I saw mothers and many nurses gazing at children with
this same retroactive movement which stamped their gaze with a certain
expression of satisfied pride, generally to be noted in those who
carried a nursling distinguished for its beauty or the elegance of its
clothes.
Two words, as important as they are opposite in the sense that they
determine, are disengaged: _sensuality_ and _tenderness_.
Such are the sources to which we must refer the attitudes assumed by the
head on sight of the object considered.
Between these inverse attitudes a third should naturally be placed. It
was easy for me to characterize this latter: I called it _colorless_ or
_indifferent_.
It is entirely natural that the man who considers an object from the
point of view of the mere examination which his mind makes of it, should
simply look it in the face until that object had aroused the innermost
movements of the soul or of the life.
Whence it invariably follows that from the incitement of these
movements, the head is bent to the side of the soul or to the side of
the senses.
"Which is, then, for the head, the side of the soul," you will ask me,
"and which the side of the senses?"
I will reply simply, to cut short the useless description of the many
drawbacks that preceded the clear demonstration that I finally
established, that the side of the heart is the objective side that
occupies the interlocutor, and that the side of the senses is the
subjective, personal side toward which the head retroacts; that is to
say, the side opposed to the object under examination.
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