A geographical individuality does not result simply from geological and climatic conditions. It is not something delivered complete from the hand of Nature. The idea we must begin with is this: a country is a store-house of dormant energies, laid up in the germ by Nature but depending for employment upon man. It is man who reveals a country’s individuality by moulding it to his own use. He establishes a connection between unrelated features, substituting for the random effects of local circumstances a systematic co-operation of forces. Only then does a country acuqire a specific character differentiating it from others, till at length it becomes, as it were, a medal struck in the likeness of a people.
Paul Vidal de la Blache, La personnalité géographique de la France [=The geographic personality of France], Trans. H. C. Brentnall (London: Knopf, 1928), pg. 14.
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