One must always be on one’s guard before people who do not have a kindly nature. A natural disposition to maliciousness is very hard to be overcome. It shows itself most easily in a tendency to making sport of others.
It is an uncommonly pleasant thing, on the other hand, to have to do with people who make their fellow-men feel comfortable in their presence, who are always even-tempered, always friendly and ready to help, never nervously unquiet or intrusive, rejoicing in the welfare of others, sympathetic and consolatory in trouble. This does not necessitate a clever mind; on the contrary, the very clever people often lack just this quality, which, for the first time, would make all their other qualities really useful and valuable.
At ordinary times it is very difficult to recognize real bravery. Yet there is one unfailing sign. Brave people never enter a fight with arrogance and are less afraid after a defeat than after a victory, since every victory works some injustice to the opposing side; while cowards show themselves arrogant after every victory. As to this characteristic, a man best learns to know himself in his dreams. There he sees himself as he is, being beyond the control of a better will that does not depend upon merely physical and mental emotions.
A crafty shrewdness always lowers a man in our regard. We think of the possibility of its being used against us. Therefore, as a proverb says, “all foxes come to be skinned at last.” No one likes them, and in the long run they lose their game.
Every man should perfect his own national type. When a man no longer knows to which nation he belongs, he becomes an unedifying phenomenon. Therefore dwellers on the border are often vacillating in their nature, and polyglot speech is, as a rule, a mark neither of genius nor of character. The most questionable people are those who mingle different languages in a single sentence and who lack education besides.
Not very much, on the whole, is to be learned from the external features of a man; the science of physiognomy is a deceptive one, generally speaking. Yet a strong development of the lower part of the face as contrasted with the upper, an insignificant chin, expressionless eyes, an ever uneasy glance of the eye, and a habit of speaking very loud in the case of women, portend nothing favorable. Happily, these latter are never able to imitate the expression of innocence.
The wide diffusion of photography has been very injurious for the knowledge of human nature, since they usually make the photograph a deceptive portrait, and one who sees it is, therefore, favorably prepossessed.
As to human efficiency, it mostly depends upon a certain confidence a man has with his contemporaries. God alone can give this, and, as a rule, it appears late, in the case of men of real note. All the stones must first be rejected by the builders before they can become the head of the corner. This is the only right course for a man’s life to take, and no sort of exertion can supply its place.
With men of original qualities one usually goes through three stages of acquaintanceship. In the first stage, they please one absolutely; in the second, they rather repel, on account of the angularities and singularities of all sorts in their nature; in the third, however, the whole man again pleases. But in the case of more ordinary men, one’s first impression is slight, the second is often better, on account of various good individual qualities, but the final impression, again, is unsatisfying. Take it all in all, one may perhaps say that the first impression one has of a man, provided one is himself quite unprejudiced, is the right one.
Hardest of all it is to read human nature from the point of view of religion. It is easiest to do so along the lines of the first epistle of John, the first six verses of the fourth chapter, and the first five verses of the fifth chapter. But, along with this, we must not exclude a certain human excellence which rests upon philosophical culture, or upon great sagacity and experience of life. All piety must make one more friendly, or it is not genuine.