nse is called by that
name. This method is to read character. Any object with which we are
familiar teaches us to divine its habits; slight indications, which we
should be at a loss to enumerate separately, betray what changes are
going on and what promptings are simmering in the organism. Hence the
expression of a face or figure; hence the traces of habit and passion
visible in a man and that indescribable something about him which
inspires confidence or mistrust. The gift of reading character is partly
instinctive, partly a result of experience; it may amount to foresight
and is directed not upon consciousness but upon past or eventual action.
Habits and passions, however, have metaphorical psychic names, names
indicating dispositions rather than particular acts (a disposition being
mythically represented as a sort of wakeful and haunting genius waiting
to whisper suggestions in a man's ear). We may accordingly delude
ourselves into imagining that a pose or a manner which really indicates
habit indicates feeling instead. In truth the feeling involved, if
conceived at all, is conceived most vaguely, and is only a sort of
reverberation or penumbra surrounding the pictured activities.

[Sidenote: Conduct divined, consciousness ignored.]

It is a mark of the connoisseur to be able to read character and habit
and to divine at a glance all a creature's potentialities. This sort of
penetration characterises the man with an eye for horse-flesh, the
dog-fancier, and men and women of the world. It guides the born leader
in the judgments he instinctively passes on his subordinates and
enemies; it distinguishes every good judge of human affairs or of
natural phenomena, who is quick to detect small but telling indications
of events past or brewing. As the weather-prophet reads the heavens so
the man of experience reads other men. Nothing concerns him less than
their consciousness; he can allow that to run itself off when he is sure
of their temper and habits. A great master of affairs is usually
unsympathetic. His observation is not in the least dramatic or dreamful,
he does not yield himself to animal contagion or re-enact other people's
inward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent on his own
purposes. His observation, on the contrary, is straight calculation and
inference, and it sometimes reaches truths about people's character and
destiny which they themselves are very far from divining. Such
apprehension is mas