If temperament is an original structure of personality, the next question arises on its own: how does that structure begin to operate? How does what exists as an initial disposition become concrete experience, lived reaction, inner pattern, habit and, finally, character?
The answer starts from a simple principle: temperament belongs to the embodied person, that is, to man as a composite of body and soul. It is not merely bodily, as if it were a reflection of neural circuits, hormones or activation thresholds, nor is it a spiritual abstraction hovering above organic life. It belongs to the living unity of the person and must therefore be understood as a psychophysical disposition of the embodied soul. The body provides the material conditions of operation: a certain regime of sensitivity, a certain threshold of excitation, a certain speed of response, a certain ease in discharging, holding back, approaching or inhibiting. But the body alone does not explain human experience, because it is the soul that unifies, perceives, interprets, desires, fears, remembers, imagines and acts. Temperament appears precisely at this intersection.
That is why Axis Ratio rejects both psychological materialism and a free-floating spiritualism. Man is not a spirit using the body as an external instrument, nor an organism producing inner life as a blind by-product. The soul informs a concrete body, and that body is not neutral: it has its own way of being excited, of responding, of saving or spending energy. Some structures lean more toward inhibition, others toward approach; some toward retention, others toward discharge; some toward stability, others toward impact. This base, however, is not yet temperament in the full sense. It is the bodily condition of operation, and temperament only becomes intelligible when that base is lived by the soul as experience, which happens at the level of sensitive life.
The internal senses
Reality enters first through the external senses: a person sees, hears, touches, smells and tastes. What comes in through them, however, is not yet complete human experience, because that material must be gathered, retained, imagined, evaluated, remembered and related. This is where the internal senses come in, and they are the first place where temperament takes shape in experience:
- the common sense, which unifies sense impressions into a single experience;
- the imagination, which retains and recombines images;
- sense memory, which keeps what has been lived together with its affective coloring;
- the cogitative, or estimative, power, which perceives concrete relevance: threat, usefulness, practical value, affective charge and the direction of the response.
At this level, the world stops being raw data and begins to be reality lived by a specific structure. What does this mean? That temperament does not appear first in the abstract concept but in the way a person receives, qualifies and organizes reality at the level of the senses. Before the intellect forms higher judgments, the structure has already tilted the way of feeling, of registering and of reacting. Reality does not land on everyone with the same weight: some structures perceive more quickly what threatens; others, what invites; others, what calls for confrontation; others, what asks to be preserved.
The cogitative power deserves special attention, because it is one of the great bridges between temperament and the concrete personality. It is not yet the abstract intellect, but the power that makes the practical reading of reality at the sensitive level and gives the stimulus an existential meaning: this attracts, this threatens, this is a chance to strike, this is a risk, this weighs, this is room to expand, this calls for retreat. And temperament strongly influences that reading. In the choleric, the cogitative tends to perceive the obstacle as something to be overcome; in the phlegmatic, friction appears as something to be cushioned; in the sanguine, the world is read in terms of presence, warmth and circulation; in the melancholic, in terms of cost, weight, density and demand. The difference is enormous, because it means that personality is not built on neutral data but on a world that has already been received in a distinct way.
The appetites and habit
After the internal sensitive reading, the sensitive appetites come onto the scene. The classical tradition distinguishes the concupiscible appetite, which is moved by simple sensible good and evil, from the irascible appetite, which responds to the difficult good and the arduous evil. This distinction is central to the method, because temperament is a form of perception and also a form of the soul's movement. A person does not only see reality in a certain way; they move before it in a certain way: they approach, withdraw, hold back, attack, preserve, desire, fear, endure, cut off, avoid, insist. The choleric more easily turns the reading of reality into practical impact, the phlegmatic tends toward preservation, the sanguine toward warm expansion and the melancholic toward grave restraint.
The path of temperament can, then, be summed up in a sequence: from the basic psychophysical structure to the external senses, from them to the internal senses and the cogitative power, from the cogitative to the appetites, and from the appetites, through repetition, to habit. This is how the initial structure gradually becomes concrete life, and that is why temperament is not a classificatory idea but a living process: it enters the world through the body, takes shape in the internal senses, moves the appetites, repeats itself in patterns and settles into habits. The concrete personality does not appear in a single leap; it appears through a course, and temperament is its beginning.
This course, however, does not unfold in a state of perfect order. The very passage from the body-soul composite to the internal senses already takes place under the mark of the fall: memory can fix what wounds, imagination can fantasize in disorder, the cogitative power can distort reality and the appetites can react against reason. That is why the original structure quickly also becomes a field of disorder. Even so, the truth remains: temperament is the first outline of the personality, it begins in the whole human composite and necessarily passes through the internal senses, which is where the embodied soul begins to live the world according to its form and where, therefore, the work of ordering it also begins.