Mackinder in the history and historiography of geography

Scholars have scrutinized Mackinder's intellectual and academic development, politics and life course, and to a lesser extent his methodological innovations. Yet throughout this extensive scholarship the significance of Tyndall and physics in Mackinder's geography has been overlooked. Mackinder's university studies and academic career have been surveyed.Footnote ¹³ His school studies in chemistry, physics and biology at Epsom College, Surrey, have been identified.Footnote ¹⁴ His prize-winning essays – ‘A glimpse of A.D. 1950’ and ‘Geological Epsom’ – demonstrate an aptitude for succinct synthesis and the sharp visual narration of time and space in a style reminiscent of popular dissolving-view lantern performances and an interest in light technologies.Footnote ¹⁵ After taking a first in natural sciences (with a specialization in biology) at Oxford, Mackinder's junior scholarship enabled him to study modern history. He did so, allegedly, to test the theory of natural selection against human development.Footnote ¹⁶ Despite this range of studies, according to Osbert Howarth, it was said of Mackinder ‘by historians that he knew no history, by geologists that he knew no geology, by climatologists that he knew no climatology’.Footnote ¹⁷

Early scholarship deemed that as an undergraduate Mackinder was ‘relatively uninterested in evolution and unaffected by Darwinism [when] the movement was gathering momentum in the universities in the 1880's’.Footnote ¹⁸ However, following the centenary of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species, historians overdetermined the influence of natural-selection theory upon later nineteenth-century British geography.Footnote ¹⁹ By pursuing ‘the Darwinian revolution’, geographers started to reveal the longevity and plurality of the concept of physiography. Although the term was variously employed by Immanuel Kant and Alexander von Humboldt, Huxley's Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature (1877) offered an extensive exposition of this concept. Based on a series of Huxley's lectures inspired by German Erdkunde, or physical geography, Physiography outlined the structure of the Earth, its relation to other bodies, and features of winds, tides, rivers, mountains and plains.Footnote ²⁰ Nevertheless, in illuminating the overlaps and contradictions between Huxley's physiography and the burgeoning, equally plural, ‘new’ geography, scholars have overlooked the influence of Tyndall's natural philosophy and that of emergent physics practices on Mackinder.

Mackinder's attention to visuality has been noted and the transformation of his conceptualization of geographical practice from a science to an art and philosophy has been observed.Footnote ²¹ Further exploration of these shifts supported the argument that Mackinder was influenced by a ‘British scientific-exploratory tradition’ carried out in the field which sought to apprehend the physical environment of the whole globe.Footnote ²² More recently, his martial and imperial instincts have been mapped.Footnote ²³ Yet scholars have also asserted that his politics were charged with romanticism. The latter have been viewed as a catalyst for his ‘social-imperialist vision of education’ and desire to forge an ‘efficient national workforce’.Footnote ²⁴ Finally, Mackinder's philosophy has been summarized as an ‘organic conservative ideology’ and the man himself has been deemed ‘a political economist with a holistic viewpoint’ whose unifying vision resided in natural phenomena.Footnote ²⁵

Scholars now understand that the identities of the sciences are not defined solely by the establishment of university disciplines.Footnote ²⁶ Other histories of geography than the above Whiggish approaches have identified the retrospective separation of nineteenth-century social and earth sciences.Footnote ²⁷ The qualification of Mackinder's geographical practice as ‘new’ has been undermined by Robert Mayhew's survey of pedagogical texts from the early modern period to the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁸ A vibrant discursive, rather than disciplinary, tradition of geography existed in British university mathematics, natural philosophy and history before geography was institutionalized as an independent science. Mackinder is understood as having steered geography away from an ‘essentially humanist conception of education and the curriculum’.Footnote ²⁹

It has been argued that the richly variegated nineteenth-century landscape of geographical knowledge production across Britain has been ‘underplayed, at worst neglected, even as it is partially remembered’.Footnote ³⁰ Before Mackinder's appointment to the Oxford readership, contributions to scientific practices were made via entertaining and educational public lecture performances. From the 1830s the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), and from 1851 BAAS Geography Section E, promulgated scientific methodologies within a civic, rather than institutional or academic, context. More generally, nineteenth-century education saw a shift in scholarly focus from humanist to scientific expository practices.Footnote ³¹ It has therefore been suggested that Mackinder's readership was less a foundational moment than a consequence of pre-existing, wider-reaching intellectual transformations.Footnote ³²

Although throughout the nineteenth century geography straddled both the social and the earth sciences, the subject was in ‘reconnaissance’ mode and lacked overarching principles.Footnote ³³ However, in post-Darwinian science greater emphasis was placed upon methods, laws and anomalies. Staley notes that scientific approaches were ‘dominated by law (like physics) or by description (like geography)’.Footnote ³⁴ In this regard Tyndall's investigations of glacier dynamics epitomized the former. Recent work has investigated the methodology, instruments and practices of geographical science. Yet despite apprehending the diversity of Mackinder's geography, historians have not studied his pedagogical methods.Footnote ³⁵ Nor have they considered his use, in this context, of the magic lantern for the purposes of making and communicating scientific knowledge. It is therefore to the use of that instrument that we now turn.

Nineteenth-century science and the lantern

Founded in 1799, the Royal Institution (RI) was amongst the most popular of the London savant societies.Footnote ³⁶ As academic practices of physics shifted in Britain towards bespoke academic laboratories and developed around experiments with new instruments, the RI maintained a tradition of scientific showmanship and natural philosophy for middle-class audiences.Footnote ³⁷ In the second half of the century, its lectures – many highly visual – helped to sustain science.Footnote ³⁸ Tyndall first lectured at the RI in 1853 and subsequently became the professor of natural philosophy there. From 1858 he and Michael Faraday, the Fullerian Professor of Chemistry, lectured with the lantern.Footnote ³⁹ In 1869 Tyndall lectured with this instrument in a series of performances published the following year as Nine Lectures on Light.Footnote ⁴⁰ The lantern's ‘convenient and controllable light source for public demonstrations’ became integral to his lectures from 1872, when his fame was at its zenith.Footnote ⁴¹ During a lecture tour of the USA that year, Tyndall's skilful manipulation of the lantern, described as ‘a camera’, made headline news.Footnote ⁴²

Within nineteenth-century regimes of truth and their empiricist scientific methods of evidencing, visual media such as lanterns and cameras were both privileged and regarded with suspicion. Although lantern projections came to prominence across the country, the RI's courting of popular audiences in its fashionable Friday discourses led to criticism.Footnote ⁴³ Jill Howard's scholarship has argued that RI audiences were actually the real ‘co-stars’ of scientific performances.Footnote ⁴⁴ Whether at the RI or in BAAS meetings, in the laboratory or the lecture theatre, audiences were as vital to the making and shaping of science as the elements in the experiments performed.Footnote ⁴⁵

Figure 1.

‘Professor Tyndall lecturing to a juvenile audience at the Royal Institution, 1876’. From a pen-and-ink sketch by Silvanus P. Thompson in Jane S. Thompson and Helen G. Thompson, Silvanus P. Thompson, His Life and Letters (London: Fisher Unwin, 1920, p. 22), reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

The lantern, a common feature of spectacular entertainments for general audiences attending the London Royal Polytechnic Institution (RPI) shows, was also used by Tyndall in children's lectures.Footnote ⁴⁶ The physical investigator Oliver Lodge's (1851–1940) recollections of the Christmas lectures he attended as a child evidence Tyndall's impact upon the next generation of scientific practitioners.Footnote ⁴⁷ Physicist John William Strutt (1842–1919) similarly remembered the popular-science performances at the RPI.Footnote ⁴⁸ Despite his considerable fame, Tyndall, as Ursula Deyoung argues, was ‘half-forgotten by the next generation of scientists’: his research, lecturing and experimenting methods had become outdated.Footnote ⁴⁹ Within a few decades of his death in 1893 geographies of scientific practice shifted and university laboratory demonstrations outshone the RI's experimental practices.

The RI also contributed to the promotion of geographical knowledge. Geologist and four-time president of the RGS Sir Roderick Murchison (1792–1871) sat on the RI board of managers in the 1870s.Footnote ⁵⁰ When the RGS was still without a permanent home, Murchison engineered the hire of the RI lecture theatre for the RGS's Monday night meetings. Between October 1868 and May 1870, and before it moved to Savile Row in 1870, the RGS's evening lectures were held in the RI where the lantern and screen were much used.Footnote ⁵¹

Our knowledge of such pedagogical objects as the lantern is still incomplete: we need to know, in Martin Lawn's words, more ‘about why these objects were constructed [and] used within single or integrated systems’.Footnote ⁵² Jeremy Brooker argues that by the 1880s science teachers and students already recognized Tyndall's ingenious model of lantern use.Footnote ⁵³ As this article shows, geographers and geography teachers were among the latter.

Tyndall, Mackinder and the lantern

Scholars locate Mackinder's ‘lifelong love’ of geography in his childhood.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, Mackinder described an influential personal meeting between himself and Tyndall in an early period of his life:

Although such testimonies require cautious interpretation, they may nevertheless offer insights.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even if a retrospective construction, it still tells us something about the way Mackinder wished to present his field. Mackinder here describes one of Tyndall's RI lectures on ‘Fluorescence’ on the emission of ultraviolet light, or nonvisual waves that compel substances to emit slow vibrations invisible to the naked human eye, a sub-topic of Lecture Five of Tyndall's Six Lectures on Light. The aim of this widely illustrated publication was ‘to develope [sic] and deepen sympathy between science and the world outside of science. I agreed with thoughtful men who deemed it good for neither world to be isolated from the other, or unsympathetic towards the other’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The lantern was integral to the achievement of these aims.

Tyndall and Mackinder also shared a common connection to mechanics’ institutes. Tellingly, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) described the RI as ‘a kind of sublime Mechanics’ Institute for the upper classes’.Footnote ⁵⁸ When not working as a surveyor on the railway network, the young Tyndall studied at the Preston Mechanics’ Institute.Footnote ⁵⁹ Similarly, the Gainsborough Mechanics’ Institute library galvanized Mackinder's childhood imagination.Footnote ⁶⁰

Mackinder's interest in light-conducting technologies was manifest from an early age. He argued successfully for the installation of electric light at the Oxford Union Society.Footnote ⁶¹ The subject of his first lecture to the university was electric light, given in 1863 to the Junior Science Club, of which he was a founding member, and which he ‘illustrated by numerous diagrams and by a Pilsen arc lamp’.Footnote ⁶² Modelling his own demonstration methods on those of Tyndall, the lantern later became central to his lectures.

Education and educational reform were Mackinder's great passion.Footnote ⁶³ In 1886 the syllabus of the Oxford University Extension scheme (OUE) lectures to working-class audiences expanded to include geography.Footnote ⁶⁴ Travelling extensively on the railways that Tyndall helped to survey, Mackinder reputedly delivered some six hundred OUE lectures, many on natural science and economic history, often in mechanics’ institutes, and to audiences of elementary teachers.Footnote ⁶⁵ In these lectures, Denis Cosgrove suggested, Mackinder was ‘framing the argument’ of his ‘On the scope and methods of geography’ lecture.Footnote ⁶⁶ Critically, from February 1886, his lectures included ‘oxy-hydrogen’ lantern projections.Footnote ⁶⁷ As a user of the institutes, and lantern lecturer, Mackinder's career paralleled that of Tyndall. Significantly, Mackinder himself employed this optical device in the visual and verbal manifesto that shortly preceded his appointment as reader in Geography at Oxford. In ‘On the scope and methods of geography’, delivered to an RGS audience in 1887, Mackinder conjured up a vision of a ‘new’ geography concerned with human–environment relations.Footnote ⁶⁸ Among other things it assessed how artificial lighting had improved life in St Petersburg.Footnote ⁶⁹

Throughout the 1890s geography school teaching was in the early stages of professionalization. Continuing eighteenth-century teaching practices, the Geographical Association (GA) for teachers, the RGS, the Manchester Geographical Society and the geographer Andrew Herbertson (1865–1915) promoted secondary-school geography by emphasizing the discipline's scientific aspects and rational utility.Footnote ⁷⁰ Soon after, the Education Act of 1902 reorganized secondary-education curricula and staffing. Local education authorities created more school places for girls, thereby generating a demand for teachers. This shift also engendered a need for geography teaching materials. As Mackinder explained his own pedagogy he naturalized the use of an instrument that had once been perceived as contentious by senior RGS figures.Footnote ⁷¹

Mackinder's commitment to geography education illuminates his pedagogical philosophy.Footnote ⁷² In his 1906 Presidential Lecture to the Froebel Society, which promoted kindergarten teaching methods, he shared an anecdote which demonstrates the importance of Tyndall in his thought:

Faraday instructed Tyndall to explain experimental processes in order to discipline audience attentions, foster understanding, and thus assert knowledge claims. Like Tyndall, Mackinder emulated Faraday's method. Believing that ‘the child is interested in persons, and that history should begin with Heroes’ (sic), Mackinder included this vignette about his own heroes in The Teaching of Geography & History.Footnote ⁷⁴ Demonstration and directed observation alone did not inform or teach; it was necessary to deliver a verbal explanation in order to guide audiences through the processes to which they were witness.

The above passage confirms Brooker's findings by showing ‘the importance of attracting and disciplining the eyes and ears of his audiences’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Faraday's attention might otherwise ‘have been diverted to immaterial happenings’.Footnote ⁷⁶

The passage also evidences the continuation of an eighteenth-century tradition of incorporating fictional audiences into science teaching textbooks in order to show the utility of demonstration and to engage readers’ imaginations.Footnote ⁷⁷ That period also saw the development of an educational philosophy of associationism, which projected relationships between the acts of inscription, the shaping of the mind of the child, and the latter's conduct in the world.Footnote ⁷⁸ Well-defined educational credentials were a distinguishing feature of, and critical to, the professionalization of nineteenth-century sciences.Footnote ⁷⁹ Mackinder repeatedly name-checked Tyndall and Faraday rather than Huxley, who was also an educational reformer.Footnote ⁸⁰ In doing so Mackinder projected a relationship between himself and the RI's natural philosophers, and constructed his own disciplinary practice around theirs. His presentation of these grandees as mentors, and his use of methods attested to by them, suggest that he sought to mould a new generation of geography teachers in Tyndall and Faraday's likeness.

Natural philosophy, physics and geography

During the nineteenth century, natural philosophy gradually gave way to more specialized sciences.Footnote ⁸¹ Between 1830 and 1860 professional academic physics became institutionalized in universities as science, and scientific practices diverged from philosophy, theology and other genres of knowledge.Footnote ⁸²

Conceding that a shift in scientific focus and in hierarchies of knowledge had occurred, Mackinder explained that in the 1880s scientific interest lay ‘in the accumulating proof of the theory of evolution just as to-day it is in the physics of the Atom [sic]’. Despite specializing in animal morphology, Mackinder later observed that it ‘was very little applicable to utilitarian purposes’ in the 1880s.Footnote ⁸³ Mackinder's retrospective attentiveness to physics confirms the assertion that atomic thinking and the recognition of micro-entities as ‘the fundamental building-blocks making up the world’ shifted in the 1890s.Footnote ⁸⁴

Huxley, a close friend and colleague of Tyndall, delivered and published numerous public lectures on physiography.Footnote ⁸⁵ When Mackinder and the RGS sought the public recognition of geography, a physiographical approach was powerfully appealing.Footnote ⁸⁶ During his first OUE lectures to working-class audiences, Mackinder essentially taught physiography.Footnote ⁸⁷ In his 1887 BAAS address Mackinder explained the curriculum of his first year:

Mackinder's claim that his best students had, as he did, a grounding in ‘general sciences’ rather than history is testament to the foundation of the ‘new’ geography upon physical sciences.Footnote ⁸⁹ Physiography became the mainstay of his early readership teaching.Footnote ⁹⁰

Tyndall and Huxley alike were champions of the moral and intellectual, as well as the practical, value of science education.Footnote ⁹¹ In an 1854 RI lecture Tyndall stated that physics was ‘an implement of culture’ with which to develop mental faculties.Footnote ⁹² Similarly, in 1894, at the first meeting of the GA designed to exchange teaching practices and materials such as lantern slides, Mackinder echoed Tyndall in enunciating his vision of ‘Geography as a Training of the Mind’.Footnote ⁹³ A teacher, he later averred, ‘conquers nature like an artist by understanding the properties of the material in which he works’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Similarly, physics was, for Tyndall, ‘no mere branch of education, but the means of education itself’.Footnote ⁹⁵ For Mackinder, like Tyndall, argued that his subject ‘is but a tool’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Throughout his career, Mackinder's pedagogical language and practices paralleled those of Tyndall. Whether addressing RGS, BAAS or GA audiences, Mackinder spoke and wrote in an accessible language and was consistently empathetic towards learners. In 1904 he acknowledged that ‘until lately, we, as a rule, did not put ourselves into the position of the child's expanding mind. We thought from the adult point of view’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Audiences’ fashioning of knowledge is thus substantiated.

Mathematization, close dependence upon technologies and a focus on theory transformed physics from the 1880s. Mackinder's core vision, like that of physics, was processual and attentive to the laws of nature.Footnote ⁹⁸ It consisted of interpenetrating dynamic, dimensional spheres:

In his 1895 Ipswich BAAS address, Mackinder articulated his vision of the ideal geographer in Tyndallian turns of phrase:

From 1905 he portrayed geography as ‘a branch of physics’ distinct from history.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In The Teaching of Geography and History he asserted,

Consequently, geography teachers, especially those whose training had been literary, should purchase a ‘primer’ of the physics of the air and water.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Scottish meteorologist and geographer Hugh Robert Mill (1861–1950) concurred with Mackinder by asserting that geography ‘as a science is so far akin to physics that it is a generalisation of the second order’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Mackinder expressed his dynamic model of geography as

Familiar images such as the flow of ice and a steaming kettle illustrated the transformations within the circuit of water.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In turn, the latter illuminated the flow of blood in human physiology.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Geographical teaching therefore circulated metaphors, and transposed knowledge, between human and physical sciences.

Inspired by notions of exchange and integration Mackinder thought dynamically and in the round. Geography engendered ‘not merely sight … but insight’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Writing in 1935, he claimed that the notionally prophetic skills of the geographer would eventually ‘forecast the kaleidoscopic changes of seasonal pattern on the world's surface’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Temporal and spatial relations in their potential past, present and future states fell within the remit of his geography.

Imagery related to energy, inertia and momentum illustrated Mackinder's interdisciplinary outlook.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The political and social spheres of human activity were ‘the product not only of environment but also of the momentum acquired in the past’.Footnote ¹¹¹ He advanced that ‘the principle of momentum or inertia is so called by analogy with the same principle in mechanics. Newton's “first Law of Motion” is to the effect that a moving body tends to continue in movement with the same velocity and in the same direction’.Footnote ¹¹² He continued to express the central concept of circulation in terms of the momentum and energy of the hydrospheric ‘closed dynamic system’.Footnote ¹¹³

At the 1931 BAAS centenary meeting Mackinder described the hydrosphere's ‘internal elasticity … fortunately mitigated by the rising and falling of the liquid surfaces and the passage of the liquid into gaseous and solid states’ in oceans, air, clouds, rain or snow, and glaciers.Footnote ¹¹⁴ His depiction of water as ‘the most important and generally diffused agent in the physical processes, both inanimate and animate, at work on the planetary surface’ reads like the practical and topographical application of the phenomena investigated by Tyndall.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The lantern was critical to Tyndall's pedagogy. However, light also constituted a source of imagery: ‘material Nature furnishes a screen against which the human spirit projects its own image, and thus becomes capable self-inspection’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Mackinder advised the use of newly available light technologies for teaching the angular division of a circle. In 1914 he recommended that ‘little electric hand lamps which are now so commonly used for throwing a flash into a dark room or garden’ would serve the purpose well by ‘cast[ing] a sharply-defined shadow’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ An electric lamp or oil lamp globe with the outlines of the continents drawn on in thick black ink projected onto a cone of translucent paper could be employed to ‘develop’ a map.Footnote ¹¹⁸

Historians of science remain sceptical about the dissemination of scientific knowledge to a wider non-expert community via metaphors, and warn against the conflation of homologues with consequential relationships in the historical material.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Metaphor, however, constitutes a key theme around which relativist and realist views of knowledge revolve.Footnote ¹²⁰ The trope of light, already an ancient moral and Christian metaphor, and, from the later nineteenth century, one connected to the emergent moral economies of electricity, featured prominently in Mackinder's speech.Footnote ¹²¹ In 1890 he declared that geography could be applied ‘to the lighting up of history’.Footnote ¹²² In his final years he began to theorize a ‘photosphere’ and a philosophical scale of geography that encompassed ‘The spheres, 5 & 1, Litho-, Atmo-, Hydro-, Photo- (or Radio) Bio-, and a bit apart, Psycho [sic]’.Footnote ¹²³ His published lecture contained no elaboration of this scheme, but it is significant that he projected these physics-inspired metaphors onto the three-dimensional earth.Footnote ¹²⁴

Figure 2.

[A.R.], cover image of John Tyndall lecturing before a lantern projection. From Tyndall, His Life and Work: An Illustrated Biography, London: ‘Westminster’ Populars Gazette no 6, 1893.

The lantern and the imaginative practice of science

Throughout the nineteenth century, scientific practitioners and other intellectuals debated the legacy of romanticism and definitions of the imagination.Footnote ¹²⁵ The ‘origin and scope of physical theories’, Tyndall ventured, lay in the imagination.Footnote ¹²⁶ The latter comprised ‘the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Tyndall's claim is seen as ‘a rejection of positivist empiricism and a reflection of the romantic idealist emphasis on the creative power of the mind’.Footnote ¹²⁸ In theoretical speculations, the imagination became a valid replacement for mathematics. In his 1870 BAAS lecture, Tyndall argued that the imagination could ‘dissipate the repugnance, and indeed terror, which in many minds are associated with the thought that science has abolished the mystery of man's relation to the universe’.Footnote ¹²⁹ The ‘power of forming mental images of the ultrasensible’ informed the German understanding of ‘the basis of theory formation in science’.Footnote ¹³⁰

The juxtaposition of Mackinder and Tyndall's writings and knowledge-making practices reveals how intellectual training alone did not forge the ‘new’ geography: as Brian Blouet recognizes, Mackinder's ‘strongest mental attributes were vision and imagination’.Footnote ¹³¹ That vivid imaginative faculty animated the essays he had written at school: ‘The observation, the reason, the judgment, and the imagination have equal scope, and each must be supported and limited by the others. No expensive apparatus nor tedious mathematical preparation are necessary to commence its study’. Yet his branch of knowledge was no mere ‘educational instrument’.Footnote ¹³² Both men saw ‘the dynamic interconnections between forces in the physical environment’.Footnote ¹³³ However, since it required little preparation and few appliances, and was best pursued as observation in the field, geography differed at this time from Tyndall's laboratory and lecture theatre physics.

Following the publication of ‘On the scope and methods of geography’, visual methods became a principle of Mackinder's practice. The ideal geographer was ‘a man of trained imagination, more especially with the power of visualizing forms and movements in space of three dimensions – a power difficult of attainment, if we are to judge by the frequent use of telluria and models’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Querying the rigid linearity of an earlier pedagogical tradition based on Euclidean geometry, Mackinder warned against the overuse of books and materials that resulted in the stifling of intellectual freedom and in boredom for teachers and students alike.Footnote ¹³⁵ He mused in 1931 that he ‘went to school and came under the routine with which our race seeks to make its men dependable and calculable in the tiger hunts of life. But do we not also often dock the imagination with which we come into life?’Footnote ¹³⁶ Thus Mackinder underscored his faith in the imagination.

Good teaching comprised ‘the picturing of absent things and movements, some absent in space and some in time, but most in both’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Geography, rightly understood, ‘expands and précises a natural power: the power of thinking in the geographical plane’.Footnote ¹³⁸ The teacher's mission was to install the power of ‘insight’ as ‘[c]onstructive genius lies in the child-like power of seeing “what is not” continued without break from “what is”, or, in other words, of piercing through the material into the immaterial world to perceive the invisible’.Footnote ¹³⁹ To access matter's latent potential, students learned the ‘seeing into things and not merely the seeing of things’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Veering into abstraction, Mackinder declared, ‘Having now lifted the imagination to the reality, take care to keep the mind concentrated on the real great globe’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In this way the earth was reconceived as a simulacrum of the globe.

In Six Lectures on Light Tyndall explained that experiments had two great uses in discovery and verification, and in tuition: ‘They were long ago defined as the investigator's language to Nature, to which she sends intelligible replies … after the discoverer comes the teacher, whose function it is to exalt and modify the experiments of his predecessor as to render them fit for public presentation’, yet he was branded ‘flamboyant’ for combining ‘practised showmanship with extravagant experiment’.Footnote ¹⁴² Similarly, there was something of the ‘showman’ about Mackinder.Footnote ¹⁴³ He was aware of a demand for ‘more concrete life in teaching’ from audiences of all ages. Demonstrations and thought experiments were essential in conveying the ‘visual way of thinking’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Local climatic contrasts should ‘live’ in pupils’ minds with assistance from the science master ‘teaching physics in the laboratory’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This faith in live performance motivated his attempts to found a national theatre in 1913.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ He articulated the perhaps surprising connection between science and drama thus: ‘In science, long ago, you had the student turned to the laboratory, and away from the mere book. So it should be in literature. After all a composition was originally intended to be delivered, even poetry, certainly the drama’. Ultimately, Mackinder attributed the establishment of geography, and the rise of scientific authority, less to universities than to audiences’ thirst for knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Imaginative practices had featured in geography from the 1860s.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Yet Mackinder cited Tyndall and Faraday rather than practitioners and popularizers of geography.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Tyndall drew on romantic poets’ faith in the imagination as the primary source of creative synthesis. In calling upon audiences’ imaginative engagement, he and Mackinder acknowledged the active role of the former in defining the teaching and learning process; both valorized subjective understandings at a time when objectivity featured in disciplinary discourses, and the creation of objectivity was nurtured via the harnessing of visual supports and media.

Imaginative practices were activated with the internal instrument of the mind's eye.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In urging them ‘to “look with the mind's eye” at oscillating atoms’ Tyndall trusted audiences’ own imaginative knowledge-making abilities.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In his RI Christmas lecture ‘The forms of water in clouds and rivers, ice and glaciers’ he exhorted his audience to ‘[i]magine the molecules of water in calm cold air to be gifted with poles of this description, which compel the particles to lay themselves together in a definite order’. Thus they would reveal ‘the unseen architecture’ of nature.Footnote ¹⁵²

Mackinder, similarly, advocated the cultivation of a ‘sympathetic imagination’ by retaining the ‘childish power of thinking in images’ with ‘the mind's eye’.Footnote ¹⁵³ Before showing students images, teachers should visualize

Geographical features and, by extension, historical human activities such as the march of armies across time and space could be envisioned. He favoured such expressions until the end of his life.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

In the construction of imaginary landscapes of science, topographical and geographical terms afforded a language of transference and transformation. Abstract science thinking was spurred by the conception, and expression, of fictional places.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Tyndall's mountaineering exploits galvanized his scientific imagination, and his metaphorical repertoire.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The use of such expressions enabled audiences and readers to transcend the physical world and the experiments demonstrated to them.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

Mackinder's graphic expressions also appealed to ‘the mind's ear’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Robert Mayhew has identified the ‘congruity between programme and practice’ in Mackinder's Elementary Studies in Geography series.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Sliding spatial scales mediated the movements of thought. In theorizing the brokering of knowledge by oasis-dwelling peoples, Mackinder argued, ‘They drew a veil between East and West which heightened the effect of the desert. To borrow a simile from physics, this veil was transparent to things, but not to ideas’.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In their imaginative practices, inverted images of the other are therefore seen; Tyndall employed topographical and geographical analogies, whilst Mackinder harnessed metaphors from ‘the high priests of science … mathematicians and physicists’ to elucidate human transformations across time and space.Footnote ¹⁶²

For Tyndall the distinction between visible and invisible rays ‘did not reflect the nature of things but the limited capacity of human vision’.Footnote ¹⁶³ Tyndall located his own work ‘in the shadowy space beyond the red of the visible spectrum’, an area of ‘darkness which surrounds the world of the senses’ where ‘the mere signs of external things’ were seen with the imperfect organ of the human eye.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Audiences ventured ‘beyond the boundary of mere observation, into a region where things are intellectually discerned’.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Vision is a core geographical skill. Mackinder's geographical philosophy evidences his concern with dynamic processes of interaction and exchange between visible and invisible matter. Travelling into ‘imaginative space’, teachers became path-finding guides leading students into landscapes of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Geography was theorized as six roads: drawing and modelling, nature study, the annual flow and ebb of animal and vegetable life, the circulation of water, romantic tales of distant lands, and ‘once upon a time’. The latter led to the sphere of physics and ‘to the conclusion that the earth is a body hung in space’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Both men employed metaphors from the integrated and multi-scalar perception of natural phenomena that was central to physics.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Mental projection animated and transported phenomena: ‘Now philosophers may be right in affirming that we cannot transcend experience. But we can at all events, carry it a long way from its origin’, declared Tyndall.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Articulating the cosmological via familiar examples, he made visible and audible ‘the reaches of vibration that make up life’.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Tyndall performed ‘imaginative mental leaps’, and in order to explain natural processes he rescaled them:Footnote ¹⁷¹

Like the lantern, mental projection exposed the latent properties or processes of phenomena by magnification. Rendering phenomena visible brought them into existence:

Early twentieth-century classrooms have been described as spatially and materially alien environments of ‘high whitewashed walls full of crumpled maps, worn-out charts, and other scraps of paper’.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Yet for Mackinder they were places in which teachers and pupils could nurture their humanity through imaginative practice. Performing intellectual acrobatics he rescaled concepts, thereby perpetuating the eighteenth-century schooling traditions.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ ‘Above all we lead the imagination to think on the big scale, the world scale, which is essential to powerful thinking in later life’, he explained.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Whilst Tyndall scaled up the minute or invisible, Mackinder scaled down the world's features to bring the distant close. The lantern and the imagination functioned symbiotically as instruments of visualization which exposed the dynamics of geographical phenomena and demonstrated their equivalence.Footnote ¹⁷⁷

The science, art and philosophy of geography

Later nineteenth-century scientific naturalists aspired to ‘construct a public image of science as a moral and intellectual force’.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ In doing so their commitment challenged Christian doctrine.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ As well as performing research, and ‘instruction and edification’ via dramatic experiments, scientists strove to embody standards of public morality.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Scientists were, for Tyndall, qualified to judge all affairs of the natural world.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Huxley shared these views.Footnote ¹⁸²

It is arguable that Tyndall's romantic transcendental physics paralleled religious expression, even whilst apparently repudiating it.Footnote ¹⁸³ His aim was for audiences to transcend the senses to reach a place ‘where vision becomes spiritual, where principles are elaborated, and from which the explorer emerges with conceptions and conclusions’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ The philosophy and poetry of the American transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) resonate in Tyndall's verses.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ By using a ‘molecular language’ as Emerson did, Tyndall elucidated phenomena across multiple scales ‘from the level of the imperceptible ether, whose particles vibrate thus transmitting radiant heat and light through space, to the level of “the grass of a meadow”, whose molecules impart their vibratory motion to ether thus becoming chilled “on a starlight night”’.Footnote ¹⁸⁶

Over time, Mackinder's philosophical turn of mind, already discernible from 1887, became more manifest. From 1890 he saw geography as a philosophy and a science.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Further, as with Tyndall, ‘imaginative eloquence’ transformed him into an interpreter of culture.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Because the imaginative spatialization was integral to mathematical and moral training, teachers inculcated an ethics of space.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ As physics professionalized and specialized, the concerns of a tradition of natural philosophy found expression in geography: ‘Geography begins from two poles of our observation, from the home and from the heavens. The one is local and at our feet, the other is universal’.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Mackinder incorporated natural philosophy's aims of questioning, interpreting and explaining into an existing geographical tradition of regional description, distinguishing between scientific researchers and teachers, whom he said ‘can and should think of the bearing of science on the art of living; in other words, should think of its relation to moral and aesthetic values’.Footnote ¹⁹¹

References to the numinous resonate throughout Mackinder's publications and lectures. Although his nature mysticism was never ardent, he nevertheless believed in geography's central unifying role within a scientific and humanistic continuum.Footnote ¹⁹² From 1906 geography became ‘an art of expression’, and in it the expression ‘all flesh is grass’ was a recurring refrain:Footnote ¹⁹³

This biblical expression illuminated Mackinder's sense of a continuum of energy exchange. In transmitting this physics-derived language, Mackinder amplified rather than diminished the energy of interpenetrating phenomena.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ His urging of teachers and students alike to transcend static classroom walls was perhaps a manifestation of his spiritual development.

Geography, as Kant perceived it, was a propaedeutic field.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ In Mackinder's practice, it remained a transcendental discipline which overlapped with other sciences. Its function was to bring to light relations between humanist and scientific education curricula, and the arts and sciences, for sociopolitical purposes.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Mackinder argued that in government, and the civil service, ‘a rift divides the organization of our higher education [and its effect] has been to press most educated people, including the teachers in our public and secondary schools, into one or other of the two moulds’. The solution was an education which taught the seeing of ‘the world whole’.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

The ‘new’ geography's ‘inherent breadth and many-sidedness’ mirrored Mackinder's political ideology that saw ‘culture’ as an integrated system which, if threatened with disintegration, might or should exist in a state of natural balance.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Here Mackinder's idealistic views differed from those of Tyndall who, in exposing the second law of thermodynamics, rejected equilibrium as a desirable state.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Nevertheless, Mackinder later urged geographers to maintain ties with archaeologists and geologists, and intimated his hope that ‘in becoming Realists let us not cease from being, in a reasonable degree, Romantics’.Footnote ²⁰¹

Authors’ ideas are frequently inconsistent, change and become fluid through the influence of others and of new interpretations.Footnote ²⁰² Mackinder's geography moved further towards philosophy. By 1935 geography comprised the ‘natural and appropriate counterpoise for the materialism of the specialist sciences’ that Tyndall himself had been instrumental in establishing.Footnote ²⁰³ He granted that

The subject, he explained to GA teachers in 1942, ‘culls its data from the geographical aspect of a number of sciences … integrates its conclusions from the human standpoint, and … departs from the objectivity of science, for it ranges values alongside of measured facts’.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Geography became ‘the chief outlook subject’, as Mackinder aligned his philosophy with the Scottish geographer and sociologist Patrick Geddes's (1854–1932) approach.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Embodied symbolically by the camera obscura used in the teaching in Edinburgh's Outlook Tower, the approach apprehended sliding scales of phenomena in order to engender an understanding of the unity of the physical, organic and social conditions.Footnote ²⁰⁷ Mackinder's ‘philosophy of Man's environment’ aspired for geography to become such a beacon.Footnote ²⁰⁸