TEE STUDY OF CHARACTER 593 



This doctrine does not stand alone as such an attempt. The 

 " spirit " theory of disease has a like basis and purpose ; it reaches from 

 primitive medicine to Christian exorcism and beyond. The reference 

 of epilepsy or other mental invasion to a foreign and malignant spirit 

 is not unrelated to the notion of animal spirits coursing through the 

 body and finding a local habitation in the ventricles — literally, breath- 

 ing-spaces — of the brain. Again, the doctrine of signatures, in ac- 

 cordance with which red flowers were considered efficacious in the treat- 

 ment of blood diseases and yellow ones in the treatment of jaundice, 

 or " heart's-ease " was prescribed for heart trouble, and walnuts for 

 mental disorders (by virtue of the resemblance of their outer shell to 

 the skull and of their convoluted kernels to the brain) illustrate the 

 force of native analogy in cruder practises. 



When notions of this order, instead of being carried along as the 

 folk-lore products of primitive thought, assume a systematic form, they 

 become more fantastic in the analogies employed as well as more re- 

 mote from a corrective common sense. Astrology is the most ambi- 

 tious of such efforts In both design and scope of application. The 

 three persistent motives in this world-wide and world-old expression — 

 a composite of primitive culture, superstitious survivals, and pseudo- 

 scientific elaboration — seem to be the cure of disease, the reading of 

 character, the fore-knowledge of the future and in all, the control of 

 fate. The motives combine. Astrology aims to determine the char- 

 acter as well as the careers of men, to predict their liability to disease 

 and its issues, and to prescribe the set of disposition — making one of 

 jovial temperament if the hour of birth showed favorable relations to 

 Jupiter, or gloomy (saturnine) if Saturn ruled the critical moment. 

 These and related notions and systems form a vast background of be- 

 lief, continuously influencing the views of character and its sources. 

 Whether the causes or the signs of dispositions were regarded as resi- 

 dent in the fluids of the body, or in the stars and planets, or in the 

 detailed contours of the features of the face and head — as in the later 

 physiognomy, itself a revival of classic and popular lore — or with 

 more modern but no less fanciful elaboration, in the " bumps " of 

 phrenolog}', or again in the creases of the hand upon which palmistry 

 specializes, there appears in all a common practical motive in the con- 

 trol of fate through insight or revelation, and a common quasi-logical 

 attempt to establish its basis by reading the secret of its conditioning — 

 the insignia of its dominion. The logic of the procedure, as judged 

 by our standards, is of the feeblest, but these standards are the issue 

 of many generations of experience, each critically testing the conclu- 

 sions, revising and enlarging the data, of its predecessors. The stress 

 of practise, we must bear in mind, is insistent. Men will apply what 

 knowledge they have; they can not await its perfection. Ideals and 

 systems support the intercourse with reality, but they also express the 



