Science and Citizenship
experience. Had St. Augustine been more of a traveller, he would doubtless have avoided the geographico-historical blunder of believing that it is predetermined once for all which are the cities of God and which are the cities of Satan. One of the truths revealed to us by social geography is that every city is engaged from moment to moment, from day to day, in determining for itself how far and to what extent, here and now, it is, and will become, a city of God, and how far it is, here and now, and will become, a city of Satan. In other words, predestination is a recurring and not a stationary phenomenon.
XIV
It may be objected by some traitorous professors of the science that the humanist note has extremely little part and place in geography, and the idealist one none at all. But it is always open to us to choose our standards of geography from the great founders of the science rather than from the bookworms parasitic on Petermann's Mitteilungen. And in any case, to the determinist geographer, whose scepticism refuses to see the idealist side of the shield, we may reply in the words of Turner to the critic who protested that he could, see nothing in Nature like one of the artist's pictures, "Don't you wish you could?" The father of history, Herodotus himself, in passing to humanist studies by way of geography, made a step which, in the normal growth of the geographical
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