The ancients had 4 elements: air, water, earth, and fire. These can be put in a 2×2 table, labelled by the (non-Osgoodian) adjectives hot-cold and dry-moist, as shown in the first diagram. There were also 4 humours (fluids) in the human body and in the foods that were eaten: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These corresponded to 4 personality characteristics (in the same order): sanguine (generally happy), phlegmatic (lazy and indifferent), choleric (easily angered), and melancholy (sad and depressed). The moods and characters were supposed to arise when the corresponding body fluid was present in excessive amounts.

Later, the alchemist Paracelsus introduced a system based on 3 elements: mercury (which meant gases or aqueous fluids), sulphur (which meant fats and oils), and salt (which meant solids). This pretty well defines the phase composition of foods and of organic matter in general. There is also a system of 3 in defining early embryonic levels: exoderm (which forms the skin and nervous system), mesoderm (muscles), and endoderm (internal organs). The corresponding characters are: exodermic persons are quiet and intellectual, mesodermic persons are physically skilled and athletic, and endodermic persons are pleasure-loving and sensual.

Freud had 3 levels of personality: the id (the pleasure drive), the ego (the will and reason), and the super-ego (conscience derived from parental discipline).

How do the 3-based systems and the 4-based systems fit together? You cannot, of course, square a triangle any more easily than you can square a circle. But maybe a sanguine person is an id-oriented endomorph. But that’s as far as it goes. We could perhaps construct a heptagon where all 3s and 4s would fit together in a cycle, or maybe a hexagon if the two points mentioned above coincide. An attempt is made in the second diagram.

The 6 or 12 problem arises when we try to match chakras (7), esoteric bodies (8), Tarot Major Arcana symbols (21), astrological zodiac signs (12), Erikson development stages (8), the 7 heavens, Psyche’s tasks (4), days of the week and of creation (7), periodic table of the elements (8 in short rows, 18 in long rows), fundamental physical forces (4), Kabbalah Parzufs (10 to 13), the number of archangels (10), “minds” according to Jantsch (6 or 9), Kohlberg stages of moral reasoning (6), age ranges of the human life cycle (12 cycles of 7 years each), and other schemes of qualitative classification. We may try some of this in a huge diagram, but it would not quite fit. A series of smaller diagrams fit better. Some of them were done in the essay “Passages”.

As for space dimensions postulated in string theory, the latest attempt to understand both the basic structure of matter and the nature of cosmology, I have read of 10, 11, or 26 dimensions, most of them tightly curled up. They may correlate with Kabbalah Parzufs or “Ages of the Universe” (another essay).

We humans like small whole positive numbers, which we can apprehend as having some sort of “numerical personality” which large numbers lack, especially very large numbers.

(Cf. essay on “Number in Itself”.) Fractions and irrationals lack this too, except for the mysterious pi, e, golden mean, and a few others. (Cf. essay on “Irrationality”.) Imaginaries and complex numbers are among the paradoxes of our mind set. But small whole positive numbers are used in the law of chemical combination, in musical scales, in letters of the alphabet, in the bases in DNA genes (only 41), all of which can produce prodigious combinatorial explosions in the form of chemical compounds, melodies (harmonies, chords), words (sentences, paragraphs, essays, books, libraries), and millions of species of life on Earth. It all unfolds as our wondrous world of experience.