The attempt to express the characteristic
and essential life and thought of a given region in each period upon a
series of maps is in fact the best method of understanding the everyday
map at which we commonly look so unthinkingly.

Much of the preceding, I am assured, must be most unsatisfactory to
those who look at cities only from the standpoint of so many committees
dealing with police, water, finance, and so on; or to those who are
content to view the magnitude, the wealth and the population, the
industries and the manufactures of a great city without considering
whence these have come and whither they are leading; equally
unsatisfactory also, I fear, to those to whom civic dignities and
precedence, or the alternations of winning political colours, appear of
prime importance. I can only hope that some of these may, on
consideration, admit that the points of view I have endeavoured to
outline above may be worth some thought and study as elementary
preliminaries to their own more special and developed interests; and if
the society permit. I hope to approach these more closely in a later
paper.

[Page: 111] The abstract economist or legalist, the moral or political
philosopher may also resent the proposed mode of treatment as an attempt
to materialise sociology by reducing it to concrete terms alone. But I
would reply that observation, so far from excluding interpretation, is
just the very means of preparing for it. It is the observant naturalist,
the travelled zoologist and botanist, who later becomes the productive
writer on evolution. It is the historian who may best venture on into
the philosophy of history;--to think the reverse is to remain in the
pre-scientific order altogether: hence the construction of systems of
abstract and deductive economics, politics or morals, has really been
the last surviving effort of scholasticism. Viewed as Science, Civics is
that branch of Sociology which deals with Cities--their origin and
distribution; their development and structure; their functioning,
internal and external, material and psychological; their evolution,
individual and associated. Viewed again from the practical side, that of
applied science, Civics must develop through experimental endeavour into
the more and more effective Art of enhancing the life of the city and of
advancing its evolution. With the first of these lines of study, the
concretely scientific, our philosophical outlook will not fail to widen;
w