Character Reading

Book excerpt: Does character determine appearance? Can the shape of a person's face-or the bumps on his head-provide insight into intelligence and personality? What effect, ultimately, do our thoughts and attitudes and personality have on how we look? It's a question that artists and scientists (and dictators) have grappled with for ages, and one that can lead down increasingly slippery slopes. But in pre-Freudian, pre-Holocaust America, when phrenology was still semi-respectable, New Thought pioneer William Walker Atkinson (writing as Theron Q. Dumont) wrote what he hoped would be the ultimate guide to the Science of Character Reading. Today some of his findings must be taken with a grain of salt, but this 1919 guide is a fascinating catalogue-replete with drawings and diagrams-of the many temperaments, characteristics, faces and expressions of that remarkably complex species known as the human race. American writer WILLIAM WALKER ATKINSON (1862-1932) was editor of the popular magazine New Thought from 1901 to 1905, and editor of the journal Advanced Thought from 1916 to 1919. He authored or co-authored over a hundred books under a variety of pseudonyms, including Yogi Ramacharaka, Theodore Sheldon and Theron Q. Dumont. His other works include Mental Therapeutics, The Solar Plexus, and The Power of Concentration.