Human Temperaments

From the PREFACE: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Especially Woman, as a witty commentator has added. As Pope stole the whole of the shallow philosophy of his most celebrated essay from Bolingbroke, so he stole three-quarters of this, its most often quoted couplet, from others - half his first line from Pythagoras, and all the second from Warburton. From such a pilferer one would not expect much that is original, but the Essay contains one doctrine that is undoubtedly original with Pope, and it is also undoubtedly erroneous: the doctrine, once universally accepted and now almost forgotten, of the ruling passion. On diff'rent senses diff'rent passions strike; Hence diff'rent passions more or less inflame. As strong or weak, the organs of the frame; And hence one Master Passion in the breast. Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest. As Man, perhaps, the moment of his breath, Receives the lurking principle of death: * * * * * So, cast and mingled with his very frame. The Mind's disease, its Ruling Passion came. It needs very little observation of human nature, very little of that proper study of mankind which the opening lines of the Second Epistle commend to us, to discover how hopelessly erroneous this doctrine is. Pope derived it, not from the study of mankind which he recommends, but, as the German derived his description of the camel, from his own inner consciousness. No man is dominated, in the way Pope described, by a ruling passion; but nevertheless different passions, that is to say, different desires, emotions, propensities, capabilities, and so forth, do attain to very different degrees of intensity in different people, and the constitution of what we now call the character, or what our ancestors called the temperament, varies widely, and has been a favourite study ever since the birth of philosophy. The following pages attempt a description of some common types of character, drawn, not from the inner consciousness of the writer, but from study of Man - and Woman.