There should be a stable balance between the various endocrines, the stability expressing itself in what we are pleased to call the normal.  There should also be a balance between the antagonistic elements in the same gland; for instance, the pituitary.  The pituitary, built of two distinct portions, the anterior and the posterior, is in equilibrium when the two are nicely adjusted.  But the accidents and vicissitudes of life (pregnancy for example) will upset the balance.  And so there will result changes of physique, conduct and character.  Like possibilities apply to all the other glands of internal secretion.  In our ability to exercise a control over these disturbances of balance, to be developed in the future, lies one of the great hopes for a chemical perfectability of human life and nature.

NATURE’S EXPERIMENTS VS.  MAN’S

The kinds of personality described, as prototypes and variants and the fundamental facts supporting the view that they are the reaction types of the human beings we meet in everyday life, represent simply a beginning of the work to be done.  Putting into our hands a new powerful searchlight that penetrates the interiors of body and soul, a fresh attitude toward the complicated problems of Man in society grows imminent.  The normal and the abnormal become illuminated with an effect as if our retinas were suddenly to get sensitive to the ultraviolet rays to which we are now blind.  An apparatus is put in our hands which shows us not only a static condition at a given moment, but the whole life process of an individual, normal or abnormal, his past and his future.

Upon that fetich of the biologists, the struggle for existence, the struggle for survival, the struggle for possessions and satisfactions, for happiness, victory and virility, in short, for success, as success is measured by the biologists, a searching spectroscope can play, with a yield for our understanding and control of life, that will stand comparison with the astronomer’s analysis of the stars.  Toward the process of adjustment and adaptation, of the environment to the individual, as well as of the individual to the environment, attitudes will change from hopeless acquiescence in the inevitable to a complete self-determination of the self and its surroundings. The adventures of the personality, strung along as the episodes of his career, his friendships and sex reactions, his mishaps and diseases, and the final fate or fortune that overtakes him, be he normal, subnormal, supernormal, or abnormal, begin to become comprehensible, and hence controllable.

CHAPTER XI

SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES

THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS IN HISTORY