Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/653

Rh of St. Peter. And in like manner some of those "painefull and pious" Christians who regard all theatrical and similar amusements as sinful, find support for their views in the stodgy visages of musicians and public singers. In both cases science is on the side of the charity which thinketh no evil. For if the inferences here drawn from what we know as to the physiology of emotion are correct, the facts prove no more than that the ugly priest, or public entertainer, has good assimilative organs, deep feelings, a sluggish mind, and narrow interests. If in feature he tends to resemble certain moral offenders, the fact is owing to a mere unhappy accident, like the black eye of the tennis player aforesaid. Any such resemblances depend upon the fact that man's emotional machinery has not kept pace with civilization, but is still practically in the same state as when it was adapted for the very limited wants of our pristine ancestor, who had no inward feelings unassociated with animal appetite. Our complex modern life has revealed its deficiencies, just as the advent of a missionary among certain primitive races reveals the ludicrous poverty of languages, which can only express the idea of "heavenly bliss" by words meaning "a very full belly."

Into the distinguishing facial traits of the sensualist it is not necessary to enter. In his case the evil expression is honestly come by, and is due to no physiological accident. To any competent reader of facial records it tells its story with a frankness which out-Zolas Zola. What is chiefly of interest about it is the mechanical process by which the inner man is revealed upon the surface. Here, again, we find that the sympathetic nervous system is the agent chiefly responsible; for the changes which have occurred since the face lost its youthful innocence are owing to trophic rather than to muscular causes.

It is worth while noting that here, as in the other tpyes instanced, the exercise of the will and the intellect, or any interference with organic nutritive processes, will mask the facial results of yielding to emotion. Any man of the world will support me when I say that there are not a few grossly sensual men whose expressions do not readily betray them. An ascetic debauchee is an impossible being, but there are not a few instances of men who give free rein to their desires, who nevertheless, from some defect in the assimilative organs, or from the fact that they exercise their wills and minds in other directions, do not develop the bloated countenance and prominent lustful eye which typify the class generally.

In concluding my remarks on the three types we have been discussing, let me say that no abnormally acute powers of observation are required to enable one to distinguish the actual marks of vice from the marks of sensuous emotion which is innocent in