Besides the ante-pituitary, in the evolution of judgment, and the judgment faculty, due stress must be laid upon the influence of the internal secretion of the testes or ovaries, the product of the interstitial cells.  Although the probability is that the effects are indirect, through a stimulation of the ante-pituitary, the fact remains that, in a child, memory may be marvelous and judgment poor (such memory is possibly purely thyroid in its determination).  With the advent of the gonads upon the scene, judgments become the centre of the play’s plot undoubtedly.  The intelligence of eunuchs and eunuchoids is in general low.  The skull and brain of castrates, animal and human, is smaller than the average.  Gall, the physiologist who popularized ideas concerning the meaning of the protuberances and depressions of the head in relation to faculty and character, early in the nineteenth century, was the first to prove this.  Among historic castrates, eunuchs, not a single example of great intellect, of the creative type, is known.  On the contrary, the native gifts of the mind were destroyed.  Thus Abelard, who was punished with castration by his uncle for his love affair with Heloeise, never composed a verse of poetry thereafter.

IMAGINATION AS AN ENDOCRINE GIFT

That brings us to the consideration of imagination as influenced by the endocrines.  The physical conditions of exercise of the imaginative faculty have not been sufficiently investigated.  Alcohol has long been known to act as an evocant of strange images.  The hallucinations of delirium tremens are the results obtained in extreme intoxication.  A strangely imaged flow of consciousness, the imaginative state, may also be evoked by morphine and cannabis indica.  There is no doubt that the brain cells may be made to combine in the fresh, novel, and unfamiliar associations that are recognized as unreal.

Francis Galton, pioneer student of the conditionings of human faculty, left an interesting study of the visualising capacity, so far as it could be attacked by the statistical method.  Two of his conclusions are worth repeating for our purposes.  One is that the power to imagine is poor in philosophers and men of science.  The other that it is higher in the female sex than in the male.  We have seen that the philosophic, scientific, intellectual mind, the capacity to abstract, and think in terms of abstractions, is definitely dependent upon proper secretion by the ante-pituitary.  In woman, the post-pituitary is generally predominant over the ante-pituitary.  Though we are in need of a series of studies of the endocrine traits and composition of men endowed with high imaginative qualities, and so are at a loss, we have indications of an endocrine control of the state of consciousness we speak of as the imaginative.