ABSTRACT
GEDDES’ ENTHUSIASM WAS TO ENSURE THAT FROM THE earliest moment of his return to Edinburgh at the end of 1879 he was to pursue his interests in the social sciences on a voluntary basis. His problem was that his biological viewpoint, his use of his ‘thinking machines’, and his belief that sociology was a discipline which must grow through an interaction of thought and action, made him an outsider in the debate about sociological studies. He was to spend the decade of the 1880s developing his ideas and testing them in a specific context, the city of Edinburgh. In 1880 he was 26 years old and his energies were by no means absorbed by the work he was able to get as a demonstrator in zoology and lecturer in natural history at the School of Medicine. He was thus able to undertake voluntary social work in his spare time. He was to enter this field at a time when social questions were being debated by students everywhere. It was in the 1880s that Geddes’ hero, Ruskin, was Slade Professor of Art at Oxford, teaching his students, not the finer points of aesthetics, but the nobility of manual labour and the ideal of citizenship.
