If, again, your eye is not strongly colorful; if it is prominent, with the pupil small and seldom dilating to any extent, and with the glance fixed, the modern physiognomist warns you to cultivate generosity of heart and breadth and tolerance of mind. For these are the qualities which this eye formation indicates that you lack.
So, too, there is a danger signal for you if you find a puffiness below your eyes, with the rim of the lower lid falling away from the eye, showing the red, while the upper lid droops. These signs usually point to one of two things, we are told.
Either you are wasting your energies in some form of dissipation or your internal organs, particularly your kidneys, are not functioning as they should. You yourself know best to which of these evils—dissipation or ill health—the puffiness is due.
Does your glance meet that of other people squarely[Pg 58] and fearlessly? Or do you have a tendency to shift your eyes and look away when talking with others?
In the latter event, says the physiognomist, you may be sure something is wrong with you. You are perhaps suffering from some slight nervous weakness. Or, what is more likely, you have thoughts in your mind which are not altogether to your credit. The shifting or drooping of your gaze is then based on a subconscious fear that your eyes will betray what is passing through your mind.
Finally, note the position of your eyes. Mistrust yourself especially if you find your eyes “slanting upward from the nose under brows also slanting upward with fullness in the upper lid which overhangs the eye and hides the rim of the lid, the eyeball thrown upward.”
“This,” says the physiognomist Foshbroke, and the writer has verified his observation, “is the eye of craft and treachery, indicating the nature of the tiger and the fox, whose eye it resembles.”
A person with such an eye cannot too soon begin a course of moral self-education to straighten out the kinks in his nature.
This can always be done. Eye indications do not mean that your nature is fixed and unalterable in accordance with the signs shown by the eyes. On the contrary, the value of such signs is that they specify precisely in what respects reforms are most desirable.