utset
into a number of different studies contained in different text-books)
gives an utterly erroneous idea of the relations of studies to one
another and to the intellectual whole to which all belong. In fact,
these subjects have to do with the same ultimate reality, namely, the
conscious experience of man. It is only because we have different
interests, or different ends, that we sort out the material and label
part of it science, part of it history, part geography, and so on. Each
"sorting" represents materials arranged with reference to some one
dominant typical aim or process of the social life.

This social criterion is necessary, not only to mark off studies from
one another, but also to grasp the reasons for each study,--the motives
in connection with which it shall be presented. How, for example, should
we define geography? What is the unity in the different so-called
divisions of geography,--mathematical geography, physical geography,
political geography, commercial geography? Are they purely empirical
classifications dependent upon the brute fact that we run across a lot
of different facts? Or is there some intrinsic principle through which
the material is distributed under these various heads,--something in the
interest and attitude of the human mind towards them? I should say that
geography has to do with all those aspects of social life which are
concerned with the interaction of the life of man and nature; or, that
it has to do with the world considered as the scene of social
interaction. Any fact, then, will be geographical in so far as it has to
do with the dependence of man upon his natural environment, or with
changes introduced in this environment through the life of man.

The four forms of geography referred to above represent, then, four
increasing stages of abstraction in discussing the mutual relation of
human life and nature. The beginning must be social geography, the frank
recognition of the earth as the home of men acting in relations to one
another. I mean by this that the essence of any geographical fact is the
consciousness of two persons, or two groups of persons, who are at once
separated and connected by their physical environment, and that the
interest is in seeing how these people are at once kept apart and
brought together in their actions by the instrumentality of the physical
environment. The ultimate significance of lake, river, mountain, and
plain is not physical but social; it