In primitive tribal times it was the custom in most places to measure knowledge by the length of the beard. Today it is found that many of our cleverest atomic energy scientists are comparatively young and certainly beardless! It is as sensible to follow the primitive custom nowadays as it is to measure virtue by the beauty of the face. Yet it is not an uncommon attitude for self-styled truth-seekers to follow one spiritual teacher because his facial appearance pleases them and to reject another teacher because his physical figure displeases them! Says Sören Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. "He (Socrates) was very ugly, had clumsy feet, and, above all, a number of growths on the forehead and elsewhere, which would suffice to persuade anyone that he was a demoralized subject. This was what Socrates understood by his favourable appearance in which he was so thoroughly happy that he would have considered it a chicane of the divinity to prevent him from becoming a teacher of morals, had he been given an attractive appearance like an effeminate cithara player, a melting glance like a shepherd lad, small feet like a dancing master in the Friendly Society and in toto as favourable an appearance as could have been desired by any applicant for a job through the newspapers, or any theologue who has pinned his hope on a private call. Why was this old teacher so happy over his unfavourable appearance, unless it was because he understood that it must help to keep the learner at a distance, so that the latter might not stick fast in a direct relationship to the teacher, perhaps admire him, perhaps have his clothes cut in the same manner? Through the repellent effect exerted by the contrast, which on a higher plane was also the role played by his irony, the learner would be compelled to understand that he had essentially to do with himself, and that the inwardness of the truth is not the comradely inwardness with which two bosom friends walk arm in arm, but the separation with which each for himself exists in the truth."
-- Notebooks Category 1: Overview of the Quest > Chapter 6 : Student-Teacher > # 567
