Science Quote by Patrick Geddes

Geddes is smuggling a whole theory of society into a sentence that sounds almost politely observational. “Social formation” is his deliberately broad unit: not just classes or institutions, but guilds, neighborhoods, families, professions, movements - any organized way people live together. The point is architectural. Society isn’t steered only from parliaments or pulpits; it’s built, day after day, by work, infrastructure, habits, and the quiet logistics of getting on with life.

The phrase “material activities” carries the scientist’s bias toward the tangible: labor, housing, transport, sanitation, the everyday metabolism of a city. For Geddes, those aren’t background conditions to politics; they are politics, because they “exert influence upon the civic whole.” He’s arguing against the fantasy that the “civic” is a clean, elevated sphere of laws and speeches. The civic is a composite, shaped from below by how people actually make and maintain life.

Then he pivots: “ideas and ideals” also “win” their “place and power.” That verb matters. Ideas don’t float in on their own merit; they compete, they’re fought for, they get institutionalized - in schools, planning offices, museums, unions, churches, newspapers. Subtext: culture is not decoration, it’s an engine; but it only becomes force when it finds a material footing.

Contextually, this is classic Geddes: a late-19th/early-20th century urban thinker trying to fuse biology, sociology, and city planning. It’s a rebuke to top-down reform and a warning to reformers: if you ignore the lived machinery of a place, your ideals stay weightless.