Both are to some extent true.

As a science, anthropo-geography can deal only with large averages, and these exclude or minimize the exceptional individual.

Moreover, geographic conditions which give this or that bent to a nation's purposes and determine its aggregate activities have a similar effect upon the individual; but he may institute a far-seeing policy, to whose wisdom only gradually is the people awakened.

The acts of the great man are rarely arbitrary or artificial; he accelerates or retards the normal course of development, but cannot turn it counter to the channels of natural conditions.

As a rule he is a product of the same forces that made his people.