Square Pegs in Round Holes

Many problems in life and society would be eased if we were better at reading characters — especially our own.

1804-1806

Introduction

In 1804-06, the Revd Sydney Smith gave a series of lectures to the Royal Institution, later published as Sketches on Moral Philosophy. The lectures were aimed at a wide audience (much like Michael Faraday’s Christmas lectures there), and encouraged Smith’s naturally easy style. It was in one of these lectures that Smith gave us what is now an indispensable analogy for a misfit employee.

by Sydney Smith 1771-1845

It is a very wise rule in the conduct of the understanding, to acquire early a correct notion of your own peculiar constitution of mind, and to become well acquainted, as a physician would say, with your idiosyncrasy. Are you an acute man, and see sharply for small distances? or are you a comprehensive man, and able to take in wide and extensive views into your mind? Does your mind turn its ideas into wit? or are you apt to take a commonsense view of the objects presented to you? Have you an exuberant imagination, or a correct judgment? Are you quick, or slow? accurate, or hasty? a great reader, or a great thinker?

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Précis

In a lecture at the Royal Institution, around 1804-6, Sydney Smith urged his audience to think more deeply about their peculiarities of character. The thinker and the doer, the imaginative person and the common-sense person, the big-picture person and the precise person, are all quite different. It is very desirable, he said, to categorise ourselves correctly when still young.

Sevens

Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.

What does Smith understand by ‘idiosyncrasy’?

Suggestion

A person’s distinctive mental and emotional make-up.

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