Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/844

824 and wife, sometimes ultimately acquire a similarity of physiognomy. Animals faithfully express the passions of their race in their organs and attitudes; and men, in turn, reproduce in themselves various types of animality. Different races of men have their own respective varieties of physiognomy, according to the predominant traits of their characters, and different nations among men of the same race.

The professions also leave their traces in the forms of the organs and in the features. "The hearing of the soldier," says M. Mantegazza, "is precise, stiff, and energetic; that of the priest, supple and unctuous. The soldier, even in civil life, shows in his movements the habit of obedience and command; while the priest in a lay dress wears the mark of the cassock and the cloth, and his fingers seem all the time to be blessing or absolving." So many other professions may be recognized by their attitudes, but there are limitations in the matter; for physiognomy, as M. Mantegazza says, "can not yet be considered an exact science, because we do not yet know all the elements of the problem. It has, nevertheless, its well-established general laws We are not likely to confound a frank physiognomy with a tricky one, or an honest face with the face of a debauchee or rascal."

There remain a few words to be said on the interpretation of signs, in which the old psychology saw a mysterious faculty. We regard it as the simple continuation in another of the sympathetic contagion, of the solidarity which is first manifested in the interior of an organism. In the exterior as well as in the interior of our body, sympathy is the only psychological law of expression; to interpret is to sympathize. In a mechanical view, this sympathy is a real communication of movements, as when the vibrations of a bell set another bell in vibration; in the psychological and social view, it is a real solidarity of sensations, impressions, and volitions. The instinctive reaction of the will under the influence of the feeling, having been extended by contagion to our whole organism, extends by contagion to similar organisms, and, if other men comprehend what we feel, it is because they themselves feel it. The final result of this sympathetic communication is the retranslation of the emotion felt by one into similar emotions in the others. The emotion of our neighbor is returned to us by a kind of response or return shock. Seeing the movements and. attitudes of others, we tend to realize them in ourselves; then, as by a counter-stroke, the movement and attitude realized by us reproduce in us the feelings that correspond to them.

Mr. Spencer would explain the interpretation of signs by a purely mechanical association. This same cause, acting upon several animals simultaneously, makes them, for example, utter the same cry of alarm; the fear and the cry are finally associated mechanically; this association, by the survival of the best endowed, becomes organic and hereditary; at least the mere hearing of the sound of alarm will be enough mechanically to awaken the feeling. While we do not deny the