Читать книгу The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman - Страница 18

Besides, it is time that the secrets of the laboratories stepped out into the market place, unashamed. Imaginative man has played for ages immemorial with wondrous fairy tales and fancies of what he would achieve. The sciences of physics and chemistry have made everyday commonplace realities out of his radiant dreams. One need not repeat the clichés of our editors. But the analogy is there nevertheless. No control over heat and light and electricity, today our slaves, was possible until physics and chemistry took them in hand. No control of the human soul is possible until it too will be taken in hand by them. We may now look forward to a real future for mankind because we have before us the beginnings of a chemistry of human nature. The internal secretions, with their influence upon brain and nervous system as well as every other part of the body corporation, as essentially blood-circulating chemical substances, have been discovered the real governors and arbiters of instincts and dispositions, emotions and reactions, characters and temperaments, good and bad. A huge complex of evidence, as various, complicated and obscure as human nature itself, supports that fundamental law.

The chemistry of the soul! Magnificent phrase! It's a long, long way to that goal. The exact formula is as yet far beyond our reach. But we have started upon the long journey and we shall get there. Then will Man truly become the experimental animal of the future, experimenting not only with the external conditions of his life, but with the constituents of his very nature and soul. The chemical conditions of his being, including the internal secretions, are the steps of the ladder by which he will climb to those dizzy heights where he will stretch out his hands and find himself a God. Modern knowledge of these chemical substances, circulating in the blood, and affecting every cell of the body, dates back scarce half a century. But already the paths blazed by the pioneers have led to the exploration of great countries. The thyroid gland, the pituitary gland, the adrenal glands, the thymus, the pineal, the sex glands, have yielded secrets. And certain great postulates have been established. The life of every individual, normal or abnormal, his physical appearance, and his psychic traits, are dominated largely by his internal secretions. All normal as well as abnormal individuals are classifiable according to the internal secretions which rule in their make-up. Individuals, families, nations and races show definite internal secretion traits, which stamp them with the quality of difference. The internal secretion formula of an individual may, in the future, constitute his measurement which will place him accurately in the social system.

"More and more we are forced to realize that the general form and external appearance of the human body depends, to a large extent, upon the functioning, during the early developmental period, of the endocrine glands. Our stature, the kinds of faces we have, the length of our arms and legs, the shape of the pelvis, the color and consistency of the integument, the quantity and regional location of our subcutaneous fat, the amount and distribution of hair on our bodies, the tonicity of our muscles, the sound of the voice, and the size of the larynx, the emotions to which our exterior gives expression. All are to a certain extent conditioned by the productivity of our glands of internal secretion." (Llewellys F. Barker, Johns Hopkins University, 1st President of Association for Study of Internal Secretions.)

The implications for the statesman, the educator, the vocational expert, the student of the neurotic and of genius, of delinquents, deficients and criminals, the explorers of the exceptional and the commonplace, the understanding of the poetic and kinetic, base and dull types, as well as of those two master interests of mankind, Sex and War, are manifest. The mystery of the individual, in all his distinct uniqueness, begins to be penetrated. And so every phase of social life, in which the individual is at bottom the final determinant, must be reviewed in the light of the new knowledge. History may be examined from an entirely new angle. The biographies of our Heroes of the Past, in the Carlylean sense, will bear reinspection. Even Utopias will have to be revised.

The internal secretions constitute and determine much of the inherited powers of the individual and their development They control physical and mental growth and all the metabolic processes of fundamental importance. They dominate all the vital functions during the three cycles of life. They co-operate in an intimate relationship which may be compared to an interlocking directorate. A derangement of their function, causing an insufficiency of them, an excess, or an abnormality, upsets the entire equilibrium of the body, with transforming effects upon the mind and the organs. In short, they control human nature, and whoever controls them, controls human nature.

The control of the glands of internal secretion waits upon our knowledge of them, the nature and precise composition of the substances manufactured by them, and just what they do to the cells. Envisaging the future, that knowledge today is meagre. Looking back fifty years, it becomes an amazing achievement and revelation. It is worth our while to survey the accomplished, and to trace its general human significance. For a certain tangible degree of knowledge and control has been attained and should be part of the average citizen's equipment in dealing with the everyday problems of his life.