96 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



Engels and Marx, or historians such as Buckle and Meyer — the two chief 

 contributions have come from the school of thought associated with the 

 name of Ratzel and that associated with the name of Vidal de la Blache. 

 Many English students of geography who may not have read the 

 Anthropogeographie and the Politische Geographie of Ratzel are yet 

 acquainted with the general tendencies and the standpoint of his school 

 through the packed pages of Miss E. C. Semple's Influences of Geographical 

 Environment, which is based upon his principles, and of the same author's 

 American History and its Geographic Conditions, where we see their 

 historical application. All, it is to be hoped, have studied Vidal de la 

 Blache's conception of human geography as the master himself developed 

 it in his incomparable Tableau de la Geographie de la France and in some 

 of the great series of regional monographs written by his disciples of the 

 French school. 



' Determinism ' and ' Possibilism ' are the respective labels which have 

 been attached to the two schools, and although labels, here as elsewhere, 

 are liable to mislead, they sufficiently indicate a fundamentally different 

 emphasis and attitude between the two in their treatment of the relation- 

 ship of human societies to their natural environments. In the first or 

 Ratzelian School the main emphasis is undoubtedly on the control of 

 human activities by natural conditions, on the limitations which these 

 impose, on the permanency of the stage, ' always,' as Ratzel insisted, 

 ' the same and always situated at the same point in space,' and of the 

 influences which it exerts, on the inevitability of particular developments, 

 given a certain milieu. This attitude is even more pronounced in the 

 works of some of the disciples of that other school of French human 

 geographers or, as it is perhaps better to call them, geographical 

 sociologists, who drew their inspiration from Le Play's Les Ouvriers 

 Europeens, although Le Play himself cannot be identified with all their 

 views. Geographical ' determinism ' reaches its culmination in the 

 Comment la Route cr'ee le Type Social of Demolins, who maintains that if 

 history were to begin all over again it must in all essentials follow the 

 same lines, given the same setting of the stage. Apart from the question 

 of bias on the compelling power of physical circumstances, a criticism 

 which has been levelled, as I think rightly, against the Ratzelian School, 

 is that it is excessively dogmatic, and that, notwithstanding the vast 

 amount of material which Ratzel himself and many of his disciples have 

 sifted and classified with great skill, we are far as yet from having the data 

 necessary for many of the big generalisations which they make. 



The same criticism can certainly not be brought against Vidal de la 

 Blache and his followers, whose discussions of these issues, while often 

 extremely suggestive and illuminating, are rarely dogmatic or final in 

 their conclusions or implications. The master himself did indeed deal in 

 his larger works with what may justifiably be called ' principles ' of human 

 geography, but his teaching was always that the larger generalisations 

 could only gradually emerge from a series of detailed and exact regional 

 studies, and we shall all admit, I think, that his disciples have been very 

 true to his precepts. The conception appears in the approach and particu- 

 larly in the form even of the more ambitious work of Brunhes which bears 

 the title La Geographie Humaine. It is hardly possible in a few sentences 



