"Happily there is one figure whose life-interests fully represent the forces I have been describing: one whose conscious philosophy reached a fuller stage of formulation than either Emerson or Whitman: one whose actual life, coming later, faced more fully the corruptions and devitalizations of the present scene. Obscure in his own lifetime, hardly better known today, a dozen years after his death, he incarnated the organic and made an orderly constellation of its vitalities. Patrick Geddes was his name. What he was, what he stood for, what he pointed toward will become increasingly important as the world grows to understand both his philosophy and his example. Lincoln, observing Whitman striding past a White House window, is reported to have said: There is a man. So one who followed the darting glance and eager footsteps of Geddes, rambling through a city, or wandering with an armful of plants along a country road, might have said: There goes one enriched and energized and sensitized by the life-force he has studied so fervently: his is the touch that will make the dry wand burgeon. Such a man has worshiped the burning bush and beheld from afar the Promised Land."
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Sociologists from ScotlandBiologists from ScotlandPhilanthropists from ScotlandBotanists from ScotlandGeographers from Scotland
Original Language: English
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Lewis Mumford, The Condition of Man (1944), p. 382
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Patrick_Geddes
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Patrick Geddes
Sir FRSE (2 October 1854 – 17 April 1932) was a Scottish biologist, sociologist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning and sociology.
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