These facts explain the reactions of Lieut.  B. The acute call upon his adrenals made by his dangerous situation probably soon exhausted them of their content of reserve secretions.  Overwhelming fatigue with loss of muscle tone followed.  The changes in the brain caused him to talk as he did in the wilderness.  Returned to safety, the news that his reputation was under fire because of C.’s letter brought out another adrenal characteristic:  the excessive instinct of pugnacity, easily stimulated, with its emotion of anger and the tendency to violence.  What is spoken of as a quick temper is an adrenocentric trait.  Returned to New York, an infection, tonsillitis, attacked him.  Infections in adrenocentrics use up the content of the adrenals as rapidly as physical exhaustion or emotion.  So the tonsillitis, which in another type of individual would have been combatted continuously by the adrenals and so passed by as a mere sore throat, presented him with a high temperature, and the brain disturbance described by the medical officer as exhaustion-psychosis, with again a tendency to violence.  In short, the history of his adventure is the history of his adrenals under stress and strain.  It illustrates the mechanism of a typical endocrine neurosis.

THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE VISCERA

In the chapter on the glands of internal secretion as an interlocking directorate, certain generalities were stated as the laws of the government of the organism’s life by them in association with the vegetative apparatus.  It was put forward as a fundamental revision of the theory, hitherto accepted, of the limitation of mind to the brain cells.  We think and feel not alone with the brain, but with our muscles, our viscera, our vegetative nerves, and last but not least our endocrine organs.  In short, we think and feel with each and every part of ourselves.

Among these pristine factors determining the content of consciousness, the endocrines are most important, because they alone to start with, of all the other factors, are different in each and every individual.  They are what render him unique at birth, even though he looks the counterpart of millions of other babies born at the same time.  They constitute his inner destiny.  As he grows, the external factors, social experiences, climate, accidents, and disease modify and condition the reactions and complexity of the endocrine system.  As these modifications and associations are of the greatest import for the final elaboration of the personality, composing as they do the elements of the unconscious which confers the unique stamp of normal, abnormal, supernormal, or subnormal, it is worth while now to review the most general of the determining laws.  Man is an energy phenomenon, both conscious and unconscious, with the energy emanating from the endocrine-vegetative mechanisms.  So it becomes possible for us, by their aid, to analyze the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious with the terms long current in the analyses of physics.