In the case of the so-called action-consciousness the neglect of the connections becomes preposterous. The adventitious scraps of consciousness called ‘willing’ which may intervene between a situation productive of a given act and the act itself are hopelessly uninstructive in comparison with the bonds of instinct and habit which cause the situation to produce the act. In conduct, at least, that kind of psychology which Santayana calls ‘the perception of character’ seems an inevitable part of a well-balanced science of human nature. I quote from his fine description of the contrast between the external observation of a mind’s connections and the introspective recapitulation of its conscious content, though it is perhaps too pronounced and too severe. “_Perception of Character._—There is, however, a wholly different and far more positive method of reading the mind, or what in a metaphorical sense is called by that name. This method is to read character. Any object with which we are familiar teaches us to divine its habits; slight indications, which we should be at a loss to enumerate separately, betray what changes are going on and what promptings are simmering in the organism.... The gift of reading character ... is directed not upon consciousness but upon past or eventual action. Habits and passions, however, have metaphorical psychic names, names indicating dispositions rather than particular acts (a disposition being mythically represented as a sort of wakeful and haunting genius waiting to whisper suggestions in a man’s ear). We may accordingly delude ourselves into imagining that a pose or a manner which really indicates habit indicates feeling instead. “_Conduct Divined, Consciousness Ignored._... As the weather prophet reads the heavens, so the man of experience reads other men. Nothing concerns him less than their consciousness; he can allow that to run itself off when he is sure of their temper and habits. A great master of affairs is usually unsympathetic. His observation is not in the least dramatic or dreamful, he does not yield himself to animal contagion or reënact other people’s inward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent on his own purposes. His observation, on the contrary, is straight calculation and inference, and it sometimes reaches truths about people’s character and destiny which they themselves are very far from divining. Such apprehension is masterful and odious to weaklings, who think they know themselves because they indulge in copious soliloquy (which is the discourse of brutes and madmen), but who really know nothing of their own capacity, situation, or fate.”[3] Mr. Santayana elsewhere hints that both psychology and history will become studies of human behavior considered from without,—a part, that is, of what he calls physics,—if they are to amount to much.