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followers of Darwin ‘are indeed to draw full consequences from their greatest law – that organism is made by function and environment’, they must recognise – as Geddes claimed Ruskin had done – that ‘man, if he is to remain healthy and become civilised […] must take especial heed of his environment’ (Geddes, 1884, 35). Geddes rubbished the idea that in the ‘sentiment versus science’ debate, Ruskin was on the (wrong) side of sentiment’. Instead, ‘his aesthetic economics was, because of its recognition of the lessons of function-environment, more scientific than the abstractions of mainstream economists’, who fall prey to ‘sheer blindness to the actual facts of human and social life’ and produce a metaphysical mish-mash of ideas ‘frozen into dismal and repellent form by a theory of moral sentiments which assumed moral temperature at its absolute zero’ (Geddes, 1884, p. 36). I am indebted to Professor Jim Spates for the listing of Ruskin’s practical proposals. The list appears in ‘Why Ruskin?’, a paper given on February 23, 2001 as part of the Faculty Lunch Presentation series at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York; and now forthcoming in The Friends of Brantwood Newsletter, June 2009.
References Armytage, W. H. G.. 1961. Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England 1560 – 1960. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Brooks, Michael W.. 1989. John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson. Claiborne, Jay Wood. 1969. ‘Two Secretaries: The Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Augustus Howell and the Rev. Richard St. John Tyrwhitt’. Ph.D. diss, University of Texas at Austin. Cook. E. T. and Wedderburn, Alexander, eds. 1903-12, 39 vols. The Library Edition of John Ruskin’s Works. London: George Allen. Cosgrove, Dennis. 1995. ‘Mappa Mundi, anima mundi: imaginative mapping and environmental representation’. In Ruskin and Environment, ed. by Michael Wheeler. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Daniels, Stephen and Cosgrove, Dennis (eds.). 1988. The Iconography of Landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments - (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography; 9). Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Douglas. 1988. ‘The Evocative Symbolism of Trees’. In Daniels and Cosgrove. Garbett, Edward Lacy. 1850. Rudimentary Treatise on the Principles of Design in Architecture. London: John Weale, 1850. Geddes, Patrick. 1884. John Ruskin, Economist. Edinburgh: William Brown,1884. Granger, Frank, trans. 1931. Vitruvius, De Architectura,. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins, 1995. Sherburne, J. C. 1972. John Ruskin, or Ambiguities of Abundance: A Study in Social and Economic Criticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Spates, James. 2001. ‘Why Ruskin?’ (February 23, 2001, Faculty Lunch Presentation series at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York). Surtees, Victoria (ed.). 1979. Reflections of a Lifetime; John Ruskin’s Letters to Pauline Trevelyan, 18481866. London: Allen and Unwin. Warnke, Martin. 1994. Political Landscape: the Art History of Nature. London: Reaktion Books. Williams, Raymond. 1982. Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell. London: The Hogarth Press.