Man’s Intellect and Physical Environment
Auguste Comte, who “was very slightly affected by German thought,” and who, in early youth, came under the influence of the philosophy that had become prevalent in France before the Revolution, “read the works of most of its leading representatives. He accepted its cardinal principle that ‘thought depends on sense, or, more broadly, on the environment.’”[[270]]
Adolf Bastian worked unceasingly “among the conceptions of the Naturvölker—the ‘cryptograms of mankind,’ as he called them—..., demonstrating first the surprising uniformity of outlook on the part of the more primitive peoples, and secondly the correlation of differences of conceptions with differences in material surroundings, varying with geographical conditions. This second doctrine he elaborated in his Zur Lehre von den geographischen Provinzen, in 1886.”[[271]]
Physiology and statistics “show that most human functions are subject to the influence of heat (Lombroso, ‘Pensiero e Meteore,’ Milan, 1878). It is to be expected, then, that excessive heat will have its effect upon the human mind.”[[272]]
The physiographer, “... looking back over the history of life upon the earth’s surface, ... is forced to the conclusion that its highest estate embodied in the moral and intellectual qualities of man has been, in the main, secured by the geographic variations which have slowly developed through the geological ages.”[[273]]
Benno Erdmann, in his “Gedächtnisrede auf Wilhelm Dilthey,” observes that in ripe old age Dilthey in the last of his larger works declared that man finds himself determined by the physical world in which mental occurrences appear only as interpolations.[[274]]
Religion and Physical Milieu
As physical characteristics “are in the main the result of environment, social institutions and religious ideas are no less the product of that environment.... We might just as well ask the Ethiopian to change his skin as to change radically his social and religious ideas. It has been shown by experience that Christianity can make but little headway amongst many peoples in Africa or Asia, where on the other hand Muhammadanism has made and is steadily making progress, ... This is probably due to the fact that Muhammadanism is a religion evolved ... in latitudes bordering on the aboriginal races of Africa and Asia, and that it is far more akin in its social ideas to those of the Negro or Malay than are those of Christianity, ...”[[275]]
Ernest Renan “points out that the desert is monotheistic, its uniformity suggesting a belief in the unity of God.... In his Seas and Skies in Many Latitudes (London, 1888, pp. 42–43), Abercromby gives two maps, showing respectively the areas of Mohammedanism and the districts in Asia and Africa with a mean annual rainfall of less than ten inches. The maps are strikingly similar. The author adds: ‘Whether this distribution of a great creed is the result of chance, or of some deep connection between the tenets of that religion and climatic influences, I can not say;—but still the relation is so remarkable that I have thought it well to bring the matter forward.’”[[276]]