The preceding view is, as yet, too purely determinist.  The due place of ideals, individual and corporate, in their reaction upon the function and the structure of the city, and even upon its material environment, has next to be recognised.  For where the town merely makes and fixes its industry and makes its corresponding schools, where its habits and customs become its laws, even its morality, the community, as we have just seen, sinks into routine, and therefore decay.  To prevent this a twofold process of thought is ever necessary, critical and constructive.  What are these?  On the one hand, a continual and critical selection among the ideas derived from experience, and the formulation of these as Ideals:  and further, the organisation of these into a larger and larger whole of thought; in fact, a Synthesis of a new kind.  This critical spirit it is which produced the prophets of Israel, the questioning of Socrates, and so on, to the journalistic and other criticism of life to-day.  The corresponding constructive endeavour is now no mere School of traditional learning or of useful information.  It is one of science in a new and reorganised sense; one of philosophy also, one of ideals above all.

As from the Schools of the Law, as over against these, arise the prophets, so from the technical and applied sciences, the descriptive natural sciences, should arise the scientific thinkers, reinterpreting each his field of knowledge and giving us the pure sciences—­pure geometry henceforth contrasted with mere land surveying, morphology with mere anatomy, and so on; while instead of the mere concrete encyclopaedia from Pliny or Gesner to Diderot or Chambers, vast subjective reorganisations of knowledge, philosophic systems, now appear.  Similarly, the mere observations of the senses and their records in memory become transformed into the images of the poet, the imagery too of the artist, for art proper is only thus born.  That mere imitation of nature, which so commonly in the graphic arts (though happily but rarely in music) has been mistaken for [Page:  84] art, thus modestly returns to its proper place—­that of the iconography of descriptive science.

Thus from the Schools of all kinds of knowledge, past and present, we pass into the no less varied Cloisters of contemplation, meditation, imagination.  With the historian we might explore the Cloisters of the past, built at one time from the current ideals of the Good, at another of the True, at another of the Beautiful; indeed, in widely varying measures and proportions from all of these.  How far each of these now expresses the present, how far it may yet serve the future, is obviously a question of questions, yet for that very reason one exceeding our present limits.  Enough if in city life the historic place of what is here generalised under this antique name of Cloister be here recognised; and in some measure the actual need, the potential place be recognised also.  Here is the need and use, beyond the fundamental