Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/596

592 in the search for elements and in the explanation of manifold appearance as their variable combination. The elements of creation were regarded as fourfold: Air, fire, earth and water. These are distinctive by virtue of elemental qualities: namely, dry and moist, hot and cold, heavy and light, which by combination yield the qualities of the elements: fire as hot, dry and light; water as cold, moist and heavy, and so on. The fourfold elements of the body are the humors or fluids: the blood, the (yellow) bile, the phlegm, and the black bile. (3) Subjected to the play of analogy and correspondence in the speculative manner then employed, blood becomes related to air, has the quality of being warm and moist; the season which it typifies is Spring, and its temperament is the sanguine. Its direct opposite is earth, which is cold and dry, finds its bodily correspondent in the black bile and its season in the Fall of the year; its temperament is the melancholic. Fire as warm and dry has special relations to Summer, is represented in the body by the yellow bile, and produces the fiery or choleric temperament; while water as cold and moist is allied to the phlegm, to the sluggish season of Winter, and to the languid temperament which we still, in deference to Hippocrates, call phlegmatic.

These views were held as much more than speculative possibilities; they were practically applied. Diseases were regarded as defects in the composition of the humors, to be counteracted by appropriate applications of heat and cold, or of dry and moist, to restore a favorable equilibrium. Winter was held to be the dangerous season for a temperament lacking in fire; the body must not be too full of humors nor yet be too dry and sapless. The several ages of man, from childhood to senility, reflected the natural sequence of dominance of the several humors.

The doctrine of temperaments is historically important quite beyond any illumination which it affords. It is obvious that the philosophers of the school of Hippocrates had no means of ascertaining that cheerfulness was resident in the blood, laziness in the phlegm, testiness in the yellow bile, and low-spiritedness in the black bile; nor that any such fundamental vital basis was afforded by the “humors” thus distinguished. Their habits of mind inclined them to such an opinion; and their sense of plausibility was gratified (where we see only far-fetched and irrelevant analogy) by observing the hot moist fluidity of blood and the damp cold sluggishness of phlegm. The originators of the doctrine of temperaments were empirical psychologists, who observed that differences of mental disposition, like cheerfulness and testiness, were common and conspicuous traits of men. They were also medical practitioners with a fair knowledge of the body and its ills, and recognized that mental dispositions were intimately related to bodily condition. Their philosophical temper found satisfaction in connecting these two varieties of information through the doctrine of the temperaments.