E.—GEOGRAPHY 101 
flow and abundance of life, he writes, ‘ Brazil is marked above all the other 
countries of the earth. But, amid this pomp and splendour of nature, 
no place is left for man. He is reduced to insignificance by the majesty 
with which he is surrounded’; and so on. Finally we reach an argu- 
ment which is independent of any purely literary charm; it comes when 
Buckle leaves climate, soil and food, and speculates on man’s sensitiveness 
to what he calls the aspects of nature. They fall into two categories, 
those which excite the imagination, and those which address themselves 
to the understanding. In countries where the former abound, in the 
shape of mighty mountains, earthquakes, or devastating pestilence, man 
is conscious of his own unimportance, and the powers of nature fetter 
his will. Where, on the contrary, nature is gentle in her manifestations, 
man regains confidence and exercises authority. Buckle takes India and 
Greece as types of the two extremes. In India the tropical grandeurs 
and perils have led to an uncontrolled ascendancy of the imagination, 
which runs riot in its literature, its art, and its theology ; fear governs 
men’s minds and the gods are monstrous. In Greece, at the opposite 
end of the scale, nature is friendly, and the imagination quickly loses its 
supremacy. Reason gains dominion, superstition dies, and the enquiring 
and sceptical faculties of the understanding are cultivated. A touchstone, 
Buckle suggests, is to be found in hero-worship: the canonisation of 
mortals soon became a recognised part of Greek religion ; while in India 
the whole tendency was to widen the distance between men and their 
deities. From this pregnant series of contrasts he concludes that “ every- 
where the hand of nature is upon us, and the history of the human mind 
can only be understood by connecting with it the history and the aspects 
of the material universe.’ 
V. 
In this summing-up we may all agree. Generalisation is a seductive 
and flowery meadow, but it is studded with pitfalls, and into several of 
_ these it may be that Buckle, with all his erudition, stumbled. Neverthe- 
less is there not wide scope for investigation into the rdle which geography 
plays, at first in shaping religions, and afterwards in maintaining morals ? 
This very contrast to which we. have just been listening between Greece 
and India is full of suggestions. Wherever it was situated (and this 
probably we shall never know), there was assuredly one common ancestral 
home for the main gods of Olympus and the earlier occupants of the 
Indo-Aryan pantheon ; on this point the evidence of philology is con- 
clusive. The possibility is that, in the region where they were first 
worshipped, those divinities were the great natural phenomena, which 
man, as soon as he learned to think, watched with wonder and reverence : 
the Sky-father, the Earth-mother, the Sun, the thunder, the fertilising 
rain-cloud. Most of these survived into Greek mythology, but it was 
very largely mythology. They had come down from some ancient cradle 
of the race as a part of its culture. They were honoured by shrines, by 
sacrifices, and offerings on festive occasions ; but they were never the 
object of fear. In that land of clear air and sparkling sea, there was no 
gloom about the temples. The deities in time were personified, moving 
