6io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



This account of one strand in the network of data indispensable to 

 the establishment of a psychological point of view is presumably typical 

 of parallel movements. It indicates how recent are the steps of direct 

 bearing upon present-day problems, and in so far justifies the slight 

 consideration (in the present connection) of the remoter and more 

 fragmentary historical antecedents. It will also make it easy to under- 

 stand how readily in the absence of an accredited and established view 

 of the bodily correlates of mental action, the ambitious innovations as 

 well as the traditional survivals of beliefs could gain a foothold. This 

 is true in part of even so late a propagandum as that of Lavater — 

 which in large measure was operative before the day of the most de- 

 cisive discoveries — and to the careers of Gall and Spurzheim, whose 

 contributions in part came after them. The spirit of nineteenth-cen- 

 tury science was not then sufficiently disseminated to make obvious the 

 irrelevancy of such pretensions as phrenology, nor indeed to offer a sat- 

 isfactory consideration of the problems which that system professed 

 to solve. 



In the collateral ancestry of "character and temperament" the 

 anthropological attitude occupies an important place, — in a new sense 

 making mankind the proper study of man. It forms part of the 

 broadening outlook upon the constitution of nature in general and 

 human nature in particular, that characterizes modern thinking. It 

 doubtless has a relation to the closer study of the political struggles of 

 nations and to economic expansion, though the relation is not intimate. 

 It aimed at a philosophical interpretation of the structure and motive 

 sources of human society and institutions. The anthropological in- 

 terest extended to the characteristics of the social groups, particularly 

 of races and peoples in different stages of develojDment and under the 

 sway of distinctive cultures. The enlargement of outlook resulted 

 from the spirit of exploration and inquiry, which brought knowledge 

 of peoples and habitations and other systems of culture, and in another 

 direction extended the reconstruction of the past of man. A similar 

 enterprise resurveyed the story of the intellectual past and traced the 

 slow control of the forces of nature through invention, and the equally 

 laborious attainment of a social control through the organizations of 

 men. The larger intercourse with varieties of mankind together with the 

 broader interpretation of the forces responsible for the development re- 

 sulting from the same spirit of exploration and inquiry that led to the 

 technical scientific advances, brought Avith it a more thorough knowl- 

 edge of the diversity of men and civilizations, and traced in the latter 



develop "readings of character" from signs and systems of appearance or ex- 

 pression. The best-known of these is palmistry and graphology. That hand- 

 writing has a modest place as an expression of the neuro-museular function is an 

 admission that in no sense qualifies it to serve as an index to "Character." 

 That a few students of handwriting have appreciated the physiological and psy- 

 chological aspects of their findings is to be recorded. 



