CENTER FOR CULTURAL PHILANTHROPY |
| DIRECTOR Arnold Potsandpans |
ABOUT
May the union between the knowledge of the heart and philanthropy be obtained by the same means ? Does not a knowledge of the heart destroy or weaken philanthropy? Does not our good opinion of any man diminish when he is perfectly known ? And if so, how may philanthropy be increased by this knowledge ?
What is here alleged is truth; but it is partial truth. And how fruitful a source of error is partial truth!' It is a certain truth, that the majority of men are losers by being accurately known; but it is no less true, that the majority of men gain as much on one side as they lose on the other by being thus accurately known. Who is so wise as never to act foolishly ? Whereis the virtue wholly unpolluted by vice; with thoughts, at all moments, simple, direct, and pure? I dare undertake to maintain, that all men, with some very rare exceptions, lose by being known. But it may also be proved, by the most irrefragable arguments, that all men gain by being known; consequently a knowledge of the heart is not detrimental to the love of mankind, but promotes it.
Physiognomy discovers actual and possible perfections, which, without its aid, must ever have remained hidden. The more man is studied, the more power and positive goodness will he be discovered to possess. As the experienced eye of the painter perceives a thousand small shades and colours, which are unremarked by common spectators, so the physiognomist views a multitude of actual or possible perfections, which escape the general eye of the despiser, the slanderer, or even the more benevolent judge of mankind.
The good which I, as a physiognomist, have observed in people round me, has more* than compensated that mass of evil, which, though I appeared blind, I could not avoid seeing. The more I have studied man, the more have I been convinced of the general influence of his faculties; the more have 1 remarked, that the origin of all evil is good, that those very powers which made him evil, those abilities, forces, irritability, elasticity, were all in themselves actual, positive good. The absence of these, indeed, would have occasioned the absence of an infinity of evil, but so would they likewise of an infinity of good. The essence of good has given birth to much evil; but it contained in itself the possibility of a still infinite increase of good.