Now if we could photographically _decompose_ a composite photograph
so as to separate in order inverse all the impressions interblended
to make it, such process would clumsily represent what really
happens when the image of a strange face is telegraphed back--like a
police-photograph--from the living retina to the mysterious offices
of inherited memory. There, with the quickness of an electric flash,
the shadow-face is decomposed into all the ancestral types combined
in it; and the resulting verdict of the dead, though rendered only by
indefinable sensation, is more trustworthy than any written certificate
of character could ever be. But its trustworthiness is limited to
the _potential_ relation of the individual seen to the individual
seeing. Upon different minds, according to the delicate balance of
personality,--according to the qualitative sum of inherited experience
in the psychical composition of the observer,--the same features will
make very different impressions. A face that strongly repels one person
may not less strongly attract another, and will produce nearly similar
impressions only on groups of emotionally homogeneous natures. Certainly
the fact of this ability to discern in the composition of faces that
indefinable something which welcomes or which warns, does suggest
the possibility of deciding some laws of ethical physiognomy; but
such laws would necessarily be of a very general and simple kind, and
their relative value could never equal that of the uneducated personal
intuition.
How, indeed, should it be otherwise? What science could ever hope to
measure the infinite possibilities of psychical combination? And the
present in every countenance is a recombination of the past;--the living
is always a resurrection of the dead. The sympathies and the fears,
the hopes and the repulsions that faces inspire, are but revivals and
reiterations,--echoes of sentiency created in millions of minds by
immeasurable experience operating through immeasurable time. My friend
of this hour, though no more identical with his forefathers than any
single ripple of a current is identical with all the ripples that ever
preceded it, is nevertheless by soul-composition one with myriads known
and loved in other lands and in other lives,--in times recorded and in
times forgotten,--in cities that still remain and in cities that have
ceased to be,--by thousands of my vanished selves.