REGIONAL SURVEYS.

The article describes the function of the regional surveys of the Regional Association. The survey of the past and possible growth of human experience in the region with which we are or can be in contact is called a regional survey. It is very important to distinguish it at the outset from that kind of neighborhood study which treats the neighborhood as a selection from life rather than as a specimen of life. It is said that a regional survey may begin anyhow, anywhere, and this is true in a sense; true is it especially that the surveyor should not begin by defining his region. It is claimed that this type of study would enforce attention to scientific facts around us, and so would promote a scientific discipline related to life as well as to the laboratory. It would provide also a training in humanism that would guard against the mistake so current in the last hundred years, the mistake of setting man and environment against one another in necessary opposition when they are really so deeply interpenetrating and so incomplete apart from one another. A regional survey will thus not only trace out with maps, figures, statistics and notes, the chief phases of the growth of human experience in a region It will also dig back into all the sciences which can make contributions to accurate knowledge of the conditions of that growth of experience. It will further study very specially the human types and their geographical and also their social distributions. But it will go further, and will endeavor to link up all the facts thus gathered to make them a guide for the future. And it will make them a guide not so much towards a quantitative financial goal as towards the enrichment of human experience and the consequent enhancement of its spiritual expression.