E.—GEOGRAPHY 103 
If we turn to two other great religions, Judaism and Islam, is it 
altogether fanciful to surmise that geography has been directly concerned 
in their development ? Their central idea is the oneness of God, not 
as a universal soul, but a solitary, omnipotent and jealous power. We 
are told by scholars that Judaism in origin was the triumph of one tribal 
god, Jehovah, over a number of other rivals. It is not implied, as I 
understand, that the individual tribes were polytheistic, though each 
had its own name and attributes for its own protecting deity. Be that 
as it may, the conception of unity was paramount among the Hebrew 
stock; and it was militantly re-stated by Mahomed. Why did 
unitariansim so fiercely possess the mind of Arabia, to the exclusion of 
the more complex creeds which permeated the rest of Asia? The 
Semitic spirit will hardly furnish the explanation, because it has not 
always and everywhere been incompatible with idolatry. It is in the 
daily life of the desert-dweller that we must look for the reason, in its 
solitude, its stern simplicity, its concentration of thought and purpose 
on the business of the moment. ‘There is no room for the luxury of 
polytheism, and no time ; furthermore, the unity of surrounding nature 
postulates the same quality in the Creator. With other religions the 
case may not be so straightforward ; and I am not sure how far it is 
possible to pursue the same line of thought into the great reforming 
movements of the world. Buddhism, for example, presents a curious 
problem, with its complete disappearance from the land of its birth and 
its fervid acceptance in other geographical areas. Or, coming back to 
Europe, we have the familiar theories as to the spread of Calvinism and 
the present-day distribution of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. 
The ground, however, is too delicate for an amateur geographer. There 
is also very little left of the raw material for such enquiries. Our modern 
creeds cross oceans and capture new territory, just as our modern lan- 
guages do, with more reliance, let us hope, on their intrinsic merits than 
on geographical considerations. 
VI. 
The last section of the survey through which we have been scampering 
is human geography on its material and practical side. Here we study 
nothing less than the eternal conflict of nature versus man,—the rdéle 
which Michelet assigned, though not convincingly, to history. Often it is 
a real conflict, with times and places at which nature defeats man, with 
others at which man gains, or seems to gain, the victory. Often, and 
more often as civilisation advances, it settles down into bouts of diplomacy, 
where man endeavours to get on terms with nature. Geography, if he 
understands it, helps to tell man where defeat has hitherto been final, 
where victories can be snatched, how relations of mutual aid can be 
established. Moralising in a general way on individual instances, it 
would point to the Alpine barrier, which at first protected Rome from 
the north, later admitted the barbarians, and then for centuries compli- 
cated Italy’s connection with Central Europe, until engineering skill 
bored holes through it and cleared away many of the old troubles. Or 
it would tell how the Appalachian barrier for long dictated the lines of 
