ready wit, and
brilliant but not sustained mental effort, numerous neuropaths excel. In
things calling for calm, well-balanced judgment, or stern effort to conquer
unforseen difficulties, they fail utterly.

Subtle in debate, they are but stumbling-blocks in council; brilliant in
conception, they fail in execution; fanciful designers, they are not
"builders of bridges". They are boastful, sparkling, inventive, witty,
garrulous, vain and supersensitive, outraging their friends by the
extravagance of their schemes; embarrassing their enemies by the subtlety
of their intrigues.

They wing on exuberant imagination from height to height, but the small
boulders of difficulty trip them up, for they are hopelessly unpractical;
they have neither strength of purpose nor fortitude, and their best-laid
schemes are always frustrated at the critical moment, by either the
incurable blight of vacillation, or by the determination to amplify their
scheme ere it has proved successful, sacrificing probable results for
visionary improvements.

Great and cunning strategists while fortune smiles, they are impotent to
direct a retreat, but flee before the fury they ought to face. They rarely
have personal courage, but are timid, conciliatory and vacillating just
when bravery, sternness, and determination are needed; furious, obstinate
and reckless, when gentleness, diplomacy and wisdom would carry their
point.

They are ready to forgive when there is magnanimity, vainglory and probably
folly in forgiveness, but will not overlook the most trivial affront when
there is every reason for so doing. They have brain, but not ballast, and
their whole life is usually a lopsided effort to "play to the gallery".

In poetry and literature, fancy has free play, and they often succeed,
sometimes rising to sublime heights; usually in the depiction of the
whimsical, the wonderful, the sardonic, the bizarre, the monstrous, or the
frankly impossible. They are not architects as much as jugglers of words,
and descriptive writing from an acute angle of vision is their forte. They
sometimes succeed as artists or composers, for in these spheres they need
not elaborate their ideas in such clean-cut detail, but many who might
succeed in these branches have not sufficient strength of purpose to do the
preliminary "spadework".

They have too many talents, too many differing inclinations, too much
impetuosity, too much vanity, too little concentration and will-pow