If the first axis deals with how the embodied soul stands before reality, the second deals with how that same soul lives experience inwardly. The question is no longer "how do I act on the world?" but "how is the world lived in me?" This is the sanguine-melancholic axis, the axis of affective and existential tone, and at stake in it are pairs such as expansion and restraint, warmth and coldness, circulation and density, lightness and weight, openness and recollection.
The sanguine pole
The sanguine pole is the pole of expansion toward the pleasant, which the method pictures as warmth and the radiance of the sun. Its signs are radiance, presence, vitality, a taste for the surroundings, openness to encounter and the ease of warming others and being warmed. The sanguine does not live reality, first of all, as weight or obstacle, but as surroundings and a field of relationship, as experience that can be widened, exchanged and communicated. This warmth is not a sentimental detail; it is a structural form of energy, and it indicates that the soul tends to go out of itself easily, to spread quickly through its surroundings and to seek contact, resonance, presence, a mirror and exchange.
That is why the sanguine tends toward openness, communication, friendliness, liveliness, the desire for presence and the search for response and echo. They do not live life as something that calls for holding back, but as something that calls for circulation. There is in them an outgoing force, though not in the sense of the choleric's practical impact, but in the sense of the warm expansion of what is lived.
The melancholic pole
The melancholic pole, by contrast, is the pole of restraint before measure, which the method pictures as cold and the crystallization of ice: density, form, sharpness and retention. The melancholic does not live reality as a field of circulation, but as a field of weight. They register, keep, deepen, condense and take things seriously, and their energy, instead of spreading, concentrates. Melancholic coldness does not simply mean sadness. It means that the soul tends to live reality in terms of gravity, cost, memory and depth: the melancholic does not easily let things pass, what is lived goes into them and weighs, and the world appears to them also as demand, risk and mark.
That is why the melancholic tends toward interiority, gravity, a strong memory of what has been lived, selectivity, recollection, a sense of cost and affective retention. If the sanguine warms and expands, the melancholic cools and condenses; if the sanguine multiplies presence, the melancholic concentrates meaning; if the sanguine circulates, the melancholic keeps. This axis, then, does not measure who is cheerful and who is sad, which would disfigure the method. It measures the way affective energy opens or contracts, spreads or concentrates, becomes surroundings or becomes weight.
What the axis shows in body and soul
In the method's vocabulary, this is the axis of extroversion and introversion: the sanguine directs experience outward, the melancholic inward. The closest scientific tradition is that of extroversion, from Eysenck onward, and research itself learned to separate sociability from impulsivity there, which helps show that the sanguine is the extroverted pole and that impulsivity, when it appears, comes from another source. But the extroversion of personality tests is not the sanguine, because it mixes the direction of experience with disinhibition, which belongs to the choleric-phlegmatic axis; and neuroticism, which measures emotional instability, is not the melancholic. Nor can it be said that the sanguine has a stronger approach system (BAS), or that the melancholic has a stronger inhibition system (BIS). In the revised theory of Gray and McNaughton (2000), the BIS responds to conflict between goals, when what attracts and what threatens appear together, whereas the melancholic's measuring shows up even before a neutral problem, where there is no conflict at all. The psychophysical base, as always, is not the end of the explanation, because the difference rises to the soul and shows itself in each power. Sense memory keeps what has been lived with more of the warmth of presence or with more of the weight of a wound. Imagination expands into a living field or condenses into depth and return. The cogitative power more readily perceives what attracts or, on the contrary, risk, lack and gravity. And the concupiscible appetite moves more promptly toward sensible good or holds itself back more strongly in the face of cost.
The sanguine-melancholic axis, then, touches less on the way of attacking the obstacle and more on the way the soul welcomes or bears the world within itself. That is why it is related to the experience of presence, warmth, reception, pain, loss, sadness and enthusiasm.
Virtue and fall on the second axis
In the created order, the sanguine carries a very beautiful aptitude, which is to warm the world and make it breathable, more human and more present. Their warmth was not created for dispersion but for communion. Their relationship with temperance, however, is asymmetrical: the taste for the pleasant is the matter that temperance has to order, and so it is more necessary and more difficult for them, not easier. The melancholic, for their part, has an aptitude for the matter of justice, because they perceive proportions, lacks and what is due. They were not created for closed-in sadness but for true seriousness, faithful memory and just gravity; but measuring well is not being just, because the yardstick can be wrong or can be used for one's own benefit.
Once again, the problem comes from the fall. In the sanguine, reception, which is a good, can become a condition of identity: my presence has to keep being well received. By this path comes vanity, which is the excessive love of being loved, and with it the person begins to adjust what they say, show and defend so as not to be rejected. In the melancholic, the yardstick can stop serving reality and start defending the position of the self. By this path comes envy, accompanied by disordered sadness, rigidity, rumination and self-enclosure, and density, which was faithfulness to the true weight of things, becomes a prison that the person builds out of injury, lack and comparison.
Neither pole is a vice in itself; each is a capacity for good, and the drama only appears when one of these goods becomes the condition of a thesis about one's own self. This axis helps explain, for example, why two people can suffer the same pain and live it in opposite ways: one looks for company, response and warmth; the other deepens, closes up, keeps and weighs. The difference is structural, and recognizing it has a practical consequence: the problem of someone who suffers lies not only in what they feel but in the structural way they live what they feel, and it is that way that needs to be ordered.