or the cipher of a man. But his stimulating curiosity went much further. It was not merely concerned with the poems, novels, and revelations of important individuals; it also took into account their features and build, going still beyond this to the spiritual physiognomics of countries and whole races, to considerations of what might be called the spirit of an age or the spirit of a people. The centre of his interests moved from the West to the East; and the little book which he calls Der Indische Gedanke is certainly the subtlest and most succinct work written on the Indian character in Central Europe or perhaps in all Europe. Kassner's power lies in his refusal to pass anything by as a mere insignificant detail. He can speedily discover some relationship connecting the most heterogeneous elements. In this, as is true of all original thinkers, his mind—which in spite of its subjectivity is guarded and rigorous—follows the procedure of nature itself: it makes no division into the important and the subsidiary, and rejects any distinction between exterior and interior. It seems almost self-evident that a man like Kassner should begin his career by translating Plato and that in maturity he should arrive at physiognomics. The subject of his latest books is entirely physiognomics; not, however, in the restricted and pedantic manner of the eighteenth century. His method is peculiarly his own, and holds a half-way position between the systematic and the fragmentary or aphoristic. The most recent of his books, Die Grundlagen der Physiognomik, contains many sharp and profound observations concerning mouth and eye, ear and chin, the contrast between the face and the nape of the neck, between the front and back views of the human frame; and from this—without the slightest break in his treatment—he goes into the deeper subject of repose and mobility as it shows on the human face, contrasts the ancient type with the modern—utilizing the opposites: seeming and being, art and reality. In short, morphology becomes for him the channel whereby one enters into the realm of a truly universal or philosophic manner of considering the world.
My American readers will be surprised if I follow the names of these two isolated spirits with that of Dr Freud, who has been famous for some years in both hemispheres and whose psychoanalytic theories have been adopted by hundreds of students and, in a partly elaborated form, have become a kind of world-power. But in matters of the mind fame is an unrelated incidental feature, very often the result of sheer accident. In any case it leaves no imprint upon
