ORIGIN AND NATUEE OP THE INQUIRY. 7 



often self-confident and even self-important. When 

 the mental endowment is high and the surroundings 

 favourable, the active and less-impassioned tempera- 

 ment furnishes many of our finest characters great 

 statesmen and great leaders ; sometimes, especially 

 when the mental gifts are slight, the character is less 

 pleasing : love of change may become mere fitfulness ; 

 activity may become bustle ; sparing approval may 

 turn to actual censoriousness ; love of approbation may 

 degenerate into a mania for notoriety. In the impas- 

 sioned temperament, on the other hand, we find quite 

 another group of elements repose or even gentleness, 

 quiet reflection, noiseless methods, tenacity of purpose. 

 The emotions, good or evil, are deep and enduring. 

 In this class also, especially when the intellect is 

 powerful and the training refined, lofty characters are I/ 

 found. In it, too, are found probably the worst and 

 most degraded characters. In its lowest levels we 

 meet too often with indolence, self-indulgence, morbid 

 brooding, implacability, and possibly cruelty. ^^^ 



The most important teaching, then, of these pages 

 is, that a given cluster of characteristics run, in equal 

 or unequal degrees, together in the passionless tem- 

 perament, and that another given cluster run as 

 uniformly in the impassioned. Next in importance is 

 the conclusion that each temperament has its cluster 

 of special, distinctive, bodily signs. The more marked 

 the temperament the mdfe marked are the signs. 



The classification of men and women into the active 

 and more unimpassioned, the reflective and more im- 

 passioned, and the intermediate, does not claim to be, 

 or to come near, a general or exhaustive classification of 

 character. It has no direct bearing on many even of 

 its leading divisions. It says nothing, for example, 



