The geographic factors in history appear now as conspicuous direct
effects of environment, such as the forest warfare of the American
Indian or the irrigation works of the Pueblo tribes, now as a group of
indirect effects, operating through the economic, social and political
activities of a people. These remoter secondary results are often of
supreme importance; they are the ones which give the final stamp to the
national temperament and character, and yet in them the causal
connection between environment and development is far from obvious. They
have, therefore, presented pitfalls to the precipitate theorizer. He has
either interpreted them as the direct effect of some geographic cause
from which they were wholly divorced and thus arrived at conclusions
which further investigation failed to sustain; or seeing no direct and
obvious connection, he has denied the possibility of a generalization.

Montesquieu ascribes the immutability of religion, manners, custom and
laws in India and other Oriental countries to their warm climate.[17]
Buckle attributes a highly wrought imagination and gross superstition to
all people, like those of India, living in the presence of great
mountains and vast plains, knowing Nature only in its overpowering
aspects, which excite the fancy and paralyze reason. He finds, on the
other hand, an early predominance of reason in the inhabitants of a
country like ancient Greece, where natural features are on a small
scale, more comprehensible, nearer the measure of man 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