The Four Temperaments (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

From the very earliest days of the medical and mental sciences the bodily constitutions of men, especially as those bodily constitutions bear on the mind, have been called the complexions and the temperaments. And the outstanding and distinctive temperaments have been classified and designated from the earliest days as the sanguine temperament, the choleric temperament, the phlegmatic temperament, and the melancholy temperament. Not that any man was ever made up of blood and of blood alone, or of choler alone, or of phlegm alone, or of black bile alone. The four temperaments, as they are found in actual and living men, have undergone as many combinations and permutations as there have been individual men and women on the face of the earth. At the same time, some one of the four great temperaments has predominated and has had the upper hand in the construction and constitution of every several man. And thus it is that, broadly speaking, each several man among us may quite correctly be described as a sanguine man, or a choleric man, or a phlegmatic man, or a melancholy man, according as this or that temperament or complexion has the ruling hand over him. ‘So in every human body, The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood, By reason that they flow continually In some one part, and are not continent, Receive the name of humours. Now, thus far It may, by metaphor, apply itself Unto the general disposition: As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his effects, his spirits, and his powers, In their conductions, all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humour.’