It does not follow that because we are beginning to understand the normal that we are to establish one fixed absolute standard of the normal.  In view of all the possible mixtures, permutations and combinations of the endocrine glands, that may construct an individual, it is possible to conceive a million types of normals.  For normality means harmony, the harmonious equilibrium between the hormones, which tends to continue itself, because it does no harm to itself.  So there are all sorts and conditions of men and women who are classed as normals.  We need create no inquiry into the value of raising the subnormal to the normal level.  It is when we come to consider the possibility of lowering the supernormal (in certain respects) to the normal, that we pause and hesitate.  Traditional morality assists not, but hinders us here.

Whatever the race may ultimately decide, it is safe to predict that it is now somewhat possible, and will become more and more possible, to regulate or even check the ills of genius, without interfering with its highest evolution and expression.  For example, Bernard Shaw, to take a living man of genius, is pretty visibly a pituitocentric of the well-balanced variety.  He has the height, the facial features, the hands, and the sort of mentality that run together in his endocrine make-up.  He also has the headaches.  It is quite probable that feeding him pituitary gland extract in the proper dosage would relieve him of his headaches.  A process might be started in his pituitary, however, that would diminish its extraordinary output which has assisted to make his brain so brilliant.  The possibility, nevertheless, is excessively remote as the pituitary predominance in him is so overwhelming, that nothing short of surgery, nature’s or the medical graduate’s, could really affect that overmastering eminence.  The time will come, though it is not yet by a long, long road, when we shall be able to intervene, and perhaps meddle, in nature’s most intimate plans.  The right of the power to modify, like the power to kill, will be defined and limited by common agreement before that goal will be reached.

CHAPTER XII

APPLICATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES

The knowledge that the shape and action of a man’s body as well as his mind depend on the internal secretions inspires the hope of the emergence of a hitherto inconceivable controlling power over human life in the future.  For in the wake of chemical discovery there has always come chemical control.  The nature of chemical research, the necessity for clear thinking, accurate measurement, and experience in the actual handling of materials, the fundamental tradition and technique of the science, have made and will make the practical applications about which we today may only speculate.  What the study of the internal secretions suffers from, at the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth century, is insufficient appreciation of