Last year at http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2472 [1] I touched on the element of fire or warmth and its relationship to the personality types known as choleric and melancholic.  

[2]

The element of air is something that can so easily elude us.  What is it, after all? The experiences of a gentle breeze, of a sigh, of a gasp of amazement – every breath and every word we speak is involved with the being of the air.

Yet intellectually and scientifically, what is air thought to be?  A collection of usually invisible particles – atoms, molecules and so on randomly colliding and interacting to create the large scale interactions – wind, weather, breathing and so on – here, it is thought, there is no soul or element of feeling, just something imagined to be like an empty space full of freely floating billiard balls.
 
But it is possible that it is this something that eludes us that in fact comprise the real being of air.  It is possible that our emotional experiences actually tell us something vital about this element air that the sciences of thermodynamics, meteorology and so on can never tell, us, no matter how long they search for it.
 
With this in mind, we can turn to the person of Sanguine temperament.

Octahedron - Air - Sanguine Temperament - Human Chest
 
Of course, just as the presence of a “pure” element like oxygen in the real world is an unrealizable ideal, in the same way we do not find “pure” sanguine personalities, only degrees of the presence of this quality in human beings living in the world.
 
When describing sanguine personalities, our vocabulary is stretched and drawn out to try and describe the reality – floating from experience to experience like a butterfly from flower to flower, dipping their souls gently into delightful experience like a hummingbird sipping nectar, and so on. The essence of this mood is changeability, delight in the colours and varieties of life experience, a never-ending mobility that even in the darkest emotional moment can bring a shaft of light into the soul’s life.
 
This mobility is represented in Christian symbols, for example, by the dove of the Holy Spirit.  In purity this spiritual principle descends to the human being and makes its home there.
 
The purity of the dove, of the Spirit, is not something that is readily understood in our age.  However, Rudolf Steiner speaks of the study of “The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” itself being a way of purification. We may think of the scientific spectrum of visible colours and how in a certain sense these are subsumed within, contained within, white light. 
 
In the same way, the purification of the sanguine soul element can be conceived of as a return to and discovery of the true source of soul delight, of joy and love. The dove appears not to destroy or obliterate the profusion of colours, forms and creatures that appear in the realm of sanguine soul experience, but rather places them in their right light, in the right realm of understanding and vision. Such a purification, such a return to the origin of all things, can be achieved at the end of a long and difficult soul path.  As T.S. Eliot’s often-quoted lines in “Four Quartets” (http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/ [3]) say:
 
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
 
The dove, and the thought of purity, lead to the image of Christ’s baptism and the element of Water. But that is for next time!