The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY
A STUDY OF THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION IN RELATION TO THE TYPES
OF HUMAN NATURE
BY LOUIS BERMAN, M.D.
ASSOCIATE IN BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
1922
The passage from the miracles of nature to those of art is easy.
--Francis Bacon, _Novum Organum_, 1620.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE
I. HOW THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION WERE DISCOVERED
II. THE GLANDS: THYROID AND PITUITARY
III. THE ADRENAL GLANDS, GONADS, AND THYMUS
IV. THE GLANDS AS AN INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATE
V. HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE NORMAL BODY
VI. THE MECHANICS OF THE MASCULINE AND FEMININE
VII. THE RHYTHMS OF SEX
VIII. HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND
IX. THE BACKGROUNDS OF PERSONALITY
X. THE TYPES OF PERSONALITY
XI. SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES
XII. APPLICATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES
XIII. THE EFFECT UPON HUMAN EVOLUTION
THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY
INTRODUCTION
ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE
THE CASE AGAINST HUMAN NATURE
Man, know thyself, said the old Greek philosopher. Man perforce has
taken that advice to heart. His life-long interest is his own species.
In the cradle he begins to collect observations on the nature of
the queer beings about him. As he grows, the research continues,
amplifies, broadens. Wisdom he measures by the devastating accuracy
of the data he accumulates. When he declares he knows human nature,
consciously cynical maturity speaks. Doctor of human nature--every
man feels himself entitled to that degree from the university
of disillusioning experience. In defense of his claim, only the
limitations of his articulate faculty will curb the vehemence of his
indictment of his fellows.
For all history provides the material, literature the critique,
biology the inexorable logic of the case against human nature. The
historical record is a spectacle of man destroying man, a collection
of chapters on man's increasing cruelty to man. Limitations of time
and space have been shortened and eliminated. Tools of production have
been multiplied and complicated. The sources of energy and power have
been systematically attacked and trapped. But the nature of man has
remained so unchanged that clap trap about progress is easy target for
the barrage of every cheap pamphleteer.
The naturalist probes into codes of conduct, systems of morality,
structures of societies, variations in the scales of value that
individuals, races and nations have subjected themselves to as custom,
law and religion. Again and again the portrait is presented of
man preying upon man, of cunning a parasite upon stupidity and of
predatory strength enslaving the weakling intellect. Until finally are
evoked reactions and consequences that overtake in catastrophe and
cataclysm preyer and preyed upon alike.
Human nature is but part of the magnificent tree of beast nature. Man
is linked by every tie of blood and bone and cell memories with his
brethren of the sea, the jungle, the forest and the fields. The beast
is a seeker of freedom, but a seeker for his own ego alone, and the
satisfaction of his own instincts only. Thus he struggles to a sort of
freedom which makes him the Ishmael of the Universe, everyone's hand
against him, as his own hand is against everyone. The human animal has
achieved no advance beyond the necessities of his ancestors, nor freed
himself from his bondage to their instincts and automatic reflexes.
And so the sociologist, the analyst of human associations, turns out
to be simply the historian and accountant of slaveries.
Yet the history of mankind is, too, a long research into the nature
of the machinery of freedom. All recorded history, indeed, is but
the documentation of that research. Viewed thus, customs, laws,
institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor, systems
of life, become inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized,
established until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more
perfect means of freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom
to a host of innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life,
vegetable and animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid, gorilla, as well
as of man is the history of a searching for freedom.
Freedom! What to a living creature is freedom? How completely has it
dominated the life history of every creature that ever crawled upon
the earth? Trace our cellular pedigree, descend our family tree to its
rootlets, our amebic ancestors, and the craving for more freedom is
manifest in the soul of even the lowest, buried in darkness and slime.
When the first clever bit of colloidal ooze, protoplasm as the ameba,
protruded a bit of itself as a pseudopod, it achieved a new freedom.
For, accidentally or deliberately, it created for itself a new
power--the ability to go directly for food in its environment, instead
of waiting, patiently, passively, as the plant does, for food to just
happen along. Therewith developed in place of the previous quietist
pacifist, quaker attitude toward its surroundings, a new religion, a
new tone: aggressive, predatory, careerist.
That adventure was a great step forward for the ameba--a miracle that
freed it forever from the danger of death by starvation. But latent
in that move were all the terrible possibilities of the tiger, the
alligator, the wolf and all the varieties of predaceous beast and
plant, parasitism and slavery. The device that enabled the ameba to
change its position in space of its own will, and so increased its
freedom immeasureably, meant the generation of infinite evil, pain,
suffering and degradation for billions in the womb of time.
THE BREEDING OF INFERIORITY
Human history, being a continuation of vertebrate history, is full of
similar instances. The invention of the stock company, for example,
furnished a certain relative freedom to hundreds, a certain amount of
leisure to think and play, and independence to travel and record, and
immunity from a daily routine and drudgery. In turn, it bore fruit in
miseries and horrors multiplied for millions, like those of the child
lacemakers of Mid-Victorian England, who were dragged from their beds
at two or three o'clock in the morning to work until ten or eleven at
night in the services of a stock company.
A corporation is said to have no soul. The struggle for freedom of
every living thing has no conscience. Throughout the living world,
from ameba to man, parasitism and slavery together with their
by-products, physical and spiritual degeneracy, appear as the after
effects of the more vital individual's efforts to remain alive and
free. The origins of slavery may be seen in the parasitisms of the
infectious diseases which kill man. The change from parasitism to
slavery was an inevitable step of creative intelligence. In the
transition evolution made one of those breaks which it indulges in
periodically as its mode of progress.
The natural effect of slavery has been a selection of two sorts of
individuals along the lines of the survival of the adapted. It has
tended to perpetuate in the breed the qualities of the strong which
would make them stronger, and certain qualities in the weak which
would increase their weakness. For parasitism and likewise slavery
infallibly entail the degradation of certain structures and an
overgrowth of others by the law of use and disuse. The type of organ
which would function normally, were not its possessor parasitic in
that function, invariably degenerates or disappears. Parasitic insects
lose their wings. An entire anatomical system may even be lost. So the
tapeworm, which feeds upon the digested food present in the intestines
of its host, has no alimentary canal of its own because it needs none.
On the other hand, the organs of attack and combat grow by a constant
use into the most remarkable of efficient weapons.
In human society the process continues. Out of the tapeworm nature,
the tiger nature, the wolf nature, the simian nature, human nature
evolves. Repeated episodes of subjugation and suppression mixed with
countless incidents of predaceous cupidity and rapacity have made
Man what he is today. Indeed, by a sort of instinct, society has
constructed its institutions upon empirical observations and
assumptions agreeing with this principle. The deductions concerning
human nature and human traits that an interplanetary visitor would
draw from a study of our common law would be at least slightly
humiliating to our incorrigible pride. Law courts, codes of civil
contract and criminal procedure, the systems of subordination in
armies and navies, castes and classes, men and women, employers and
employees, teachers and pupils, parents and children, are based upon
the fundamental, the conservative axiom that man, especially the
common plain man (Lincoln's phrase), is a being incurably lazy,
stupid, dishonest, muddled, cowardly, greedy, restless, obsessed with
a low cunning and a selfish callousness and insensibility to the
sufferings of his fellow creatures, animal and human.
Why is it that Man, the noblest creature of creation, made in the
image of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a
Christ, a Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so
described, not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and
Mark Twain, but by the common law, the common opinion, the common
assumptions of mankind? Because the development of slavery and
parasitism in human society, the subjection of the weak to the strong,
the dull and base to the clever and headstrong, set up a vicious
cycle: the liberation of more energy for the making of more and
more slaves and the propagation of slaves and slave qualities in a
geometrically increasing proportion.
This might be called the _Malthusian law of slavery_. For the
qualities that I have named as man's own characterization of himself
are the qualities of the slave and the slave-soul. Nietzche took great
pains to repeat ad nauseam that these qualities were the qualities of
the slave. But by burdening himself with the hypothesis, evolved from
his inner consciousness, that the slaves imposed from below a morality
of weakness upon their masters, he missed the really obvious process
by which slaves beget more slaves, slavery begets more slavery, and
the slave-soul becomes universal. That process is the simple action
of physical and spiritual reproduction of the slaves. The subnormal
begets the subnormal, the inferior begets the inferior.
Slavery appeared as an invention of the would-be-free. It was a
brilliant flash of genius of a seeker after freedom. However, it
became a boomerang. By multiplication and hereditary transmission, the
inferiority and the number of the slaves created a new overwhelming
problem for the superior few, the upper crust of the free. At last the
problem grew into the problem of problems, the problem of government,
that threatened all freedom, as an epidemic disease threatens even
the most healthy. Government, at first organized for conquest and
subjugation, had to change its character until it became more and more
to consist of experiments in a new social machinery that would free
somebody of the incubus. So through the centuries, one technique of
liberty after another was tested in the laboratory of experience.
But always the attempts are so muddled, because the problem is not
grasped. Muddledom is the essence of the slave-soul. And the
essence infiltrates and poisons the whole atmosphere in which the
would-be-free think and act. Kings' heads are chopped off, a whole
class is guillotined, reform movements come and go, the masters fight
every inch of their retreat, and pile stratagem upon stratagem, device
upon device, to retain their spoils.
The democratic formula of freedom for all comes to the fore. So at
last universal suffrage is introduced as the panacea. Freedom seems
within grasp. Now it looks as if a method and an objective have been
hit upon, that will lead both the free and the enslaved out of their
mutual bondage, and release the handcuffs which have bound them
together. All the trial and error tests to which history had subjected
institutions appeared to culminate in the formula that would
automatically yield Liberty. The French wanted a little more and added
Equality and Fraternity. The Americans put it quite definitely as the
formula that would assist the Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness.
That formula is: the _democracy of the normals_.
To be sure, a civilization might be organized for the breeding and the
glorification of the supernormals. Such a civilization may yet have to
be tried. But as the supernormals, as we know them today, are merely
biologic sports, in a sense, simple accidents, no one can tell whether
they will turn out true shots or just flashes in the pan. So it looks
the better course to stick to the plan of nature, which seems to be
the raising of the level of the normals, and the gradual increase of
their faculties and powers.
WHAT THE STATESMAN IS UP AGAINST
Under the terms of the democratic formula the problems of the
statesman seem to become enormously simplified. That is, if one
assumes that he has worked out a perfectly clear idea of what
a democracy means and what the normal means. Assuming these
unassumables, his problem simplifies into the definite object of
producing and developing the greatest possible number of normals--or
if you will, the greatest happiness of the greatest number of normal
lives.
Furthermore you then begin to have the entirely novel possibility in
the world: some sort of collective effort for a collective purpose,
beyond the personal greeds and fears, factions and hatreds. So the
state, instead of fulfilling its old function of serving as the tool
of certain powerful individuals, latterly known as the Big Men, might
be transformed into an instrument toward freedom. With the ideal of a
democracy of the normals ever before him, the statesman could go on
to construct and modify his social machinery. That would entail the
satisfaction not alone of the animal needs, but also the highest
aspirations and therefore the provision of the finest conditions of
life for the normal: those most favorable, stimulative, and assistant
to creative activity. For what else is the content of the idea of
freedom?
Without committing the intellectual sin which William James named
Vicious Abstractionism, the goal of the clearest progressive and
liberal thought and forces of the twentieth century might be summed
up as this freedom in a democracy of normals. A good formula which
coincides with the technique of nature in the evolution of species.
A fair fight, a free-for-all who are unhandicapped, is the motto
of natural selection. Where civilization shakes hands with natural
instinct, what but the happiest of results can be expected?
Unfortunately, the formula in human society possesses an Achilles'
heel. Again it is slavery. Where slavery has become bred into the
bone, the standard of the normal becomes reduced so tremendously that
the average of normals, the majority, are hopelessly inferior. In
effect, they are really subnormal. So the ideal of our ideal statesman
is bound to be defeated because of the inadequacy of his material.
No matter how interested in his main business: the promotion of
freedom for creative activities in a democracy of the normals, he is
bound to be beaten by the majority consisting of subnormals. There is
nothing left for him but to cater to the minority of careerists, the
one-eighth of the electorate representing superior intelligence. The
intelligence tests employed in the War showed that and also that
forty-five per cent of the examined, or about one half the total
population, had a mental capacity, or natural ability that would never
develop beyond the stage normal to a twelve-year-old child. They are
doomed to remain forever subnormal.
THE CAREERISTS AS THE ABNORMALS
The careerists are those who practice the careerist religion. The
careerist religion is the religion par excellence of modernity.
Someone once said, with the perfect candor of the North American, that
America is the land of opportunity. He meant that America is the land
of the Careerist or, as it has also been put, it is the land of the
man on the make. The careerist, or the man on the make, is of a
thousand genera and species, varieties and subvarieties, with
transition links between. One finds him at every level of society.
Excepting a negligible minority, the feminine career of today (as of
the last ten thousand years of the race's history) consists in the
acquisition of a husband. After that she is so identified with him
that her own life, as something distinct, individual and unique,
becomes blurred and then completely erased. The feminine careerist,
the careeristina, if you will, is a definite type. Consider the
unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the
mate, and then the mate's career. All the kinks and twists of the
feminine mind, resulting from the necessities of that fundamental
primary problem, would form a multitudinous and interesting list. The
most successful careeristinas are the absolutely unconscious ones
because they are not passively besieged nor actively bombarded by any
doubts as to what they want. They play their game exceedingly well as
do not the quasi-rebels and faint-hearted revoltees that form no small
percentage of the Newest Women. For a number of women the feminist
movement has been an attempt to break away from the traditions of
the wife-careerist, and to strike a line of auto-careerism. Can
the careeristina instinct, the fruit of the practice of so many
generations, be uprooted by the good intentions of a mere statesman?
But the masculine careerist is a marvelous creature. He is a biologic
sport, an abnormal variation. New York is the place to watch and
study him in his thousands and tens of thousands. You can observe
him climbing, climbing, climbing, precisely as an ant climbs a tree.
Nothing can really discourage or sway him from his chosen path. If he
is not getting on financially, he is getting on socially, or he is
using the one method of advance to help him with the other. How the
line of least resistance and greatest advantage is determined for and
taken by him is a fascinating process.
The careerist instinct, the inherited flair for a career, must not be
confounded with the instincts of self-preservation, self-expansion
or self-expression, because they are utterly different. Indeed, the
careerist instinct is often their direct antagonist, clashing with and
dominating them. The making of the career involves the distortion, the
mutilation, degradation, degeneration or even the complete suppression
of the true personality. But it is all instinctive. To consider the
life of the careerist as an expression of instinct will explain too
the success of so many who have no inner awareness of what they want.
These go straight for the career, looking neither to the right nor
to the left, without doubt or hesitation, just as they go for the
respiration business as soon as they are born.
Then there is the Super-Careerist. Ordinarily, the careerist is rather
obvious, easily recognizable, with diaphanous motives and conduct. But
there is another and rarer bird, the careerist of talent, even the
careerist of genius, whom it is not so easy to see through. Clever and
brainy, he may be a good all around trifler, or his specific gift for
some line of achievement may make him more effective. There is nothing
he may not call himself: conservative, liberal, progressive, or
radical. Often he is an agnostic about social and political affairs
and problems, which passes for the indecision of the open mind, and is
quite handy to render him all things to all men. But perpetually, the
underlying careerist instinct drives him to use all men and women, all
ideas and movements and forces he comes in contact with for his own
personal advancement, just as the slave making instinct guides the red
ant in all its activities to procure its captives. Ideas do not make a
hero out of him, but he makes heroes of ideas, because they serve him
in his ascent.
Because he is the most subtle, the most complex and the most deceptive
type of careerist, he is the most dangerous to the adventure and
speculation in intellect which mankind is. To say that he is a wolf in
sheepskin is to be unjust to him, since he is most successful when he
is most unaware of his own charlatanry. He is most sincere when he
is most insincere, and most truthful when he lies best. A little
self-consciousness of hypocrisy is a corrupting thing, much of it
completely incompatible with the most successful careerism. Tartuffe
is always applauded by the world when he plays Hamlet, if he really
believes in himself as Hamlet. And, as all he has to do, if he is at
all talented, is to look into his glass and see himself in the part,
he carries it off very well.
WHY THE STATESMAN FAILS
Slaves and careerists, subnormals and abnormals, are the important
elements of the constituency of every modern statesman. The financial
and social careerists as business men, professionals, artists,
publicists, presidents of countries, politicians, philosophers
dominate his outlook, his plans, his horizon. The slaves, the
inferiors, the subnormals exist merely to be exploited by them. No
one questions the causes of the multiplicity of them. No one asks why
there are so many little lives. For a fundamentally minded statesman
the control of the production of the careerist, why he is produced,
and how he may be prevented, becomes the primary problem of his art.
Well, you say, what are you going to do about it? That is human
nature. The Evils of Human Nature! There is the perpetual answer to be
repeated by our clever editors unto Eternity. You cannot get away from
human nature. It is human nature to be a careerist. It is human nature
to put the immediate triumphs of the self and its pleasures above
the more indirect, the more remote and distant benefits of a great,
wonderful, free community. We are all careerists. In so far as
democracy has succeeded as a form, it has persisted because there was
in it for the common man the promise of his getting more out of life
that way than any other way. For himself. And the devil take the
others. The myopia of such crude selfishness continues to determine
his politics to this very day. And so he proceeds to vote for favors
bestowed and patronage past or potential. That is, when he does not
throw his ballot away altogether into the fire of family habit,
sectional inertia, or race prejudice.
Again you say, that is human nature. It is human nature for us to
be narrow, to be confined within the circle of personal thought and
desire, without imagination for the beyond. So the calf is limited in
its wanderings to the radius of the rope by which it is tethered. The
servile soul will always be submissive and docile, greedy and stupid.
What else could you expect from the descendant of the solitary beast
who once lived for thousands of years in caves? Without servility of
the soul, without chains for the spirit of the wild animal against
the world, men could never have been driven to live together for
twenty-four hours in communities.
The conception of human quality out of which all social machinery has
been devised and built is a conception of slave quality and careerist
quality. As we are all caught in the net, as the unconscious memories
of our slave and careerist ancestors flow in our blood and echo in our
cells, all we can do is accept it and work with it. Human nature is an
incurable disease. Like Jehovah's definition of Himself, it is, it has
been, and ever will be. Everywhere the same, always the same, forever
the same, there is no way out.
POOR HUMAN NATURE
All of these strictures upon poor human nature are exceedingly
delightful to our careerists. Every unpleasant social fact, every
outrage to our best instincts, every exhibition of incapacity,
incompetency, inefficiency, indifference, every example of
super-criminal negligence is pardoned as an effect of that universal
sin, human nature. Take the case of the statesman and the diplomats
who failed to prevent the Great War, though they saw it coming for
years, and who should therefore all, Entente as well as German,
American as well as Japanese, be indicted for their criminal
negligence, precisely as a physician would be for failure to report
and stop the spread of an epidemic disease. All these crimes of
omission and commission are excused on the plea that it was all due to
human nature, and that what can be blamed on human nature in general
can be blamed on no one in particular.
Poor human nature! Flagellated on every hand, what are we to do with
it? Why is the careerist so numerous and ubiquitous? Why does the
slave-soul infiltrate like a cancer the soul of society with its black
fluid? Is freedom, the divine idea, nothing but the toy of an orator
to the majority, a distant star in the night to a helpless minority?
Yet the instinct to freedom, the appetite for freedom, flickers
through the centuries as a fitful flame, though snuffed out by every
gust of class passion, every wind of mob resentment, and every storm
of national jealousy. Though the inferior subnormals multiply into
great sheep majorities, and the careerists, like Napoleon, morbid
variants, involve millions in their disease, the idea of freedom
persists obstinately. Have we any reason for regarding it as other
than an illusion?