Astyages

“ And here let me observe that the taste for stratagem—the little wiles and snares inspired by a first passion—are among the strongest incentives to its origin. It was the secrecy of our meeting at night, the little difficulties of our intercourse by day, the peril of discovery as we spoke together, the danger of detection as we exchanged glances, that, by giving us a common object, suggested a common feeling. ”

“ In like manner to these are heat and cold called passive qualities, not from the recipients themselves suffering any thing, but because each of the above-mentioned qualities produces passion in the senses, they are denominated passive qualities; for as sweetness, produces a certain passion in the taste, and warmth, in the touch, so also do the rest. ”

“ Such are all those which are called natural; for instance, those which come into existence through the body—such as the desire of food, thirst, hunger, the desire of such and such food in particular; the desires connected with taste, sexual pleasures, in a word, with touch, smell, hearing, and sight. I call those desires rational which are due to our being convinced; for there are many things which we desire to see or acquire when we have heard them spoken of and are convinced that they are pleasant. ”

“ A third class within this category is that of affective qualities and affections. Sweetness, bitterness, sourness, are examples of this sort of quality, together with all that is akin to these; heat, moreover, and cold, whiteness, and blackness are affective qualities. It is evident that these are qualities, for those things that possess them are themselves said to be such and such by reason of their presence. Honey is called sweet because it contains sweetness; the body is called white because it contains whiteness ”

“ Gods of Human Qualities
Students of Far-Eastern mythology and literature have observed the feeble grasp of personality which distinguishes them from the similar products of the Western mind.1 They are characterised by a certain poverty of imagination which is manifested in various directions, and more especially by the almost total absence of personified abstractions of human qualities. We look in vain for such conceptions as Age, Youth, Love, Fear, Patience, Hope, Charity, and a host of other personified qualities. ”

“ The mask or "make up," of personality, by which men may read each other's character, is evolved and developed from the instinctive physical expression accompanying thought, feeling and emotion. Just as the frown accompanying the feeling of annoyance or anger will, if repeated sufficiently [Pg 40] often, become fixed upon the countenance of the man, so will all of his general thoughts, feelings and emotions register themselves in his manner, gait, tone of voice, carriage and facial expression. ”

“ In these pantheistic sympathies I dimly recall that another sect finds three great mysteries in its esoteric view of the world. The wind whistling through the trees, the river breaking over its rocks, the movements of man and his voice,—or, indeed, his silence,—are the expression of the great mysteries of body, of word, and of thought. ”

“ The spheres which we behold may each have their variety of intelligent ‘being,’ as links in nature’s beautiful chain, connecting the smallest insect with the incomprehensible and immutable God. The beautiful variety we see in his works portrays His will, and we are justified in following this variety up to His throne. ”

“ The fire of the mind-formed vesture, fed by the five powers of perception, as though by five sacrificial priests, with objects of sense like streams of melted butter, blazing with the fuel of manifold sense-impressions, sets the personality aflame. ”

“ Thus the qualities of redness, sweetness, hardness, softness, etc., lead us to the abstract terms, red, sweet, hard, soft, etc. In the same way courage, cowardice, virtue, vice, love, hate, etc., are abstract terms. No one ever saw one of these things—they are known only in connection with objects, or else as "abstract terms" in the processes of Thought. They may be known as qualities, and expressed as predicates; or they may be considered as abstract things and expressed as nouns. ”

“ Without pretending to an exhaustive classification, we find four chief temperaments of mind expressed in the theologies and scepticisms of civilized Europe: the quest of physical order, the sense of right, the instinct of beauty, and the consciousness of tempestuous impulses carrying the will off its feet. ”

“ Shews, in the example of Natura, how from our very birth, the passions, to which the human soul is incident, are discoverable in us; and how far the organs of sense, or what is called the constitution, has an effect over us. ”

“ Elsewhere temperaments are more evenly balanced; one finds precision, the word exactly fitted to the thing. But farther on—effect of the sun, the air, the wine perhaps—hot blood courses in the veins, tempers are excitable, language is extravagant, and the simplest things are said in the strongest terms. ”

“ In this way all great events were accomplished; a mood, a divinity, or a demon, first descending like a faint sigh into men’s minds and then changing their thoughts and their actions until hair that was yellow had grown black, or hair that was black had grown yellow, and empires moved their border, as though they were but drifts of leaves. ”

“ To some temperaments it might seem as though this reduction of the immense unfathomable universe to a congeries of living souls were a strangling limitation. There are certain human temperaments, and my own is one of them, whose aesthetic sense demands the existence of vast interminable spaces of air, of water, of earth, of fire, or even of blank emptiness. ”

“ There were vital facts he seemed thus to catch, to seize, with a nervous hand, and the twilight helping, by their vaguely-whisked tails; unquiet truths that swarmed out after the fashion of creatures bold only at eventide, creatures that hovered and circled, that verily brushed his nose, in spite of their shyness. ”

“ Passion and desire together with astral model-body are common to men and animals, as also to the vegetable kingdom, though in the last but faintly developed. And at one period in evolution no further material principles had been developed, and all the three higher, of Mind, Soul, and Spirit, were but latent. ”

“ What mysterious rites are celebrated above by the assembled maids and matrons, freed awhile from the disturbing influence of the male element? Does a wholly unaffected, perhaps unamused expression possess those lovely features, erst so full of every virtue showing forth in every look? ”

“ Touch, as Aristotle tells us, is the “mother sense.” Starting from this form of sensibility as a basis, the other senses develop as we ascend the animal series, by processes of increasing complexity and refinement. ”

“ Whatever of booty fortune unto each Had proffered, each alone would bear away, By instinct trained for self to thrive and live. And Venus in the forests then would link The lovers' bodies; for the woman yielded Either from mutual flame, or from the man's Impetuous fury and insatiate lust, Or from a bribe—as acorn-nuts, choice pears, Or the wild berries of the arbute-tree. ”

“ Rusticity, Avarice and Impudence, are in their own Nature distinct Vices, but yet there is a very near Relation between them, which has a real Foundation in the Actions of Men. And, as on the one Hand, Theophrastus 36 has drawn distinct Characters of these Vices, so, on the other Hand, he has made the peculiar Features of one or more of these Vices enter into the Characters of the other. ”

“ We shall find that all the facts of rivalry and substitution that have so struck us, all the shiftings and expansions and contractions of the sphere of what shall be considered me and mine, are but results of the fact that certain things appeal to primitive and instinctive impulses of our nature, and that we follow their destinies with an excitement that owes nothing to a reflective source. These objects our consciousness treats as the primordial constituents of its Me. ”

“ He feels as if he was removed to another planet. The language, the dress, the manners, every thing he beholds, dazzles and confounds him: till at length reflection and judgment resume their influence, and experience makes the contrast familiar. ”

“ With equal assurance may one appeal to the universal instinct which is gratified by the adaptation [Pg 87] of ends to means; to the innate human sense of the rightness of what is fitting; the constant pleasure in order, in appropriateness, in harmony. It is this instinct, this sense, this pleasure, which underlies the sensitiveness of the mind to what we call Elegance in composition. ”

“ The sight, the smell, the hearing, the touch, and the taste, are taught to exercise themselves upon objects revolting to their original inclinations. They learn to minister to the will without displaying one rebellious symptom. ”

“ If he had said that there are two kinds of appetites, natural and superfluous ones, and that the natural appetites might be also subdivided into two kinds, necessary and not necessary, he would have been all right. And those who have learnt what he despises do usually say so. For it is a vicious division to reckon a part as a genus. ”

“ And this reflection brings us to the first question of importance, what this primitive concept of purity and impurity really is, and what were the sensations from which it was evolved. Nothing is more difficult to describe than simple sensations, but it is possible to distinguish one from another. And we must distinguish between the modern feeling about cleanliness and the primitive feelings which we are considering. ”

“ How these mosaics of aesthetic feelings correspond psychologically with the similar mosaics of other feelings in combination with which they are woven; how they vary in men of different temperaments, and how they change within ourselves with varying moods and from occasion to occasion; what is their present process of individual make-up, and what their biological origin in general, — all these things, I hope, will now appear somewhat more comprehensible to the student of modern science. ”

“ Thus, in the opinion of the wild savage, that face or form will be the most beautiful that assimilates with his idea of savage virtues, corporeal strength, courage, &c. perfections that are placed in bones and nerves: as that of the most cultivated nations, witness the Grecians, will indicate or portray the most refined mental virtues. ”

“ Changes of the bodily attitude, corresponding in their fine gradations with changes of the feelings, comprise conditions 165of the surface of the body, postures of the limbs, and also especially those expressive attitudes of the face to which our attention is particularly directed when we notice one another. The visible expression of the features is a symptom which displays the speaker’s state of mind, his feelings of pleasure or disgust, of pride or humility, of faith or doubt, and so forth. ”

“ Savages look on animals as personalities like themselves, but more powerful, gifted with more wakan, or mana, or cosmic rapport: each man, therefore, and each organised magical society, looks out for, and, for some reason of dream or divination, adopts, a special animal friend. ”

“ So in like manner the different feelings appear to be all accompanied by some particular condition of the body — such feelings, viz. as anger, meekness, fear, pity, courage, and further joy and love and hate — all of which appear to be accompanied by some particular affection of the body. ”

“ The old division of temperaments into phlegmatic or lymphatic, sanguine, choleric, and nervous or melancholy, is a fairly good foundation for preliminary observation, especially as each of the four subdivides itself easily into two types—the hard and soft—reforms itself easily into some cross-divisions, and refuses to be blended into others. ”

“ As I have already pointed out, differences of taste are started by the perceptive and empathic habits, schematically various, of given times and places, and also by those, especially the empathic habits, connected with individual nervous condition: people accustomed to the round arch finding the Gothic one unstable and eccentric ”

“ Some later authorities added a fifth temperament, called the Nervous temperament, which was held to be characterized by a medium complexion, large brain, small physical frame, fineness of organization, thin hair, finely cut features, quick lively disposition, intellectual tastes and tendencies, sensitive nature, high capacity for enjoyment and suffering. ”

“ The true is that sensibility, considered in its external and visible organs, and in its internal organs, the invisible seats of the vital functions, is the indispensable condition of the development of all our faculties, not only of the faculties that evidently pertain to sensibility, but of those that seem to be most remote from it. This true side of sensualism we have everywhere recognized and elucidated in metaphysics, æsthetics, ethics, and theodicea. ”

“ With touch, there is reproduction of externality, but the ideality of the reproduction is not so complete as in the other forms. With taste, the feeling cognizes the external object as undergoing dissolution, and assimilation within its own organism. ”

“ It is the fashion, I find, among a certain class of philosophers, to impute this propensity to the proneness of the human mind toward superstitious beliefs; to the mere effect of poetical or imaginary temperament in certain races of men, or to fear in other races ”