ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE INQUIRY. D 



marriage morning would have changed their lives and 

 views. These sentences would need but little change 

 if they began with the words " Look at two women/' 

 and considered the matter from the woman's point of 

 view. If Mary Stuart's first husband had been a 

 Bothwell, much else in her life would have been 

 different. The less impassioned men and women are 

 perhaps not well fitted, however willing, to judge their 

 impassioned brothers and sisters. The more emo- 

 tional also 'are too insensible to the merits of the active 

 and less emotional. 



Here, then, was a clue, not to every nook and 

 corner, but still to a wide range of character. Mate- 

 rial for observation is everywhere around us in 

 domestic, in social, and in public life ; in the school, 

 in the committee-room, in parliament ; in the theatre, 

 the law court, the church ; in history,, biography, and 

 fiction in all written and spoken words, and in all 

 writers and speakers themselves. 



With this clue, and after prolonged observation and 

 with competent help, the following conclusions became 

 clear to me. There are two generic fundamental 

 biases in character, and, keeping this fact in mind, 

 two types (three if the intermediate be included) of 

 character come conspicuously into view one in which 

 the tendency to action is extreme and the tendency 

 to reflection slight ; in another the proneness to 

 reflection greatly predominates, and the impulse for 

 action is feebler. Between the two extremes are 

 innumerable gradations ; but it is sufficient to point 

 only to a third type a fortunate intervening type, 

 concerning which it is obvious that little need be said 

 here in which the powers of reflection and action 

 tend to meet in more or less equal degrees. In an 



