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.

D—­NEED OF ABSTRACT METHOD FOR NOTATION AND FOR INTERPRETATION

Not only such general geographical studies, but such social interpretations as those above indicated have long been in progress:  witness the labours of whole schools of historians and critics, among whom Montsquieu and his immediate following, or in more recent times Buckle and Taine, are but the most prominent; witness the works of geographers like Humboldt, Ritter, Reclus, or of developmental technologists like Boucher de Perthes and regional economists like Le Play.  The main lines of a concrete and evolutionary sociology (or at [Page:  66] least sociography) have thus been laid down for us; but the task now before us, in our time, in such a society as this—­and indeed in such a paper as the present one—­its that of extracting from all this general teaching its essential scientific method, one everywhere latent and implicit, but nowhere fully explicit, or at least adequately systematised.