To interpret then our tangle of ideas, both of the city and its
citizens, let us now bring more fully to our transverse valley sections,
and to each occupation separately, the geographical view-point which we
have found of service to elucidate the development of towns and cities
upon its longitudinal [Page: 64] slope. But this is neither more nor
less than the method of Montesquieu, whose classic "Esprit des Lois"
anticipates and initiates so much of that of later writers--Ritter,
Buckle, Taine, or Le Play. Once more then let their common, or rather
their resultant, doctrine be stated in terms expressing the latest of
these more fully than the first. Given the region, its character
determines the nature of the fundamental occupation, and this in turn
essentially determines the type of family. The nature and method of the
occupation must normally determine the mode of its organisation, e.g.,
the rise and character of a specialised directive class, and the nature
of these occupational chiefs as contrasted with the people and with each
other. Similarly, the types of family tend to develop their appropriate
types of institutions, e.g., for justice, guidance, and of course
notably in response to social environment as regards defence or attack.
Thus at this point in fact we seem to be pressing upon the student of
sociology the essential argument of geographical and evolutionary
determinism, in fact inviting him to adopt a view, indeed to commit
himself to a method, which may be not only foreign to his habits, but
repugnant to his whole view of life and history. And if able advocacy of
this determinist view of society for at least the past five generations
has not carried general conviction, why raise so controversial a
suggestion, in the guise too of a method professing to harmonise all
comers? Yet this is advisedly done; and as no one will deny some civil
importance to geographical factors, let patience be granted to examine
this aspect of the city's map and shield, and to get from it what it can
teach, under the present assurance to the philosophic and idealist
critic that his view of other factors, higher and deeper, as supreme in
human life, and therefore in city making, will not be forgotten, nor
excluded from consideration when we come to them. All that is really
insisted upon here is that if anything of naturalistic method of
evolutionary conception is to be permitted at all, we must obviously
proceed from this simple towards the more complex, and so begin with it
here and now.
It is the appropriate slope or steppe, the needful rainfall, that
conditions the growth of grass, this which conditions the presence of
herds or flocks, and these again which determine the very existence of
shepherds. These granted then, not only do the pastoral arts and crafts
arise, but the patriarchal type and family develop, and this not only
with their hospitality and other virtues, with their nomadic tendencies,
at any rate, their unfixed land-tenure, very different from the
peasant's, but their slow and skilful [Page: 65] diplomacy (till the
pasture is bared or grown again, as the negotiator's interests incline).
The patriarch in his venerable age, the caravaneer in his nomadic and
exploring youth, his disciplined maturity, thus naturally develop as
different types of chief and leader; and it is therefore not until this
stage, when all is ready for the entry of Abraham or Job, of Mohammed
the camel-driver, or Paul the tent-maker, that any real controversy can
arise between the determinist and his opponent, between the democratic
and the great-man theories of history, towards which these respectively
incline.[6] And at that stage, may not the controversy stimulate a
fruitful analysis? After all, what is the claim of free-will but to
select among the factors afforded by a given set of circumstances? And
the utmost stretch of determinism to which geography and civics may lead
us obviously cannot prove the negative of this. But whether the
psychologic origins of new ideals be internal to the mind of genius, or
imparted by some external source, is a matter obviously beyond the scope
of either the geographer or the historian of civics to settle. Enough
surely for both controversialists if we use such a means of tabulating
facts as to beg the question for neither view; and still better if we
can present the case of each without injustice to either, nay, to each
with its clearness increased by the sharp edge of contrast. If the
geographical determinist thesis on one hand, and its ethical and
psychological antithesis on the other, can thus clearly be defined and
balanced, their working equilibrium is at hand, even should their
complete synthesis remain beyond us.
[6] A fuller study, upon this method, of the essential origins of
pastoral evolution, and of its characteristic modern developments, will
be found in the writer's "Flower of the Grass," in _The Evergreen_,
Edinburgh and Westminster, 1896. See also "La Science Sociale,"
_passim_, especially in its earlier vols. or its number for Jan. 1905.