The life and work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose / by Patrick Geddes.

  • Geddes, Patrick, Sir, 1854-1932.
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The life and work of Sir Jagadis C. Bose / by Patrick Geddes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    which American travellers have been taking home these two generations, would their present virtual reincorpora¬ tion with Western and Mediterranean Europe have been possible ? The reunion of Europe, then, can most strongly, even if slowly, be made through the education of travel. Not merely in the recent tourist spirit, at least in the cruder forms; but in that combining of the best . of modern cultural travel with something of the old spirit of pilgrimage which that helps effectively to renew. The Brownings and Ruskin in Italy were examples of this union in their day : why not renew it more widely ? As Europeans grow more tolerant and more sympathetic, like the Indian travellers we have been following, our scheme of educational travel will grow and spread into fuller pilgrimages, which should be on the Indian scale —throughout Baltic and Mediterranean lands alike, from Scandinavia to Spain, and thence to Greece and beyond. Why not east and west, from Russia to Ireland, indeed to America as well ?—with ever increasing appreciation of all their regional and civic interests, the natural, the spiritual and the temporal together, and in aspects historic, actual and incipient. Does this seem ‘ Utopian ? It is after all but what the tourist and the wandering nature- lover, the art-student, and the historian have long been doing, and what the regional agriculturist and town planner are now in their turn doing. To-day it lies with re-education, with reconstruction, and with re-religion as well, to organise all these contacts more fully. In view of the real and profound unity and all but universal tolerance, in spite of many imperfections and drawbacks, the recovery of some such measures of spiritual unity as her children feel cannot be unattainable in the West, the more since this once was a living force in the old days of Christendom—a force which, so far from having lost its old appeals, is indeed for ever reviving. Not only is the cultural and spiritual value of a large