TOWARDS A THEORY OF LIFE X403 



piire Economist, long and still so commonly apart from our every- 

 day Place and Folk, how can his promised and professed stud}?- of 

 Work be a real and working one? Is it not thus that he so coldly 

 imagines his essential Place as "the Market," and abstractionalises 

 Work into "Production and Exchange", and these regulated by an 

 abstract Money-notation, in oscillations we cannot follow, nor 

 sometimes he either; and all ruled by rival deities of "Supply and 

 Demand". And that he also takes so little note of Folk, even abstract- 

 ing the concrete and materially indispensable work-Folk, into Labour 

 and Capital? Hence surely it is that to the lay mind his science 

 has so long appeared the dismal one. Yet as human ecology, of 

 "Man and his Work" — is it not the most generally interesting of all? 

 So let us leave now for a little these three sciences, thus at their 

 coldest, since so far breaking up our conception of Life. We shall 

 soon see that its notation will help us to study them at their 

 best, when re-incorporated into the human Ufe from which they 

 each and all arose, and to which each, at its living best, returns. 

 For with this fully biological outlook, geography and ecology, 

 anthropology and evolution, are all at one in the understanding of 

 Place, Work and People, in living interaction, psychological as well. 

 And yet these are physical, biological, and social too. Life is the 

 unity; its full study is synthetic; its analyses are but temporary 

 divisions of labour, of which the results have ever to be incorporated 

 into our understanding of Life, and thus into its graphically summar- 

 ised chartings. 



LIFE-DIAGRAM IN DEVELOPMENT.— Return, then, to our life 

 diagram. Let us now for further clearness dot in two horizontal 

 lines abo\e and below Work. This now ninefold diagram will be 

 easily retained as that of our childhood's "noughts and crosses", 

 though the game on it is different. Three squares are occupied; but 

 six are empty. How are we to fill them? The diagram thus begins 

 to ask us questions, which demand thought, and soon elicit reply. It 

 is thus like an abacus, or other helpful "thinking-machine". Begin, 

 say, with Place and Folk : what ideas do their combinations afford 

 when we qualify each by the other? Plainly fk-Pl and pl-Fk; i.e. 

 folk-Place, and place-Folk, respectively. In familiar language we 

 say Home and home- Folks: so our uninviting-looking notation 

 already expresses the two earliest and most familiar ideas of our 

 lives; and with their numberless connotations, even of simplest 

 song — "Way down upon the old plantation, there are the old folks 

 at home"; and many others each may recall. Enough to illustrate, 

 and from the very first, how notations and rhythms, mathematics 

 and music, intellect and emotion, are nearer than they seem, when 

 unified in Life. 



Next let us mutually relate Place and Work; obviously as place- 



