Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/753

 SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP 737

tioned by such natural features as a river or a plain, an estuary or a mountain, a coal bed or a forest. How relatively slight a geographical disturbance is made by the building of a city even a modern capital city may be realized by recalling that practi- cally the whole of the new town of Edinburgh is built out of a local sandstone quarry, so small that its floor would not afford camping space to a traveling circus.

XII. The foregoing account is intended to suggest the geog- rapher's vision such as he sees it in his naturalist or cosmic mood. But the geographer is himself a man and a citizen, and as geog- rapher he still has his humanist or idealist mood. Viewed in his humanist or idealist mood, the world-drama undergoes for the geographer a profound change. The perspective changes from the cosmic to the human focus. The typical river valley, which is the essential regional unit of the geographer, is no longer a mere fold of the earth's crust, in its endless and aimless cycle of changes, but is conceived as the realization of a great purpose. The long geological history of the river valley is seen as the preliminary preparation to fit it to be the scene of the exploits and aspirations of a god-like race of beings, such as has been suggested and fore- shadowed by the noblest type of the human species. The design- ing and the making of a suitable theater on which the human play may develop, is a thought which gives a new orientation to the geographical conception of the river valley. Now the soil and the vegetation which cover its floor, the beds of coal, iron, sand, and limestone which underlie its surface, the forests which clothe its .slopes and shelter its animal world, the metaliferous deposits of its mountain sides, the river which from source to sea invites to locomotion all these are seen to be but energies and instruments, awaiting for their orchestration the tuning hand and the idealizing mind of man. And the city the city which embanks and strides the river, which stretches across the plain and juts into the ocean, which ascends the hill-slopes or penetrates the mountains what is the part and place of this city in the vision of the human- ist geographer ?

When we think of the river valley as the regional unit of geo-