Part 1 — I A Sketch of the History of the Idea of Milieu Down to the Nineteenth Century

Recorded mesologic^[19] thinking begins with the ancient Jewish Prophets whose striking aperçus concerning the providential correspondence between the configuration of the surface of the earth and the destiny of nations, concerning the connection between “Landesnatur” and “Volkscharakter,” etc., anticipated^[20] a number of great thoughts of later anthropo-geographers.

8Hippocrates (if he really is the author of the essay commonly ascribed to him and entitled περὶ αέρων ὑδάτων τόπων) investigates the effect of climate on man’s nature, character, temperament, and life, with the emphasis on the regularity of the effect.^[21] Owing to the imperfection of knowledge in his day, his observations are necessarily vague.^[22] He limited himself to the problem of the relation between land and people.^[23] He is said to be the founder of anthropo-geography.^[24] His treatise is admirable and unequalled in the eyes of Auguste Comte.^[25] Hippocrates, “in his work, 9About Air, Water, and Places, first discusses the influence of environment on man, physical, moral, and pathological. He divided mankind into groups, impressed with homogeneous characters by homogeneous surroundings, demonstrating that mountains, plains, damp, aridity, and so on, produced definite and varying types.”^[26]

Aristotle, in his Politics, enquires into the influence especially of geographical position on laws and the form of government,^[27] while in his Problems he shows the far-reaching dependence of national character on the physical environment: “Zeigt ja doch Aristoteles selbst in einem andern Werke das entschiedenste Bestreben, eine sehr weitgehende Abhängigkeit des Volkscharakters 10von geographischen Verhältnissen zu erweisen. Während die Politik [especially parts of the seventh book] nicht über Andeutungen [on the effect of the milieu] hinausgeht [discussed by Poehlmann, l.c., on pp. 64–8], läßt der vierzehnte Abschnitt der ‘Probleme,’ welcher sich mit den Einwirkungen der Landesnatur auf Physik und Ethik des Menschen beschäftigt, deutlich einen Standpunkt erkennen, welcher auf das Lebhafteste an die physiologische Betrachtungsweise der neueren französisch-englischen Geschichtsphilosophie erinnert ...”^[28]

Eratosthenes, in a work cited by Varro, sought to prove, in the opinion of the Italian scholar Matteuzzi prematurely, that man’s character and the form of his government are subordinated to proximity or remoteness from the sun.^[29] The greatest geographer of antiquity, Strabo, in his Geography, connected man with nature in a causal relation.^[30]

11John M. Robertson, noting that “theories of the influence of climate on character were common in antiquity,” refers^[31] to Vitruvius (VI, 1), Vegetius (“De re militari,” 1, 2), and Servius (on Vergil, Aeneid, VI, 724). Ritter does not mention the effort of the ancients in this line of ideas.^[32]

Giovanni Villani, the noted Florentine historian of the fourteenth century, observes with a deal of finesse that Arezzo by reason of its air and position produces men of great subtilty of mind.^[33]

12The Arabic statesman and philosopher of history, Ibn Khaldūn, little mentioned, yet known by his great work, the Universal History, attempted in the Muqaddama^[34] (the preface, comprising the first volume of his History), which he composed between 1374 and 1378,^[35] to explain the history and civilization of man, more especially of some of the Arabic peoples, by the encompassing physical and social conditions. The “First Section of the ‘Prolegomena’ treats of society in general, and of the varieties of the human race, and of the regions of the earth which they inhabit, as related thereto. It starts from the position that man is by nature a social being. His body and mind, wants and affections, for their exercise, satisfaction, and development, all imply and demand co-operation and communion with his fellows,—participation in a collective and common life....

“There follows a lengthened description of the physical basis and conditions of history and civilisation. The chief features of the inhabited portions 13of the earth, its regions, principal seas, great rivers, climates, &c., are made the subjects of exposition. The seven climatic zones, and the ten sections of each, are delineated, and their inhabitants specified. The three climatic zones of moderate temperature are described in detail, and the distinctive features of the social condition and civilisation of their inhabitants dwelt upon. The influence of the atmosphere, heat, &c., on the physical and even mental and moral peculiarities of peoples is maintained to be great. Not only the darkness of skin of the negroes, but their characteristics of disposition and of mode of life, are traced to the influence of climate. A careful attempt is also made to show how differences of fertility of soil—how dearth and abundance—modify the bodily constitution and affect the minds of men, and so operate on society....

“The Second Section of the ‘Prolegomena’ treats of the civilisation of nomadic and half-savage peoples.

“In it Ibn Khaldūn appears at his best, ... He begins by indicating how the different usages and institutions of peoples depend to a large extent on the ways in which they provide for their subsistence. He describes how peoples have at first contented themselves with simple necessities, and then gradually risen to refinement and luxury through a series of states or stages all of which are alike conformed to nature, in the sense of 14being adapted to its circumstances or environment.”^[36]

Ibn Khaldūn seems also to have had a clear idea of some aspects of the principle of relativity,^[37] an integral part and inevitable concomitant of the theory of milieu, since “As causes of historians erring as they have done, there are mentioned [by Khaldūn in the introduction] the overlooking of the differences of times and epochs, ...”^[38]

About the middle of the sixteenth century we find Michelangelo avowing to Vasari (who hailed from Arezzo): “Any mental excellence I may possess, I have because I was born in the fine air of your Aretine district.”^[39]

In “Measure for Measure” (Act III, Sc. I, v. 8–11), a play first produced in 1604, Shakespeare affirms of man:

“... a breath thou art,

Servile to all the skyey influences

That do this habitation where thou keep’st,

Hourly afflict.”

During the Renaissance, Greek thought on milieu is resurrected in France. Thence it spreads later, particularly in the eighteenth century, to England and Germany. Jean Bodin bridges the gap existent since the close of classical antiquity. He is the first among modern writers not only to 15revive the idea in Western Europe,^[40] but also to make it a subject for detailed investigation. Bodin thus first in French letters introduces and firmly establishes a line of study destined to be followed by a long list of authors among whom are to be found many illustrious French names.

Bodin “treats of physical causes with considerable fulness in the fifth chapter of the ‘Method,’^[41] and in a still more detailed and developed form in the first chapter of the fifth book of the ‘Republic.’”^[42] He traces the relation between climate and the ever changing fate of States, and elaborates the manifold effects of climate on States, laws, religion, language, and temperament.^[43] In Bodin’s view, man’s physical constitution is closely and directly connected with climate and surrounding nature; it is in harmony 16with the behavior of the earth in the respective zones of his abode.^[44] From this assumption of dependence of the human body on climate, there follow a number of inferences concerning the physical properties of man’s constitution.^[45] Temperament varies according to climate. Language, the generative power, diseases likewise depend indirectly on climate.^[46] Man’s talents and capacities do so no less.^[47] The climate in each region 17always favors the development of some special aptitude; on this basis he groups the peoples of the earth.^[48] Although the nexus between human abilities and the physical milieu is thus intimate, yet reason, common to all men and invariable, is per se independent of physical environment.^[49] He postulates, then, reason as the absolute part of the mind, not subject to surrounding influences, whereas the unfolding of the human faculties is relative to the environment. By taking this middle course concerning the effect of nature on man, Bodin escapes the extreme views of nature’s compelling influence over man, on the one hand, and of man’s total independence of nature, on the other.^[50]

Bodin also investigates the influence upon national character of geographical situation, of 18elevation, of the quality of the native soil, and of an east-west position.^[51] Nations and their civilizations differ according to the particular conditions of a given national existence.^[52]

He holds fast to the doctrine of the freedom of the will. Man is morally free from environmental control. The circumambient medium determines only the development of man’s capabilities.^[53] 19Man can counteract, and may, even though with difficulty, overcome the injurious action of climate and nature.^[54]

“... It is altogether unfair,” concludes Flint,^[55] “to put their general enunciations [i.e., those made by Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Galen] of the principle that physical circumstances originate and modify national characteristics, on a level with Bodin’s serious, sustained, and elaborate attempt to apply it over a wide area and to a vast number of cases. Dividing 20nations into northern, middle, and southern,^[56] he investigates with wonderful fulness of knowledge how climatic and geographical conditions have affected the bodily strength, the courage, the intelligence, the humanity, the chastity, and, in short, the mind, morals, and manners of their inhabitants; what influence mountains, winds, diversities of soil, &c., have exerted on individuals and societies; and he elicits a vast number of general views....”

Bodin, “der größte theoretische Politiker Frankreichs im 16. Jahrhundert,” declares Renz,^[57] “besitzt ... das unbestreitbare Verdienst, wenn nicht die Grundgedanken und nicht ausschließlich originale Gedanken, so doch die erste weitgehende wissenschaftliche Untersuchung über den Zusammenhang zwischen umgebender Natur und Menschenwelt in neuerer Zeit auf dem Boden der Erfahrung und Wissenschaft des 16. Jahrhunderts angestellt zu haben.”

Bodin, “writing in 1577 OF THE LAWES AND CUSTOMES OF A COMMON WEALTH (English edition [translated by Richard Knowlles] 1605), contains, as Professor J. L. Myres has pointed out (Rept. Brit. Assoc., 1909 [1910], p. 593), ‘the whole pith and kernel of modern anthropo-geography....’”^[58] 21And Renz believes that “In der Bodinschen Behandlung der Theorie des Klimas finden sich die Anfänge der Anthropogeographie und der Ethnographie...”^[59]

Writing in 1713, Lenglet du Fresnoy, toward the end of the sixth chapter of the first volume of his Méthode pour étudier l’histoire, expresses, decades before Montesquieu, the latter’s basic idea of the effect of social and political milieu on laws.^[60]

In any discussion of milieu, Montesquieu is the writer most frequently mentioned, although not the most often read and quoted. He devotes the well-known five “Books,” from the fourteenth to the eighteenth, of his magnum opus, L’Esprit des Lois (1748),^[61] to a consideration of this idea which, as has already been seen, was anything but original with him.^[62] In Books fourteen to seventeen 22he treats of the relation of laws to climate, and in Book eighteen of their relation to soil. In the fourteenth^[63] he discusses the effect of climate on the body (and mind) of individual man, in the fifteenth^[64] on civil slavery, in the sixteenth^[65] on domestic slavery, in the seventeenth^[66] on political servitude, and lastly in the eighteenth^[67] he delineates the influence of the fertility and barrenness of the soil. By climate he means little more than heat and cold. In the light of the continued high praise bestowed on him for much longer than a century, the altogether too general and dogmatic statements of these short seventy-odd pages would seem somewhat meager, so that upon their perusal one is very likely to suffer an outright disenchantment. Therefore, Flint’s judgment appears overdrawn, when he says that Montesquieu “showed on a grand scale and in the most effective way ... that, like all things properly historical, they [laws, customs, institutions] must be estimated not according to an abstract or absolute standard, but as concrete realities related to given times and places, to their determining causes and condition, 23and to the whole social organism to which they belong, and the whole social medium in which they subsist. Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli and Bodin, had already, indeed, inculcated this historical and political relativism; but it was Montesquieu who gained educated Europe over to the acceptance of it.”^[68]

Turgot’s sketch of a ‘Political Geography’ shows “that he had attained to a broader view of the relationship of human development to the features of the earth and to physical agencies in general than even Montesquieu. And he saw with perfect clearness not only that many of Montesquieu’s inductions were premature and inadequate, but that there was a defect in the method by which he arrived at them.... The excellent criticism of Comte, in the fifth volume of the ‘Philosophie Positive,’ and in the fourth volume of the ‘Politique Positive,’ on this portion of Montesquieu’s speculations, is only a more elaborate reproduction of that of Turgot, and is expressed in terms which show that it was directly suggested by that of Turgot.”^[69]

Cuvier “had not hesitated to trace the close relation borne by philosophy and art to the underlying geological formations.”^[70]

In the teaching of a number of great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, man 24is “the product of environment and education” and, in their opinion, “all men were born equal and later became unequal through unequal opportunities.”^[71]

Goethe echoed Herder’s thought when he remarked to Eckermann on the flora of a country and the disposition of its residents: “Sie haben nicht Unrecht, sagte Goethe (d. 2. April 1829), und daher kommt es denn auch, daß man der Pflanzenwelt eines Landes einen Einfluß auf die Gemütsart seiner Bewohner zugestanden hat. Und gewiß! wer sein Leben lang von hohen ernsten Eichen umgeben wäre, müßte ein anderer Mensch werden, als wer täglich unter luftigen Birken sich erginge...”^[72] And again, when he said of environment and national character: “... so viel ist gewiß, daß außer dem Angeborenen der Rasse, sowohl Boden und Klima als Nahrung und Beschäftigung einwirkt, um den Charakter eines Volkes zu vollenden ...”^[73] And in the following, Goethe but reiterates Herder’s oft uttered admiration for islanders and coast dwellers: “Auch von den Kräften des Meeres und der Seeluft war die Rede gewesen (d. 12. März 1828), wo denn Goethe die Meinung äußerte, daß er alle Insulaner und Meer-Anwohner des 25gemäßigten Klimas bei weitem für produktiver und tatkräftiger halte als die Völker im Innern großer Kontinente.”^[74] And: “Es ist ein eigenes Ding, erwiederte Goethe (d. 12. März 1828),—liegt es in der Abstammung, liegt es im Boden, liegt es in der freien Verfassung, liegt es in der gesunden Erziehung,—genug! die Engländer überhaupt scheinen vor vielen anderen etwas voraus zu haben ...”^[75]

Wolf and Niebuhr began to examine historical sources “nach neuen Prinzipien des Eingetauchtseins in eine bestimmte seelische Umwelt, in ein klargezeichnetes zeitgenössisches Milieu.”^[76]

One of the principal offices of an historian, according to August Wilhelm Schlegel, is “Die zeit- und kulturgeschichtliche Bedingtheit aller Erscheinungen aufzuzeigen.”^[77] But the effect of physical milieu on history is not rated high in the philosophy of the romanticists.^[78]

26Ingeniously, albeit not with his wonted acuteness, Hegel penned the concept “Volksgeist.”^[79] The saying, which now seems trivial, that every nation and every man in the nation is “ein Kind seiner Zeit,” is said to be Hegel’s.^[80] Hegel, however, distinctly rejected the idea of explaining “die Geschichte und den Geist der verschiedenen Völker aus dem Klima ihrer Länder.”^[81] The implication would be that one single factor might satisfactorily be held responsible for all progress in human history. As climate can not explain everything to Hegel, it seems not to explain anything at all to him. Hegel, then, is excessive in his denial of the power of environment. This is markedly shown by his thinking his position substantiated by the fact that the climate of Greece, although the same since classical antiquity, has not changed the Turks who now [i.e., early in the nineteenth century] dwell in Greece into ancient Greeks.^[82]

27