1390 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



has often been far from an enviable or esteemed one, and his con- 

 dition now is by no means so bad as it too often has been, the 

 urban low estimate of his intelligence seems to have reached its 

 climax in our own day. Witness not simply the popular cockney 

 estimate of "Hodge" — and there are cockneys in every city — but 

 even the extreme one — of that would-be most democratic and 

 certainly most proletarian of all influential writers, Karl Marx, for 

 whom the peasant "incarnates barbarism in modern society." And 

 it is manifest in Russia that this view has been maintained in its 

 proletarian doctrine and regime. For in our industrial age, physical 

 sciences and machine processes have educative value so far as they 

 go, while to this peasants largely remain ignorant, if not refractory. 

 Yet though the townsman can thus so far justify his superiority, 

 he, in his turn, is seldom less ignorant of the peasant's world, of 

 life and growth, and no less refractory to them; since usually con- 

 fined to the circle of ideas which his leaders in industry, commerce, 

 and finance commonly possess; or easily satisfied with the well- 

 expressed abstractions of his political, legal, economic, and other 

 leaders — ^when not, as often most of all, preferring the leisure and 

 pleasures of his city; and these also increasingly attract the young 

 rustic to come to town. Again, the educated and thinking townsmen 

 are many, in comparison with those of the rural world; and its 

 thought has been, and still too commonly is, left out, between that 

 of physical science and its applications on the one hand, and that 

 of the traditional "humanities" on the other. So, when the thinking 

 rustics, like even Darwin and Wallace, bring their ideas to town, 

 the townsfolk first doubt their vital contribution to science, and 

 next reduce it to terms of their own competitive system. That 

 typical Jura-peasant-thinker, Pasteur, had a hard task to teach 

 what he had learned from tan-^^ard and cottage, with his 

 cleaning of its milk and bread, its wine and beer, its flesh-food, and 

 so on, even to his abating of the rural tragedy of the mad dog; and 

 he could only do all this effectively from his city vantage-point ; 

 there taken simply for chemist, instead of the profound unraveller 

 of life's secrets that he was. His greatest disciple, Lister, albeit 

 fundamentally a good "Shepherd, with the tar-box by his side", 

 needed also to be surgeon and professor in the city— that is, barber, 

 and up to the record "clean shave" — to gain slow and often reluctant 

 acceptance, even from his profession. Here, however, such examples 

 illustrate that full and fertile combination and interaction of the 

 urban with the rural thought, which is, of course, the ideal: what 

 we complain of is that in its general thinking, the urban world 

 remains still too little affected by the rural. Hence that claim for 

 our studies of life, and this in its widest senses, organic and psycho- 

 logic, social and ethical, which more or less runs through this 

 volume — ^happily also through many others, yet not enough — that 



