The Glands Regulating Personality

The Glands Regulating
Personality

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Title: The Glands Regulating Personality
Author: Louis Berman, M.D.
Release Date: November 25, 2003 [EBook #10266]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY
A STUDY OF THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION IN
RELATION TO THE TYPES OF HUMAN NATURE
BY LOUIS BERMAN, M.D.
ASSOCIATE IN BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY

1922
The passage from the miracles of nature to those of art is easy.
--Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE I.
HOW THE GLANDS OF INTERNAL SECRETION WERE
DISCOVERED II. THE GLANDS: THYROID AND PITUITARY III.
THE ADRENAL GLANDS, GONADS, AND THYMUS IV. THE
GLANDS AS AN INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATE V. HOW THE
GLANDS INFLUENCE THE NORMAL BODY VI. THE
MECHANICS OF THE MASCULINE AND FEMININE VII. THE
RHYTHMS OF SEX VIII. HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE
MIND IX. THE BACKGROUNDS OF PERSONALITY X. THE
TYPES OF PERSONALITY XI. SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES
XII. APPLICATIONS AND POSSIBILITIES XIII. THE EFFECT
UPON HUMAN EVOLUTION

THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY

INTRODUCTION
ATTITUDES TOWARD HUMAN NATURE
THE CASE AGAINST HUMAN NATURE
Man, know thyself, said the old Greek philosopher. Man perforce has
taken that advice to heart. His life-long interest is his own species. In
the cradle he begins to collect observations on the nature of the queer
beings about him. As he grows, the research continues, amplifies,
broadens. Wisdom he measures by the devastating accuracy of the data
he accumulates. When he declares he knows human nature, consciously
cynical maturity speaks. Doctor of human nature--every man feels
himself entitled to that degree from the university of disillusioning
experience. In defense of his claim, only the limitations of his articulate
faculty will curb the vehemence of his indictment of his fellows.
For all history provides the material, literature the critique, biology the
inexorable logic of the case against human nature. The historical record
is a spectacle of man destroying man, a collection of chapters on man's

increasing cruelty to man. Limitations of time and space have been
shortened and eliminated. Tools of production have been multiplied
and complicated. The sources of energy and power have been
systematically attacked and trapped. But the nature of man has
remained so unchanged that clap trap about progress is easy target for
the barrage of every cheap pamphleteer.
The naturalist probes into codes of conduct, systems of morality,
structures of societies, variations in the scales of value that individuals,
races and nations have subjected themselves to as custom, law and
religion. Again and again the portrait is presented of man preying upon
man, of cunning a parasite upon stupidity and of predatory strength
enslaving the weakling intellect. Until finally are evoked reactions and
consequences that overtake in catastrophe and cataclysm preyer and
preyed upon alike.
Human nature is but part of the magnificent tree of beast nature. Man is
linked by every tie of blood and bone and cell memories with his
brethren of the sea, the jungle, the forest and the fields. The beast is a
seeker of freedom, but a seeker for his own ego alone, and the
satisfaction of his own instincts only. Thus he struggles to a sort of
freedom which makes him the Ishmael of the Universe, everyone's
hand against him, as his own hand is against everyone. The human
animal has achieved no advance beyond the necessities of his ancestors,
nor freed himself from his bondage to their instincts and automatic
reflexes. And so the sociologist, the analyst of human associations,
turns out to be simply the historian and accountant of slaveries.
Yet the history of mankind is, too, a long research into the nature of the
machinery of freedom. All recorded history, indeed, is but the
documentation of that research. Viewed thus, customs, laws,
institutions, sciences, arts, codes of morality and honor, systems of life,
become inventions, come upon, tried out, standardized, established
until scrapped in everlasting search for more and more perfect means of
freeing body and soul from their congenital thralldom to a host of
innumerable masters. Indeed, the history of all life, vegetable and
animal, of bacillus, elephant, orchid, gorilla, as well as of man is the
history of a searching for freedom.
Freedom! What to a living creature is freedom? How completely has it
dominated the life history of every creature that ever crawled