The Greek theory of the four elements and their corresponding temperaments has been used extensively in science and literature. Bachelard, a French literary critic, postulated that these elements are the primary symbols used in imagination. To assess the hypothesis that people are aware of element-temperament correspondences, we asked naive subjects to sort 80 element and temperament words in a free-sorting task. As predicted, subjects grouped words so that element and temperament words were combined into four clusters. Two further sorting studies provided evidence that subjects perceive two recent circumplex models of behavior and affect as being analogous to the Greek theory. In a fourth study, computer content analysis of samples of French poetry indicated that poets also equate element and temperament words, as Bachelard predicted. These results provide empirical evidence that people are aware of the hypothesized correspondence between elements and temperaments at a preconscious and imaginal level.Portions of the results were presented at the 198 3 International Colloquium on Empirical Aesthetics in Santa Cruz, California, and at the 1986 meeting of the American Psychological Association in Washington, DC.

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