26. The Secret of the Human Temperaments

GA 68d/1908-12-15/p030 ·1908-12-15 · English HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: mixed sources. This volume draws on more than one kind of record (transcripts, notes, documents). Check the volume's own front matter before weighing a single passage. Evidence: «Vorträge aus den Jahren 1905 bis 1909 in Form von ausführlichen Mitschriften, Zuhörernotizen und Zeitungsreferaten» (Lectures from the years 1905 to 1909 in the form of detailed transcripts, listeners' notes and newspaper reports). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 68d). The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.

When the distribution of the faculties is such that the astral body has a predominant effect on the etheric body, making its impressions particularly strong, and suppressing what comes up from the physical body, then what we call the sanguine temperament arises. Here the astral body is active; the surging feelings and sensations are lively and animated. The person is open to all impressions from the outside world. We will soon hear that it is the ego that contains the images that arise in the astral body and have their physical instrument in the nervous system, and that the blood, the expression of the ego that contains them, is physical. In fact, the blood and nervous systems work together in a very strange way. Imagine that the blood weakens. What happens? Fantastic images, hallucinations, fantasies that do not correspond to reality appear. The right inhibitions for these hallucinative and imaginative powers are formed physically by the blood and spiritually by the ego. There is nothing pathological about the sanguine person, but he is therefore open to all impressions from the outside world because the actual ego does not yet appear strong enough. What appears strong is the astral body and the nervous system. That is why the sanguine person is open to all impressions; that is why the sanguine person is mobile because his astral body is mobile. Look at the sanguine gait of the sanguine child, how it bounces, how it is interested in this and that. If it were not the case that the child is alternately interested in this and that, then the impressions would have to be regulated by the ego and the blood.

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Cite: GA 68d/1908-12-15/p030 · edition English