Esoteric Lesson

When a person urges toward a new incarnation, higher beings of four kinds create his etheric body: the sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic beings. Every person receives something from each of these beings, although one or the other may predominate. This predominant temperament is expressed in the entire behavior of the person, especially in children. (A sanguine child jumps around; his gaze wanders carelessly over many things. A choleric child, for example, will grasp a pear offered to him quite differently than a phlegmatic child.) Therefore (because of the interaction of all four temperaments), people have a phlegmatic feeling for one thing and a choleric feeling for another. These temperaments keep each other in balance. For example, phlegmatic people are the enemies of all philistinism, of all the pettiness into which people would fall if they were exposed to too much melancholy.