Condensing now this lengthy, yet compressed and abbreviated series of
analyses into a single page of summary, we may briefly define the main
aspects and departments of civics from the present point of view. First
then, comes the study of civics as fundamentally (and ever anew) an
orderly development--at once geographic, economic, and anthropologic in
its nature--a survey of place, work, and folk--and these not merely or
mainly as broken up into the fine dust of censuses and statistics, nor
even of the three too separate sciences above named, but as a living
unity, the human hive, the Town.
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.