The Glands Regulating Personality Part 26

Varieties of the human race exist as do varieties of dogs. The pekingese and the fox terrier are as different as the Slav and Latin are different: because of differences in internal secretion make-up.

The Slav peasant is definitely subthyroid in his general effect: round head, coa.r.s.e features, stubby hands, and his stolid, brooding intellectual and emotional reaction. The Latin shows a p.r.o.nounced adrenal streak in his coloration, his emotivity, his susceptibility to neurosis and psychosis. H. Laing Gordon, a Scot physician, reported that of 700 cases he studied, more than twice as many of duplex eyed individuals (brown or black, i.e., adrenal-centered most often), were susceptible to the mental disturbances of war as the simplex (blue or gray-eyed, i.e., thyroid-centered most often). He also pointed out that such individuals tend to have a narrow and abnormally arched palate. The Anglo-Saxon tends to be more sharply pituitarized, his features are more clean-cut, his mentality more stable. The Frenchman is rather a cross between the Anglo-Saxon pituitary-centered and the Italian or Spanish adrenal-centered.

So national resemblances, traceable to climatic influences being repeated from generation to generation upon the endocrines, may be explained physiologically. The physiologic interpretation of history will indeed be found the broadest, including as complementary Buckle's climatic theory, Hegel's ideas on the influence of ideas, and Marx's on the superiority of the economic motives and forces.

THE RACES OF MANKIND

Arthur Keith, conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, was the first to apply the principle of endocrine differentiation to the problem of the color-lines--the lines which have divided mankind crudely into the yellow, the red, the white and the brown, the Negro, the Mongol, the Caucasian, the copper tinted American. It has long been recognized by anthropologists that the differences of color march with differences in every comparable trait.

Thus the ideal Negro is built upon a pattern in which all the elements are specific and singular. When the looms revolve that make him, there is produced a gleaming black skin, kinky black hair, squat wide-nostriled nose, thick protruding lips, large striking teeth, prominent jaws, and staring eyes. As his upright carriage and bone-muscle-fat proportions are distinctive, so are his musical voice and his easily wrought upon nerves. In contrast the Caucasian has a good deal of hair on his body, his skin is a pale tan-pink, his lips are thin, and his nose especially has the definite bridge which narrows it. The Mongol, like the Negro, has the hairless body and the beardless face, but unlike him has lank straight hair on his head, while his features are flattened and fore-shortened.

Upon the basis of these structural, functional and mental differences, the qualitative and quant.i.tative evolution of which in the race as in the individual is guided by the glands of internal secretion, Keith presents a very good case for the view that the white man is an example of relative excess of the pituitary, thyroid, adrenal and gonad endocrines. "The sharp and p.r.o.nounced nasalization of the face, the tendency to strong eyebrow ridges, the prominent chin, the tendency to bulk of body, and height of stature in the majority of Europeans" are the signs of pituitary dominance. Keith is also of the opinion that "the s.e.xual differentiation, the robust manifestations of the male characters, is more emphatic in the Caucasian than in either the Mongol or Negro racial types ... in certain negro types, especially in Nilotic tribes, with their long stork-like legs, we seem to have a manifestation of abeyance in the action of the interst.i.tial glands." As for the adrenal superiority of the white man, "it is 150 years since John Hunter came to the conclusion ... that the original color of man's skin was black, and all the knowledge that we have gathered since his supports the inference he drew. From the fact that pigment begins to collect and thus darken the skin when the adrenal bodies become the seat of a destructive disease we infer that they have to do with the clearing away of pigment, and that we Europeans owe the fairness of our skins to some particular virtue resident in the adrenal bodies." Finally, as regards the thyroid, a comparison of the face of a cretin with that of the Negro or Mongol tells the story.

A certain variety of idiocy, Mongolian idiocy, in which the face simulates cretinism so closely as to deceive practised clinical observers, is characterized by a Chinese cast of the features and eyes, hence the name. And in the Bushman of South Africa, the cretin's face is even more startlingly recalled.

There is every reason then for believing that the white man possesses more of pituitary, adrenal, gonad, and thyroid internal secretions as compared with the yellow man or black man. And since these endocrines control not only physique and physiognomy, anatomic and functional minutiae, but also mind and behaviour, we are justified in putting down the white man's predominance on the planet to a greater all-around concentration in his blood of the omnipotent hormones.

While the Negro is relatively subadrenal, the Mongol is relatively subthyroid. Their relative deficiency in internal secretions const.i.tutes the essence of the White Man's Burden.

MAN'S ATt.i.tUDE TOWARD HIMSELF

A last, but by no means least, application we may consider of the developing knowledge of the internal secretions in relation to human evolution is its effect upon Man's att.i.tude toward himself and so toward his fellow men. Whatever else he is, man is a land animal with ideas. That makes him a thought-adventurer among materials. In a word, he is the last word of mind working upon matter. But persistently he has refused to recognize himself as matter and as subject to the laws, to the physics and chemistry of matter.

History consists of the protocols that record the high lights of the interactions of materials and ideas which is the adventure of man in time and s.p.a.ce. Materials and ideas have reacted, the record shows; materials come upon have begotten strange fantasies. Ideas that flashed from nowhere into a consciousness have transformed utterly the face of the earth. The herd-brute, agglutinated with his fellows by a magnetism beyond his ken, could be infected with thought, and so cast in the heroic mould. The possibility of communion,--that possibility of possibilities, for without it none other could be possible--has rendered man the heir of a divine destiny. For the progressive education of the race, a single discoverer here, an inventor there, and thinkers everywhere have been inspired. In due time their inspiration becomes the possession of even the lowest brain but capable of grasping it.

Man's att.i.tude toward himself, his self-consciousness, and his att.i.tude toward his fellow creatures has grown and varied and evolved with his education about himself. According to the theory he formulated concerning his being, his why and wherefore, he directed and governed, punished and mutilated himself and them. But the pressure of his curiosity, and the inexorable quality of the truth would not let him stand still. The poetic genius within him, as Blake called it, struggled on from one dogma concerning his nature to another. Behaviour malignant or beneficent, horrible in its tragedy and pitiable in its comedy, flowed inevitably on. Witchcraft trials and the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition belong among the more mentionable consequences of some of man's theories about his own nature and its requirements.

Heretofore the imaginative spirit has had its day in the matter. And, curiously enough, an obsession to subjugate the natural has made it exalt the supernatural. Visions, dreams, portents, revelations, all symptomatic of an order of things above nature, are the stuff of what more than ninety-nine per cent of the millions of the race believe about themselves and their fate. Man's cruelty to man, through the ages, is a comment upon how vast and ramifying may be the consequences of a delusion.

But now for a couple of centuries the critical spirit, which is the spirit of science, has been invading the affairs of men. Humble but persistent corrosive of delusion, it has infiltrated the furthest bounds of ignorance and superst.i.tion. It has not dared to a.s.sert the supremacy of its fundamental views upon the everyday problems of human life because it was without concrete means of vindicating its claims.

That lack is now supplied by the growing understanding of the chemical factors as the controllers and dictators of all the legion aspects of life.

The profoundest achievement of the physiologist will be the change his teachings and discoveries will bring about in man's att.i.tude toward himself. When he comes to realize himself as a chemical machine that can, within limits, be remodeled, overhauled and repaired, as an automobile can be, within limits, when he becomes saturated with the significance of his endocrine-vegetative system at every turn and move of his life, and when sympathy and pity informed by knowledge and understanding will come to regulate his relationships with the lowest and most despised of the men, women and children about him, the era of the first real civilization will properly be said to be born.

Morality, as society's code of conduct for its members, will have to change in the direction of a greater flexibility with the establishment of organic differences in human types. There is nothing that is more emphasized to the pathologist than that one man's meat is another man's poison. In the family, as nature's laboratory for the manufacture of fresh combinations of the internal secretions, allowances will be made for divergences in capacity and deportment from a new angle altogether. Schools will function as the developers, stimulators and inhibitors of the endocrines, as well as investigators of the individuals who have not enough or too much of one or some of them. Prisons will have the same function, only they will be named detention hospitals. The raising of the general level of intelligence by the judicious use of endocrine extracts will mean a good deal to the sincere statesman. The average duration of life will be prolonged for an enormous ma.s.s of the population. If the prevention of war depends upon the burning into the imagination of the electorates what the consequences of war are, a high intelligence quotient and revaluation of life will count for a good deal.

Man is the animal that wants Utopia. So long as human nature was looked upon as fixed constant in the ebb and flow of life, a Utopia of fine minds could be conceived only by the dreamer and poet. The desire for such a Utopia could only be regarded as a tragic aspiration for an impossibility. The physiology of the internal secretions teaches that human nature does change and can be changed. A relative control of its properties is already in view. The absolute control will come.

Nor need anyone fear that the science of the internal secretions in its maturity will signify the abolition of the marvelous differences between human beings that create the unique personalities of history.

A derangement of the endocrines has been responsible for masterpieces of the human species in the past and will be responsible for them in the future. The equality of Utopia can be the equality of the highest and fullest development possible for each of its inhabitants. The applications of endocrine control will not necessarily interfere with the life of the individual. There will be breeding of the best mixtures of glands of internal secretion possible. And there will be treatment for those born with a handicap, or who have become handicapped in the life struggle. There will be a stimulation of capacity to the limit. But beyond that, compulsory equalization is a theorist's bogey.

The internal secretions are the most hopeful and promising of the reagents for control yet come upon by the human mind. They open up limitless prospects for the improvement of the race. A few hundreds of investigators are engaged upon their study throughout the world. That is one of the ironies of our contemporary civilization. A concerted effort at the task of understanding them, backed by the labors of tens of thousands of workers, would, without a doubt, accomplish as much for humanity as the vast armies and navies that consume the substance of mankind. If we could not obtain Utopia then, we might, at least by abolishing the subnormals and abnormals who const.i.tute the slaves and careerists of society, render the human race less contemptible and more divine.