hear him talking to others, we pay no attention to his physiognomy
proper. It is the underlying substance, the fundamental _datum_, and we
disregard it; what interests us is its pathognomy, its play of feature
during conversation. This, however, is so arranged as to turn the good
side upwards.

When Socrates said to a young man who was introduced to him to have his
capabilities tested, "Talk in order that I may see you," if indeed by
"seeing" he did not simply mean "hearing," he was right, so far as it is
only in conversation that the features and especially the eyes become
animated, and the intellectual resources and capacities set their mark
upon the countenance. This puts us in a position to form a provisional
notion of the degree and capacity of intelligence; which was in that
case Socrates' aim. But in this connection it is to be observed,
firstly, that the rule does not apply to moral qualities, which lie
deeper, and in the second place, that what from an objective point of
view we gain by the clearer development of the countenance in
conversation, we lose from a subjective standpoint on account of the
personal relation into which the speaker at once enters in regard to us,
and which produces a slight fascination, so that, as explained above, we
are not left impartial observers. Consequently from the last point of
view we might say with greater accuracy, "Do not speak in order that I
may see you."

For to get a pure and fundamental conception of a man's physiognomy, we
must observe him when he is alone and left to himself. Society of any
kind and conversation throw a reflection upon him which is not his own,
generally to his advantage; as he is thereby placed in a state of action
and reaction which sets him off. But alone and left to himself, plunged
in the depths of his own thoughts and sensations, he is wholly himself,
and a penetrating eye for physiognomy can at one glance take a general
view of his entire character. For his face, looked at by and in itself,
expresses the keynote of all his thoughts and endeavors, the _arret
irrevocable_, the irrevocable decree of his destiny, the consciousness
of which only comes to him when he is alone.

The study of physiognomy is one of the chief means of a knowledge of
mankind, because the cast of a man's face is the only sphere in which
his arts of dissimulation are of no avail, since these arts extended
only to that play of feature which is akin to mimicry. And that is