is a most characteristic mark of race) and sound (the sound of speech, song, and, above all, laughter, which enables us accurately to sense deep differences inaccessible to scientific method) the profusion of images before the eye is so embarrassingly rich in details, either actually visible or sensible to the inner vision, that the possibility of marshalling them under a few aspects is simply unthinkable. And all these sides to the picture, all these traits composing it, are independent of one another and have each their individual history. There are cases in which the bony structure (and particularly the skull-form) completely alter without the expression of the fleshy parts — i.e., the face — becoming different. The brothers and sisters of the same family may all present almost every differentia posited by Blumenbach, Müller, and Huxley, and yet the identity of their living race-expression may be patent to anyone who looks at them. Still more frequent is similarity of bodily build accompanied by thorough diversity of living expression — I need only mention the immeasurable difference between genuine peasant-stock, like the Frisians or the Bretons, and genuine city-stock.[1] But besides the energy of the blood — which coins the same living features ("family" traits) over and over again for centuries — and the power of the soil — evidenced in its stamp of man — there is that mysterious cosmic force of the syntony of close human connexions. What is called the "Versehen" of a pregnant woman[2] is only a particular and not very important instance of the workings of a very deep and powerful formative principle inherent in all that is of the race side. It is a matter of common observation that elderly married people become strangely like one another, although probably Science with its measuring instruments would "prove" the exact opposite. It is impossible to exaggerate the formative power of this living pulse, this strong inward feeling for the perfection of one's own type. The feeling for race-beauty — so opposite to the conscious taste of ripe urbans for intellectual-individual traits of beauty — is immensely strong in primitive men, and for that very reason never emerges into their consciousness. But such a feeling is race-forming. It undoubtedly moulded the warrior- and hero-type of a nomad tribe more and more definitely on one bodily ideal, so that it would have been quite unambiguous to speak of the race-figure of Romans or Ostrogoths. The same is true of any ancient nobility — filled with a strong and deep sense of its own unity, it achieves the formation of a bodily ideal. Comradeship breeds races. French noblesse and Prussian Landadel are genuine race-denotations. But it is just this, too, that has bred the types of the Euro-
- ↑ In this connexion it ought to be someone's business to undertake physiognomic studies upon the massy, thoroughly peasantish, Roman busts; the portraits of Early Gothic; those of the Renaissance, already visibly urban; and, most of all, the polite English portraiture from the late-eighteenth century onward. The great galleries of "ancestors" contain an endless wealth of material.
- ↑ The sudden fear of some animal or object seen, believed to result in her child's bearing the mark of it. Cf. Jacob and the speckled cattle (Genesis xxx, 37). The attitude of biologists to this question is not negative, but non-committal. — Tr.
