Such diagrammatic presentments, while of course primarily for the purpose of clear expression and comparison, are also frequently suggestive—by "inspection," as geometers say—of relations not previously noticed. In both ways, we may see more clearly how prevalent ideas and doctrines have arisen as "reflections upon" the life of action, and even account for their qualities and their defects—their partial truth or their corresponding inadequacy, according to our own appreciative or depreciative standpoint. Thus as regards "People," in the first column we see expressed briefly how to (a) the individual life, with the corresponding vivid interest in biography, corresponds the "great man theory" of history. Conversely with (b) alone is associated the insistance upon institutional developments as the main factor. Passing to the middle column, that of "Affairs," we may note in connection with (b) say the rise of statistics in association with the needs of war, a point connected with its too empiric character; or note again, a too common converse weakness of economic theory, its inadequate inductive verification. Or finally, in the column of "Place," the long weakness of geography as an educational subject, yet is periodic renewal upon the field of war, is indicated. We might in fact continue such a comparison of the existing world of action and of ideas, into all the schools, those of thought and practice, no less than those of formal instruction; and thus we should more and more clearly unravel how their complexity and entanglement, their frequent oppositions and contradictions are related to the various and warring elements of the manifold "Town" life from which they derive and survive. Such a fuller discussion, however, would too long delay the immediate problem—that of understanding "Town" and its "School" in their origins and simplest relations.
F—PROPOSED METHODICAL ANALYSIS
(1) THE TOWN
More fully to understand this two-fold development of Town and School we have first of all apparently to run counter to the preceding popular view, which is here, as in so many cases, the precise opposite of that reached from the side of science. This, as we have already so fully insisted, must set out with geography, thus literally replacing People and Affairs in our scheme above.
Starting then once more with the simple biological formula:
ENVIRONMENT ... CONDITIONS ... ORGANISM
this has but to be applied and defined by the social geographer to become
REGION ... OCCUPATION ... FAMILY-type and Developments
which summarises precisely that doctrine of Montesquieu and his successors already insisted on. Again, in but slight variation from Le Play's simplest phrasing ("Lieu, travail, famille") we have
PLACE ... WORK ... FOLK