t really understand each other,
what rules between them being not so much sympathy as habitual trust,
idealisation, or satire; foreigners' minds are pure enigmas, and those
attributed to animals are a grotesque compound of AEsop and physiology.
When we come to religion the ineptitude of all the feelings attributed
to nature or the gods is so egregious that a sober critic can look to
such fables only for a pathetic expression of human sentiment and need;
while, even apart from the gods, each religion itself is quite
unintelligible to infidels who have never followed its worship
sympathetically or learned by contagion the human meaning of its
sanctions and formulas. Hence the stupidity and want of insight commonly
shown in what calls itself the history of religions. We hear, for
instance, that Greek religion was frivolous, because its mystic awe and
momentous practical and poetic truths escape the Christian historian
accustomed to a catechism and a religious morality; and similarly
Catholic piety seems to the Protestant an aesthetic indulgence, a
religion appealing to sense, because such is the only emotion its
externals can awaken in him, unused as he is to a supernatural economy
reaching down into the incidents and affections of daily life.

Language is an artificial means of establishing unanimity and
transferring thought from one mind to another. Every symbol or phrase,
like every gesture, throws the observer into an attitude to which a
certain idea corresponded in the speaker; to fall exactly into the
speaker's attitude is exactly to understand. Every impediment to
contagion and imitation in expression is an impediment to comprehension.
For this reason language, like all art, becomes pale with years; words
and figures of speech lose their contagious and suggestive power; the
feeling they once expressed can no longer be restored by their
repetition. Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a
relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a
scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a
learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even
a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Unsure the ebb and flood of thought,
The moon comes back, the spirit not.

[Sidenote: Perception of character]

There is, however, a wholly different and far more positive method of
reading the mind, or what in a metaphorical se