example, were based on a manipulation of his data, known as "smoothing," that brought it into line with his expectations.
77. See Gilham, Life of Sir Francis Galton (cit. n. 35), p. 254. Among the numerous studies of the debates between the "biometricians" and the "Mendelians" see Donald A. MacKenzie, "Sociobiologies in Competition: The Biometrician-Mendelian Debate," in Biology, Medicine, and Society, 1840-1940, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 243-288;
78. Daniel J. Kevles, "Genetics in the United States and Great Britain, 1890-1930: A Review with Speculations," ibid., pp. 193-216; and MacKenzie, Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930: The Social Construction of Knowledge (Edinburgh:Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1981), Chs. 5, 6.
79. Patrick Geddes, "Mr. Francis Galton on Natural Inheritance," Scottish Leader, 14 Mar. 1890, 2:2.
80. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, Victor Branford-Geddes's friend and collaborator-described Geddes as a "Galtonian"-"a critical one," Branford wrote, "but still a Galtonian." Victor Branford to Lady Victoria Welby, 22 May 1904, Lady Victoria Welby Collection, York University, Toronto, MS 1970-010/002, folder 2. For more on Branford see John Scott and Christopher T. Husbands, "Victor Branford and the Building of British Sociology," Sociol. Rev., 2007, 55:460-484.
81. Geddes, Co-Operation versus Socialism (cit. n. 33), p. 22.
82. James Mavor, My Windows on the Street of the World, 2 vols., Vol. 1 (London: J. M. Dent, 1923), p. 215. For more on the housing problems of Edinburgh's Old Town and the city council's attempts to deal with them
83. see P. J. Smith, "Planning as Environmental Improvement: Slum Clearance in Victorian Edinburgh," in The Rise of Modern Planning, 1800-1914, ed. Anthony Sutcliffe (London: Mansell, 1980), pp. 99-133.
84. "Five percent philanthropy" was a method of securing money for social projects by running them not as hand-to-mouth charities but, in theory at least, as prudent organizations. Thus funds were sought by guaranteeing potential philanthropists a modest return of 5 percent on their money. See Octavia Hill, Octavia Hill and the Social Housing Debate: Essays and Letters by Octavia Hill, ed. Robert Whelan (London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1998).
85. The building Geddes is still most closely associated with is the "Outlook Tower," which houses a camera obscura and is situated on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, not far from James's Court. Geddes purchased the tower in 1892, and it quickly became a physical and intellectual base for his activities, such as his summer schools of the late 1890s. See Patrick Geddes, "The Edinburgh Outlook Tower," Report ofthe Sixty-eighth Meeting ofthe British Association for the Advancement of Science Held at Bristol in September 1898: Section E-Geography, 1899, pp. 945-947.
86. Speakers and visitors at the summer schools Geddes organized included Ernst Haeckel, A. C. Haddon, Lloyd Morgan, and William James. Despite wide acclaim (see Charles Zueblin, "The World's First Sociological Laboratory," American Journal of Sociology, 1899, 4:577-592) and the best efforts of his friends and backers-in particular Victor Branford, who was an accountant-the Outlook Tower under Geddes's ownership was almost always in financial difficulties. The building functions to this day as a tourist attraction, however.
87. Geddes's move to the slums can also be seen as an example of a more general trend among social reformers in late nineteenth-century Britain. In the late 1880s it became fairly common, for example, for graduates of Oxford University to spend time working at Toynbee Hall-a settlement scheme in the poverty-stricken east end of London-where the founder, Canon Samuel Barnett, encouraged them to use their education for the benefit of the surrounding area. For more on Toynbee Hall see Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880-1914 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1987).
88. Under its nineteenth-century pseudonym the "Malthusian Question," contraception had been a regular topic of conversation and site of action for British radicals inspired by the eugenic idea that it would empower people-in particular women- by enabling them to seize control of their reproductive capacities. However, involvement with the debate about contraception came with risks. In 1877, for example, Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant-leading figures of the British free-thought movement-had been prosecuted for obscenity, having republished the American physician Charles Knowlton's 1832 birth control pamphlet The Fruits of Philosophy. Bradlaugh and Besant were sentenced to six months in jail but successfully appealed on a technicality. However, Besant-who was tutored by Geddes during the late 1870s and corresponded with him for many years afterward-lost custody of her youngest child, having been judged an unfit parent as a result of the trial and the events surrounding it. See Walter L. Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case: A Study in Late Victorian Opinion and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965);
89. Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1978); and Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866-1915 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1980). For more on the relationship between contraception, eugenics, and the "woman question" see Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003).
90. Patrick Geddes, "Reproduction," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. (cit. n. 31), Vol. 20, pp. 407-422;
91. Geddes, "Sex," ibid., Vol. 21, pp. 720-724;
92. and Geddes, "Theory of Growth, Reproduction, Sex, and Heredity," Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh, 1884-1886, 13:911-931. Geddes and Thomson's collaboration on The Evolution of Sex (cit. n. 31)-as discussed with regard to their other work in note 31, above-was one in which Thomson's role was to help summarize existing scientific knowledge, improve the clarity of the writing when expressing Geddes's theories, and, as many exchanges in the Geddes Papers at the National Library of Scotland reveal, restrain Geddes's expansive scientific vision. On Thomson's role during the writing of The Evolution of Sex
93. see also Philip Boardman, Patrick Geddes: Maker ofthe Future (Chapel Hill: Univ. North Carolina Press, 1944), pp. 120-121;
94. and Paddy Kitchen, A Most Unsettling Person: An Introduction to the Ideas and Life of Patrick Geddes (London: Gollancz, 1975), p. 96. A further sign of Geddes's guiding hand in the writing of The Evolution of Sex was the book's frequent use of diagrams, which were clearly inspired by what he called "thinking machines"-a diagrammatic style of representing the dynamic relationship between different objects of study, including ideas and artifacts, that he had developed during the previous ten years. Geddes attached a great deal of importance to "thinking machines" throughout his career, but few other people appear to have understood them. Indeed, the statistician Karl Pearson, who was soon to fall under the spell of Francis Galton's statistical biology, felt that the use of diagrams in The Evolution ofSex was "exaggerated": Pearson, annotation dated 8 Nov. 1889, in Geddes and Thomson, The Evolution ofSex, p. 314;
95. the annotation appears in a copy of the book held by University College, London, in their main library stack. It should be noted, though, that Mumford described one of Geddes's larger and most elaborate thinking machines as, "in effect, an effort to replace Herbert Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy. by a condensed version, a graph of thirty-six squares": Mumford, Sketches from Life (cit. n. 31), p. 157. For more reproductions of numerous thinking machines see Boardman, Worlds of Patrick Geddes (cit. n. 18), pp. 465-484.
96. Geddes and Thomson, Evolution of Sex, p. 26. Indeed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the terms "anabolic" and "katabolic" were first used in 1876 by the Spencerian Michael Foster-whom Geddes had been studying under when he first read Spencer's Principles of Biology (see note 18, above). The explanation of sex in terms of anabolism and katabolism was one Geddes had earlier given in his encyclopedia articles. In particular, see Geddes, "Sex," p. 724.
97. Geddes and Thomson, Evolution of Sex, pp. 27, 97-134 (behavioral differences as the social articulation of physiological factors), 235, 270.
98. As he moved from strictly biological issues in the late 1870s to more explicitly social questions in the mid and late 1880s, one might expect Geddes to have engaged with Spencer's writings on sociology-copies of which he would later keep in the library at the Outlook Tower. But it is clear from the continuity between Geddes's research of the late 1870s and his practical and written work of the late 1880s that it was certainly Spencer's biology, rather than his sociology, that remained his source of inspiration. There are a number of possible reasons why this was the case. As one of my anonymous referees has helpfully suggested, the volume of Spencer's sociology that Geddes would have found most relevant to his own work-in particular to his interventions in Edinburgh's slums-was the third installment of The Principles ofSociology (cit. n. 14), which dealt with industrial issues. However, Spencer did not publish that book until 1896, when Geddes's practical work and approach to sociology were already well developed. Furthermore, given that Geddes's intention throughout the mid and late 1880s was to articulate the relationship between social questions and biological principles in the evolutionary process, it is understandable why he would still turn to Spencer's biology.
99. P. C. M, "The Evolution of Sex" [review], Nature, 1889-1890, 41:531-532; and Geddes and Thomson, Evolution of Sex (cit. n. 31), pp. 297, 293-298.
100. Geddes and Thomson, Evolution of Sex, p. 267. Indeed, it is on this point that assessments of Geddes have diverged most widely. Some scholars, including Thomas Dixon and Jill Conway, have argued that The Evolution of Sex was a fundamentally conservative work that upheld traditional conceptions of the innate differences between men and women. Others, such as the historian Eileen Janes Yeo, have instead emphasized how Geddes's writings were often used for more progressive causes. For example, the critic of Victorian marriage and leading figure of the late nineteenth-century "new woman" movement, Mona Caird, cited The Evolution of Sex to support her arguments about the future equality of men and women. See Dixon, Invention ofAltruism (cit. n. 7), Ch. 7;
101. Jill Conway, "Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution," in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 140-154; Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations ofGender and Class (London: Rivers Oram, 1996), p. 197;
102. and Mona Caird, "A Defence of the So-Called 'Wild Women,'" Nineteenth Century, 1892, 31:811-829, on p. 827.
103. Geddes and Thomson, Evolution ofSex, p. 267.
104. Patrick Geddes, City Development: A Study of Parks, Gardens, and Culture-Institutes: A Report to the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust (Birmingham: Saint George, 1904);
105. and Geddes, Cities in Evolution: An Introduction to the Town Planning Movement and to the Study ofCivics (London: Williams&Norgate, 1915). Geddes traveled far and wide during the final two decades of his life in order to promote "civics"-the name he gave to his evolutionary sociology of the city. In addition to serving as professor of sociology and civics at the University of Bombay between 1919 and 1924, his later activities included a commission in 1919 from the Zionist Federation to design the campus for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. However, only a few buildings from Geddes's plan, which he produced with his architect son-in-law Frank Mears, were actually realized.
106. Maggie Studholme, "Patrick Geddes: Founder of Environmental Sociology," Sociol. Rev., 2007, 55:441-459;
107. Fuller, "Path Better Not to Have Been Taken" (cit. n. 34); and Studholme, John Scott, and Christopher T. Husbands, "Doppelgängers and Racists: On Inhabiting Alternative Universes: A Reply to Steve Fuller's 'A Path Better Not to Have Been Taken,'" Sociol. Rev., 2007, 55:816-822.
108. Geddes, Cities in Evolution (cit. n. 53), pp. 66, 72, 75, 402. "Paleotechnic" and "Neotechnic" are terms Geddes derived from "Paleolithic" and "Neolithic"-the names used to differentiate the two phases of the Stone Age. While the terms are known mainly from Cities in Evolution, he first used them in his work during the opening years of the twentieth century. See Geddes, City Development (cit. n. 53), p. 175;
109. and Patrick Geddes, "Civics: As Applied Sociology: Part II," Sociological Papers, 1905, 2:55-111.
110. Lewis Mumford, "Patrick Geddes" (1950), in Mumford, The Human Prospect, ed. H. T. Moore and K. W. Deutsch (Boston: Beacon, 1955), pp. 99-114, on p. 111. On this point, it should also be noted that Geddes's final book was a massive, two-volume work on biology, cowritten with Thomson: Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson, Life: Outlines of General Biology, 2 vols. (London: Williams&Norgate, 1931).
111. James A. Secord, "Knowledge in Transit," Isis, 2004, 95:654- 672;
112. Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History ofScience (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 9;
113. and Jonathan R. Topham, "A View from the Industrial Age," Isis, 2004, 95:431-442, esp. p. 432.