The presence or absence of sterility, natural or enforced, always present, or say appearing after the birth of one child, must all be donated a prominent place in studying the endocrine make-up of a woman. When there is not enough ovarian secretion, the ovum may not be able to burst through the ovary, a necessity before it may begin its travels to the uterus. Next, the propulsive action of the genital ducts may be insufficient because of defective corpus luteum. Or the uterus may not have received enough posterior pituitary or thyroid to make it fit soil for the ovum to plant itself in. Or there may be too much of these, which cause the uterus to massage itself daily by gentle contractions and so keep it well-toned. Excessive massage will throw the ovum out. All these are factors in the sterility problem, with its psychic resonances affecting the maternal instinct.
THE MATERNAL INSTINCT
There have been created high odes to an unknown god, sensuous lyrics of love, apostrophes and addresses to every human passion. But no poet, to my knowledge, has risen to the heights of the maternal instinct. Some contemporary clap-trap about sentimentalism will perhaps decry and ridicule the demand for an apotheosis of it. There are some who deny its existence, and assert that maternity is forced upon every woman. Reduced to its elements, such nonsense turns out the absurd pose of the theorist desperate to épater le bourgeois or to cover up hidden defects in his or her make-up.
Without the maternal instinct, without the hope of immortality through somatic or spiritual posterity, we should all, who were sane enough, have to condemn ourselves to the futilities of hedonism. So that the criminal who was condemned to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to see it roll down again, would have to thank his lucky stars for his lighter punishment. The future, tomorrow, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or if you will, the Republic of Supermen, means to all of us what the child means to the madonna. The cynical epicurean careerists and careeristinas, and the depraved degenerates of a comfort-lusting civilization may have suffered an absolute atrophy and castration of that instinct. But they are pathologic specimens, and we are not for the moment concerned with them.
The Freudians have set up a great hullaballoo about creative activities as sublimations of the sex instinct, or as they would have it, the libido. That is their obsession, the confusion of the sex instinct, the instinct for sex life and satisfaction in the relation of the male to the female, with the maternal instinct. The paternal instinct bears the same relation to the maternal, as the breasts of the male do to those of the female, i.e., a functional hermaphrodite trait. The maternal instinct is the instinct to create, provide and care for offspring.
The mother expresses the deep craving of protoplasm for immortality. What drives her is the instinct of Life to preserve itself unto eternity in infinite space and time. That separates it sharply from the temporary needs of the sex instinct. The artist, the man of science or letters, the statesman, craftsman and maker of every sort is instigated by the maternal instinct. He creates for his own pleasure, to be sure. But it is in its essence the pleasure of the bird making its nest.
It is necessary, therefore, to distinguish between the sex instinct and the maternal instinct. For different glands of internal secretion have been found responsible for them. A distinct difference in the quality and amount of the two instincts may be observed in the same person. A strong maternal instinct may be seen again and again to dominate a woman with but little or no sex urge or passion. Numerous physiologically frigid women have lived successful and happy married lives because of contented maternity. Other women, with normal or exaggerated sex instinct who welcome and stimulate the sex life, may have no wish for children, no functioning maternal instinct at all, and if sterile, will accept their fate with indifference or even exultation. These variations occur because of a difference in chemical source and determination of the two instincts. While the ovary, stimulated by the thyroid and the adrenal medulla, is the chief determinant of the sex instinct, to the posterior pituitary must be credited the chief hormone of the maternal instinct. The interactions of the two glands, the ovary and the posterior pituitary, modified by accessory influences, determine the relative intensity of the two instincts. In a sense, the two glands may be said to be antagonistic and yet one stimulates and complements the other.
THE TRANSFIGURATIONS OF CHILD-BEARING
Though what happens at puberty, what happens all through life through the agencies of the endocrines is amazing enough, what occurs during the period of child-bearing is perhaps the most amazing of all. As emphasized, pregnancy is the time, among the internal secretions, of a great uprooting and stirring, of fundamental and cataclysmic changes in the most intimate chemistry of the cells. It is as if a dictator, inspired by his country's danger, its enemies at the gates of its capitol, were to draft and mobilize everyone, man woman and child from everyday activities to the necessities of defense. Or rather it is as if there appeared within the heart of our civilization a common purpose and intelligence, now so palpably lacking, which magnetized and drew to itself all the streams of individual self-aggrandizing effort. Imagine that possibility and how it would change the face of the earth and the entire basic constitution of human life and society. So do the profound tides of the hormones, centering around the new creature being made in the womb, transfigure the face and constitution of the child-bearing woman.
During pregnancy, in consequence, the integrity of every structure of the body is tested. A stern, relentless accountant goes over the cells, counts up their reserves, establishes a balance, credits and debits according to the demands of the growing parasite within them. Follow changes in the skin, the bones, the nervous system and the mind. That is, all the glands, subtle recorders, transmitters, producers of the vibrations of change are influenced. But the most influential are the most affected, as the most dominant personalities in a community are most disturbed by a revolution.
In Sinclair Lewis' "Main Street," the best novel ever made about America as a nation of villagers, the heroine, Carol Kennicott, has this to say to someone sentimentalizing about maternity.
"I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogar. My complexion is rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato bag, and I think my arches are falling,… and the whole business is a confounded nuisance of a biological process."
The exploration of the internal secretions has brought us an explanation and an understanding of why child-bearing is a nuisance. We know now that if Carol Kennicott's complexion became rotten and her hair fell out, it was because her thyroid was not adequate to the demands of pregnancy, and that if her arches were falling, and her figure acquiring a potato bag dumpiness, it was because her pituitary was insufficient. In all probability she was a thymus-centered type, which accounts for much of the material that goes to make up the novel.
Different endocrine types react characteristically toward the situations of pregnancy. The adrenal type may not be able to respond with the necessary enlargement of its cortex which is normal for the needs of gestation. So pigmentations, darkenings and discolorations of the skin, especially of the face, the traditional chloasma develops. The hyperthyroid type may become sharply exaggerated, almost to the point of mania and psychosis. The subthyroid will suffer an emphasis of her defect, and pass on, because of pregnancy, to the truly diseased state of myxedema, the state of dull, slow, stupid, semi-animal semi-idiocy. The pituitary type becomes more masculinized. The face becomes more triangular and coarser, the chin and cheek-bones more pronounced, and there is a growth of all the bones, so that she is seen to grow visibly in height and breadth, and in the size of the hands and feet. Concomitantly, there is a changed, a more matured and steadier outlook upon life, all due to stimulation of the anterior pituitary, controller of growth, physical and mental.
In general, the major endocrines, the pituitary, the adrenals, and the thyroid should hypertrophy and hyperfunction during pregnancy. Should they not, should adverse mechanical circumstances or chemical malfunction prevent, dire effects may follow. A woman with the closed-in type of pituitary, shut up in a small non-expansile sella turcica, will suffer the most violent headaches, will become fat, will frequently abort. One whose thyroid cannot rise to the demands of gestation, because of previous disease (like typhoid or measles) which injured her thyroid excessively, may be poisoned by the new elements introduced into the blood by the growing fetus, as it is the job par excellence of the thyroid to render innocuous these poisons. Of adrenal insufficiency, failure of the adrenals to hypertrophy sufficiently in pregnancy, little is known. Possibly the corpus luteum, the endocrine formed of the torn egg nest in the ovary, makes up for any deficiency in this respect. For there is the most curious resemblance imaginable between the cells of the adrenal cortex and those of the corpus luteum, some day to be completely explained.
THE PLACENTAL GLAND
The placenta, an organ and gland of internal secretion newly formed in the uterus, when the fertilized ovum successfully imbeds itself within it, must be considered in any analysis of the transfigurations of child-bearing. Born with the pregnancy, its life is terminated with the pregnancy, for it is expelled in labor as the after-birth. Its importance and function as a gland of internal secretion has become known only recently. Many still doubt and question the accordance of that rank to it. But feeding experiments with it, in various endocrine disturbances in human beings, have proved its right to the title.
The placenta is created by the fusion of the topmost enlarged cells of the uterine surface and the most advanced cells constituting the vanguard of the growing and multiplying ovum. These front line invaders interact with the cells in contact with them to make a new organ which serves as lung, stomach and kidney for the embryo, since it is the medium of exchange of oxygen, foodstuffs and waste products between the blood of the mother and the blood of the embryo. Ultimately it acts, too, as a gland of internal secretion, influencing the internal secretions of the mother, and also those of the embryo.
Settlement of the fertilized ovum in the womb introduces into the system new secretions, new substances which are partly male in origin, since the ovum contains within it the substance of the male sperm which has penetrated it. This masculine element causes a rearrangement of the balance of power between the endocrines towards the side of masculinity. They push down the pan of the scale to inhibit the post-pituitary. So menstruation, the menstrual wave which follows the increasing tide of post-pituitary secretion, is postponed. For ten lunar months, not another ovum breaks through the covering of the ovary, and the uterus is left undisturbed. The placental secretion plays a most important rôle as brake upon the post-pituitary, the most active of the feminizing uterus-disturbing endocrines. Until at last something happens that puts the placenta out of commission in this function of restraint, and the long bottled up post-pituitary secretion explodes the crisis apparent as the process of labor.
A condition of self-poisoning often occurs in pregnancy, with symptoms orchestrating from mild notes like nausea and vomiting to the high keys of convulsions and insanities. They represent what happens when an unbalanced endocrine system is attacked by the placenta. Depending upon where in the internal secretion chain the weak point, the Achilles' heel spot, will be found, the nature of the reaction will vary. And even after labor, after the explosive crisis, so much of the reserve endocrine materials may be consumed, that an actual mania or a chronic weakness may come in its wake.
Yet the placental secretion must not be looked upon as something wholly evil in its potentialities. Without enough of it to hold the uterus stimulating endocrines, particularly the post-pituitary, in check, still-birth results. If there is enough, and not too much of it, the woman will not feel ill at all, or perhaps only transiently, but will be possessed of a curious feeling of drowsy content and passive, relaxed happiness. Let there be relatively too much of it, too little of the other glands, and the grosser transfigurations and ailments of the child-bearing period follow.
THE MAMMARY GLANDS
Once pregnancy is terminated by labor, the placenta is expelled from the body as the after-birth. The placenta removed, a new arrangement of the balance of power among the endocrines becomes necessary. But a new-comer appears upon the scene to take up the function left vacant by the absent placenta. This new-comer is the secretion of the activated breasts, the mammary glands. They make for a persistence of the state of equilibrium among the endocrines attained during pregnancy.
The mammary glands are typical glands of external secretion. They make the milk and pour it out of the breasts through little canals into the mouth of the suckling. Yet evidence forces us to conclude that they are also glands of internal secretion, that their internal secretion substitutes to a certain extent for the loss of that of the placenta but not quite.
What seems to happen in fact, is this: the corpus luteum secretion stimulates the dormant cells of the mammary glands, formed during puberty, but latent until the advent of pregnancy. We know that injection of corpus luteum will cause an hypertrophy of the breasts. The same effect is produced regularly during the menstrual period, with a consciousness of swelling of the breasts. Their atrophy at the menopause coincides with the shrinkage of the ovaries that takes place at that period. Activity of the breasts parallels indeed more or less the activity of the corpus luteum.
With the prolonged activity of the corpus luteum during pregnancy, prolonged stimulation of the breasts occurs. The secretion of the post-pituitary would now cause the change from the internal cell secretion to milk. But it is inhibited from so doing by the placenta. When the placenta is removed, after labor, the post-pituitary can act, and a free flow of milk is established. However, to counterbalance this, and to prevent the post-pituitary from overacting, the breasts secrete a hormone with an action like that of placenta, but not so strong, which tends to inhibit the ovary. So is put off the imposition of a pregnancy upon a period of lactation, obviously bad for mother, infant, and embryo. We have here an exquisite sample of the checks and compensations which make for a self-balancing of the whole endocrine system.
CRITICAL AGES
The Dangerous Age is a phrase coined by a Scandinavian writer as a more dramatic euphemism for the time of life when sex function ceases, the climacteric. As a matter of fact, the age of adolescence is just as much of a dangerous age as the age of deliquescence. The only difference between them is that the dangers of the one have been hushed up, the dangers of the other well boomed and advertised. Both are dangerous to the individual, because both are periods of instability and readjustment of the cells, particularly the brain cells, to a deranged endocrine system and blood chemistry.
Moral attitudes differ at the two ages, not so much as an effect of experience, as expressions of different visceral pressures produced by newly dominant internal secretions. So in Eugene O'Neil's play, "Diff'rent," we see the woman Emma Crosby as she is in her youth, when her ovaries have budded and bloomed for only a few years, and her other endocrine influences are still dormant. She breaks off her engagement to Captain Caleb Williams on the eve of her wedding because she is informed of the episodes of a sex affair he was involved in on his last voyage, under circumstances not discreditable to him. The next act shows her thirty years later when, as an elderly spinster, she is passing through the climacteric, and is in the state of sexual hyperesthesia some women are afflicted with before the menopause. It is as if the ovaries and the accessory sex internal secretions erupt into a sort of final geyser before they are exhausted. So the captain, ever faithful, finds her, and discovers to his horror that she is a thousand times more like other women than he has ever been like other men. Because of his ignorance of the underlying chemical basis for the transfiguration, tragedy follows. Critics may cackle about a sex starved woman, who has repressed her natural desires, and hail the play as a contribution to the Freudian clinics. As a matter of fact, it is a study of libido variation, with endocrine variation, at two stages of the inner chemical life of a woman.
The chain of events at the menopause, the acme and then ebb of the sex tide, may be summed up something like this:
The ovaries cease producing their eggs and so shrivel as a storage battery atrophies when it dries up. An important member of the endocrine board of directors thus drops out, and so a rearrangement of gland activities, a new régime, becomes necessary. If a balance of power is established quickly and equitably, very little happens. Quickly the woman passes on to the next plane of her existence. But if some endocrine proves recalcitrant, and takes advantage of the situation to make itself dominant, trouble and maladjustment, and their psychic echoes, come. Anterior pituitary control will mean a relative masculinization, with hair on the face and aggressive attitudes. Post-pituitary most often refuses to settle down, and expressing its ambition as headaches, flushes, obesity and hysteria, may cause extreme misery and unhappiness to its possessor. Sooner or later, if the harmonious equilibrium of the normal life is to be revived, all the glands must regress, thyroid, pituitary and adrenals.
With the waning of the ovarian function, the thyroid type will also exhibit its particular flare. If there is thyroid excess the woman will be excitable and irritable, the thyroid deficient will be depressed and dull, the thyroid unstable (that is swinging between excess and deficiency) will have a cyclic up and down alternation of mood and temperament. The adrenal centered will have a high blood pressure and masculinoid traits, the adrenal inferior will have a low blood pressure and suffer from a constant weakness and fatigability. So each form of reaction to the critical ages is individualized according to the predominating glandular influence in the constitution of the woman. When the womb has atrophied, and the breasts have shrunk, the typical tan complexion, and the angular masculinoid figure, face and psyche follow, and the transfiguration has been completed.
Man has his critical age of sex cell deterioration as well as woman. The age period swings between forty-five and fifty-five. Here enters upon the scene that organ of external and internal secretion, the prostate, the most important of the accessory sex glands in the male. Experiments with its extract upon growing tadpoles have demonstrated it to have the same differentiating effects as thyroid, but without the poisoning effects. Furthermore, the microscope reveals cyclic changes in its cells comparable to the menstrual phenomena of the uterus. Indeed it is accepted as the homologue or male representative of the uterus. Small and undeveloped during childhood, its growth at puberty parallels that of the other reproductive organs. Its secretion has been shown to be necessary to the vitality of the sperm cells. The regression of the prostate, its retirement from the field of sex competition, is the central episode of the male climacteric. Accompanying its shrinking are prominent an irritable weakness, despondency, and melancholia, which may emerge at any time if there is disease or disturbance of it. The influence of the prostate upon man's mental condition, and its contribution to the sex index, still remains to be investigated in detail.
SEX CRISES
At the periods of interstitial cell hyperactivity, when a wave of radicalism in the blood sweeps through the tissues, the other endocrines are tested, and their latent stability or instability is made manifest. Even before puberty, cyclic variations of health and conduct may be observed in boys and girls which undoubtedly depend upon currents among the internal secretions. Children, who, in the best of circumstances, habitually are attacked by a wanderlust and run away from home, or suffer from fits of naughtiness, are samples of such endocrine lability. Children specialists have found that at about the end of the second year their charges begin to individuate. In a certain percentage, sex traits appear pretty early. But the fact of the matter is that it is rather the minority of girls who spontaneously exhibit the traditional stigmata of the natural girl. The doll-cherishing, housekeeping imitator of mother is another story.
At puberty arise the most exquisite cases of life crisis dependent upon hormonic crisis. The boy becomes restless, irritable and quick-tempered when his thyroid and adrenals respond to the call of the interstitial cells. If they do not, he will become dull, heavy, lazy and listless. The girl correspondingly is transformed into a vivacious, gay, nervous and apprehensive butterfly, or a sedate, dreamy, bashful, or even morose moth. It is interesting to note that poise, mental equilibrium, is not established until physical growth ceases, marked by a cessation of growth of the long bones known as ossification of the epiphyses. Poise seems to be controlled by the ante-pituitary. The growth of the long bones is also dominated by the ante-pituitary. It would seem as if, its secretion dedicated to the one function, could not be available for the other. So it happens that those in whom growth ceases early (probably because of an earlier and more vigorous invasion of the internal secretion system by the interstitial cell product), develop mental maturity more rapidly and possess more of it than those in whom growth continues. The acumen and salacity of certain dwarfs is proverbial. The puberty phenomena teach that sex crises of every sort are dependent fundamentally upon fluctuations, periodic or aperiodic, of the sex index, as we have defined it.
THE DETERMINING FACTORS OF SEX LIFE
The material summarized in the preceding paragraphs furnish some slight inkling of the vast dominion of Sex, in all its relations, somatic and spiritual, over which the glands of internal secretions rule. The founder of modern pathology, Virchow, said that woman is woman because of her ovaries. He meant that woman is a woman, the sort of woman she specifically is, because of her internal secretions. But no divine decree has laid down a line of cleavage between man and woman. There are fundamental constitutional differences between man and woman. But it is just as true that man is man because of his internal secretions.
We have seen that the concepts of Man and Woman are the end-points of a curve including variations of every possible combination that are embraced in the construction of a sex index. This sex index is not an absolute constant, although its range of fluctuation is pretty well fixed at birth. It varies from day to day, year to year, depending upon the influences that have been brought to bear upon it. But it determines the character of the three planes of sex: the endocrine, the vegetative, and the psychic. The endocrine is concerned with the fundamental chemistry of sex, the internal secretions, which determine the chemical reactions that provide the free energy for the sex process. Upon the vegetative plane occur those transformations, tensions, and relaxations, in the viscera, which are controlled in part by the endocrines and in part by the experiences of the individual as registered in his subconscious. Upon the psychic, conscious planes appear the echoes and reflections of the occurrences upon the other two planes, as well as reactions arising in the brain from the necessity of the organism reacting as a whole to isolated episodes. Accompanying is a self-awareness of the organism as a unit. The three planes are not like separate plates of glass one raised above the other, the usual idea picture of planes. They are nebulae, swirling into each other, influencing and being influenced continually. The reactions among these three complexes of sex create the milieu for the variations and aberrations of tendency, character and conduct which stamp his unique quality upon the individual. Sex morale is likewise so influenced. The fundamentals of sex ethics will, in due time, be revised in accordance with these conceptions.
CHAPTER VIII
HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND
It is impossible to review here in detail all the facts accumulated concerning the influence of the internal secretions upon all the processes of mind, intellectual and emotional. A volume would not suffice for their adequate consideration. Reflexes, instincts, habits, tendencies and emotions are involved in their machinery. The development and normal functioning of the intellect, the pure reason as Kant called it, are controlled by them. Brain, without them in solution, without enough of them in that wonderful solution, the blood, sleeps or remains dormant like the butterfly in the cocoon. The cretin, who has not enough thyroid or no thyroid, is an imbecile because of his deficiency. Supply him with thyroid from outside sources, feed him animal thyroid, be it of the sheep, the pig, or the goat, and behold a miracle! he is restored to the level of at least the relatively normal intelligence.
Acuteness of perception, memory, logical thought, imagination, conception, emotional expression or inhibition and the entire content of consciousness are influenced by the internal secretions. The most ultramicroscopic activities of the molecules and atoms in the highest nerve cells and nerve tissues are dominated. The speed of their chemistry and their associations, and thus the speed of thought, are regulated. Iodine has been shown to increase the electric conductivity of the brain that is, the rate at which electrons will fly through it. The thyroid may then be regarded as manipulating the amount of iodine brought to play upon the brain cells at a particular moment of danger or exaltation. Adrenalin increases the electric conductivity of the brain. Nerve impulses, and with them sensations and ideas, travel faster or flow more quickly through iodinized or adrenalinized brain cells. In dangerous situations we think more rapidly and keenly, for in emergencies the blood floods the brain with extra thyroid and adrenal secretions.
THE BODY-MIND COMPLEX
Mind, still regarded by most of mankind as something distinct and apart from the body, is thus exhibited as but part and parcel of it. A deaf, dumb, and blind animal, deprived of tongue, and olfactory mucous membrane, without sensations from the outside world can grow no mind, in the sense of intelligence. The sense organs of the body mediate the primary mind stuff. Without internal secretions and a vegetative system there could be no soul, in the sense of complex emotion. Nor those combinations of thought and emotion which synthesize attitudes, sentiments and character. The internal secretions and the vegetative system mediate the primary soul stuff. Mind is thus emulsified with body as a matter of cold literal fact. The soul was once a subtlety of metaphysics. Now when mind appears soaked in matter saturated with chemicals like the hormones, therefore woven out of material threads, the independent entity created out of intangible spirit flies like a ghost at dawn.
View the outlook. Mind, the slippery phantom, now becomes controllable for the purposes of everyday life, because we can put our fingers upon, touch, handle and change these material factors, the internal secretions and the vegetative system. Through them we may affect the very quality of the nerve tissue. The future of the race, the future of human nature, depends upon the knowledge to be born of the researches into the vast possibilities of this idea. Man, the Adventurer, the prey of Chance and Luck, will then become, indeed now becomes, the Captain of Fate and Destiny.
It is, of itself, a revolution in the intellect, to conceive of instincts and emotions, suggestibility and contra-suggestibility, initiative and imitation, volitions and inhibitions as chemical matters. In all their relations, mutually reacting effects and defects, excesses and deficiencies, the internal secretions set up psychic echoes and reflections. When morbid and their equilibrium dislocated, we may even have phobias and neuroses.
A man's nature is essentially his endocrine nature. Primarily, when he is born, he represents a particular inherited combination of different glands of internal secretion. They, constituting the inventory of his vital stock in trade, start him in life. Afterwards, food, the routine of his existence, the accidents of experience, education, disease and misfortune, in short, environment, modify him because they modify his ductless glands and his vegetative apparatus, as well as his brain, depressing some parts, and stimulating others, and so rearranging the system. In particular will he be transformed as the gland is affected which is the centre of the system to which the others adapt and accommodate themselves. The inertia of the system is very great, almost absolute, and always tends to return. If he has children, he hands on his constellation of endocrines, in spite of mishaps, not at all or only slightly transformed. Sometimes, however, the experiential transformation has been sufficiently deep, and shaken the very constitution of his germ-plasm. So family dispositions and traits, national and racial temperaments, are propagated, maintained and varied.
THE SEX INSTINCTS
Hormone reactions, as we have seen, initiate the complicated forces, processes and expressions of sex. The dictum of the founder of modern pathology, Virchow, that Woman was in effect an appendix to the ovaries, has long been taken to apply to her psychic traits as well as somatic. Her mind, like her skin, her hair and her pelvis, is a product of the ovarian endocrines. But these determinations are by no means her monopoly. Man is likewise a creation of the chemical wheels within wheels and springs within springs that are his glands of internal secretion. That he is not so obviously an appendix to his testes is due to two reasons. First, the male sex hormones have not the instability nor cyclic rhythmicity of the female. Secondly, and perhaps consequently, his sex instincts have become overlayered with other more labile instincts, with habits and customs and necessities that appear to oust the sex instinct into an altogether decentralized position. Moreover, it is the function of the female to be the excitor in the sex process: her subconscious, thoroughly aware of the fact, sees to it that the sex instinct stands starkly central and dominating in her life.
The moods of love, like the more stereotyped manifestations of sex, are dependent upon a proper supply to the blood of the internal secretions of the reproductive organs, the gonadal endocrines. If the testes are removed from frogs, it is found that the clasp-reflex, symptom of sex desire, is abolished. If, after an interval of several days, the testes' extract is injected into the frog, the reflex reappears for a few days. The hormone provoking this sex reflex is present in the testes only during the breeding season. In birds, the seasonal nesting and migrating instincts may be eliminated by interfering with their ovaries. At the same tine there is a change in their plumage toward the male type. Similarly, the males, when their sex endocrines are cut off, will change their psychic nature as well as physically. Besides owning his flag-waving comb, his spurs and brighter feathers, the rooster struts to attract the female, and fights aggressively with his sex competitors. When he is made a capon, he loses his spurs and comb and distinctive plumage, and in addition becomes retiring and submissive, in short, a pseudo-hen in his instincts as well as in appearance. If the genital glands are extirpated from a male before puberty, the wattles remain small, pale and bloodless, no active, amorous or combative instinct emerges. The creature maintains a demure silence, and may even be sought by a virile male. So we may see homosexuality of a kind in the lowest animals. On the other hand, hens deprived of ovaries tend to metamorphose in the male direction, even to acquire the male spurs, and to display the male attitudes.
All through the animal world, in the springtime, when the pituitary awakens or increases its secretion, and so stimulates the sex glands to augmented activity, emotions of sex and their expression are provoked by the inner stirring. When the nightingale warbles passionately and the mocking bird gurgles provokingly, when the robin fills its scarlet breast and the starling floats in ecstasy through the perfumed air, when the pigeon coyly woos its mate, and the butterfly flirts with the dazzling multicolors of its wings, when all the marvelous devices of sex attraction in nature, selection and courting, mating and reproducing are pondered, who but must wonder at the infinite possibilities of reaction of the sex hormones? All is for love, and all is because of the love in the blood that is manufactured unconsciously by a few hidden cells.
EXPRESSIONISM AND EXHIBITIONISM
We need a detailed examination of the various forms of expression art has differentiated into, in its relation to exhibitionism and as effects of the circulating libido-producing substance of the gonads. Sex exhibition differs in man and woman because of the differently combined internal secretions that are their substrates. The male's attitude, aggressive pursuit, is instigated by the compound adrenal and gonad endocrines. The female's various emulsions of coyness and display are motivated by posterior pituitary and gonad hormones in alliance.
It is a dogma to state that the internal secretions of sex do not begin to function until after puberty. Some children manifest exhibitionism with a certain independence of environment. Before adolescence a good many girls act like tom-boys, and are distinguishable externally from boys only by their clothes. But others display signs of sex differentiation that are to be traced back to an awakening interstitial gonad action. Some boys have no interest whatever in sex. Others will show an intense curiosity spontaneously, a curiosity which perhaps may be explained as a larval precocity, dependent upon the minimum of sex hormone production by the gonads. Close observation of the correlation of somatic and psychic development in extreme examples of these children corroborates this view. Jonathan Hutchinson has described full-busted children of London already boasting of their affairs. Indeed, as education and environment affect the body (in so far as they influence it as a whole) by exciting or inhibiting the glands of internal secretion, sex-arousing stimuli from without must be considered to evoke their effects as stimulants of the latent puberty glands.
At puberty, when the sex glands bloom, and the complex of the sex instincts is activated, exhibitionism manifests itself in a host of guises and disguises. Femininity in a woman, the womanly woman, or the eternal feminine, may indeed be defined by the degree of somatic and psychic exhibitionism she presents. A woman who has a delicate skin, lovely complexion, well-formed breasts and menstruates freely will be found to have the typical feminine outlook on life, aspirations and reactions to stimuli, which, in spite of the protests of our feminists, do constitute the biologic feminine mind. Large, vascular, balanced ovaries are the well-springs of her life and personality. On the other hand, the woman who menstruates poorly or not at all is coarse-featured, flat-breasted, heavily built, angular in her outlines, will also be often aggressive, dominating, even enterprising and pioneering, in short, masculinoid. She is what she is because she possesses small, shrivelled, poorly functioning ovaries. Between these two types all sorts of transitions exist, according as the other endocrines participate in the constitutional make-up. But no better examples could be given, off-hand, of the determining stamp of the internal secretions upon mind, character and conduct.
INSTINCT AND BEHAVIOUR
The sex instinct, analyzed as an endocrine mechanism, provides the clue to the understanding of all instinct and behaviour. If the post-pituitary regulates the maternal instinct, then its correlates: sympathy, social impulses, and religious feeling, must be also influenced, and so is furnished another example of a chemical control of instinctive behaviour. McDougall, once of Oxford, now of Harvard, introduced into psychology the idea of the simple instinct as a unit of behaviour, regarding the most complex conduct as a compounding of instincts. The instinct itself he analyzed into three elements: a specific stimulus-sensation, an emotion following, all ending in a particular course of muscular reaction. Translated into endocrine terms, what happens may be pictured as a series of chemical events.
When the activity of a ductless gland rises above a certain minimum, its hormones in the blood sensitize, as a photographic plate is sensitized, a group of brain cells, to respond to a message from the outside world, with a definite line of conduct. There is a registration by the brain cells of the presence of the specific stimulus. Then there is communication by them with the endocrine organs. As a result, some of them are moved to further secretion, and others are paralyzed or weakened. In consequence of changes of concentration in the blood of the various internal secretions, tensions, movements and tumescences, as well as relaxations, inhibitions and detumescences, occur throughout the vegetative system—the blood vessels, the viscera, the nerves and the muscles. Each wires to the brain news of the change in it. In addition, the brain cells themselves are excited or depressed by the new hormones bathing them. In their final fusion, the commingling vegetative sensations constitute the emotion evolved in the functioning of the instinct.
To lower the new tensions throughout the vegetative system to the normal range, the instinctive action is carried out. This superficially is regarded as the essence of the instinct. As a matter of fact, it is only the endpoint of a process, the resultant of a drive to restore equilibrium within the organism. It may all happen in less time than it takes to tell about it.
The play of an instinct may therefore be analyzed into four processes. They succeed one another as sensation—endocrine stimulation—tension within the vegetative system—conduct to relieve tension. The dash is the symbol of a cause and effect relationship.
This equation for an instinct, based upon an analysis of the working of the sex instinct, is the model for the analysis of all instincts, and therefore of all the compounded instincts that all human behaviour may be resolved into. Conduct, that fascinator of the common gossip and the great novelist alike, normal and abnormal, social and asocial, in all their complexities, even unto the third and fourth generation, the Freudian complexes, is governed therefore by the same laws that determine the movements of the stars and the eruptions of volcanoes. The most interesting factor in the instinct equation is the endocrine, because that is the one that is most purely chemical.
ENDOCRINE CHARGING OF WISHES
It is the distinction of modern psychology that it has established the wish (craving, need, desire, libido) as the moving force in any psychic process. The position of the wish in psychology as the force within and behind the instinct may be compared to that of energy in physics, when it was elevated to a central position in the explanation of physical processes in the nineteenth century. The concept of the charged wish has illuminated all the hidden recesses and rendered audible all the subdued murmurings of the mind. The truly novel in the content of the idea is the recognition of the fact that the wish is charged. Now it could never be charged in a vacuum. That means that a wish could never be born in the brain alone. For the brain has no power to charge itself with energy—it can only store and transmit. If a wish is potential energy that must be transformed into kinetic, it must have a source. That source is the vegetative system. Without the vegetative system, the great complex of viscera in the abdomen and chest, blood and its vessels, endocrines, muscles and nerves, the brain would remain but an intricate cold storage plant of memories, associations of past experiences. It would need no change and initiate no effort. But when the wish enters upon the scene, it is as if a dead storage battery has been refreshed with new current. Enriched with billions of electrons there is a stir and a movement, dynamic mind. But the dynamo is the more ancient possession of the animal, the vegetative apparatus. In short, what must always be remembered is that a wish is never cerebral, but always sub-cerebral, visceral, in its origins.
The sub-cerebral makes the cerebral. Activities in the nervous system below the brain and especially the vegetative system, force upon it its function of the active verb. It has to be, to do, and to suffer, and then to manipulate the environment to satiate the insatiable viscera, insatiable because the local chemistry is continually raising the tension of one or the other of them. A physics of human behaviour becomes possible with the aid of these concepts of endocrine regulation of intravisceral pressure, and intervisceral equilibrium, an intramuscular pressure and an intermuscular equilibrium, with the brain as the shifting fulcrum of the system.
The sensation of hunger, as we have seen, serves as good an exemplar as any of this mechanism of the wish. Hunger is preceded and accompanied by contractions of the stomach of increasing intensity. Those contractions must be brought about by a substance acting upon the nerve endings in the wall of the stomach. As it closes down upon itself, waves pass up and down. With each wave, the pressure within it rises. The exact amount of the pressure may be accurately measured by means of a small balloon swallowed and then inflated. When the pressure rises above a certain figure, the sensation of hunger breaks into the consciousness of the individual. We infer that certain sensory impulses sent up to the brain attain a strength that finally forces itself into the conscious field of feeling. The sensation of hunger varies from individual to individual because of variation in the reaction throughout the vegetative system. Most often it is a sense of movement or even an itch in the upper abdomen. Let some cause produce a weakening or cessation of the movements of the stomach—as fear and anger—and the sensation of hunger disappears coincidently with the drop in the pressure within it. As the mathematicians would say, the wish is a function of the pressure, and so of the concentration of substance behind the pressure.
We have in hunger the wish reduced to the lowest terms, the most primitive form of it. Yet we may resolve all wishes, even the most idealistic, into the same terms. As the vegetative system becomes habituated by repeated experience to react in the same way to the same stimulus, permutations and combinations of wishes become possible until at length the inscrutable complexities of the behaviour of civilized man are evolved. We have to thank Von Bechterew, the greatest of Russian physiologists, for these fundamental principles, so important for the understanding of the control of human life and conduct.
The associated reflex, aboriginal ancestor of the involved train of associations that constitute the highest thought, conduct and character, is the unit of the system. Recall the classic example cited. If a piece of meat is shown to a dog, his mouth waters. If now you proceed to ring a bell before offering the meat, his mouth will water only when he sees or smells the meat. If, however, the ringing of the bell precedes the meat a sufficient number of reactions, a time comes when merely the sound of the bell will cause salivation, without the presence of the meat. So it is with the associated reactions of the internal secretions. A stimulus originally indifferent to the endocrines may, by association, the laws of which are many, come to act like a spark to the endocrine-instinct mechanism. Hence we can account for the subtle play of instinct throughout all thinking.
Even objects resembling the specific excitant of an instinct only remotely, or in some one quality, may start its mechanism and a host of associations bound up with it. Thus the maternal instinct may be excited by the sight of a baby. But because a baby is small and delicate, anything small and fine, a tiny book, a toy, a miniature, may arouse it. The object is then said to be appealing. The doctrine of association of instinctive and so of endocrine reactions enables us to understand the feeling—tone that at any moment pervades consciousness as well as its content.
Choices, the psychology of selection of food, color, friends, mates, amusements also become explicable rationally. For conflicts among the different components of the vegetative system are continuous and inevitable. If the pressure within a viscus has been heightened, and persists, that is, is not disturbed by some other associated factor or instinct, conduct results to lower the pressure to what it was before the instigator of the tension appeared. But if another instinct is sparked, or another associated factor comes into play, another focus of increased pressure within the vegetative system is created, with another stream of energy flowing to the brain and demanding an outlet. This clash of instincts, the struggle between different foci of the vegetative system competing for the possession of the brain, is a common everyday process in conduct. Which will win means which will will. And so we have an energetic basis for volition.
Which will win appears to depend primarily upon the kind of endocrines that predominate in the make-up of the individual, secondarily with his education. For it is the endocrines that are really in conflict when there is a struggle between two instincts. And if one endocrine system conquers, it must be either because it is inherently stronger, its secretion potential, that is, the amount of secretion it can put forth as a maximum, is greater (so explaining the term dominant)—or because a past experience has conditioned it to respond, although the opposing endocrine system does not. Fear and anger, respectively bound up with the activities of the adrenal medulla and cortex, we shall see, provide as good exemplars as any of this process.
The response of the ductless glands to situations varies with their congenital capacity, and acquired susceptibility. Capacity is a question of internal chemistry, modifiable by injury, disease, accident, shock, exhaustion. Susceptibility depends upon the play of the forces focusing upon them that may be summed up as associations. In the ability of one endocrine system to inhibit another we have the germ of the unconscious. Hence the modus operandi of the repressions and suppressions, compensations and dissociations, which may unite to integrate or refuse to integrate, and so disintegrate and deteriorate a personality.
As the personality develops, the vegetative system becomes susceptible to the manifold associates of family, school, church and society, art, science and religion, and last but not least sex. All the different nuances of personality are expressions of a particular relationship, transitory or permanent, between the endocrines and the viscera and muscles. Conversely, behaviour shows what a person actually is chemically; that is, what endocrine and vegetative factors predominate in his make-up.
FEAR, ANGER, AND COURAGE
Fear and anger are the oldest and so the most deep-rooted of the instincts. An ameba, contracting at the touch of some unpleasant object, feels fear in its most primitive form. And anger, the destructive passion, must have appeared early upon the scene of life. Certainly these two instincts were definitely developed and fixed in the cells before sex differentiation and the sex instincts were born at all. It is interesting to note this for our rabid Freudians.
Fear and anger involve the adrenal gland. How comes it that two states of mind so contrasted should involve the same area? The answer lies in the bipartite construction of the adrenal. All the evidence points to its medulla as the secretor of the substance which makes for the phenomena of fear, and to its cortex as dominant in the reactions of anger.
When adrenalin is injected under the skin in sufficient quantity, it will produce paleness, trembling, erection of the hair, twitching of the limbs, quick or gasping breathing, twitching of the lips—all the classic manifestations of fear. These are the immediate effects of fear because they are the immediate effects of excess adrenalin in the blood upon the vegetative viscera and the muscles. The perception by associative memory of these effects of adrenalin, the sensations arising from the organs affected, constitute the emotion of fear. Flight follows by muscle prepared for flight, for the disturbance of the inter-muscular equilibrium tenses the flexor muscles, the muscles of flight, and relaxes the extensor muscles, the muscles of attack.
If, it would seem, the cortex secretion now pours into the blood, enough to more than overcome the effects of the medulla secretion, the inter-muscular equilibrium is disturbed in the opposite direction, for fight rather than flight, and anger results. Or if the cortical secretion pours in an overwhelming amount of its secretion from the first into the blood there will be no fear, but anger immediately. Habitually charging and fearless animals like the bison, bull, tiger, or lion have a relatively larger cortex in their adrenals. Habitually fleeing and fearful animals, like the rabbit, have a small cortex and a wide medulla in their adrenals. The reinforcing action of the thyroid is important. The adrenal medulla reinforced by the thyroid makes for terror, the adrenal cortex reinforced by the thyroid makes for fury.
Some people are not easily frightened, others are more readily frightened, and still others are of an extremely fearful nature. It depends upon the proportion of adrenal cortex to medulla secretion in them. And their reaction to fear stimuli is a pretty good measure of the ratio. These formulations apply more particularly to fear in general and anger in general. But even in the least fearsome, i.e., an individual in whom cortex dominates medulla, there may be fear—complexes, dating back to events and times when medulla overtopped cortex, especially childhood. So in the coolest people, certain persons, objects, episodes, may send a wave along an old line of nerve cells and paths which lead to the adrenal medulla, and so flood him with fear, terror or even panic before his usual cortex response occurs. Impressions during the early years of childhood, probing of the unconscious by various methods, have been shown to be the most potent in this respect. Sometimes the episode goes further back than childhood, and one must assume an inherited conditioning of the vegetative and endocrine systems. An animal leaping upon an ancestor in a forest during the night might account for the panic fear some people experience when alone in the dark, that nothing of their childhood history may account for.
In women, the adrenal medulla naturally tends to overtop the cortex, because the latter makes for masculinity. Besides, the recurring cycle in the ovary, making the corpus luteum, evolves an additional stimulant to the medulla, through its irritating influence upon the thyroid. Then the influence of the post-pituitary is anti-adrenal cortex. So that, on the whole, a number of endocrines work to render woman naturally fearful, as we say.
Courage is so closely related to fear and anger that all are always associated in any discussion. Courage is commonly thought of as the emotion that is the opposite of fear. It would follow that courage meant simply inhibition of the adrenal medulla. As a matter of fact, the mechanism of courage is more complex. One must distinguish animal courage and deliberate courage. Animal courage is literally the courage of the beast. As noted, animals with the largest amounts of adrenal cortex are the pugnacious, aggressive, charging kings of the fields and forests. The emotion experienced by them is probably anger with a sort of blood-lust, and no consideration of the consequences. The object attacked acted like the red rag waved at a bull—it had stimulated a flow of the secretion of the adrenal cortex, and the instinct of anger became sparked, as it were, by the new condition of the blood. In courage, deliberate courage, there is more than instinct. There is an act of volition, a display of will. Admitting that without the adrenal cortex such courage would be impossible, the chief credit for courage must be ascribed to the ante-pituitary. It is the proper conjunction of its secretion and that of the adrenal cortex that makes for true courage. So it is we find that acts of courage have been recorded most often of individuals of the ante-pituitary type. Photographs are obtainable of thirty-four winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery in the War with Germany. Of these twenty-three exhibited the somatic criteria or hormonic signs of the ante-pituitary type. A prerequisite for adequate ante-pituitary function is a normal secretion of the interstitial cells of the reproductive glands. Cowardice is said to be a feature of eunuchs.
THE PITUITARY AND INSTINCT
We have seen that, more than any other gland or tissue of the body, the post-pituitary governs the maternal-sexual instincts and their sublimations, the social and creative instincts. A great deal of evidence is in our possession concerning the disturbances of emotion accompanying disturbances of this gland, and controllable by its control. It might be said to energize deeply the tender emotions, and instead of saying soft-hearted we should say much-pituitarized. For all the basic sentiments (as opposed to the intellectualized self-protective sentimentalism), tender-heartedness, sympathy and suggestibility are interlocked with its functions. Its secretion must act upon the great basal ganglia, at the base of the brain, which contain the nerve cells and fibres that are the centers of emotional control and co-ordination.
The ante-pituitary has been depicted as the gland of intellectuality (to use that term for lack of better). By intellectuality we mean the capacity of the mind to control its environment by concepts and abstract ideas. The frontal lobes of the brain are the central offices for higher thought. Their cells are the most complex, have the most numerous branches and association fibres. They store the fruits of abstract thinking, mathematics, for example. The anterior pituitary is in the closest relation and contact with them. Its secretion is tonic to them. Now the instinct that is the forerunner of intellectuality is the instinct of curiosity, with its emotion of wonder, and its expression in the various constructive and acquisitive tendencies. Studies of intellectual men, and of those with a keen instinct of curiosity and a constructive-acquisitive trend prove them to be ante-pituitary dominant in their make-up. The administration of ante-pituitary extract to some defectives increases intellectual activity and self-control. The future of intelligence may expect a great deal from the newer chemistry of the secretions of the ante-pituitary.
Two most important instincts, therefore, which in the complexity of their sublimations have created most of the institutions of society, the maternal and the intellectual, are connected directly with a proper function of the pituitary endocrines. So it happens that disturbances of these instincts, reaching far into the normal and intellectual spheres of the mind, are definitely connected with disturbances of the pituitary. As we shall note in reviewing the essentials of the pituitary-centered or pituito-centric personality, the personality governed by the fluctuations of activity within the pituitary, people with injured, diseased or mechanically limited pituitaries (because of the smallness of the bony case enclosing them) exhibit defects and perversions of conduct and intelligence directly attributable to affections of the very instincts and functions the pituitary governs. Children with small, mechanically cramped pituitaries lie and steal, are bed-wetters, have poor control over themselves, and a low learning capacity.
THE THYROID AND INSTINCT
The chemical mechanism of the instincts described: sex libido, passion and jealousy in relation to the ovaries and testes, fear and anger in relation to the adrenals, sympathy and curiosity in relation to the pituitaries, suggests that a similar explanation will hold for the dynamics of the other instincts. In the closest relation to the thyroid appear the instincts first isolated, so to speak, by McDougall as the instincts of self-display and self-effacement, accompanied by emotions of pride and shame respectively. In certain states of excessive thyroid activity there is an extra stimulation of the instinctive display of the person which may go on to boasting, mania and exhibitionism. On the other hand, in states of thyroid insufficiency, depression is produced, which may go on to melancholia, a desire to be alone, to hide, to sit apart and even a tendency to accuse the self of various uncommitted crimes and sins. In the form of cyclic insanity known as the manic-depressive psychosis, mania alternates with depression, as if the personality were dominated wholly in turn by one or the other of these two instincts of the ego. There is a good deal of evidence that behind them is a corresponding fluctuation in the amount the thyroid secretes into the blood. Among the thyroid-centered attitudes toward the self gyrate more than in any other type. Egomania and megalomania occur most often in thyroid unstable individuals.
ENERGY AND SENSITIVITY
In his classic Inquiries into Human Faculty, Francis Galton laid down some fundamental considerations concerning energy and sensitivity as mental traits. Energy he defined as the capacity for labor, and declared it to be the measure of the fullness of life or vitality. Statistical study by him of men of genius and their ancestors showed them to be endowed with a large amount of energy. It has been said to be the absolute prerequisite of genius. Now if there is a single fact that has been well established by investigations of the internal secretions, it is that the energy quantum of an individual is a function of and determined by his thyroid. The more thyroid he has, the more energetic will he be—the less thyroid the less energetic, and the lazier. The thyroid-centered individual, of the excess thyroid type, actually burns up more food and produces more heat than the ordinary organism. He burns himself up faster in general.
When the thyroid sends more secretion into the blood, more thyroxin, it accelerates all the functions and activities of the organs. Tea and coffee produce loquacity because they stimulate the thyroid. People with thyroid dominant constitutions talk fluently, rapidly, and continuously. Their energy makes them doers, actors rather than spectators. They get up early in the morning, are on the go all day without surcease or fatigue, go to bed late, and often suffer from insomnia.
Thyroid deficients, however, are definitely the opposite. They are quite conscious of the limited reserve of energy at their command. Also that they need plenty of refreshing sleep. Early to bed and late to rise remains the leading maxim of health for them. In addition they find it necessary to sleep during the day. Forty winks or more in the afternoon makes a good deal of difference to them. Taciturn, inarticulate, lazy, slow, tired, are the adjectives applied to them by their friends as well as by their enemies. All because of an insufficient or inefficient supply of the thyroid's iodine to their cells. The mobility of energy in an organism is a measure of the amount of active iodine in it. The physiologic synonyms for "energetic and lazy" are "well-iodinized" and "poorly iodinized."
Sensitivity, the ability to discriminate between grades of sensation or acuteness of perception is another thyroid quality. Just as the thyroid plus is more energetic, so is he more sensitive. He feels things more, he feels pain more readily, because he arrives more quickly at the stage when the stimulus damages his nerve apparatus. The electric conductivity of his skin is greater, sometimes a hundred times greater, than the average. Conversely the thyroid deficient type has a low discriminative faculty. Galton has recorded that idiots hardly distinguish between heat and cold and that their sense of pain is so obtuse that some of the more idiotic seem hardly to know what it is. Cretins may moan but never shed tears.
Energy and sensitivity in an individual should direct attention to the thyroid element predominating in his composition. Lack of energy and insensitivity to the degree of thyroid insufficiency in their make-up.
MEMORY, JUDGMENT, AND POISE
In between sensitivity and energy, the sensation and the reaction, comes a passage of the stimulus through the gauntlet of the stored past experience of the individual known as memory. Many hypotheses have been advanced by philosophers, psychologists and physiologists to explain the phenomenona of memory. To conceive of memory materially at all one must admit some sort of memory trace as the basis for the persistence of memory. This memory deposit facilitates the occurrence of the chemical reaction constituting the memory along the same path the next time. Forgetting then consists in a disappearance of these memory traces or deposits. Forgetting is greatest in the first hour after remembering, more than half of the memory trace being lost in that time. Comparison of the curve of forgetting, and the curve of diffusion of a colloid like gelatine from its solution, into a surrounding medium, shows them to be exceedingly similar. Forgetting may be explained by some such loss of the memory trace or deposit into the blood continually flowing by it.
The internal secretions influence the amount and duration of the memory deposits. The thyroid appears to be essential to the laying down of the memory trace. Cretins have poor memories on the retention side and so cannot learn. The memory of thyroid insufficients is wretched. In the extreme grades, the memory for recent occurrences becomes completely lost. Iodine and thyroid increase the electric conductivity of the brain, so that the memory trace must be deposited more easily in those who have an excess of thyroid. Removal of the thyroid produces a degeneration of nerve cells and their processes, and associative memory becomes difficult or impossible because conduction from cell to cell is interfered with. If sufficient thyroid is fed in excess, brain conduction may be so facilitated that epilepsy may result upon slight irritation.
On the other hand, the pituitary seems to be related to preservation of the memory deposit. In conditions of disease of the pituitary, loss of memory for past experiences is more marked. As regards recent experiences, they are better held, although in a sort of subconscious manner, recoverable when the condition improves or is cured. But the greatest difference between the thyroid and pituitary effects upon memory exists as regards material: the thyroid memory applies particularly to perception and percepts, the pituitary to conception (reading, studying, thinking) and concepts.
Judgment is another mental process that often intervenes between sensation and the energy-reaction. It involves memory and association of experiences. Behind it is an attitude as much as there is in an emotion or the arousing of an instinct. Beliefs and reasonings are complex judgments. They form the units of the intellectual process.
There is an element of speed in judgment on reasoning as in perception and memory. And as in the latter, the thyroid determines the velocity. Quick thinking, as we call it, means good thyroid action, and slow thinking deficient thyroid action. The other element in judgment, accuracy, is influenced by the ante-pituitary. During adolescence there is physical growth which consumes most of the secretion of the ante-pituitary. After adolescence, after the early twenties, when physical growth has ceased, the ante-pituitary secretion sensitizes the cells of the brain to mental growth. The reaction potential of the ante-pituitary, that is its inherent, latent ability to supply a maximum of its endocrine for the nerve cells of the frontal lobes, is the best-known chemical determinant of intellectual genius. It makes for the greatest co-ordination of experience, knowledge, information, tastes and problems into one harmonious whole. And curiously, not only does it cause a fusion of intellectual material: it creates a desire for and a love of such material.
We should expect to find extraordinarily well-developed ante-pituitary action among eminent philosophers and men of science, and we do. Adequate action of it is present throughout the range of normals who evidence sufficiently ripened judgment as they progress through life. The ability to profit by experience, and to make more and more accurate judgments as one grows older implies at least a maximum efficiency of it. This maturation is not at all universal. Even after middle age, after forty and fifty years of reasoning, some individuals retain the juvenile mind of their youth. Like the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Their ante-pituitary insufficiency often coupled with a post-pituitary excess, and other instabilities and disequilibriums in the endocrine system, render them immature morons, compared with what might be expected of them for their years. They are the people who are old enough to know better. For the same reasons, inhibition and emotional control are poor in them.
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 Helöise, 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.
Most of the evidence accumulated in the examination and treatment of morbid conditions characterized by a restless, incoordinate activity of the brain cells points to excess of the post-pituitary secretion as the cause, or as one of the most important causes. The thyroid and the adrenal medulla also exert their influence. But the strongest appears to be the post-pituitary. Phobias, fears which obsess the mind, anxiety neuroses, suspicions, hallucinations, delusions, nervousness, all expressions of what we may sum up technically as the imaginative state of mind, occur and occur frequently, associated with other symptoms of posterior pituitary overactivity. Persons in whose make-up it rules are more liable to imagine disturbances of their mentality, or exhibit a well-developed imaginative streak. Normal states of overactivity of the post-pituitary such as occur in some women during the menstrual period and pregnancy, and in some men as part of the endocrine cycle of their everyday lives, are accompanied by increase in the susceptibility and vigor of the imagination. Whether the feeding of excess post-pituitary would lead to a stimulation of the tendency or ability to imagine is still to be decided. But it is known that quieting the post-pituitary by various means will cause a depression of the faculty, and eliminate its pathologic manifestations.
Psychologists distinguish between the constructive imagination that expresses itself in an ordered activity and the unbalanced fancies of the fearful neurotic for example. The post-pituitary confers the lability of the underlying state of brain in all of these imaginative tincturings of consciousness. The constructive imagination, one of the few truly precious gifts of a personality, is probably the expression of a certain balanced activity of the ante-pituitary and the post-pituitary.
MOODS AND THE ORGANIC OUTLOOK
The lability the post-pituitary confers upon the combinations of perceptions and conceptions, grouped as the imagined, extends to the ruling mood that may be spoken of as the organic outlook. Post-pituitary in excess, without compensation or balancing by one or some of the other endocrines, is associated with an instability of mood and the organic outlook. Concomitant is a defective self-control. Typically, one sees the effects in the mental abnormalities of women during the premenstrual period. A number of them have their pituitary balance upset then, with an overtopping of the ante-pituitary by the post-pituitary. Irritability, a sub-hysteria, or an actual hysteria may emerge in the usually most placid characters. A quiet wife and mother may go for her husband, curse and mortify him, even strike and beat him. She may slap her children at that time and no other. It is well known that most of their crimes are committed by women during the menstrual period. So are the suicides. Deterioration of mentality and character so often observed during the menopause, with its apathies or excitements, melancholia or mania, the fits of weeping or gaiety, the loss of grip upon reality, the complete change in mood and temperament that reflect the transformation of the organic outlook, demonstrate clearly the overwhelming influence of the endocrines upon the attitudes of the self toward the self.
It is possible to speak of thyroid moods, adrenal moods, ante-pituitary or post-pituitary moods, gonadal moods. Each of these is the echo in the mind of cells stimulated or depressed, by concentration or dilution in the blood of particular internal secretions. Restlessness and excitement can be produced experimentally by feeding thyroid. Vague anxiety, depressive fancies and fears, imaginative overactivity can be removed by inhibiting the post-pituitary. Hypersecretion of the ovary will cause a sexual susceptibility and a mood of genital obsession, capable of the most remarkable sublimations and perversions.