3. _There is also an acknowledged difference between the mental character of the inhabitants of a bright and sunny climate who breathe an elastic atmosphere, and are surrounded by the most inspiring scenery, and that of the people who dwell under a gray and sombre sky, and daily look upon the more stern and rugged aspects of nature._ The dwellers in the former climate are ardent, vivacious, and mercurial; the inhabitants of the latter are slow, deliberate, persistent, and conservative. One nation will be speculative, enamored of plausible hypotheses, and prone to hasty and brilliant generalization; the other will be practical, intolerant of hypotheses, and clamorous for facts and logical inferences from facts. In the former climate the fine arts will be enthusiastically cultivated, and elegance and taste, and all that is graceful in sentiment and action, will find a congenial home; in the latter, the exact sciences and the useful arts will be cultivated with persistence and zeal. Under the former conditions, a religion of poetry, of sentiment, of artistic display and imposing ceremonial, will sway the popular mind; under the latter, a religion of personal duty and purity, of social righteousness, of active beneficence, and of universal charity, will command respect.
These principles constitute what may be designated the _statics_ of history--the more or less stable and permanent _conditions_ under which the living forces of humanity are developed.
The _dynamics_ of history are the fundamental powers and rational ideas of human nature. There are certain primary ideas of the reason which are revealed in the universal consciousness of our race under the conditions of experience--the exterior conditions of physical nature and sensational life. Such are the ideas of substance and cause, of unity and infinity, which govern all the processes of discursive thought, and lead us to the recognition of the uncreated and unconditioned Being; such the ideas of right, of duty, of accountability, and of retribution which regulate all the conceptions we form of our relations to other moral beings, and constitute _morality_; such the ideas of order, proportion, and harmony which preside in the realm of art, and constitute the beau-ideal of _æsthetics_; such the ideas of God, the soul, and immortality which rule in the domain of _religion_, and constitute man a religious being. In addition to these, there are the powers of observation, of abstraction, of generalization, of inference, the capacity of symbolic conception and expression, the faculty of creative imagination, the powers of invention, of foresight, and of scientific prevision. These are the living forces of humanity, fundamentally the same under all circumstances, but modified in their intensity and development by geographical, climatal, and scenic conditions. The providential adjustment and harmonious relation of the exterior conditions with the inherent powers of humanity is the problem of history.