BIOTYPOLOGY. – The science that studies the human individual in all his vital manifestations, in order to determine, as completely as possible, the well-defined and unmistakable personal biological type (biotype or individual type) (v. individual trino). Biotypology, directed toward the deepest knowledge of the individual in all his aspects, aims to provide useful contributions to the understanding of constitutional weaknesses, morbid predispositions, and the differing working and educational capacities of individuals; hence its practical importance for the physician, educator, and priest.
To achieve as perfect a determination as possible of the individual type, biotypology directs its investigation toward the anatomical structure of the human body (habitus or morphological type or constitution in the strict sense), the physiological manifestations (bio-chemical, endocrine-humoral, kinetic, and nervous aspects of vegetative life), and the neuro-psychological activities of the individual’s relational life (development and balance of emotionality, degree and practical orientation of intelligence).
Nicola Pende, who deserves special mention among the first and most authoritative scholars of biotypology (he was the first to introduce this term into science), wished to consider separately, after the morpho-physiological characteristics of the biotype, intelligence from the moral character of the individual, that is, from his affective-volitional characteristics. He maintained that biopathological study must proceed along four lines (the four faces of Pende’s *biotypological pyramid*): morphological (habitus), dynamic-humoral (temperament), moral (character), and intellectual (type of intelligence). Pende himself, however, pointed out “the great practical difficulty of defining or diagnosing a person’s character”: our diagnostic judgment can only be provisional and reserved, and cannot compromise the development of the character itself” (N. Pende, *Scienza moderna* etc., p. 339). On the other hand, the moral or ethical aspect of the individual, although in varying degrees linked to the traits of habitus, temperament, and psychological orientation, is stimulated, shaped, and modeled by the action of the environment and the educator, by the work of self-education that each person undertakes to a greater or lesser extent, and, supernaturally, by the mysterious work of Grace.
Given this, it seems more correct and more in line with the practical aims of biotypology to study, following the constitution (v.) and temperament (v.) of the individual, in a single whole, his neuro-psychological characteristics—both material and immaterial (sensitivity and motility of relational life, formula of emotional balance, development and type of intelligence)—which together constitute the third element or third face of the triangular block of the biotype. This face is of a more refined, mixed, material-immaterial nature (v. IDOLA), a “native state” on which the true character (v.) of the individual will develop. This character is too rich in extrinsic elements of the physical organism and in too many moral, natural, and supernatural factors to remain the object of study of biopathological anthropology. The moral or ethical aspect of the individual, although indirectly and to varying degrees connected with constitutional, humoral-functional, and neuro-psychological traits, is the proper object of moral theology.
Giuseppe de Ninno