PERSONALITY 1. Intuitive judgments.—A few years ago a col lege professor who had bad business experience made an experiment with members of the entering fresh man class. He had been assigned as faculty ad viser of some twenty members of the class, and it was his duty to help in the selection of their studies. In voluntarily this college professor found himself siz ing the young men up—feeling certain that some of them were going to be good students, others mediocre, others very poor.
It occurred to him that in a sense Ile was a diag nostician and that he ought to keep a record of each case. So after each interview he jotted down his impressions in a note book. Of one he wrote: "Has ability, lots of grit and energy and will finish near the top." Of another something like this : "A good mind, fairly well prepared, but lazy and pleasure-loving; in college for the fun of it; will be a fraternity man and a patron of athletics, but will not shine in his studies." Of another: "Has an ordinary mind and seems in all respects colorless—doubt that he will finish his freshman year." Of another: "Able but nervous, excitable and moody—likely to break down in health unless he exer cises regularly." And of three men lie wrote something like this: "Smart and enterprising fellows, but very conceited. They will make trouble." At the end of the year the professor was able to test his offhand judgments by a comparison of his notes with results and in almost every instance his col leagues before whom he laid his notes, admitted that his first impressions had been sound.
Now, how did he judge those men? Was be a mind reader, a physiognomist, a phrenologist? .Not at all. He judged them by no hard and fast rule, but by the common-sense method used by all busi ness men who have had much experience in the hiring of young men—merely by the impression each made upon him. This method of judgment is sometimes called intuition.
The professor judged the students by their per sonalities. He did what business men are doing every day when. they are hiring employes or dealing with strangers. When we meet a man for the first time, it is his personality that impresses us, and involun tarily we form an opinion of him. The greater our
experience in handling men, the more likely that our first impression will be correct. As we talk with a stranger we may find that Ile is more intelligent than we had at first' supposed, and later when trying to close a deal with him we may find that he is not quite so plastic as we had at first believed. But, generally speaking, we are surprised if vve discover that our first impression was altogether wrong.
2. Meaning of personality.—By the personality of a man we mean those qualities which singly or in com bination distinguish him as an individual. All men are alike in certain important respects, but as individ uals they differ from one another like the leaves in a forest. We never find two men exactly alike. Shakespeare's two Dromios produce a comic illusion of identity. The audience cannot distinguish one from the other, but we know that the likeness is super ficial.
Involuntarily and in accordance with our experi ence and training we divide men into different classes. The teacher thinks of students as bright or dull, mis chievous or orderly and peaceful, lazy or ambitious. The retail merchant wants his clerks to be courteous, prompt, accurate, honest and loyal. If a, youth possessing these traits applies for a job, the merchant is favorably impressed, altho he may not know just why. In a way that no science bas yet explained a man's personality is stamped not merely on his face, but on his speech, on his looks and on bis manner. Everyone of us carries a personality trade-mark. No matter how much we try to bide or disguise ,it, men of experience will always see it with a clearness that seems ,uncanny.
Personality is tbe man himself. It is not what he pretends to be nor what he would like to have people think he is. It reveals itself in different ways, some of which psychology has discussed and described, but others are so subtle that they baffle scientific analysis. Hence in the reading of personality we must rely largely upon intuition, or as I have said, upon com mon sense .backed up by experience.