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 its meaning for mankind. It is true that there are thousands of workers scattered throughout the world contributing their mites to the general store. They increase yearly, almost daily, and their achievements, in spite of an uncritical enthusiasm in some quarters and a semi-charlatanism in others, have been and continue magnificent. But they are pecking at a mountain which requires organized, massive, engineering organization for its blasting.
The crying need is for an international institute, endowed and equipped for investigation upon the proper scale, with all the available appliances and methods already worked out and at hand. Such an institution would possess the right chemical laboratories for the making of blood analyses, metabolism examinations, and tests of endocrine functions. There would be X-ray machines and experts to radiograph the pituitary, pineal and thymus glands when possible. There would be psychologists to carry out intelligence tests, determine emotional reactions, and group mental aberrations, deficiencies and defectives. There would be statisticians, trained in biometrics, to criticize and compare data obtained. There would be anthropoligists to note and measure variations in angles and curves, ratios and quotients of the external conformation of the body. Internists would record the history and status of the organs and viscera. There would be librarians to collect, abstract and collate the vast, accumulating literature. In short, the mystery of personality, the most marvelous, complex, and variable process in the universe, would be attacked and at length penetrated systematically and persistently, with the ideal of absolute control of its composition as the goal in view.
The nature of the researches? They would be infinite in their variety and significance. Their practical by-products, dropped in the pursuit of knowledge by the scientist, as Atalanta's lover the golden apples in his race, to assuage the scent of the hard-headed business man, would be profitable enough for any country in peace or war, to pay for itself ten times over and at compound interest. A volume could be filled with suggestions for interesting and promising investigations. But we may glance at some of the immediately useful aspects that might exercise those concerned with the everyday life of men, women and children.
THE ENDOCRINE EPOCHS OF LIFE
There is no more famous classifications of the epochs of life that mark off the milestones of the individual's evolution than Shakespeare's Seven Ages. So different is he at those different stages of his development, so changed his body and mind that it has become a part of popular physiology that we are entirely made over every seven years, and that no cell in the organism lasts longer than that. The tradition certainly does not apply to the brain and nervous system, for the number of brain cells is fixed at birth, and cannot be increased, only decreased, because they are too highly specialized to reproduce themselves.
What transfigures the individual as the years go by is no simple wear and tear of the tissues, nor the replacement of old cells by new. It is the rearrangement of relationships among the ductless glands, the shifting of influences from the predominant to the subordinate, and vice versa, in the constellation of the internal secretions, that determines the unfolding of the personality. The transformations raise doubt sometimes as to the reality of personal identity. What actually happens in the changes from childhood to adolescence, from adolescence to maturity, and so on, is the sloughing of one internal glandular dominance for another.
Growth, as a general name for the mutations, the ensemble of somatic and psychic differentiation, from year to year, passes through five epochs that are standard for the normal. The normal is the being who harmonizes with his environment, and yet reacts with it because of recurring needs within him. His endocrine equation settles what is unique and different in him. But the gland which flourishes during the epoch as its time of triumph, when it has its day, determines what makes him like his fellows.