The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, a Dialogue, Etc. eBook

said about the shock which the first sight of a face generally produces, is in keeping with the remark that it is only at that first sight that it makes its true and full impression.  For to get a purely objective and uncorrupted impression of it, we must stand in no kind of relation to the person; if possible, we must not yet have spoken with him.  For every conversation places us to some extent upon a friendly footing, establishes a certain rapport, a mutual subjective relation, which is at once unfavorable to an objective point of view.  And as everyone’s endeavor is to win esteem or friendship for himself, the man who is under observation will at once employ all those arts of dissimulation in which he is already versed, and corrupt us with his airs, hypocrisies and flatteries; so that what the first look clearly showed will soon be seen by us no more.

This fact is at the bottom of the saying that “most people gain by further acquaintance”; it ought, however, to run, “delude us by it.”  It is only when, later on, the bad qualities manifest themselves, that our first judgment as a rule receives its justification and makes good its scornful verdict.  It may be that “a further acquaintance” is an unfriendly one, and if that is so, we do not find in this case either that people gain by it.  Another reason why people apparently gain on a nearer acquaintance is that the man whose first aspect warns us from him, as soon as we converse with him, no longer shows his own being and character, but also his education; that is, not only what he really is by nature, but also what he has appropriated to himself out of the common wealth of mankind.  Three-fourths of what he says belongs not to him, but to the sources from which he obtained it; so that we are often surprised to hear a minotaur speak so humanly.  If we make a still closer acquaintance, the animal nature, of which his face gave promise, will manifest itself “in all its splendor.”  If one is gifted with an acute sense for physiognomy, one should take special note of those verdicts which preceded a closer acquaintance and were therefore genuine.  For the face of a man is the exact impression of what he is; and if he deceives us, that is our fault, not his.  What a man says, on the other hand, is what he thinks, more often what he has learned, or it may be even, what he pretends to think.  And besides this, when we talk to him, or even hear him talking to others, we pay no attention to his physiognomy proper.  It is the underlying substance, the fundamental datum, and we disregard it; what interests us is its pathognomy, its play of feature during conversation.  This, however, is so arranged as to turn the good side upwards.