CHAPTER VI THE Six DIRECTIONS OF ENERGY.

CHAPTER VI
I THE TEMPERAMENTS COMBINED
TWO BY TWO, FORMING SIX TYPES
We may see, by this single example, the fecundity
of our analogies. It is most natural to
extend them. It is most natural to extend the
Four Temperaments into the Six Types (three
pairs or two trios, according to need) which our
Theory has extracted from them, as we have
seen above.
But first let us define with precision these Six
Types:
The Objective, a combination of the Bilious
and the Lymphatic, has as its dominating desire
that of Being more, of Manifesting itself in works ;
ELOQUENCE, ADVENTURE, PRIDE and LABOR are
derived from this desire. (We shall see, in Chapter
X, why these words are emphasized.) The
features of this Type are broad, calm and harmonious,
the demeanor grave and straightforward,
the bodily posture upright even to the point of
leaning backward. The body, of medium height,
white of flesh and cold, lacks the thrill of life even
when the blood is rich; the muscles, often overdeveloped,
add to its heaviness. The hand
writing is small, regular and a trifle cramped.
The mind is broad and tolerant, through absence
of passion; the ideas travel in immense circles
without a clearly apparent object. The style is
oratorical, explanatory, given to enlarging, by
successive developments, points at first trivial.
The natural tendency of opinion is conservative,
plutocratic, even BOURGEOIS, hierarchic, friendly
to law and order, to harmony, to respectability,
with happiness or serenity as the aim. A defect
of this type is slowness of mental processes. In
philosophy, these are the pantheists; in science,
the physicians; in art, the sculptors. The women
of this type love like men; the children prefer
their mother to their father.
The Subjective, or better yet, the Possessive,
since the dominant instinct is to Have, to Possess,
is a combination of the Nervous and the
Sanguine. Whether grasping or prodigal, these
are monopolists, and thereby sentimentalists
also; jealous and frequently despotic, they live
in a state of passion and are often unjust in consequence.
Thought, with them, springs from
within outward. Their unquiet hearts are the
source of their faults or their vices. They are
chthonians, Titans, always in eruptions or in
tempests. In science, they will be chemists; in
art, painters or musicians; in politics, judges or
dictators. Theirs are expressive faces, yet with
inequalities caused by this or that ugly feature;
skin like alabaster, flashing eyes whose gaze
easily hypnotizes. Their gestures are enthusiastic,
imperious, excited; steps short and unequal;
handwriting full of variations and flourishes.
The speech is animated, the style spirited, full of
antitheses and rhetorical figures. The children
of this type prefer their father to their mother.
Later, especially if the Sanguine be predominant,
this tendency renders disturbing their admiration
for virile beauty.
The Active, a mingling of the Sanguine and
Bilious, closely approaches the preceding, but its
formula is Action. People of this type do not
limit themselves to passionate censure or condemnation,
like the Subjectives; they revolt,
they strike; neither do they travel in circles like
the Objectives; their energy has a more active
effect. Their thought is, above all, practical and
shrewd. Bold, clever, sometimes unscrupulous,
often patronizing and protecting, dangerous as
adversaries, they have the art of leading the
crowd, which is always militarist as soon as its
fears are overcome, and which finds in this type
something of its own grossness, its own brutality.
Well developed virile figures, bearded faces, tanned
complexions; gestures forceful and concentrated,
restless bodily attitudes as though always on the
point of action, coarse language and vigorous
methods in all things are characteristic of them.
They lie with facility, risk life readily, have a
tendency to take the shortest cut to the object in
view; they are experimenters, ever ready to try
something new, with the audacity of scepticism
and with a total irreverence for the past, which
they neither understand nor appreciate. Their
handwriting is rapid; they have a lively narrative
style and furnish many popular story-writers.
They have an egotism which is readily condoned,
and an ability to extricate themselves from
almost any difficulty. They love the natural
sciences.
The Passive, or rather Sensitive, since their
great role is to Feel, unite in themselves the
Nervous and the Lymphatic. They pass from
art to faith, from fidelity to sensuality, since,
sensitive and emotional, they vibrate to every
contact. Their flesh is fine and delicate, even
morbidly so; the outlines of the figure are rounded.
Gestures as well as words are often involuntary;
the postures indolent, the manner well-poised.
The handwriting remains always immature. The
style is harmonious, flowery, descriptive. This
nature is essentially musical, and frequently
becomes religious. Impressions from without
overcome impulses from within. In politics, they
are devotedly legitimist, faithful to the throne as
to the altar, influenced by ancient traditions of
loyalty and royalty, of "divine right," of aristocracy,
of "the good old times." They have a
profound seriousness in matters of sentiment,
which expresses itself in delicate old-fashioned
language. Will-power is deficient, artifice and
hypocrisy frequent. Sometimes there is coquetry,
sometimes worse; but the family virtues are
usual in this type.
The Intellectual (Bilious-Nervous) are abstract
thinkers; their role is to Idealize. The possessive
instinct in them translates itself into avarice or
ambition; emotionalism into prudence, virtue,
theology; activity into subtility. Theoretical,
mathematical, systematic, their mentality has
both a literal and an imaginative tendency.
Their language is full of strange expressions,
acquired and used almost unconsciously. Their
style, concise, elliptic, intense, vivid, reveals their
originality, which we discover also in their
BIZARRE handwriting, jerky and angular, in their
odd personal mannerisms, in their long and
somewhat heavy steps, with an excessive bending
at the knees. Their opinions are essentially
individualistic, anarchistic, destructive, pessimistic;
a strong sense of the rights of personality
causes them to hold all things admissible which
lead toward the ideal state in which individuals
and ideas shall not be dominated by mass stupidity.
They are usually thin of flesh, with
rounded shoulders and chest; the nose is nerve
RETROUSSE, for all the bodily lines curve from
above downward.
Lastly, the Physical, whose constant aim is
to Realize, to Materialize, and in whom the
Sanguine and the Lymphatic mingle, show, on
the contrary, heavy flesh, sometimes plump and
dimpled, sometimes bloated and ugly. The facial
and bodily lines tend to turn upward. They
are always thickset; their movements, nevertheless,
are easy, and neither in step nor posture
are they hampered or clumsy. Prosaic dullness
is the defect of their minds, whose grossness is
sometimes expressed in violent or voluptuous
tastes. The letters of the handwriting are short,
rounded, heavy. Their opinions, social in tendency,
rest upon some doctrine of solidarity, of
cooperation, of mass effort, and have little regard
for initiative and for that inequality which is so
fecund. They are socialistic levellers. A mind
of this type often ends in materialism; its science
will be that of industry, its life one of adaptation,
its art merely a photographic realism.
II HISTORIC TENDENCY TO GENERAL
GROUPINGS OF Six
Now these six moral and physical types, so
distinct, are nothing else than the extension of
our energy in one of the six directions into which
the three dimensions of space divide themselves:
height (upward, downward), breadth (to right,
to left), depth (before and behind). Already the
organs of our bodies are adapted to these six
directions: our legs carry us forward and backward,
our arms extend to right and left, while, in
an eternal antithesis, our heads look upward
and the weight of our bodies draws us downward.
Now the SOUL cannot escape these conditions,
whether we regard spiritual energy as simply a
subtilization of physical energy, or whether we
see in the latter but a symbol of the soul. If
the soul dwell upon vulgar things, it ABASES
itself, as we say; it UPLIFTS itself toward God in
its expansion and detachment from earthly things ;
it inclines toward the RIGHT, so to speak, in
actions clearly governed by the will, and to the
LEFT in those governed by emotional impulse; to
"possess," is not this to be held BACK, and to
"manifest" to go FORWARD?
To manifest and to possess, to act and to feel,
to idealize and to materialize, is not this the
whole of life?
We see the Orator, "rising," deliver his EXORDIUM.
"Before" him, "before" us, he places his
PROPOSITION. His NARRATION, following, carries
us "back" with him into the tyrannical past.
He brandishes, as a sword in his "right" hand,
his CONFIRMATION, and, to the "left," wards off
sinister attacks with the buckler of his REFUTATION.
Then his discourse "descends" and ends
with the PERORATION. Such, according to Rhetoric,
are the six parts of an oration; the six
directions of its force.
Poetry also, if we believe Aristotle, contains
six corresponding parts. And the Politics of
Plato enumerates six types of government :
the objective and majestic MONARCHY, the
abstract and lofty ARISTOCRACY, the military and
active TlMOCRACY, the materialistic OLIGARCHY
of the plutocrats, the sentimental DEMOCRACY
of the masses, and the jealous TYRANNY. They
succeed one another inevitably in the same order,
and the philosopher seeks not merely an image,
but THE CAUSE, in the six types of human character,
which is to say, for us, in their six
"attitudes" respecting the passions
There were too (was it for this reason?) six
Classes in Rome, as there were six cases in its
declensions, one reflects with a smile. And Physics,
which in nature envisages only force, only energy,
is it not also divided into six parts? Does not
Crystallography reduce all its polyhedrons to six
groups of forms?
And, if we would amuse ourselves longer with
these butterfly-flights which are called Analogies
(and which likewise begin in childish poetic
caprice, to end perhaps as a science), we may
still cite the six "days" or periods of Creation,
which, fifty-two times a year, the Christian,
Jewish and Moslem week repeats and celebrates
in its six days.*
The seventh period was consecrated to rest.
But Sunday, according to Genesis, saw the birth
of light and darkness; Monday, the fluids, air
and water; Tuesday, the principal minerals and
vegetables; Wednesday, the astronomical organization
of our sun and stars; Thursday, the fish
and birds of our earth; Friday, the terrestrial
animals and humanity.
The six gods early established over these six
days correspond to the six types which we have
just drawn from the four temperaments combined
two by two. The Sun-god is our Sensitive,
the Moon our jealous Possessive; Mars is our
Active, virile and brutal; the ingenious Mercury
is our Intellectual, the majestic Jupiter our
Objective and the sensual Venus our Physical.
These six types have had an incomparable
fortune; not only have they served all the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance, but we find them,
clearly specified, in Shakespeare, who makes
constant allusion to them* and evidently constructs
from them a method for his classification of men.
We find them again in Schiller, who seems for
a time to have preferred them to the four primitive
temperaments dear to his master Kant.**
Ill ANALOGOUS GROUPINGS OF
SEVEN AND THREE
As for the seventh type, that of Saturn, it
has been little used except by dullards who have
corrupted the system. It rests, in effect, on the
superstitious idea of Evil Fortune. Its characters
are alternately those of the six others,
obscured by this conception, which, as we shall
see further on, is one of the subdivisions of Apollo,
stripped of personal passion. If vicious, it corresponds
to the type of Venus, and if cold, to
Diana; dry and abstract, to the intellectual
Mercury; hard and destructive, to Mars.
It seems to have been invented merely for the
sake of reaching the cabalistic number of 7. All
the personages, human or divine, of this seventh
class, may be reduced to the number of half a
dozen, by the fact that they all contain a composite
and central type. This keeps, from the
depths at which we see it, the too bright or too
sombre color of its origin. Of the seven princes of
the Devs, six are thus subordinated to the sinister
Ahriman, whose emanations they represent, and
the seven Amschasfands, for their part, signify
simply the six Gahanbars (each placed over a
season or double-month of the year), plus the
Universal Ormuz.
For, although we prefer to divide the year into
four seasons, in which we have seen above suggestive
analogies with the temperaments, races,
ages, centuries, parts of the day and of the world
which it lights, we should not forget that it
is not NECESSARILY thus divided. And it has
not always been thus divided, as we have just
observed in the case of the Persian year, and as
we may observe in the case of the liturgic year,
also divided into six parts, but unequal ones:
Advent, Christmas season, Septuagesima, Lent,
Paschal season and the season after Pentecost.
The Greeks, too, showed perhaps a finer sense
of life than ours when thsy recognized but three
seasons : Ear, Op6ra and Chim6n, or the
Green, the Fruitful and the Sad. They identified
these with the Beotian Thallo, Carpo and
Auxo, symbolizing Flower, Fruit and Growth;
with the Cretan Irene, Eunomia and Dirce
(Harmony, Power, Justice), more abstract, but
having the same profound significance; they
compared them to the three Graces, the gentle
Aglaia, the joyous Euphrosyne and Thalia of
the feasts; to the three Gorgons, to the three
Sirens and to the three Eumenides, whose roles
in destiny we know. It is this habit of mind
which explains how Aristotle, by analogy, draws
in his Poetics" but three ages of man: Youth,
Maturity and Age, although, accustomed to
our four seasons, we moderns tend always to
insert a fourth.
Observe that the three seasons of the Greeks
readily divide themselves into the six of the
Persians: Season of Buds and Season of Foliage;
Season of Harvest and Season of Vintage; Season
of Darkness and Season of Snow.
Although some of these divisions may appear
variable, because they blend into one another
like the colors of the spectrum, we cannot therefore
pronounce them artificial and unreal. Such
an ingratitude to Analogies, so constantly fecund
in the human mind, would be both precipitate
and imprudent.