Modern Sanguinity

An example of the sanguine temperament. — Modern psychology likes to look back at the classical Greek theory of the four humors, and the development of that hypothesis by the Peripatetics, and later Galen, into a psycho-physiological account of temperament, with bemused condescension. Our knowers are wont to say, “Though of course no one takes the humors theory seriously anymore, it is nevertheless quite impressive that, without recourse to our scientific method, the ancients were still able to intuit different personality types, and to associate them with constitutional differences, in ways that are not so far wrong, given what we have now learned through scientific research.”

Thus, when Hans Eysenck and others developed their very scientific theories of personality, they “discovered” — through pure scientific method, of course — that there really were, as a matter of scientific fact, four basic types, roughly corresponding to the four classical temperaments. “How could the scientifically ignorant ancients have come so close to delineating the very thing our objective methods of empirical research have now established as true?” our thinkers muse, in sanguine certainty that their reasoning is pure, presuppositionless, and propounded from the intellectual mountaintops of unimpeded science.

Our modern naiveté and lack of intellectual or historical self-awareness would almost seem cute, and perhaps even bring a charmed smile to the lips the way young children do when they announce their latest great discoveries to their parents or teachers — if those same modern traits were not also the source of so much of the civilizational rot and political infantilism that is currently in the process of wiping practical freedom from the Earth for a thousand years.