Hide-and-seek is one of the great games of children as well as of adults. Adults hide their own defects and seek the defects of other people in order to avoid inferiority and to feel competitive superiority.

But there is a deep contradiction in our natures: we attempt to expose ourselves as we are to those who we feel love us, and we hide our actual self from the enemy or the stranger. The protective marking of insects and birds look unskilled compared to the defensive marking we apply to ourselves.

I refrain from describing further character types because people are not as easily classified as cars, and the combinations likely outmatch computation. Character growth, in each individual human being, is a growth in likeness to others and a growth in unlikeness, as well. As we move from childhood to youth, and thereof to middle and old age, qualities come out and fall behind, and the personality passes along to unity and harmony or else there is disintegration.

While understanding character is a difficult discipline, it is also one of the principal science of life. If we want to develop such as skill; we need to approach our subject with fairness and without prejudice. Although our subject brings us in direct contact with the deepest of problems, the meaning of life, the nature of the Ego and the source of consciousness, these we must ignore as out of our knowledge. Limiting ourselves to a basic attempt to know our fellow men and our own selves, we shall find that our efforts not only add to our knowledge but add unmeasurably to our sympathy with and our love for our fellows.