is the part which it plays in
modifying and directing human relationships. This evidently involves an
extension of the term commercial. It has to do not simply with business,
in the narrow sense, but with whatever relates to human intercourse and
intercommunication as affected by natural forms and properties.
Political geography represents this same social interaction taken in a
static instead of in a dynamic way; taken, that is, as temporarily
crystallized and fixed in certain forms. Physical geography (including
under this not simply physiography, but also the study of flora and
fauna) represents a further analysis or abstraction. It studies the
conditions which determine human action, leaving out of account,
temporarily, the ways in which they concretely do this. Mathematical
geography carries the analysis back to more ultimate and remote
conditions, showing that the physical conditions of the earth are not
ultimate, but depend upon the place which the world occupies in a larger
system. Here, in other words, are traced, step by step, the links which
connect the immediate social occupations and groupings of men with the
whole natural system which ultimately conditions them. Step by step the
scene is enlarged and the image of what enters into the make-up of
social action is widened and broadened; at no time is the chain of
connection to be broken.

It is out of the question to take up the studies one by one and show
that their meaning is similarly controlled by social considerations. But
I cannot forbear saying a word or two upon history. History is vital or
dead to the child according as it is, or is not, presented from the
sociological standpoint. When treated simply as a record of what has
passed and gone, it must be mechanical, because the past, as the past,
is remote. Simply as the past there is no motive for attending to it.
The ethical value of history teaching will be measured by the extent to
which past events are made the means of understanding the
present,--affording insight into what makes up the structure and working
of society to-day. Existing social structure is exceedingly complex. It
is practically impossible for the child to attack it _en masse_ and get
any definite mental image of it. But type phases of historical
development may be selected which will exhibit, as through a telescope,
the essential constituents of the existing order. Greece, for example,
represents what art and growing power of indiv