If, as I believe, the affects are the primary motives of man, and if, as I also believe, the face is the primary site of the affects, then the face is the man. Every man has always been interested in faces, fallen in love with a face, repelled by some faces, comforted by others, bored by some faces, but psychologists have nonetheless been the last to know. Prematurely, they discounted the amount and quality of information on the face and so the decoding of these living hieroglyphics remains an unborn science. I have devoted the past 20 years to the observation and study of human faces and I am now convinced that we are on the threshold of immense new possibilities in understanding human beings.

Because there is no royal road to extracting the gold in facial responses, a mining operation beset with all the perplexity and false starts typical in the alchemists' quest, let us begin at the end rather than at the beginning and describe our most recent success. Later we will return to the more problematic nature of the face and to the challenges which must be confronted on the long and arduous road ahead.

I have been concerned for some time with a field I have called the psychology of knowledge, an analogue of the sociology of knowledge. It is a concern with the varieties of cognitive styles, with the types of evidence which the individual finds persuasive, and most particularly with his ideology.