These remoter secondary results are often of supreme importance; they are the ones which give the final stamp to the national temperament and character, and yet in them the causal connection between environment and development is far from obvious.

They have, therefore, presented pitfalls to the precipitate theorizer.

He has either interpreted them as the direct effect of some geographic cause from which they were wholly divorced and thus arrived at conclusions which further investigation failed to sustain; or seeing no direct and obvious connection, he has denied the possibility of a generalization.
Montesquieu ascribes the immutability of religion, manners, custom and laws in India and other Oriental countries to their warm climate.[17] Buckle attributes a highly wrought imagination and gross superstition to all people, like those of India, living in the presence of great mountains and vast plains, knowing Nature only in its overpowering aspects, which excite the fancy and paralyze reason.

He finds, on the other hand, an early predominance of reason in the inhabitants of a country like ancient Greece, where natural features are on a small scale, more comprehensible, nearer the measure of man himself.[18] The scientific geographer, grown suspicious of the omnipotence of climate and cautious of predicating immediate psychological effects which are easy to assert but difficult to prove, approaches the problem more indirectly and reaches a different solution.

He finds that geographic conditions have condemned India to isolation.