It is a mistake to suppose that it is enough in most cases to study that side of a man which is at the moment important--his dishonesty only, his laziness, etc. That will naturally lead to merely one-sided judgment and anyway be much harder than keeping the whole man in eye and studying him as an entirety. Every individual quality is merely a symptom of a whole nature, can be explained only by the whole complex, and the good properties depend as much on the bad ones as the bad on the good ones. At the very least the quality and quantity of a good or bad characteristic shows the influence of all the other good and bad characteristics. Kindliness is influenced and partly created through weakness, indetermination, too great susceptibility, a minimum acuteness, false constructiveness, untrained capacity for inference; in the same way, again, the most cruel hardness depends on properties which, taken in themselves, are good: determination, energy, purposeful action, clear conception of one’s fellows, healthy egotism, etc. Every man is the result of his nature and nurture, i.e. of countless individual conditions, and every one of his expressions, again, is the result of all of these conditions. If, therefore, he is to be judged, he must be judged in the light of them all. For this reason, all those indications that show us the man as a whole are for us the most important, but also those others are valuable which show him up on one side only. In the latter case, however, they are to be considered only as an index which never relieves us from the need further to study the nature of our subject. The number of such individual indications is legion and no one is able to count them up and ground them, but examples of them may be indicated.