216 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
the limits of the time allowed me, to attempt a summary of the chief 
problems and principles of this new branch; and, as methodically and 
as completely as is possible within so narrow a compass, to plot out the 
ground explored by recent work. 
Though the scientific study of individual minds is new, the popular 
interest in the practical issues has a long and venerable record; the 
ancient title of ‘ psychology ’ is by comparison a word of yesterday.” 
Time after time in the history of knowledge, the quack who has pandered 
to a public want proves to have been the primitive precursor, the earliest 
avant-coureur, of what afterwards arrives as a respected and respectable 
science. Astrology was the forerunner of astronomy, alchemy of chem- 
istry, and the lore of the bone-setter and the herbalist of modern surgery 
and medicine. In the same way the charlatan who reads your character 
from the lines on your hand or the bumps on your skull is carrying on 
an antique tradition which embodies the first attempts at a psychology 
of individuals. He has seen the problem; he has met the demand; 
and, if his wares are sham and shoddy, he has at least thrown down a 
challenge to the slower and more scrupulous disciple of truth. 
The blunders of pseudo-science, however, are never wholly unin- 
structive. Those who first practised l’art de connaitre les hommes—the 
physiognomists, the phrenologists, the palmists, and their successors— 
were all, in their crude and curious speculations, mainly guided, and 
mostly misled, by three fallacious assumptions. They looked for nothing 
but permanent and external signs; they assumed nothing but constant 
connections between the outward and visible symptom and the inward 
and invisible state of mind; and they classified both physical symptoms 
and mental qualities into arbitrary and discrete types. Thus, your nose 
was either pointed or not pointed; and your temperament was either 
choleric or not choleric. If your nose was sharp, then your temper must 
be sharp as well: for nasus acutus irascibiles notat. No graduations 
were recognised; no exceptions admitted. The correspondence was 
made perfect and invariable. Indeed, if the classes were not clear-cut, 
if the symptoms were not patent to superficial inspection, and if the con- 
nections between the two were not absolute and uniform, how could 
there be any inference, any prediction, any science of whatever sort ? 
The soul, surely, must be a riddle which could never be read. 
The difficulty was solved by the discovery of a new technique. And 
this we owe to an original English thinker of the latter half of the nine- 
teenth century, Sir Francis Galton. To the general public, Galton is 
best known by his demonstration of the hereditary factors in individual 
genius—a doctrine that in his own person he so remarkably exemplified. 
2 I suppose the earliest written recognition of the power of judging the 
quality of the mind from observable characteristics is to be found in the words 
of Nestor to the unknown Telemachus : ‘By certain signs that I discern upon 
thy face, illustrious youth, I recognise what man thou art. Thy countenance 
is proud and generous, thine eloquence great, and thy reasoning recalls to me 
thy father. What manner of youth could such a one as thou be, were he 
not the offspring of the great Ulysses?’ Homer, Odyssey, xi., 693. Those who 
care to trace the historical development of individual psychology will find most 
of the necessary materials and references collected in Mantegazza’s Phystognomy 
and Expression (1904) and Stern’s Différentielle Psychologie (1911). 
