ENDS AND MEANS
sees/ The universes of two individuals may be profoundly
dissimilar, even though they may be in receipt of equal
incomes. Pitt is to Addingtoti as London is to Paddington.-
Nature as well as nurture has set great gulfs between us.
Some of these gulfs are unbridged and seemingly unbridge-
able; across. them there is no communication. For
example, I simply cannot imagine what it feels like to be
a genius at chess, a great mathematician, a composer, who
does his thinking in terms of melodies and progressions of
harmonies. Some people are so clear-sighted that they can
see the moons of Jupiter without a telescope; in some the
sense of smell is so keen that, after a little training, they can
enumerate all the constituent elements in a perfume com-
posed of fifteen to twenty separate substances; some people
can detect minute variations of pitch, to which the majority
of ears are deaf.
Many attempts have been made to produce a scientific
classification of human types in terms of their physical and
psychological characteristics. For example, there was the
Hippocratic classification of men according to the pre-
dominance of one or other of the four humours; this
theory dominated European medicine for upwards of two
thousand years. Meanwhile the astrologers and palmists
were using fivefold classification in terms of planetary
types. We still speak of sanguine or mercurial tempera-
ments, describe people as jovial, phlegmatic, melancholic,
saturnine. Aristotle wrote a treatise on physiognomy in
which he attempted a classification of individuals in terms
of the supposed characteristics of the animals they resembled.
This pseudo-zoological classification of human beings kept
cropping up in physiognomical literature until the time of
Lavater.
In recent years we have had a number of new classifica-
tions. Stockard, in. his Physical Basis of Personality, uses
a twofold classification in terms of "linear* and 'lateral*
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