592 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



pedocles 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 dis- 

 tinctive 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 specu- 

 lative manner then employed, blood becomes related to air, has the 

 quality of being luarm 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 hlacTc tile 

 and its season in the Fall of the year; its temperament is the melan- 

 cholic. Fire as warm and dry has special relations to Summer, is rep- 

 resented in the body by the yellow tile, and produces the fiery or chol- 

 eric 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 applica- 

 tions of heat and cold, or of dry and moist, to restore a favorable equi- 

 librium. Winter was held to be the dangerous season for a tempera- 

 ment 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 cheer- 

 fulness 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 distin- 

 guished. Their habits of mind inclined them to such an opinion; and 

 their sense of plausibility was gratifled (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 recog- 

 nized that mental dispositions were intimately related to bodily condi- 

 tion. Their philosophical temper found satisfaction in connecting these 

 two varieties of information through the doctrine of the temperaments. 



