Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/183



§ 43. Alexander von Humboldt and others after him have observed the influences of a great political union, such as that effected by the Roman empire or that of Great Britain and her colonies, on human views of the physical world, no one, so far as the present writer is aware, has undertaken to trace the different aspects which Nature assumes for man under the varying and expanding forms of social organisation he has experienced. The studies of Montesquieu, to whom we owe so much as one great founder of truly historical inquiry in Europe, tended to treat social life too exclusively as the resultant of physical forces—climate, the nature of the soil, extent and character of sea-board, and the like. But though the physical conformation of the country they inhabit powerfully affects the commercial and political, the philosophical and artistic life of men, we must not forget that the structure of their social system, however dependent upon physical causes, supplies the aspects of Nature with certain lines peculiarly its own. Humboldt