not to pause until I had found a final solution.  I called to mind all my memories having any bearing on this double phenomenon.  These memories were far more numerous and far more striking than I had dared to hope.  What a magnificent thing are those mysterious reservoirs whence, at a given moment, flow thousands of pictures which until then we knew not that we possessed?  A whole world of prostrate believers adoringly turning their heads toward the object of their worship, appeared before me to support the example afforded me by the mother lovingly bending her head toward the child at which she gazed.

Among other instances, I saw a venerable master affectionately bending his head toward the being to whom he thus seemed with touching predilection to give luminous instructions.

I saw lovers gazing at their loved one with this attractive pose of the head, their tenderness seeming thus to be eloquently affirmed.  But, side by side with these examples, I saw others totally opposite; thus, other lovers presented themselves to my mind’s eye with very different aspect, and their number seemed far greater than that of the other.  These lovers delighted to gaze at their sweetheart as painters study their work, with head thrown back.  I saw mothers and many nurses gazing at children with this same retroactive movement which stamped their gaze with a certain expression of satisfied pride, generally to be noted in those who carried a nursling distinguished for its beauty or the elegance of its clothes.

Two words, as important as they are opposite in the sense that they determine, are disengaged:  sensuality and tenderness.

Such are the sources to which we must refer the attitudes assumed by the head on sight of the object considered.

Between these inverse attitudes a third should naturally be placed.  It was easy for me to characterize this latter:  I called it colorless or indifferent.

It is entirely natural that the man who considers an object from the point of view of the mere examination which his mind makes of it, should simply look it in the face until that object had aroused the innermost movements of the soul or of the life.

Whence it invariably follows that from the incitement of these movements, the head is bent to the side of the soul or to the side of the senses.

“Which is, then, for the head, the side of the soul,” you will ask me, “and which the side of the senses?”

I will reply simply, to cut short the useless description of the many drawbacks that preceded the clear demonstration that I finally established, that the side of the heart is the objective side that occupies the interlocutor, and that the side of the senses is the subjective, personal side toward which the head retroacts; that is to say, the side opposed to the object under examination.  Thus, when the head moves in an inverse direction from the object that it examines, it is from a selfish standpoint; and when the examiner bends toward the object it is in contempt of self that the object is viewed.