r "I am convinced
that we not only love ourselves in loving others, but that we also
hate ourselves in hating others." Often his captivating psychological
words are spoiled by an ethical trend. For instance, he has hardly the
right to say: "In the character of every man is something which cannot
be broken; it is the skeleton of his character." But he balances such
psychological rashness by fine observations like these: "The character
of a man can be recognized by nothing more surely than by the joke he
takes amiss"; and "I believe that we get pale from fright also in
darkness, but I do not think that we would turn red from shame in the
dark, because we are pale on our own account, but we blush on account
of others as well as on account of ourselves." And we are in the midst
of the up-to-date psychology when we read what he said a hundred years
ago: "From the dreams of a man, if he report them accurately enough,
we might trace much of his character, but one single dream is not
sufficient; we must have a large number for that."

I add a few characteristic words of distinctly psychological temper
from the great nonpsychological authors of modern times. Lessing
says: "The superstition in which we have grown up does not lose its
power over us when we see through it; not all who laugh about their
chains are free"; or again, "We are soon indifferent to the good and
even to the best, when it becomes regular"; "The genius loves
simplicity, while the wit prefers complexity"; "The characteristic of
a great man is that he treats the small things as small, and the
important things as important"; "Whoever loses his mind from love
would have lost it sooner or later in any case." But on the whole,
Lessing was too much of a fighter to be truly an objective
psychologist. We may put more confidence in Goethe's psychology:
"Where the interest fades away, the memory soon fails, too"; "The
history of man is his character"; "From nature we have no fault which
may not become a virtue, and no virtue which may not become a fault";
"A quiet, serious woman feels uncomfortable with a jolly man, but not
a serious man with a jolly woman"; "Whatever we feel too intensely, we
cannot feel very long"; "It is easy to be obedient to a master who
convinces when he commands"; "Nobody can wander beneath palms without
punishment; all the sentiments must change in a land where elephants
and tigers are at home"; "A man does not become really happy until
his abs