o to minister to his intellectual and moral development. The earth is
not a mere dwelling-place of nations, but a school-house, in which God
himself is superintending the education of the race. Hence we must not
only study the _events_ of history in their chronological order, but we
must study the earth itself as the _theatre_ of history. A knowledge of
all the circumstances, both physical and moral, in the midst of which
events take place, is absolutely necessary to a right judgment of the
events themselves. And we can only elucidate properly the character of
the actors by a careful study of all their geographical and ethological
conditions.

[Footnote 3: See chap. ii. "History of Civilization."]

[Footnote 4: Ritter's "Geographical Studies;" Guyot's "Earth and Man;"
Cousin's "History of Philosophy," lec. vii., viii., ix.]

[Footnote 5: Lectures, vol. i. pp. 162, 169.]

It will be readily perceived that, in attempting to estimate the
influence which exterior conditions exert in the determination of
national character, we encounter peculiar difficulties. We can not in
these studies expect the precision and accuracy which is attained in the
mathematical, or the purely physical sciences. We possess no control
over the "materiel" of our inquiry; we have no power of placing it in
new conditions, and submitting it to the test of new experiments, as in
the physical sciences. National character is a _complex_ result--a
product of the action and reaction of primary and secondary causes. It
is a conjoint effect of the action of the primitive elements and laws
originally implanted in humanity by the Creator, of the free causality
and self-determining power of man, and of all the conditions, permanent
and accidental, within which the national life has been developed. And
in cases where _physical_ and _moral_ causes are blended, and
reciprocally conditioned and modified in their operation;--where primary
results undergo endless modifications from the influence of surrounding
circumstances, and the reaction of social and political
institutions;--and where each individual of the great aggregate wields a
causal power that obeys no specific law, and by his own inherent power
sets in motion new trains of causes which can not be reduced to
statistics, we grant that we are in possession of no instrument of exact
analysis by which the complex phenomena of national character may be
reduced to primitive elements. All that we can hope is,