TOWARDS A THEORY OF LIFE 1437 



ously imperfectly evolved; yet which may thereby all the more 

 stimulate younger successors to supersede it, by telling their tale 

 of Life anew from their own higher levels, both of personal develop- 

 ment and of evolutionary advance, biological and psychological 

 together. 



DETERMINISM OR FREEDOM FOR GEOGRAPHER AND 

 PHILOSOPHER. — Having one day a visit from these two friends, 

 each long acquainted, though not in studies, we yet introduced them, 

 but the former as "Professor of Philosophy", and the latter as "a 

 possible student of Geography". To them, as to others standing by, 

 this seemed first a slip of the tongue, and next a rather obscure joke; 

 so explanation was needed. For the philosopher, like his fellows, 

 cannot but puzzle between determinism or freedom, in the abstract. 

 Yet has he not his particular bias largely settled for him, sub- 

 consciously, by his own life-experience of the world and the way he 

 has lived in it — in the broad sense then, by his general and social 

 geography, even though he does not realise or readily admit this. The 

 concrete geographer, on the other hand, though seldom if ever giving 

 a thought to that philosophic question in the abstract, concretely 

 knows it; and clearly, however sub-consciously, from his own 

 direct survey of the world. Thus he knows Holland, as originally 

 the worst environment for man in Europe, not simply with its poor 

 moors and sands, but with great rivers yearly flooding its plains, 

 and with sea often breaking in as well : witness its great disaster, so 

 late as the fourteenth century — the in-coming of the Zuyder Zee, 

 drowning towns and villages beyond number. Here was Nature's 

 Determinism, and at its harshest ; yet since for ages the Dutch have 

 been steadily banking in their rivers and dyking out the sea, they 

 now live safely and well, even deep below tide-levels; and are even 

 reclaiming the Zuyder Zee itself for half a million prosperous farm- 

 folk and villagers in the generation after next. Here then is victory 

 of human freedom over Nature's determinism; yet at the price of 

 vigilance, even to levee en masse, when the tocsin warns that a dyke 

 is in risk of breach. From this obvious case of Holland, we may 

 now pass to Switzerland, with its difficult alpine environment, also so 

 well taken in hand by man; and thence to any and every country, 

 as circumstances — or choice — may direct. Social Geography, as in 

 Elisee and Paul Reclus's L' Homme et la Terre, and other works of 

 social geographers, here affords suggestive material. Yet it is most 

 educative also to make our own surveys, with photographs and 

 pictures, maps, plans, and graphic outlines; and next also such 

 interpretative chartings as we may. We thus see that the geographer 

 (however much like Monsieur Jourdain as regards conscious philo- 

 sophy) has the sounder view of this great old philosophic con- 

 troversy; since he is now at once concrete and relativist, and with 



