II.
We may begin by laying down the most general conditions for the determination of character, the main guiding lines, the dominant traits which impress on it a clear and decisive mark.
As the psychic life, considered from the most general point of view, can be reduced to two fundamental manifestations: feeling and acting, we have in the first place, broadly speaking, distinguished two types: the sensitive and the active.
1. The sensitive, who might also be called the affective or emotional, have as their special characteristic the exclusive predominance of sensibility. Impressionable to excess, they are like instruments in a perpetual state of vibration, and their life is for the most part inward. The physiological bases of this type of character are not easy to enumerate; but if we admit what seems to me incontestable—viz., that the internal organic sensations of vegetative life are the principal source of the affective development, as external sensations are the source of the intellectual development,—we must admit also that here the balance inclines in favour of the first. It may be known by the extreme susceptibility of the nervous system to agreeable or disagreeable impressions. In general, this type may be said especially to include the pessimists; for experience as old as the world itself proves that sensitive subjects suffer more from a small misfortune than they enjoy a great happiness. Uneasy, timid, fearful, meditative, contemplative, such are the very vague terms in which they may be for the moment characterised, without passing beyond the region of generalities.
2. The active have as their dominant characteristic a natural and continually renewed tendency to action. They are like machines always in motion, and their life is mostly directed outwards. The physiological basis of this type of character consists in a rich fund of energy, a superabundance of life,—what Bain calls spontaneity,—which is very different from the intermittent and explosive reaction of the unstable, and which, in the end, amounts to a good state of nutrition. Taken in mass, and under their pure form, they are optimists, because they feel strong enough to struggle with obstacles and overcome them, and take pleasure in the struggle. Gay, enterprising, bold, daring, rash—such words describe their principal characteristics.
H. Schneider, in an interesting article on zoological psychology,[[243]] has attempted to show that all special movements in the higher animals are only differentiations of two simple, primary movements: contraction and expansion. The tendency to contraction is the source of all impulses and reactions, including flight, by which the animal acts in a manner tending towards its own preservation. The tendency to expansion shows itself in impulses and instincts of an aggressive form: feeding, fighting, seizing on a female, etc. The antithesis between the sensitive and the active connects itself also with this fundamental contrast between contraction and expansion, between the tendency towards the inward life in some and that towards the outward life in others.
3. The above classification is not sufficient. No doubt, if we confine ourselves to theory, there is nothing to be taken into account beyond feeling and acting; but observation teaches us that it is necessary to form a third class, that of the apathetic, corresponding, on the whole, to the lymphatic temperament of physiology. Its general characteristics are very well defined; they consist in a state of atony—a lowering of the powers of feeling and acting beneath the ordinary level. The two other classes are positive; this is negative, but very real. The apathetic characters must not be confounded with the amorphous, the first being innate and the second acquired: the special mark of the pure type of apathetic is inertia. He is not plastic, like the amorphous type: there is no hold over him. He cannot feel enough to induce him to act. He is neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but indifferent. Idle, sluggish, inert, careless: such are the epithets which usually describe him. The physiological basis of his character is the often-described lymphatic constitution—lowering of the nervous tension, increase of the lymphatic circulation according to some, weakening of the circulation of the blood according to others. However, we must not conclude that it is only a barren soil, on which nothing will grow. Add a third element,—which till now we have purposely refrained from mentioning,—intelligence, and the apathetic character assumes an individuality, as we shall see presently.
In this definition of the genera, of the fundamental types reduced to their most general form, are we to admit a fourth type—the temperate? We might say that when we have (a) predominance of feeling, (b) predominance of action, (c) apathy in the absence of both the foregoing, there is required, as a complement, a fourth state of perfect equilibrium between sensibility and action. This type exists, but I cannot admit that it should be included in a primary definition. It is a mixed, composite form, whose study is consequently out of place here. Besides, we must not allow ourselves any illusions; every character is hypertrophied or atrophied; the “perfectly balanced” character is an ideal analogous to the temperamentum temperatum of physiologists; or else it approaches the amorphous.