The Glands Regulating Personality / A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature

Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, Josephine Paolucci and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
1922
The passage from the miracles of nature to those of art is easy.
—Francis Bacon, Novum Organum , 1620.
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.