Geosophy, to repeat, is the study of geographical knowledge from any or all points of view. To geography what historiography is to history, it deals with the nature and expression of geographical knowledge both past and present–with what Whittlesey has called “man’s sense of [terrestrial] space”. Thus it extends far beyond the core area of scientific geographical knowledge or of geographical knowledge as otherwise systematized by geographers. Taking into account the whole peripheral realm, it covers the geographical ideas, both true and false, of all manner of people–not only geographers, but farmers and fishermen, business executives and poets, novelists and painters, Bedouins and Hottentots–and for this reason it necessarily has to do in large degree with subjective conceptions. Indeed, even those parts of it that deal with scientific geography must reckon with human desires, motives, and prejudices, for unless I am mistaken, nowhere are geographers more likely to be influenced by the subjective than in their discussions of what scientific geography is and ought to be.
For a friend.
via Wright, John K. 1947. Terrae Incognitae: The Place of Imagination in Geography, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 37: 1-15.
Text converted by Sara Davis, Jesse Langdon, Fred Lopez, and Tim O’Neill for the Geographers in the Web Project, GRG 374, Frontiers in Geography, Department of Geography, The University of Texas at Austin, Summer 1999.
