Nature - autonomous learning

52 the ‘nature’ of geographynoted,‘it would be difficult to cite any other single communication whichhas had such far-reaching effects on the development of our subject’ (Stamp1957: 201).Herbertson’s vision of geography as the study of regions and of regionaldifferences was consistent with the colonial origins of the discipline inBritain. What the RGS-sponsored expeditions of the nineteenth centuryhad shown was that the world was immensely differentiated in bothhuman and physical terms. Closer to home, the transition from ruralagriculturalto urban-industrial society in Western Europe was overlayinga new pattern of geographical difference upon an older, long-establishedone. Like Mackinder, Herbertson realised that if geography was to win aplace at the academic table it needed an identity that was both distinctiveand respectable.The study of ‘areas in their total composition or complexity’(Holt-Jensen 1999: 5) seemed to offer such an identity. No other discipline(except perhaps anthropology) could claim to study how the phenomenaanalysed separately by the ‘systematic disciplines’ combined in time and space.For Herbertson and those inspired by his vision, geography has uniqueamong the disciplines in its focus on regional variation and its causes.The evolutionary impulseMackinder, Davis and Herbertson – and a few other individuals – effectively‘invented’ geography as a university subject in the anglophone world.They gave the discipline an identity and, with the help of organisationslike the RGS, began the slow process of establishing it within the academy.With Mackinder we see the inauguration of what we today call ‘environmentalgeography’. With Davis, we see the beginnings of physicalgeography, despite his Mackinder-like insistence that geography was abridging subject. Finally, with Herbertson we see the beginnings of regionalgeography, something that is far less prevalent today than it was a centuryago.Leaving aside Davis’s specialist interest in geomorphology, all threeauthors saw geography in holistic terms. But what kind of holism was this?The question is an important one because if geography was to be the causaldiscipline Mackinder wanted it to be then a substantive theory of howphysical and human phenomena interacted was required. According toLivingstone (1992), that theory was furnished by a mixture of evolutionarybiology, social Darwinism and neo-Lamarkianism. Let me briefly take each