Personality - Beginning of Personality Study

Beginning of Personality Study

The study of personality started with Hippocrates' four humours and gave rise to four temperaments. The explanation was further refined by his successor Galen during the second century CE. The Four Humours theory held that a person's personality was based on the balance of bodily humours; yellow bile, black bile, phlegm and blood. Choleric people were characterized as having an excess of yellow bile, making them irascible. High levels of black bile was indicative of melancholy and pessimism. Phlegmatic people were thought to have an excess of phlegm, leading to their sluggish, calm temperament. Finally, people thought to have high levels of blood were said to be sanguine and were characterized by their cheerful, passionate dispositions.

Read more about this topic:  Personality

Famous quotes containing the words beginning of, beginning, personality and/or study:

    “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
    —Bible: New Testament, Mark 10:6-9. . . .

    “In the beginning was the secret brain.
    The brain was celled and soldered in the thought”
    —Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)

    “Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. Pancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand—my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm’s length.”
    —Angela Carter (1940–1992)

    “What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man
    that looks in my face?
    Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?
    We understand men do we not?
    What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
    What the study could not teach—what the preaching could
    not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?”
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1892)