Yet, from our ethical standpoint, that super-individuality which we thus unconsciously allow in the very language used to express psychical domination, is a lower manifestation. Though working often for good, the power in itself is of evil; and the recognition of it by the subjugated is not a recognition of higher moral energy, but of a higher _mental_ energy signifying larger evolutional experience of wrong, deeper reserves of aggressive ingenuity, heavier capacities for the giving of pain. Called by no matter what euphemistic name, such power is brutal in its origin, and still allied to those malignities and ferocities shared by man with lower predatory creatures. But the beauty of the superindividual is revealed in that rarer power which the dead lend the living to win trust, to inspire ideals, to create love, to brighten whole circles of existence with the charm and wonder of a personality never to be described save in the language of light and music.
Now if we could photographically _decompose_ a composite photograph so as to separate in order inverse all the impressions interblended to make it, such process would clumsily represent what really happens when the image of a strange face is telegraphed back--like a police-photograph--from the living retina to the mysterious offices of inherited memory. There, with the quickness of an electric flash, the shadow-face is decomposed into all the ancestral types combined in it; and the resulting verdict of the dead, though rendered only by indefinable sensation, is more trustworthy than any written certificate of character could ever be. But its trustworthiness is limited to the _potential_ relation of the individual seen to the individual seeing. Upon different minds, according to the delicate balance of personality,--according to the qualitative sum of inherited experience in the psychical composition of the observer,--the same features will make very different impressions. A face that strongly repels one person may not less strongly attract another, and will produce nearly similar impressions only on groups of emotionally homogeneous natures. Certainly the fact of this ability to discern in the composition of faces that indefinable something which welcomes or which warns, does suggest the possibility of deciding some laws of ethical physiognomy; but such laws would necessarily be of a very general and simple kind, and their relative value could never equal that of the uneducated personal intuition.