The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human NatureBerman, Louis
History
The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature
Berman, Louis
Endocrinology; Personality
Human history, being a continuation of vertebrate history, is full of
similar instances. The invention of the stock company, for example,
furnished a certain relative freedom to hundreds, a certain amount of
leisure to think and play, and independence to travel and record, and
immunity from a daily routine and drudgery. In turn, it bore fruit in
miseries and horrors multiplied for millions, like those of the child
lacemakers of Mid-Victorian England, who were dragged from their beds
at two or three o'clock in the morning to work until ten or eleven at
night in the services of a stock company.
A corporation is said to have no soul. The struggle for freedom of
every living thing has no conscience. Throughout the living world,
from ameba to man, parasitism and slavery together with their
by-products, physical and spiritual degeneracy, appear as the after
effects of the more vital individual's efforts to remain alive and
free. The origins of slavery may be seen in the parasitisms of the
infectious diseases which kill man. The change from parasitism to
slavery was an inevitable step of creative intelligence. In the
transition evolution made one of those breaks which it indulges in
periodically as its mode of progress.
The natural effect of slavery has been a selection of two sorts of
individuals along the lines of the survival of the adapted. It has
tended to perpetuate in the breed the qualities of the strong which
would make them stronger, and certain qualities in the weak which
would increase their weakness. For parasitism and likewise slavery
infallibly entail the degradation of certain structures and an
overgrowth of others by the law of use and disuse. The type of organ
which would function normally, were not its possessor parasitic in
that function, invariably degenerates or disappears. Parasitic insects
lose their wings. An entire anatomical system may even be lost. So the
tapeworm, which feeds upon the digested food present in the intestines
of its host, has no alimentary canal of its own because it needs none.
On the other hand, the organs of attack and combat grow by a constant
use into the most remarkable of efficient weapons.
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