But at whatever period impressed, certain it is that many nations have a typical form of Nose, together with other peculiar distinctive features; and it concerns us now rather to regard the fact as it exists than to inquire how it happened.
The Roman, the Greek, and the Syrian forms of Nose have been already descanted upon, as forming three bases of our nomenclature. The present European nations are the Gothic, the Celtic, the Sclavonic, and the Finnish.
The Gothic has been subjected to so many varying circumstances that it is now perhaps impossible to assert, with confidence, its original natural form. Where a uniform dull system of despotism, political and religious, has for centuries bound down these nations in abject servitude, the Nose is sharp, devoid of Cogitativeness, and Romano-Greek in profile.
This is the case with the Spanish Goths and with those of France and Italy. These nations were so long held in mental thraldom that they ceased to cultivate cogitative powers which it was dangerous to use. Where espionage and Lettres de Cachet, the Inquisition and Monachism dog and punish men’s secret thoughts, and forbid the expression of any sentiment breathing a spirit opposed to the powers that be, or demonstrative of a disposition to inquire into the why and wherefore of political and religious dogmas, the mind, by an instinct of self-preservation, must cease to think. Where to think is a death-warrant, where a look of reflection or an aspect of discontent may be followed by the axe of the executioner, or the more fearful incarceration by the gaoler, the mind has no alternative but to forget itself and live in bestial oblivion, to “sit down to eat and drink and rise up to play.” With the cessation of the Cogitative powers, the Cogitativeness of the features will disappear, and the Nose will become defective in breadth, thin and sharp. To this want of reflection succeeds, in the naturally higher and more energetic nations, animal passion; and if ever the pressure is removed from the national mind and it obtain the upper hand of its keepers, fearful retribution and sanguinary revenge inevitably ensue. They who lived the animal life of a caged wild beast in apparent ease and quietude, well fed and perhaps, sensually, better provided for than if left to their native freedom, will, when let loose from confinement, fearfully vindicate the natural law of liberty, and with an insane instinct tear in pieces the keepers who have fed them for their own purposes and nurtured them for their own pleasure and profit, reckless of the natural social rights of man.
It is for this reason that the sharp, thin unthinking Nose appears symbolical likewise of cruelty; not so much because the natural disposition is cruel, as because the mind, when unchained, acts from animal impulse and not from sage reflection; and animal revenge is always wild and cruel.
We say this of nations which, like the Gothic and other Caucasian races, were originally well organized and endowed with higher capacities. This higher organization exhibits itself—whatever the degrees of Cogitativeness which incidental circumstances may have added, or adeemed—in a profile, Roman, or Greek, or compounded of both; and which may therefore be called nationally Romano-Greek. The profile not being so subject to variation from the pressure of external circumstances as the breadth, remains still pretty uniformly the same in all the Caucasian races in Europe, which might be written I
II. Other races there are which, either naturally of less penetrable stuff, and a lower and more obtuse organization, or longer ground down beneath a more crushing and uniform despotism, remain contented slaves and willing bondmen. This degradation, as we shall see when we come to speak of the Asiatic nations, appears also in their Noses.
France, Spain, and Italy have been depressed, not only beneath a political despotism till within a very recent period, but under the still more soul-crushing despotism of a gross superstition and corrupt religion—the latter even more than the former has repressed Cogitativeness in those nations. If there is one subject which more than another interests the human mind and occupies the thoughts, it is its religion—its eternal prospects—for Man is essentially a religious animal. Debarred from exercising thought upon its most natural and interesting topics—and all other subjects being dragged within the jealous circle of a religious despotism—so stern a barrier is opposed to thought that the mind rarely dare overleap it. While a political despotism may be well pleased to see its subjects occupied in scientific or metaphysical researches, in order to wean them from too critical an examination of itself, a religious despotism forbids any such researches unless made within the small circle it has prescribed. Death or imprisonment awaits a Galileo or a Copernicus, as it would under a similar rule, even now, await a Buckland or a Lyell.
At present, we lament that we can see nothing in the recent revolutionary movements in France and Italy, to indicate the existence of those Cogitative powers, the want of which has always hitherto checked their advancement towards true liberty and self-government.
Now, as in 1793, there seems “equally a want of books and men; without which, after a few years of bloodshed and anarchy, those countries must again submit to a despotic form of government. No country can be governed without intellect; and if that is not to be found in the many, the few who possess it must become the ruler.
“By the Soul