Man and Place: Some General Reflections
G.R. Crone analyses the influences on, and development of, geographical thought over centuries.
When my interest in the development of geographical thought was first aroused, I think it would be true to say that most geographers still acted in the belief that if they continued to accumulate proved ‘facts’, the time would come when these would all fall into a logical system.
Geography would then take its place among the true ‘sciences’. The lead was given by those, among whom Professor Eva G.R. Taylor was prominent, who laid great emphasis on the ‘inter-relatedness of things’.
Somewhat later an influence, which ultimately had important effects, gradually made itself known: this was the work of men like the French scholar Roger Dion, who showed that characteristic features of the French landscape owed as much to systems of tenure and inheritance as to the physical environment.
This was only one aspect of the trend to approach the study of geography from the historical angle, and to place historical geography on a sounder basis. Another French geographer, Lucien Febvre, strongly attacked the deterministic view of geography, elaborating the alternative theory of ‘possibilism’.
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