In the normal male, Vigour dominates Vitability; the maternal potential of Vitability being differentiated in him into its male equivalent. While in the normal female, Vigour recedes within the Female traits of vital power and healthy functioning, endurance and womanly faculty.
The opposite modes of Vigour and Vitality are well shown in disease. In vigorous men, disease may assume the type known as "sthenic"; occasioning such violent re-activity, or rebellion, of the system, and such consequent severity of symptoms as speedily exhaust the resources, and tend to fatal ending. While Vital power, being anabolic and conservative, meets the foe passively, and instead of wasting, economises the forces by moderation of symptoms; bending to the course and processes of sickness, and making thereby for recovery. Because of the lesser vitability of their cells, disease in men tends toward structural, or organic deteriorations. While disease in normal women is more often functional, merely.
In masculine women, disease is prone, as in men, to structural degenerations. Masculine women are very liable to cancer; a liability they transmit as heritage to offspring of both sexes. Hence the increasing masculinity of latter-day women has entailed upon the race an increased liability to cancer and to other structural degeneration. This liability has assumed such grave proportions as to occur in children even, showing in the abnormal growths, "adenoids" now so prevalent as to have become "the normal" of modern childhood.
IX
The living body is a highly-vitalised Vegetative organism with a highly-specialised Cerebro-nervous organism differentiated in it
Professor Cuvier said, "The nervous system is, at bottom, the whole animal; the other systems are there only to serve it."
Professor Bergson amplifies the statement:
"A higher organism is essentially a sensori-motor system installed on systems of digestion, respiration, circulation, secretion, etc., whose function it is to repair, cleanse and protect it, to create an unvarying, internal environment for it, and above all to produce its potential energy for conversion into locomotive movement."
In both statements, is recognition of the Dual differentiation of the body into an organism of Life which functions in relation to its own intrinsic being, and an organism of Consciousness which functions in relation to exterior environment. That in death from starvation, the brain and the nerves remain almost unimpaired, while all the other organs and tissues lose weight, their cells undergoing profound degenerative changes, is further indication of two distinct and separate departments of development and processes in every animal existence.
As in its Mendelian phenomena of the Segregation of its Contrasting Traits, and the Dominance and Recessiveness of these in constitution and heredity, so, in its living organisation, the human body is extraordinarily and in a number of ways essentially plant-like. The brain and the nervous system may be regarded, indeed, as a highly-differentiated Cerebro-Nervous organism grafted upon a simpler Vital, and vegetative body, from which, as from a soil, it draws its life and energy: and from which, as age advances, it gradually withdraws the power of further sustaining its existence.