The soil on which a people dwell, the air they breathe, the mountains and seas by which they are surrounded, the skies that overshadow them,--all these exert a powerful influence on their pursuits, their habits, their institutions, their sentiments, and their ideas. So that could we clearly group, and fully grasp all the characteristics of a region--its position, configuration, climate, scenery, and natural products, we could, with tolerable accuracy, determine what are the characteristics of the people who inhabit it. A comprehensive knowledge of the physical geography of any country will therefore aid us materially in elucidating the natural history, and, to some extent, the moral history of its population. "History does not stand outside of nature, but in her very heart, so that the historian only grasps a people's character with true precision when he keeps in full view its geographical position, and the influences which its surroundings have wrought upon it." [2]
Footnote 1: [ (return) ] Niebuhr's "Lectures on Ethnography and Geography," p. 91.
[Footnote 2: ][ (return) ] Ritter's "Geographical Studies," p. 34.
It is, however, of the utmost consequence the reader should understand that there are two widely different methods of treating this deeply interesting subject--methods which proceed on fundamentally opposite views of man and of nature. One method is that pursued by Buckle in his "History of Civilization in England." The tendency of his work is the assertion of the supremacy of material conditions over the development of human history, and indeed of every individual mind. Here man is purely passive in the hands of nature. Exterior conditions are the chief, if not the only causes of man's intellectual and social development. So that, such a climate and soil, such aspects of nature and local circumstances being given, such a nation necessarily follows. [3] The other method is that of Carl Ritter, Arnold Guyot, and Cousin. [4] These take account of the freedom of the human will, and the power of man to control and modify the forces of nature. They also take account of the original constitution of man, and the primitive type of nations; and they allow for results arising from the mutual conflict of geographical conditions. And they, especially, recognize the agency of a Divine Providence controlling those forces in nature by which the configuration of the earth's surface is determined, and the distribution of its oceans, continents, and islands is secured; and a providence, also, directing the dispersions and migrations of nations--determining the times of each nation's existence, and fixing the geographical bounds of their habitation, all in view of the moral history and spiritual development of the race,--"that they may feel after, and find the living God." The relation of man and nature is not, in their estimation, a relation of cause and effect. It is a relation of adjustment, of harmony, and of reciprocal action and reaction. "Man is not"--says Cousin--"an effect, and nature the cause, but there is between man and nature a manifest harmony of general laws."... "Man and nature are two great effects which, coming from the same cause, bear the same characteristics; so that the earth, and he who inhabits it, man and nature, are in perfect harmony." [5] God has created both man and the universe, and he has established between them a striking harmony. The earth was made for man; not simply to supply his physical wants, but also to minister to his intellectual and moral development. The earth is not a mere dwelling-place of nations, but a school-house, in which God himself is superintending the education of the race. Hence we must not only study the events of history in their chronological order, but we must study the earth itself as the theatre of history. A knowledge of all the circumstances, both physical and moral, in the midst of which events take place, is absolutely necessary to a right judgment of the events themselves. And we can only elucidate properly the character of the actors by a careful study of all their geographical and ethological conditions.
[Footnote 3: ][ (return) ] See chap. ii. "History of Civilization."
[Footnote 4: ][ (return) ] Ritter's "Geographical Studies;" Guyot's "Earth and Man;" Cousin's "History of Philosophy," lec. vii., viii., ix.
[Footnote 5: ][ (return) ] Lectures, vol. i. pp. 162, 169.
It will be readily perceived that, in attempting to estimate the influence which exterior conditions exert in the determination of national character, we encounter peculiar difficulties. We can not in these studies expect the precision and accuracy which is attained in the mathematical, or the purely physical sciences. We possess no control over the "materiel" of our inquiry; we have no power of placing it in new conditions, and submitting it to the test of new experiments, as in the physical sciences. National character is a complex result--a product of the action and reaction of primary and secondary causes. It is a conjoint effect of the action of the primitive elements and laws originally implanted in humanity by the Creator, of the free causality and self-determining power of man, and of all the conditions, permanent and accidental, within which the national life has been developed. And in cases where physical and moral causes are blended, and reciprocally conditioned and modified in their operation;--where primary results undergo endless modifications from the influence of surrounding circumstances, and the reaction of social and political institutions;--and where each individual of the great aggregate wields a causal power that obeys no specific law, and by his own inherent power sets in motion new trains of causes which can not be reduced to statistics, we grant that we are in possession of no instrument of exact analysis by which the complex phenomena of national character may be reduced to primitive elements. All that we can hope is, to ascertain, by psychological analysis, what are the fundamental ideas and laws of humanity; to grasp the exterior conditions which are, on all hands, recognized as exerting a powerful influence upon national character; to watch, under these lights, the manifestations of human nature on the theatre of history, and then apply the principles of a sound historic criticism to the recorded opinions of contemporaneous historians and their immediate successors. In this manner we may expect, at least, to approximate to a true judgment of history.
There are unquestionably fundamental powers and laws in human nature which have their development in the course of history. There are certain primitive ideas, imbedded in the constitution of each individual mind, which are revealed in the universal consciousness of our race, under the conditions of experience--the exterior conditions of physical nature and human society. Such are the ideas of cause and substance; of unity and infinity, which govern all the processes of discursive thought, and lead us to the recognition of Being in se;--such the ideas of right, of duty, of accountability, and of retribution, which regulate all the conceptions we form of our relations to all other moral beings, and constitute morality;--such the ideas of order, of proportion, and of harmony, which preside in the realms of art, and constitute the beau-ideal of esthetics;--such the ideas of God, the soul, and immortality, which rule in the domains of religion, and determine man a religious being. These constitute the identity of human nature under all circumstances; these characterize humanity in all conditions. Like permanent germs in vegetable life, always producing the same species of plants; or like fundamental types in the animal kingdom, securing the same homologous structures in all classes and orders; so these fundamental ideas in human nature constitute its sameness and unity, under all the varying conditions of life and society. The acorn must produce an oak, and nothing else. The grain of wheat must always produce its kind. The offspring of man must always bear his image, and always exhibit the same fundamental characteristics, not only in his corporeal nature, but also in his mental constitution.
But the germination of every seed depends on conditions ab extra, and all germs are modified, in their development, by geographical and climatal surroundings. The development of the acorn into a mature and perfect oak greatly depends on the exterior conditions of soil, and moisture, light, and heat. By these it may be rendered luxuriant in its growth, or it may be stunted in its growth. It may barely exist under one class of conditions, or it may perish under another. The Brassica oleracea, in its native habitat on the shore of the sea, is a bitter plant with wavy sea-green leaves; in the cultivated garden it is the cauliflower. The single rose, under altered conditions, becomes a double rose; and creepers rear their stalks and stand erect. Plants, which in a cold climate are annuals, become perennial when transported to the torrid zone. [6] And so human nature, fundamentally the same under all circumstances, may be greatly modified, both physically and mentally, by geographical, social, and political conditions. The corporeal nature of man--his complexion, his physiognomy, his stature; the intellectual nature of man--his religious, ethical, and esthetical ideas are all modified by his surroundings. These modifications, of which all men dwelling in the same geographical regions, and under the same social and political institutions, partake, constitute the individuality of nations. Thus, whilst there is a fundamental basis of unity in the corporeal and spiritual nature of man, the causes of diversity are to be sought in the circumstances in which tribes and nations are placed in the overruling providence of God.