Human Physiognomy : or the Art of Discerning the Mental and Moral Character of Man

14 HUMAN PHYSIOGNOMY. Now, in the Sanguine temperament, the heart and blood vessels are particularly developed, and easily excited to power ful action, and we therein perceive the cause of the superficial brilliancy of intellect, and the unstable vehemence of feeling which characterize this temperament. In persons of the Phlegmatic temperament, the glands and lymphatics, which are the chief organs for nourishing the system, preponderate; and their life is almost entirely vegetative ; all their feeble energies are expended in increasing their bulky frame; and the little mental action they exhibit is feeble, meagre and heavy. Peter Pindar humorously expresses the effect of this temperament: he says, “ FiT-holds ideas by the legs and wings.” And Shakspeare, whom nothing pertaining to human nature has escaped, recognises this, and also the opposite tendency <tf the Nervous temperament, in Ctesar’s lines, “ Let me have men about me that are fat, Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights: Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much,—such men are dangerous. ------Would he were fatter.” PART II. OF EMOTIVE PHYSIOGNOMY, OR NATURAL LANGUAGE---- LOOKS, GESTURES AND POSTURES OF DIFFERENT DISPOSITIONS----NATURAL LANGUAGE DEFINED. “ When I sit and tell The warlike feats I’ve done—he puts himself In posture that acts my words.” Having thus given a brief sketch of Corporeal Physiog nomy, which enables us, by proper study, to judge of the general quality, as the energy or inertness of the human mind, we shall proceed now to relate our experience as regards Emotive Physiognomy, which is founded on the influence that the mind exerts over the body, in portraying its feelings; the traces of which becoming gradually permanent, we are enabled, from them, to judge of the characteristic feelings of the mind which has produced them. Gesture is the involuntary muscular movement occasioned

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