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PAULIN MALAPERT, Les Elements du Caractere. 247 as one or the other is predominant, so is the effect different. The depressing emotions slow the reaction time : the stimu- lating accelerate it. And thus we have two sub-types of the emotional character the melancholy and the irritable (emotif- int'lancholique, cmotif-irritable). 1 It is one of M. Malapert's merits to escape, as he progresses in his work, from mere generali- ties and grapple with the perplexing detail of his subject. But he sometimes enables us to correct his own premisses. Thus we had been led to suppose that the melancholy of the emotional type was the result of -its intense emotions ; but we now see that it is the result rather of their painful and depressing quality. And the quickness too which we had supposed to be combined with intensity is not combined with it when the emotions are of a depressing character. The intensely irritable, on the contrary, if quick and intense of feeling, show no disposition to persistent melancholy. They are always quivering with emotion, palpitat- ing with anxiety or hope, passing suddenly from enthusiasm to discouragement, from the most expansive gaiety to the gloomiest melancholy. 2 It must be admitted that in this sub-type we have departed far from the emotional character first described. Its essential quality, its persistency of feeling, is no longer present. Instead we have a type so unstable, and capricious that it seems to pass over into the opposite type of the sanguine. This illustrates the difficulty of fixing the primary qualities of each type. Even the sanguine man, so uniformly unstable, has at least one emotion that contradicts this general rule. According to all account she is persistent in hope a born optimist; and this emotion renders him phlegmatic to its opposite. The ancient types of the Phlegmatic, the Sanguine and Ner- vous are sufficiently coherent, even in the popular description, to tempt the psychologist to their reconstruction. But the Bilious presents unusual difficulties. The different qualities of emo- tional disposition, the quickness or slowness, the superficiality or persistence, the faintness or intensity of feeling have already been exhausted in the description of the preceding types. The phlegmatic are slow and obtuse, the sanguine quick and super- ficial, the nervous intense and persistent. To these pairs, a third quality is united. The phlegmatic are, like the nervous, persistent, so far as any feeling is elicited, the sanguine show considerable intensity and the nervous are, like the sanguine, quick. What qualities of emotional disposition or what combination of them are left to us to differentiate the bilious or passionate type ? In tlu> common accounts, it approximates to the man of action. The Napoleons and Caesars are said to belong to it. But M. Malapert regards the man of action as a distinctive type, nor does he place the passionate under it, but under the co-ordinate class of feeling. Hence it would seem to be difficult for him to give any 'Pp. 228, 226. 2 P. 226.