Early Origins of Geographical Thinking with Reference to Varenius and Kant

• The 17th and 18th centuries form the pre-classical period of modern geography, the foundation stage between the voyages of discovery and the classical geography of Humboldt and Ritter.
  • The voyages had produced a flood of facts about places. The scientific revolution had produced a new model of knowledge built on laws.
  • The central problem of the age was how to relate particular facts about places to general principles.
• Two scholars answered it and laid the foundations of the discipline:
  • Bernhard Varenius (1622–1650) gave geography its structure, dividing it into general and special geography.
  • Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) gave it its philosophical place among the sciences, as the science of space, alongside history as the science of time.
• Between them, the 18th century saw geography draw on the new natural sciences and move from political to natural units of description (reine Geographie).

The Seventeenth-Century Setting

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Scientific Revolution and Specialisation

• The heliocentric universe of Copernicus (1543), Kepler’s elliptical orbits (1609, 1619), Galileo’s mathematical description of nature and, later, Newton’s gravitation (1687) changed what counted as knowledge.
  • Truth now meant laws expressed mathematically, not the verbal logic of Aristotle or the authority of scripture.
  • Knowledge began to split into specialised systematic sciences, which ended the era of the universal scholar.
• Practical gains of the century also fed geography:
  • new coastlines and interiors from Dutch, English and French voyages;
  • more precise maps and the spread of Mercator’s projection for navigation;
  • the first scientific academies, the Royal Society (1660) and the Paris Académie des sciences (1666).
• Geography faced a choice: remain a description of countries, or become a science of general principles like astronomy and physics.

The Cosmographic Tradition Revived

• Many Renaissance scholars kept the classical models of Ptolemy and Strabo, and with them a geocentric universe.
  • Peter Apian’s Cosmographicus liber (1524) expounded mathematical geography and astronomy. It kept the Aristotelian idea of the ecumene, the habitable zone.
  • Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544) followed Strabo’s descriptive, historical tradition and left out most mathematical and physical geography. It remained the standard world geography for about a century.
  • Philipp Clüver (Cluverius, 1580–1622) wrote the first German universal geography, Introductio in universam geographiam (1624). Most of it is regional description.
    • He distinguished geography (the whole earth) from chorography (its parts) and set a regional model that long went unsurpassed.
  • Nathanael Carpenter’s Geography Delineated Forth in Two Bookes (1625) carried the cosmographic tradition into English.
• These works were compilations. The step towards scientific geography came with Varenius.

Bernhard Varenius (1622–1650)

Life and Context

• Bernhard Varenius (Bernhard Varen) was born in Hitzacker, on the Elbe south-east of Hamburg.
  • He studied philosophy, mathematics and physics at the Hamburg Gymnasium (1640–42), then studied at Königsberg (1643–45).
  • He took a medical degree at Leiden (1649).
• He settled in Amsterdam in 1647, earning a living as a private tutor.
  • Amsterdam was then the commercial hub of the world. Its merchants, trading through the Dutch post at Nagasaki and across Asia, needed reliable knowledge of distant lands.
• He died in 1650, aged 28, in poverty, shortly after his main work appeared.

Descriptio Regni Japoniae (1649)

• His first book, Descriptio Regni Japoniae (1649), is a regional geography of Japan. It also includes:
  • a Latin translation of Joost Schouten’s account of Siam;
  • an essay on the religions of Japan;
  • extracts from Leo Africanus on religion in Africa;
  • a short essay on forms of government.
• A companion volume on the religions of Japan followed.
• The lesson he drew: a description of a place has no standing as science unless it is related to a body of general concepts. This led directly to his next book.

Geographia Generalis (1650)

• Geographia Generalis (Amsterdam: Elzevir, 1650) was written in under a year. It was the first work to bring mathematical, physical and general geography together into one system.
  • It accepted the Copernican, heliocentric universe, unlike Münster and Cluverius.
  • It treated geography as a branch of “mixed mathematics”, and Varenius criticised those who reduced it to a list of countries.

• Influence:
  • It remained the standard text in geography for over a century.
  • Isaac Newton edited Cambridge editions (1672 and 1681) for his students, and James Jurin issued another (1715).
  • English translations followed, including Dugdale’s (1733) as revised by Shaw (1736).

General and Special Geography

• Varenius took the terms general and special from Bartholomäus Keckermann (1572–1609), who taught at Danzig. He turned them into a clear method.
• General geography (geographia generalis) studies the earth as a whole and the properties common to all places.
  • It deals mainly with physical phenomena, and most of its propositions can be proved by mathematical and astronomical laws.
• Special geography (geographia specialis) describes particular countries and regions.
  • Except for celestial features such as climate, its statements must be established by observation and experience.
  • Varenius held it to be of great practical value for government and commerce.
• His plan for special geography described each country under three heads:
  • celestial properties: climate, zone and length of day;
  • terrestrial properties: relief, waters, soils, forests, minerals, plants and animals;
  • human properties: inhabitants, their appearance, arts, trade, language, religion, government, cities and famous places.
  • Applied to a region such as Kerala, the scheme would take in its latitude and monsoon climate, then its coast, lagoons and laterite uplands, then its spice trade, towns and rulers. Regional monographs still follow this order.
• Interdependence, not dichotomy:
  • Special geography supplies the data, and general geography supplies the principles that explain them.
  • Special geography without general principles lacks foundations. General geography is of most use when applied to particular places.
  • He completed only the general volume. The special volume was never written.
• Later names: German writers came to call general geography allgemeine or systematic geography. Special geography became Länderkunde, or regional geography.
  • Varenius thus planted the seed of the systematic–regional dualism that Hartshorne later traced through the whole history of the subject.

Physical and Human Geography

• Varenius was among the first to state the difference in method between physical and human geography.
  • Natural phenomena such as climate and landforms can be treated with the precision of the natural sciences.
  • Statements about human groups must be limited in time and space and expressed as probability rather than certainty.
• He included human properties in special geography largely as a concession to tradition, because they could not be treated exactly. This is the root of the later physical–human dualism.

Contributions to Physical Geography

• He described how the amount of solar heat varies with latitude.
• He pointed out that the highest temperatures occur in the tropical hot deserts, not at the equator.
• He gave an early explanation of the planetary winds. Air heated and thinned near the equator is replaced by cold, heavy air flowing from the poles. It was a first step towards the theory of general circulation.

Evaluation of Varenius

• Strengths:
  • the first scientific framework for geography;
  • a critical synthesis of contemporary astronomy and cartography;
  • a clear statement of how particular facts relate to general laws;
  • a structure that lasted well over a century.
• Limits:
  • the human side was left undeveloped;
  • the regional volume was never written;
  • by defining geography mainly through mathematics, he left description of places without a method of its own, a gap the 18th century tried to fill.

After Varenius: Natural Science and the Earth

• For about a century after 1650, geography made little conceptual advance. The energy went into the natural sciences, organised by the new scientific academies, whose findings later fed back into geography.
  • John Ray (1627–1705) classified plants systematically and noted that running water slowly wears down mountains.
  • Domenico Guglielmini (1655–1710) studied the laws of river flow.
  • John Strachey (1719) showed that landforms reflect underlying rock structure.
  • Edmond Halley mapped the trade winds and monsoons (1686) and magnetic variation (1701).

Geography in the Eighteenth Century

The Natural Sciences Remake Physical Geography

• Uniformitarianism: James Hutton (1726–1797), in his Theory of the Earth (1788, expanded 1795), argued that the processes acting today, over immense time, explain the earth’s surface. His ideas were popularised by John Playfair (1802).
  • Uniformitarianism replaced catastrophism and tied geography closely to geology.
• Graded river: Pierre Louis Georges du Buat (1786) showed mathematically how a river balances velocity against load, the root of the idea of a graded profile.
• Classification of life: Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) classified plants and animals into classes, orders, genera and species. Leibniz and Buffon instead arranged life forms on a continuous scale.
• Buffon (Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1707–1788) wrote the Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–1804, completed after his death by Lacépède).
  • It was built inductively from travellers’ reports and specimens in the Jardin du Roi.
  • He saw man as an agent of change on the earth’s surface. He argued that forest clearance and the draining of marshes alter climate, comparing cleared, warmer Paris with forested Quebec.
  • He also attempted an early classification of soils.

Scientific Travellers: The Forsters

• Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–1798) and his son Georg Forster (1754–1794) sailed on James Cook’s second voyage (1772–75).
  • They observed for themselves, then classified, generalised and sought causes.
  • Reinhold Forster’s Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World (1778) covers:
    • the earth and its lands;
    • waters and oceans;
    • the atmosphere;
    • changes on the globe;
    • plants and animals;
    • the human species.
  • Georg Forster noted the contrast in temperature between the western and eastern sides of continents in the same latitude, and the climatic likeness of western Europe and western North America.
  • Both doubted crude climatic determinism. They supported their doubts with observations of Dutch settlers in South Africa and of Polynesian peoples.
• Georg Forster is often called the first methodological geographer in the modern sense, and he later drew Alexander von Humboldt to geography.

From Utilitarian to Pure Geography

• Early 18th-century geography was utilitarian. It served history and statecraft, describing countries within political boundaries.
  • The politico-statistical school (Gottfried Achenwall’s Statistik; Johann Peter Süssmilch’s population studies, 1741) supplied data on states.
  • Anton Friedrich Büsching (1724–1793) used these sources in his Neue Erdbeschreibung (from 1754, beginning with Europe).
    • He organised it by political units, in Münster’s manner, but he insisted on critical use of sources and accuracy.
    • He used population density as a geographical element. He also noted the economic interdependence of countries and the cheapness of water transport.
• Reine Geographie (pure geography) rejected political units as shifting and arbitrary. It described the earth through natural units, mainly river basins.
  • Philippe Buache (1700–1773), in a paper of 1752, divided the earth into drainage basins bounded by continuous mountain chains. He held that these chains continued under the sea as island arcs and submarine ridges.
    • The idea was too rigid: many European rivers cut through mountains. Yet it gave description a natural framework.
  • Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–1799) adopted Buache’s basins as natural regions for organising geography texts in the 1770s.
  • H. G. Hommeyer abandoned political boundaries entirely, dividing land into “terrains”, mostly river basins.
  • Johann August Zeune (1778–1853), in Gea (1808), defined natural divisions by relief, climate and vegetation together and looked for links between plants, animals and people.
• Significance:
  • The natural region became the basis of description, and the study of land (Länderkunde) separated from the study of states (Staatenkunde).
  • It prepared the regional concept that Ritter developed.
  • The basin idea survives in modern river-basin planning. India’s Damodar Valley Corporation (1948) treats a whole basin as one planning region.

• Universal geographies closed the period. Conrad Malte-Brun’s Précis de la géographie universelle (1810–29) opened with the history and general principles of geography. It then described the world country by country, in a frame little changed since Strabo.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Life and Lectures

• Immanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), and hardly ever left the city.
  • After his studies he worked as a private tutor (1746–55).
  • He took his doctorate in 1755 and then lectured as a Privatdozent on logic, metaphysics, mathematics, physics, mechanics and even fortification and pyrotechnics.
  • He became Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in 1770, after declining offers from Erlangen and Jena, and later served as rector of the university.
• He gave a course on physical geography almost every year from 1756 to 1796.
  • He announced its plan in 1757, and Friedrich Theodor Rink published it as Physische Geographie in 1802.
• He was an “armchair geographer”. Unlike the Forsters, he never observed distant lands. His contribution was philosophical: defining what geography is and where it belongs among the sciences.

Geographical Writings

• Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) proposed the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, later known as the Kant–Laplace hypothesis. It also interpreted the Milky Way as a disc of stars.
• He wrote essays on earthquakes, prompted by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and on the theory of winds (1756), explaining their deflection by the earth’s rotation.
• Geographical ideas also appear in:
  • the Critique of Pure Reason (1781);
  • the Critique of Judgement (1790);
  • Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), which describes peoples and their customs.

Knowledge and Geography

• For Kant, knowledge comes either from pure reason or from the senses.
  • The inner sense perceives the self (Seele, soul, or Mensch, man). Its study is anthropology, close to what is now called psychology.
  • The outer sense perceives nature. Its study is physical geography.
• Physical geography is therefore the first part of knowledge of the world, the essential preliminary to understanding everything else.
• Each person’s experience is limited in time and space. It must be supplemented by the reports of others, which take two forms: narrative (history) and descriptive (geography).

Logical and Physical Classification

• Kant held that empirical knowledge can be classified in two ways:
  • Logical classification groups phenomena by kind, by their inherent character and origin, whatever their place or time.
    • It produces the systematic sciences: botany for plants, zoology for animals, geology for rocks, and, by extension, sociology and economics.
  • Physical classification groups phenomena by where or when they occur, however different their nature.
    • Grouping by time gives history, which studies phenomena that follow one another (nacheinander).
    • Grouping by space gives geography, which studies phenomena that lie beside one another (nebeneinander).
• History is narrative, geography descriptive. Together they fill “the entire circumference of our perceptions”: history that of time, geography that of space.
• Geography is thus a chorological (area-centred) science, as history is a chronological one. Both are integrating sciences standing beside the systematic sciences, not below them.

Geography and History

• Kant asked which came first, and answered that geography is the substratum of history.
  • Events always happen somewhere. If there is an ancient history, there must also be an ancient geography that makes its events intelligible.
  • Physical geography is therefore the foundation of history and of all other “possible geographies”.
• Each period has its geography, and every region has its history. The two are mutually related, though their bases of integration, space and time, are opposite.

Kant’s Concept of Space

• In his early work, Kant treated space as a system of relations among things.
• In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) he argued that space is not an object, substance or relation existing outside us. It is a form of intuition that the mind brings to experience: a framework, like a set of pigeon-holes, for ordering everything perceived by the outer senses.
• This stress on the mind’s structuring of the world later attracted geographers of a subjective outlook. It is one source of humanistic geography.

Branches of Geography

• On the base of physical geography, Kant recognised several further geographies:

• Kant thought maps unimportant to physical geography, useful mainly for teaching and demonstration.

Man in Kant’s Physical Geography

• Kant’s physical geography was anthropocentric. It included the races of man and the changes humans make on the earth’s surface, and it treated man as one of the principal agents of change.
  • This idea probably came from Buffon, and Carl Ritter inherited it.
• Through the Critique of Pure Reason he rejected teleological explanation by final causes and insisted that causes be sought in what comes before in time. This helped free geography from theology, ending the long Aristotelian-Christian frame.
• He saw geography as useful for education, conversation, newspaper readers and statesmen: knowledge of the world for public life.

Kant and Exceptionalism

• Kant’s scheme implied that geography and history differ in method from the systematic sciences, because they integrate unique combinations of things in a place or a period.
  • Fred K. Schaefer, in “Exceptionalism in Geography” (1953), traced this view back to Kant, who is therefore often called the father of exceptionalism. Schaefer argued that geography should instead seek laws of spatial arrangement. This was the core of the Hartshorne–Schaefer debate.
• In the late 19th century, neo-Kantian philosophers developed the contrast.
  • Wilhelm Windelband (1894) set the nomothetic (law-seeking) natural sciences against the idiographic (describing the particular) historical sciences.
  • This became the idiographic–nomothetic dualism in geography.
• A fairer reading:
  • Kant’s division of history and geography was a secondary, practical classification for teaching. He did not intend barriers between disciplines.
  • Some interpreters stress that he saw geography as an empirical science seeking a “system of nature”.
  • Torsten Hägerstrand’s contrast between compositional and contextual theory restates his logical and physical classification in modern terms.

Legacy and Critique

• Legacy:
  • Kant gave geography a central and respectable place among the sciences. Geographers have cited him ever since to justify the discipline.
  • Alfred Hettner found his own idea of geography as a chorological science anticipated in Kant. He set it out fully in Die Geographie (1927).
  • Richard Hartshorne’s The Nature of Geography (1939) made the Kantian view, geography as the study of areal differentiation, the orthodoxy until about 1960.
  • His emphasis on the human mind and on man as an agent is linked with the French school’s possibilism and with modern humanistic geography.
  • His physical geography, treating the earth as the home of man, passed to Ritter.
  • The chorological tradition shaped Indian regional geography. Examples include O. H. K. Spate’s India and Pakistan (1954) and R. L. Singh’s India: A Regional Geography (1971), which describe the country region by region as integrated wholes.
• Critique:
  • Today it is thought impossible to separate the sciences so sharply. Systematic sciences also study phenomena in time and space.
  • Geographers study change over time in places, and historians study spatial patterns.
  • His geography was second-hand, compiled rather than observed, and it was largely forgotten between his death and Hettner’s revival.

Varenius and Kant Compared

• Together they turned geography from a compilation of descriptions into a discipline with a defined structure (Varenius) and a philosophical justification (Kant). On this base Humboldt and Ritter built classical modern geography.