Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/595

Rh without an analytic strain. He sets forth his intentions thus: That although all Greece is of one

The “Characters” of Theophrastus form a group of sketches of human foibles, holding the mirror up to nature, comprising the dissembler, the flatterer, the gossip, the toady, the fop, the miser, the superstitious, the mistrusting, the querulous, the bully, the coward, the stubborn, the pompous, the boor and the bore, the malaprop of either sex, the well-intentioned fool and the public-disregarding autocrat. This gallery of mental and moral shortcomings served as a model for distant ages. A group of delineations of character appeared in England in the seventeenth century; and the model was still suggestive when George Eliot chose the title for her “Impressions of Theophrastus Such.” The modern delineations emphasize circumstance, the vocations and social stations, reflect a more varied, a more specialized, and a more complicated world. The “idle gallant,” the “meer dull physician,” the “upstart country knight,” the “pot-poet,” the “plodding student,” the “down-right scholar,” as well as the “self-conceited man,” the “vulgar-spirited man,” the “too idly reserved man,” and men of other dispositions are subjected to keen strictures in the “Microcosmography, or a Piece of the World Discovered in Essays and Characters” by John Earle (1628). Such portraitures of human peculiarities, gauged by their moral or social desirability as examples to be followed or avoided, form an attractive compendium for the interpretation of men and their ways. Their consideration, ranging from gossip to philosophy, supplies the common touch of nature that makes the world of every time and clime akin, and presents graphically for our psychological contemplation the outward issues of disposition as shaped by opportunity and circumstance.

This vein of character-mining failed to yield the native ore of disposition. The more fundamental problem was early recognized in the venerable doctrine of the temperaments as the alleged determinants of the original yet distinctive natures of men, and in the general notion that outward uncontrollable forces, such as climate, and directive ones, such as breeding and training, were responsible for the types of individuals and races—as duly indicated by Theophrastus. The doctrines of the school of Hippocrates (fifth century .) formulated the Greek point of view. Its philosophical procedure followed that of