n himself.[18] The
scientific geographer, grown suspicious of the omnipotence of climate
and cautious of predicating immediate psychological effects which are
easy to assert but difficult to prove, approaches the problem more
indirectly and reaches a different solution. He finds that geographic
conditions have condemned India to isolation. On the land side, a great
sweep of high mountains has restricted intercourse with the interior; on
the sea side, the deltaic swamps of the Indus and Ganges Rivers and an
unbroken shoreline, backed by mountains on the west of the peninsula and
by coastal marshes and lagoons on the east, have combined to reduce its
accessibility from the ocean. The effect of such isolation is ignorance,
superstition, and the early crystallization of thought and custom.
Ignorance involves the lack of material for comparison, hence a
restriction of the higher reasoning processes, and an unscientific
attitude of mind which gives imagination free play. In contrast, the
accessibility of Greece and its focal location in the ancient world made
it an intellectual clearing-house for the eastern Mediterranean. The
general information gathered there afforded material for wide
comparison. It fed the brilliant reason of the Athenian philosopher and
the trained imagination which produced the masterpieces of Greek art and
literature.

[Sidenote: Indirect mental effects.]

Heinrich von Treitschke, in his recent "Politik," imitates the direct
inference of Buckle when he ascribes the absence of artistic and poetic
development in Switzerland and the Alpine lands to the overwhelming
aspect of nature there, its majestic sublimity which paralyzes the
mind.[19] He reinforces his position by the fact that, by contrast, the
lower mountains and hill country of Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia,
where nature is gentler, stimulating, appealing, and not overpowering,
have produced many poets and artists. The facts are incontestable. They
reappear in France in the geographical distribution of the awards made
by the Paris _Salon_ of 1896. Judged by these awards, the rough
highlands of Savoy, Alpine Provence, the massive eastern Pyrenees, and
the Auvergne Plateau, together with the barren peninsula of Brittany,
are singularly lacking in artistic instinct, while art nourishes in all
the river lowlands of France. Moreover, French men of letters, by the
distribution of their birthplaces, are essentially products of fluvial
valleys and pl