TEMPERAMENTS. 307 



has really the least to do with that subtile force called character is 

 the one by which we chiefly recognize the man. This is the ensembled 

 physique, the mental picture we have formed of the bodily man ; it is 

 only by long association that we come to speak of one by his mental 

 traits, and can recall him to our minds, not by accidents of size, shape, 

 complexion, but by the tone, manner, and quality, of the mental man. 

 It is curious, however, to reflect that our chief means of mutual identity 

 are the same as those by which we distinguish horse from horse, and 

 dog from dog; and that such is the infinite variety in the merely phys- 

 ical development of men, that this is sufficient for the practical affairs 

 of life. In fact, it is not within experience that two human beings 

 ever existed who were so nearly alike that side by side they could 

 not be distinguished. 1 But human individuality is separated from 

 that of the brute by the refinement of a physical quality. This is 

 called temperament. Although temperaments are purely of physical 

 origin, yet their outlet is mainly found in the actions or the mental 

 habits of the individual, and thus it is that temperaments, like charity, 

 cover a multitude of sins. Even those who believe in the imma- 

 teriality and separate entity of mind, do not hesitate to ascribe the 

 fretfulness, fickleness, temper, and other mental shortcomings of their 

 friends, to faults of temperament. This may in a measure be the result 

 of habit, but I believe that there is about it the force of a truth that 

 even the most spiritual of psychologists cannot escape. It exists as a 

 physical medium, through which the mental life shines forth, tinged 

 and refracted by its passage. The old word expresses it, humors of 

 the body, a mythical, potent, and subtile fluid, mingling with the 

 bodily substance, and rising, exhalation-like, into the brain, obscuring, 

 revealing, exalting, and depressing the operations of the mind accord- 

 ing as it is acting well or ill; as hypothetical as the interplanetary 

 ether, yet as real as a fit of the blue devils. This was somewhat the 

 old notion, and a well-fought battle-ground it was, over which the sol- 

 iclists and humoralists contended right gallantly. A standpoint upon 

 a solid basis of fact is to this day wanting from which we may say 

 they were wrong. 



Many of these old fathers in medicine fairly reveled in the idea of 

 temperaments. It contained just enough of the mysterious to spur 

 on their wonder-loving minds. All there was of fact about it, how- 

 ever, they brought out, and all that we know about it they knew. 

 We are to this day using their terms and classification, and have 

 added nothing to them. It stands as a fact in physiology which we 

 have inherited from the remotest boundary of historical medicine. 



The four qualities of Hippocrates were believed to be the origin 

 of the temperaments. In moisture and dryness, in heat and cold, not 

 as conditions of existence but as entities in life, were found the mate- 



1 There are several remarkable cases of wonderfully close resemblance and mistaken 

 identity on record, but none that stood the test indicated in the text. 



