Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/600

596 notions of like conjectural basis. Their common motive is a strong leaning towards the occult.

The parent view that mental traits are conditioned by bodily composition affiliated with views of similar ancestry holding that the traits were revealed in bodily signs. Such is the principle [sic] of physiognomy,—a doctrine as old as Aristotle, and older. There is the traditional story that the physiognomist Zopyrus, in reading the character of Socrates, pronounced him full of passionate tendencies, thus showing in the opinion of the disciples of Socrates, the vanity of his art. But Socrates came to his defence and confessed the reality of the impulses, which, however, he was able to resist. Aristotle’s advocacy of physiognomy was not very pronounced; it may have been little more than an inclination to recognize the reflection of emotion in feature, or the coordinate growth of body and mind. But the tractate on “Physiognomy” ascribed to him served as the text to the renaissance adepts in occult lore. Thus restated, even more than in its original setting, it presents the characteristic dependence upon weak analogy in connecting specific bodily features with specific mental traits. Coarse hair, an erect body, a strong sturdy frame, broad shoulders, a robust neck, blue eyes and dark complexion, a sharp but not large brow, were together regarded as marks of the courageous man, while the timid man showed opposite characteristics. The doctrine was reënforced by such analogies as that timid animals, like the rabbit and the deer, had soft fine hair; while the courageous ones, like the lion and the wild boar, were coarse-haired.

A mental trait may have at once a natural bodily cause and a manifest or covert sign. The “humorist” may also be a physiognomist, may both account for and read human character, may prescribe for its ailments according to the one set of influences, and advise as to course and career according to the other.

There is no more instructive instance to illustrate how the old learning was reinstated with slight alteration in precept and practise than the career of Jerome Cardan (1501-1576). Esteemed by his contemporaries, shrewd and able, he was urged in one direction by his taste for science and in another by his credulity. His autobiography reveals his analytic bent as well as his strong personality. It has been said of him that for all for which his contemporaries thought him wise, we should think him mad; and for what we think him wise, they would have thought him mad. So great was his reputation that he was invited and then inveigled to travel from Naples to Scotland to treat the bishop of St. Andrews. The prelate’s ailment had been described as a periodic asthma due to a distillation of the brain into the lungs, which left a “temperature and a condition too moist and too cold, and the flow of the humors coinciding with the conjunctions and oppositions of the moon.” With the characteristic prestige that