Attitudes toward Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 473

ily met. Mountaineering became a consuming passion, almost a religion (Parker 2008).
Peattie (1936: 6) called the development a “cult of mountains,” a modern, more con-
scious phase of the ancient worship of mountains. An article entitled “Mountaineering
as a Religion” was typical of this point of view:
[W]e must seek for some homogeneous and inward spiritual characteristics
marking us off as a caste apart from other men. For myself, I find these charac-
teristics in a certain mental predisposition, a distinct individual and moral bent,
common to all mountaineers, but rarely found in those who are not addicted to
mountain climbing. The true mountaineer is not a mere gymnast, but a man who
worships the mountains, (STRUTFIELD 1918: 242)
The cult of mountains had many prophets and a large following. The journals pub-
lished by the various alpine clubs are full of articles praising mountains (e.g., Freshfield
1904; Fay 1905; Lunn 1912; Godley 1925; Young 1943; Howard 1949; Vandeleur 1952;
Thorington 1957). Perhaps the most far-reaching claim of any zealot is that advanced by
Geoffrey W. Young, a respected and long-time member of the Alpine Club, at a lecture
before the University of Glasgow in 1956, that mountains have been influential in the
development of human intelligence:
It is a bold claim to make for mountains, that they contributed a third dimension,
of height and depth, to man's intelligence; and, by means of it, adumbrated even
a fourth dimension, that of spirit, not permeating it but placed above it. And
yet, when mind first grew capable of comparison, when man's mastery began to
move upon the earth, and he was released from labour only and from a surround-
ing darkness of fear, a mountain peak first sighted upon the skyline must indeed
have seemed to belong to some sphere “visited all night by troops of stars,” just
as the first flash of sunrise upon a snow summit, for the first time realised, must
have revealed the golden throne of a god. (YOUNG 1957: 14-15)
Further, in discussing the various components of landscape, he argued:
In all this visual balance, and in the influence it has exercised, the mountains
play, and have played, the principal part. It is the heights which have given the
measure. They are set like upright rulers, to mark the scale, against the per-
spectives of plain and sea and sky. In their constant contemplation, illuminated
by a lighting definite and brilliant, upon colour and shadow positive and lumin-
ous, primitive mind had no alternative but to acquire, as part of its growth, laws
of measure, of order, of proportion, in thought no less than in vision. From the
acquired ability to compare, to discriminate, reasoning, speculation, with meas-
ure and proportion, dawning upon the human mind in the genius of the first
Greek philosophers and in the sculpture and building of the first Greek artists,
began or hastened the beginnings of civilisation and culture in every western
race, (YOUNG 1957: 24-25)