even rather casual acquaintances of certain kinds. Such knowledge will enable research to proceed with more certain pace toward the time when we shall know what to look for and how to elicit what we want with the maximum of economy. The specialist who interviews a man for an hour may be able, during the course of what appears to be an ordinary social relation, to find the tell-tale signs which detailed research has shown to be invariably, or almost invariably, connected with particular impulse systems and developmental histories. As Bjerre so well put it: As soon as our intercourse with a certain person is no longer governed by common interests, but by a desire to acquire a knowledge of his inmost being, we immediately abandon the formal content of his utterance and begin unconsciously to seek for whatever indication of his inner life appears in his speech independently of, or even in spite of, his conscious will.[76] What is achieved is a correlation of the results of “casual” contact and “intensive” study, a correlation which is the common target of a converging attack upon the understanding of the human personality. Some day we shall know how to validate the saying of the old physician which is on the title-page of this book: “From him who has eyes to see and ears to hear no mortal can hide his secret; he whose lips are silent chatters with his fingertips and betrays himself through all his pores.” CHAPTER XIII THE STATE AS A MANIFOLD OF EVENTS Implications have continually been drawn in the foregoing pages about the bearing of the intensive study of individual personalities upon the meaning of the political process as a whole. Since the psychopathological approach to the individual is the most elaborate procedure yet devised for the study of human personality, it would appear to raise in the most acute form the thorny problem of the relation between research on the individual and research upon society. We are therefore justified in devoting more extended attention to the theoretical problem involved than we have yet taken occasion to do. It may be asserted at the outset that our thinking is vitiated unless we dispose of the fictitious cleavage which is sometimes supposed to separate the study of the “individual” from the study of “society.” There is no cleavage; there is but a gradual gradation of reference points. Some events have their locus in but a single individual, and are unsuitable for comparative investigation. Some events are widely distributed among individuals, like breathing, but have no special importance for interpersonal relations. Our starting-point as social scientists is the statement of a distinctive event which is widely spread among human beings who occupy a particular time-space manifold.