to oasis, where life knows much hardship but escapes the grind of
drudgery, where the watching of grazing herd gives him leisure for
contemplation, and the wide-ranging life a big horizon, his ideas take
on a certain gigantic simplicity; religion becomes monotheism, God
becomes one, unrivalled like the sand of the desert and the grass of the
steppe, stretching on and on without break or change. Chewing over and
over the cud of his simple belief as the one food of his unfed mind, his
faith becomes fanaticism; his big spacial ideas, born of that ceaseless
regular wandering, outgrow the land that bred them and bear their
legitimate fruit in wide imperial conquests.

Man can no more be scientifically studied apart from the ground which he
tills, or the lands over which he travels, or the seas over which he
trades, than polar bear or desert cactus can be understood apart from
its habitat. Man's relations to his environment are infinitely more
numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or
animal. So complex are they that they constitute a legitimate and
necessary object of special study. The investigation which they receive
in anthropology, ethnology, sociology and history is piecemeal and
partial, limited as to the race, cultural development, epoch, country or
variety of geographic conditions taken into account. Hence all these
sciences, together with history so far as history undertakes to explain
the causes of events, fail to reach a satisfactory solution of their
problems largely because the geographic factor which enters into them
all has not been thoroughly analyzed. Man has been so noisy about the
way he has "conquered Nature," and Nature has been so silent in her
persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the
equation of human development has been overlooked.

[Sidenote: Stability of geographic factors in history.]