the very dawn of civilization.  Many investigators, students and scholars, in many branches of knowledge, have labored, added their little mite to the sum total, and passed on.  The net result of all their work, all their thousands of years of research, investigation, study and thought, can now be gathered together and presented in so simple a form that it can be learned by anyone of intelligence in a few months.  It took humanity untold thousands of years to learn the scientific truth that the earth is an oblate spheroid.  Many men gave their lives to establish the truth.  As a result, to-day every schoolboy learns and understands the fact within a very few days after his first opening of a text book on geography.  Thousands of scholars have been working on the science of physics from the dawn of human intelligence down to the present date.  Now a high school student learns all of its essentials and fundamentals in a short term of fourteen weeks.

A SHORT CUT TO KNOWLEDGE

The second method of learning a science, therefore, is to take advantage of all that has been done and, instead of beginning with facts and working up to principles, begin with principles and work down to a practical application amongst facts.

There are many ways of learning principles.  One may memorize them from books, or have them set forth and explained by an instructor or lecturer, or stumble upon them in general reading, or work out a series of carefully prescribed experiments in a laboratory, leading up to an enunciation of the principles or, through its intelligent application in the world of work, establish it in one’s consciousness.

The student who learns his laws and principles out of books may have a very clear and definite understanding of them.  He may be able to add to them or to teach them.  But he has little skill in their practical application as compared with the student who learns them in a laboratory.  Furthermore, the laboratory student is at a disadvantage, probably, as compared with the man who makes intelligent application of the laws and principles to his daily work.  So well recognized by educators is this truth that no attempt is made in our colleges and universities and, for the most part, even in our high schools, to teach sciences involving observation, logical reasoning and sound judgment purely out of books.  Medicine, surgery, agriculture, horticulture, mechanics and other such sciences are now taught almost entirely by a combination of text books and actual practice.  This rule also applies to the science of character analysis.

LEARN THE PRINCIPLES

The first step in the mastery and practical use of the science of character analysis is to learn the principles and the laws which underlie them.  These principles and laws are comparatively few in number and comparatively simple.  They are all classified under and grouped around the nine fundamental variables, a list of which was given in the preceding chapter.