Contemporary science, with its retrospective inquiries into origins in the past, its everyday observation of the present, is apt practically to overlook that the highest criterion and achievement of science is not to decipher the past, nor record the present, not even to interpret both.  It is to foresee:  only thus can it subserve action, of which the present task ever lies towards the future, since it is for this that we have to provide.  Why then should not Comte’s famous aphorism—­“Voir pour prevoir, prevoir pour pourvoir,” become applicable in our civic studies no less than in the general social and political fields to [Page:  104] which he applied it?  In navigation or engineering, in agriculture or hygiene, prevision and provision alike are ever increasing; yet these are no mere combinations of the preliminary sciences and the fundamental occupations, but obviously contain very large social elements.

It is proverbially safe to prophesy when one knows; and it is but this safe prediction which we make every day of child or bud, where we can hardly fail to see the growing man, the coming flower.  Yet do not most people practically forget that even now, in mid-winter, next summer’s leaves are already waiting, nay, that they were conceived nine months ago?  That they thus grow in small, commonly unnoticed beginnings, and lie in bud for a period twice as long as the summer of their adult and manifest life, is yet a fact, and one to which the social analogies are many and worth considering.

While recognising, then, the immense importance of the historic element of our heritage, renaissance and mediaeval, classic and earlier; recognising also the predominance of contemporary forces and ideas, industrial and liberal, imperial and bureaucratic, financial and journalistic, can we not seek also, hidden under all these leaves, for those of the still-but-developing bud, which next season must be so much more important than they are to day?  It is a commonplace, yet mainly of educational meetings, to note that the next generation is now at school; but how seldom do we recognise its pioneers, albeit already among our own contemporaries?  At any rate we may see here and there that their leaven is already at work.

In this respect, cities greatly differ—­one is far more initiative than another.  In the previous paper (vol.  I, p. 109), we saw how individuals, edifices, institutions, might represent all past phases; these, therefore, often predominate in different cities sufficiently to give its essential stamp.  Why then should we not make a further survey and seek to see something of the cities of the future; though we may have to look for these in quarters where at first sight there may seem as yet scanty promise of flower?

[Page:  105] To recall an instance employed above, probably every member of this Society is old enough to remember incredulous questionings of whether any good thing could come out of Battersea.  Again, how few, even in America, much less than in Europe, a few years ago, forsaw the rapid growth of those culture-elements in St. Louis, of which the recent World-Exposition will not have been the only outcome?