2. Let us now take the ordinary condottiere, such as the Italian republics had in their pay by the thousand, fine types of physical energy and mindless activity. On this robust stock, graft an intellect, powerful, penetrating, supple, refined, unscrupulous, thoroughly skilled in diplomacy, and the ordinary condottiere becomes Cæsar Borgia, and we pass from the lower to the higher form of the active character.
The latter, the great active types, abound in history, and play prominent parts in it. Unhappily, the line of separation between these and the mixed forms which we shall encounter later on is so vague that I hesitate to name any individuals. Julius Cæsar seems to belong to this pure type; Lucan’s line Nil actum reputans si quid superesse agendum, is the complete formula for the active. Nothing either in his life or his style indicates an acute sensibility, unless we reckon certain well-known passions, and his epileptic fits, which, however, prove nothing. We may also cite the Conquistadores of the sixteenth century (Cortez, Pizarro), those Spanish captains whose expeditions read like romances, who, with a handful of men as daring as themselves, overthrew the great empires of Mexico and Peru, and appeared to the vanquished as gods.
III. The Apathetic (lymphatic, or phlegmatic, in the ordinary classification of the temperaments).—I use this word in the etymological sense, to denote, not a complete absence of feeling, which is impossible, but a slight degree of excitability and consequently of reaction. We should be disposed to think, a priori, that this type of character never rises above mediocrity; experience, however, shows the contrary. It is here that intellect is paramount. In the silence of the passions, and the absence of physiological activity, it finds a medium suitable for its development.
Nowhere can we better see the influence of the intellectual powers on the constitution of the character, and the exact limits imposed on them by nature.
In this class, too, I distinguish two species:
1. The first is the pure apathetic type: slight sensibility, slight activity, slight intelligence, a negative state. There is little to add to what has been already said. They are at once above and below the amorphous: above, because they have their own special character, their indelible mark, inertia, which the amorphous have not; and below, because they meet external occurrences with a passive resistance. They are only slightly influenced by education or suggestion, not plastic, equally incapable of good and evil.
2. With a powerful intellect, the case is quite different; but we have to distinguish two cases, according as the intellectual tendencies are speculative or practical.
The first case is outside our subject. If a lymphatic temperament coincides with a lofty speculative intellect, which has occurred in a tolerably large number of mathematicians, metaphysicians, and scholars generally, we have to do with pure intellect only: these are Schopenhauer’s monstra per excessum, and I have nothing further to say of their character.
The second case, that of practical intellect, deserves attention, because it shows us a very special form of character, that which is the result of the action from above downwards, of the influence of ideas on feelings and movements. I call this group of characters the calculators. The ideas give the first impulse, and thus we observe a lack of spontaneity; the tendencies are only excited indirectly, the will is not a laisser faire, but an alternation of effort and inhibition: of effort, because the motor power of ideas is always very weak compared with that of desires; of inhibition, not because there are any violent movements to check, but because reflection is dominant and only allows of action at proper times and places. These characters might also be called reasonable, and they are the work of art much more than of nature. If this chapter were not exclusively devoted to individual psychology, I should point out that this form of character has been predominant among certain races, in certain tribes, and at certain epochs.
Benjamin Franklin is an excellent example: he is “the great genius of prudential calculation.” In his letter to Priestley entitled “Moral Algebra, or method of deciding doubtful matters for one’s self,”[[248]] the reasons pro and con are entered opposite one another every day, after reflection for a sufficient, frequently a long, period; they are then compared, cancelled, balanced, and, this arithmetical operation concluded, we proceed to action.