He also had another basis for a division of characters according to the dominant, as he called it, and he got the nutritive as the lowest group including epicures, drunkards and the avaricious, the sexualic or licentious, the affective or sensitive, and the intellectual or thinkers who stood highest.
This science he developed to a high degree, and after some time acquired the ability to judge human beings and give their equations. To verify the truth of his observations he used himself as a psychological preparation, cut himself up bodily, experimented with himself and grafted fistulas and fontanelles, subjecting himself to unnatural and often repulsive spiritual diet, but carefully guarded faults of observation, and avoided forming a norm for others by his own sayings and doings.
When he had finally become weary of traveling abroad, and his soul was longing for its milieu, he returned home to seek a sphere of activity. As it was immaterial to him what his occupation might be he applied for the position of fish commissioner. As they were not anxious to have him too near he was appointed as the first man of the inlet to Stockholm.
Here he awoke from the review of his evolution, from which he used to regenerate himself by hastily living his life over again, thereby tracing, as it were, his standpoint and, calculating his resources, he cleared his course onward to his probable destiny and his prospects of succeeding in his enterprises.
The pilot, who in the meantime had rowed the boat behind the rocks and in lee of the ice cakes, had already decided that the Doctor, who was sitting with introverted, expressionless eyes, was a little freaky, took the occasion to ask if they should turn toward the harbor, whereto the commissioner nodded consent.
Once more he glanced at the magnificent panorama yonder, where the ice floes were driven onward, rent asunder, packed themselves, crowded together, pushed over each other, turned on edge, changed their horizontal position to big upheavals and tilting of the strata, forming mountains, dales and hills. It seemed to him as though he beheld the earth's crust being born, when on the incandescent sea the first hard cake was broken to pieces, driven forward, pushed on edge, piled in heaps to form the primitive mountains, skerries, rocks, islets, which were but enormous packs of ice, icebergs, although formed from another mineral than water. Over this repetition of the history of creation vibrated the primitive, undivided white light of the ice beside the deep blue of air and water, the first breaking of the darkness, and here the God of the saga of creation who separated light from darkness, came forth as a sensible explanation to his investigating mind. Once again the first attempt at harmonious sounds of the reptiles, now transformed into birds, rang out over the watery circle, the limitation of himself, which must be the center wherever he went....
The boat floated into harbor, the smoke was rising from the chimneys, it was dinner time.