THE URBAN COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE 771 



rural institution; it belongs to the urban community not because 

 this is a city but a community. But no other example demon- 

 strates so clearly that the solution of the cultural problems of the 

 community is really reached except in the urban communities. Also 

 in all other points of this Department (23) the enormous urban 

 influence becomes manifest. The educational theories originated in 

 cities. The two great founders of modern pedagogy, Rousseau 

 and Festalozzi, have sprung from cities. The universities can, 

 in their modern, organization, be traced back, in Europe as well as 

 in America, to the model established by Bologna and Paris, centres 

 of urban culture. The numerous foundations of universities in the 

 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were made exclusively in cities; 

 they represented the reaction against the older, monastic, world- 

 shunning learnedness, as also only those monastic orders took hold 

 of them, which in the two preceding centuries had sought their seats 

 not in rural loneliness, but in the cities, and were supported there 

 by the people, the beggar monks, the mendicant friars. 



If we call the cities centres of culture, we want to express, of 

 course, that they shall not wish to retain their acquired possession of 

 culture. The city acquires cultural treasures, but only in order to let 

 them laiiate and in order to begin, thereupon, the work again on 

 new materials. Its educational work is a constant renunciation of 

 acquired privileges. This is shown especially clearly in America in 

 the history of the library movement. This movement has begun 

 especially in the cities. First it was the ambition of each city to 

 surpass the country by the possession of a public library, accessible 

 to everybody. To-day it is the ambition of the cities to induce the 

 country to follow their example. On my wanderings through small 

 towns on the coast of Massachusetts I have visited, in each place, the 

 public libraries, such as in no European state have been carried oat 

 into the villages. 



The country can, however, claim for itself a certain superiority 

 in religious culture (Department 24), much rather than in education. 

 The development of Buddhism proves that rural solitude and contem- 

 plation are able to imprint their stamp upon great world religions. 

 But Christianity shows the influence of urban culture. Though the 

 origin of Christianity may be found in the synagogue of Capernaum, 

 a little community, almost more rural than term-like, that was so 

 poor that it had to accept its house of worship as the donation of 

 the foreign captain, yet the work of the founder of this religion 

 attained to its penetrating significance only when He stepped upon 

 the soil of the city. And this fact lives still in tradition so power- 

 fully that it is scarcely comprehended that Christ passed but few 

 days in Jerusalem. The founder of the Mohammedan religion was 

 a merchant, and even in the oldest doctrines of Islam the interest 



