The history of Man's thought is the real history of mankind. Back of all the events of history are the curious systems of beliefs for which men have lived and died. Struggling to understand himself, Man has built up and discarded superstitions, theologies and sciences.
Early in this strange and fascinating history he divided himself into two parts--a body and a mind. Working together with body, mind somehow was of different stuff and origin than body and had only a mysterious connection with it. Theology supported this belief; metaphysics and philosophy debated it with an acumen that was practically sterile of usefulness. Mind and body "interacted" in some mysterious way; mind and body were "parallel" and so set that thought-processes and brain-processes ran side by side without really having anything to do with one another.[1] With the development of modern anatomy, physiology and psychology, the time is ripe for men boldly to say that applying the principle of causation in a practical manner leaves no doubt that mind and character are organic, are functions of the organism and do not exist independently of it. I emphasize "practical" in relation to causation because it would be idle for us here to enter into the philosophy of cause and effect. Such discussion is not taken seriously by the very philosophers who most earnestly enter into it.
[1] William James in Volume 1 of his "Psychology" gives an interesting resume of the theories that consider the relationship of mind (thought and consciousness) to body. He quotes the "lucky" paragraph from Tyndall, "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, or apparently any trace of the organ which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from one to the other." This is the "parallel" theory which postulates a hideous waste of energy in the universe and which throws out of count the same kind of reasoning by which Tyndall worked on light, heat, etc. We cannot understand the beginning and the end of motion, we cannot understand causation. Probably when Tyndall's thoughts came slowly and he was fatigued he said--"Well, a good cup of coffee will make me think faster." In conceding this practical connection between mind and body, every "spiritualist" philosopher gives away his case whenever he rests or eats.
The statement that mind is a function of the organism is not necessarily "materialistic." The body is a living thing and as such is as "spiritualistic" as life itself. Enzymes, internal secretions, nervous activities are the products of cells whose powers are indeed drawn from the ocean of life.
To prove this statement, which is a cardinal thesis of this book, I shall adduce facts of scientific and facts of common knowledge. One might start with the statement that the death of the body brings about the abolition of mind and character, but this, of course, proves nothing, since it might well be that the body was a lever for the expression of mind and character, and with its disappearance as a functioning agent such expression was no longer possible.
It is convenient to divide our exposition into two parts, the first the dependence upon proper brain function and structure, and the second the dependence upon the proper health of other organs. For it is not true that mind and character are functions of the brain alone; they are functions of the entire organism. The brain is simply the largest and most active of the organs upon which the mental life depends; but there are minute organs, as we shall see, upon whose activity the brain absolutely depends.
Any injury to the brain may destroy or seriously impair the mentality of the individual. This is too well known to need detailed exposition. Yet some cases of this type are fundamental in the exquisite way they prove (if anything can be proven) the dependence of mind upon bodily structure.
In some cases of fracture of the skull, a piece of bone pressing upon the brain may profoundly alter memory, mood and character. Removal of the piece of bone restores the mind to normality. This is also true of brain tumor of certain types, for example, frontal endotheliomata, where early removal of the growth demonstrates first that a "physical" agent changes mind and character, and second that a "physical" agent, such as the knife of the surgeon, may act to reestablish mentality.
In cases of hydrocephalus (or water on the brain), where there is an abnormal secretion of cerebro-spinal fluid acting to increase the pressure on the brain, the simple expedient of withdrawing the fluid by lumbar puncture brings about normal mental life. As the fluid again collects, the mental life becomes cloudy, and the character alters (irritability, depressed mood, changed purpose, lowered will); another lumbar puncture and presto!--the individual is for a time made over more completely than conversion changes a sinner,--and more easily.
Take the case of the disease known as General Paresis, officially called Dementia Paralytica. This disease is caused by syphilis and is one of its late results. The pathological changes are widespread throughout the brain but may at the onset be confined mostly to the frontal lobes. The very first change may be--and usually is--a change in character! The man hitherto kind and gentle becomes irritable, perhaps even brutal. One whose sex morals have been of the most conventional kind, a loyal husband, suddenly becomes a profligate, reckless and debauched, perhaps even perverted. The man of firm purposes and indefatigable industry may lose his grip upon the ambitions and strivings of his lifetime and become an inert slacker, to the amazement of his associates. Many a fine character, many a splendid mind, has reached a lofty height and then crumbled before the assaults of this disease upon the brain. Philosopher, poet, artist, statesman, captain of industry, handicraftsman, peasant, courtesan and housewife,--all are lowered to the same level of dementia and destroyed character by the consequences of the thickened meninges, the altered blood vessels and the injured nerve cells.
Now and then one is fortunate enough to treat with success an early case of General Paresis. And then the reversed miracle takes place, unfortunately too rarely! The disordered mind, the altered character, leaps upward to its old place,--after being dosed by the marvelous drug Salvarsan, created by the German Jewish scientist, Paul Ehrlich.
Of extraordinary interest are the rare cases of loss of personal identity seen after brain injury, say in war. A man is knocked unconscious by a blow and upon restoration of consciousness is separated from that past in which his ego resides. He does not know his history or his name, and that continuity of the "self" so deeply prized and held by all religions to be part of his immortality is gone. Then after a little while, a few days or weeks, the disarranged neuronic pathways reestablish themselves as usual,--and the ego comes back to the man.
One might cite the feeble-mindedness that results from meningitis, brain tumor, brain abscess, brain wounds, etc., as further evidence of the dependence of mind upon brain, of its status as a function of brain. No philosopher seriously doubts that equilibrium and movement are functions of the brain, and yet to prove this there is no evidence of any other kind than that cited to prove the relationship of mind to brain.[1] And what applies to the intelligence applies as forcibly to character, for purpose, emotion, mood, instinct and will are altered with these diseases.
[1] Except that equilibrium does not itself judge of its relationship to brain, whereas mind is the sole judge of its relationship and dependence on brain. Since everything in the world is a mental event, mentality cannot be dependent upon anything, and everything depends upon mind for its existence, or at least its recognition. But we get nowhere by such "logic" gone mad. Apply the same kind of reasoning to brain-mind, body-mind relationship which anatomists and physiologists apply to other functions, and one can no longer separate body and mind.
Interesting as is the relationship between mind and character and the brain, it is at the present overshadowed by the fascinating relationship between these psychical activities and the bodily organs. What I am about to cite from medicine and biology is part of the finest achievements of these sciences and hints at a future in which a true science of mind and character will appear.
Certain of the glands of the body are described as glands of internal secretions in that the products of their activity, their secretions, are poured into the blood stream rather than on the surface of the body or into the digestive tract. The most prominent of these glands, all of which are very small and extraordinarily active, are as follows:
The Pituitary Body (Hypophysis)--a tiny structure which is situated at the base of the brain but is not a part of that organ.
The Pineal Body (Epiphysis)--a still smaller structure, located within the brain substance, having, however, no relationship to the brain. This gland has only lately acquired a significance. Descartes thought it the seat of the soul because it is situated in the middle of the brain.
The Thyroid gland, a somewhat larger body, situated in the front of the neck, just beneath the larynx. We shall deal with this in some detail later on.
The Parathyroids, minute organs, four in number, just behind the thyroid.
The Thymus, a gland placed just within the thorax, which reaches its maximum size at birth and then gradually recedes until at twenty it has almost disappeared.
The Adrenal glands, one on each side of the body, above and adjacent to the kidney. These glands, which are each made up of two opposing structures, stand in intimate relation to the sympathetic nervous system and secrete a substance called adrenalin.
The Sex organs, the ovary in the female and the testicle in the male, in addition to producing the female egg (ovum) and the male seed (sperm), respectively, produce substances of unknown character that have hugely important roles in the establishment of mind, temperament and sex character.
Without going into the details of the functions of the endocrine glands, one may say that they are "the managers of the human body." Every individual, from the time he is born until the time he dies, is under the influence of these many different kinds of elements,--some of them having to do with the development of the bones and teeth, some with the development of the body and nervous system, some with the development of the mind, etc. (and character), and later on with reproduction. These glands are not independent of one another but interact in a marvelous manner so that under or overaction of any one of them upsets a balance that exists between them, and thus produces a disorder that is quite generalized in its effects. The work on this subject is a tribute to medicine and one pauses in respect and admiration before the names and labors of Brown, Sequard, Addison, Graves and Basedow, Horsley, King, Schiff, Schafer, Takamine, Marie, Cushing, Kendal, Sajous and others of equal insight and patient endeavor.
But let us pass over to the specific instances that bear on our thesis, to wit, that mind and character are functions of the organism and have their seat not only in the brain but in the entire organism.
How do the endocrines prove this? As well as they prove that physical growth and the growth of the secondary sex characters are dependent on these glands. Take diseases of the thyroid gland as the first and shining example.
The thyroid secretes a substance which substantially is an "iodized globulin,"--and which can be separated from the gland products. This secretion has the main effect of "activating metabolism" (Vassale and Generali); in ordinary phrase it acts to increase the discharge of energy of the cells of the body. In all living things there is a twofold process constantly going on: first the building up of energy by means of the foodstuffs, air and water taken in, and second a discharge of energy in the form of heat, motion and--in my belief --emotion and thought itself, though this would be denied by many psychologists. Yet how escape this conclusion from the following facts?
There is a congenital disease called cretinism which essentially is due to a lack of thyroid secretion. This disease is particularly prevalent in Southern France, Spain, Upper Italy and Switzerland. It is characterized mainly by marked dwarfism and imbecility, so that the adult untreated cretin remains about as large as a three or four-year-old child and has the mental level about that of a child of the same age. But, this comparison as to intelligence is a gross injustice to the child, for it leaves out the difference in character between the child and the cretin. The latter has none of the curiosity, the seeking for experience, the active interest, the pliant expanding will, the sweet capacity for affection, friendship and love present in the average child. The cretin is a travesty on the human being in body, mind and character.
But feed him thyroid gland. Mind you, the dried substance of the glands, not of human beings, but of mere sheep. The cretin begins to grow mentally and physically and loses to a large extent the grotesqueness of his appearance. He grows taller; his tongue no longer lolls in his mouth; the hair becomes finer, the hands less coarse, and the patient exhibits more normal human emotions, purposes, intelligence. True, he does not reach normality, but that is because other defects beside the thyroid defect exist and are not altered by the thyroid feeding.
There is a much more spectacular disease to be cited, --a relatively infrequent but well-understood condition called myxoedema, which occurs mainly in women and is also due to a deficiency in the thyroid secretion. As a result the patient, who may have been a bright, capable, energetic person, full of the eager purposes and emotions of life, gradually becomes dull, stupid, apathetic, without fear, anger, love, joy or sorrow, and without purpose or striving. In addition the body changes, the hair becomes coarse and scanty, the skin thick and swollen (hence the name of the disease) and various changes take place in the sweat secretion, the heart action, etc.
Then, having made the diagnosis, work the great miracle! Obtain the dried thyroid glands of the sheep, prepared by the great drug houses as a by-product of the butcher business, and feed this poor, transformed creature with these glands! No fairy waving a magical wand ever worked a greater enchantment, for with the first dose the patient improves and in a relatively short time is restored to normal in skin, hair, sweat, etc., and MIND and character! To every physician who has seen this happen under his own eyes and by his direction there comes a conviction that mind and character have their seat in the organic activities of the body,--and nowhere else.
An interesting confirmation of this is that when the thyroid is overactive, a condition called hyperthyroidism, the patient becomes very restless and thin, shows excessive emotionality, sleeplessness, has a rapid heart action, tremor and many other signs not necessary to detail here. The thyroid in these cases is usually swollen. One of the methods used to treat the disease is to remove some of the gland surgically. In the early days an operator would occasionally remove too, much gland and then the symptoms, of myxoedema would occur. This necessitated the artificial feeding of thyroid the rest of the patient's life! With the proper dosage of the gland substance the patient remains normal; with too little she becomes dull and stupid; with too much she becomes unstable and emotional!
There are plenty of other examples of the influence of the endocrines on mind, character and personality. I here briefly mention a few of these.
In the disease called acromegaly, which is due to a change in the pituitary gland, amongst other things are noted "melancholic tendencies, loss of memory and mental and physical torpor."
A very profound effect on character and personality, exclusive of intelligence, is that of the sex glands. One need not accept the Freudian extravagances regarding the way in which the sex feelings and impulses enter into our thoughts, emotions, purposes and acts. No unbiased observer of himself or his fellows but knows that the satisfaction or non-satisfaction of the sex feeling, its excitation or its suppression are of great importance in the destinies of character. Further, man as herdsman and man as tyrant have carried on huge experiments to show how necessary to normal character the sex glands are.
As herdsman he has castrated his male Bos and obtained the ox. And the ox is the symbol of patience, docility, steady labor, without lust or passion,--and the very opposite of his non-castrated brother, the bull. The bull is the symbol of irritability and unteachableness, who will not be easily yoked or led and who is the incarnation of lust and passion. One is the male transformed into neuter gender; and the other is rampant with the fierceness of his sex.
Compare the eunuch and the normal man. If the eunuch state be imposed in infancy, the shape of the body, its hairiness, the quality of the voice and the character are altered in characteristic manner. The eunuch essentially is neither man nor woman, but a repelling Something intermediate.
Enough has been said to show that mind and character are dependent upon the health of the brain and the glands of the body; that somewhere in the interaction of tissues, in the chemistry of life, arises thought, purpose, emotion, conduct and deed. But we need not go so far afield as pathology to show this, for common experience demonstrates it as well.
If character is control of emotions, firmness of purpose, cheerfulness of outlook and vigor of thought and memory, then the tired man, worn out by work or a long vigil, is changed in character. Such a person in the majority of cases is irritable, showing lack of control and emotion; he slackens in his life's purposes, loses cheerfulness and outlook and finds it difficult to concentrate his thoughts or to recall his memories. Though this change is temporary and disappears with rest, the essential fact is not altered, namely, fatigue alters character. It is also true that not all persons show this vulnerability to fatigue in equal measure. For that matter, neither do they show an equal liability to infectious diseases, equal reaction to alcohol or injury. The feeling of vigor which rest gives changes the expression of personality to a marked degree. It is true that we are not apt to think of the tired man as changed in character; yet we must admit on reflection that he has undergone transformation.
Even a loaded bowel may, as is well known, alter the reaction to life. Among men who are coarse in their language there is a salutation more pertinent than elegant that inquires into the state of the bowels.[1] The famous story of Voltaire and the Englishman, in which the sage agreed to suicide because life was not worth living when his digestion was disordered and who broke his agreement when he purged himself, illustrates how closely mood is related to the intestinal tract. And mood is the background of the psychic life, upon which depends the direction of our thoughts, cheerful or otherwise, the vigor of our will and purpose. Mood itself arises in part from the influences that stream into the muscles, joints, heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, digestive tract and all the organs and tissues by way of the afferent nerves (sympathetic and cerebro-spinal). Mood is thus in part a reflection of the health and proper working of the organism; it is the most important aspect of the subconsciousness, and upon it rests the structure of character and personality.
[1] What is called coarse is frequently crudely true. Thus, in the streets, in the workshops, and where men untrammeled by niceties engage in personalities the one who believes the other to be a "crank" informs him in crude language that he has intestinal stasis (to put the diagnosis in medical language) and advises him accordingly to "take a pill."
This does not mean that only the healthy are cheerful, or that the sick are discouraged. To affirm the dependence of mind upon body is not to deny that one may build up faith, hope, courage, through example and precept, or that one may not inherit a cheerfulness and courage (or the reverse). "There are men," says James, "who are born under a cloud." But exceptional individuals aside, the mass of mankind generates its mood either in the tissues of the body or in the circumstances of life.
Children, because they have not built up standards of thought, mood and act, demonstrate in a remarkable manner the dependence of their character upon health.
A child shows the onset of an illness by a complete change in character. I remember one sociable, amiable lad of two, rich in the curiosity and expanding friendliness of that time of life, who became sick with diphtheria. All his basic moods became altered, and all his wholesome reactions to life disappeared. He was cross and contrary, he had no interest in people or in things, he acted very much as do those patients in an insane hospital who suffer from Dementia Praecox. What is character if it is not interest and curiosity, friendliness and love, obedience and trust, cheerfulness and courage? Yet a sick child, especially if very young, loses all these and takes on the reverse characters. The little lad spoken of became "himself" again when the fever and the pain lifted. Yet for a long time afterward he showed a greater liability to fear than before, and it was not until six months or more had repaired the more subtle damage to his organism that he became the hardy little adventurer in life that he had been before the illness.
There is plenty of chemical proof of this thesis as here set forth. Men have from time immemorial put things "in their bellies to steal their brains away." The chemical substance known as ethyl alcohol has been an artificial basis of good fellowship the world over, as well as furnishing a very fair share of the tragedy, the misery and the humor of the world. This is because, when ingested in any amount, its absorption produces changes in the flow of thought, in the attitude toward life, in the mood, the emotions, the purposes, the conduct,--in a word, in character. One sees the austere man, when drunk, become ribald; the repressed, close-fisted become open-mouthed and open-hearted; the kindly, perhaps brutal; the controlled, uncontrolled. In the change of character it effects is the regret over its passing and the greatest reason for prohibition.
Alcohol causes several well-defined mental diseases as well as mere drunkenness. In Delirium Tremens there is an acute delirium, with confusion, excitement and auditory and visual hallucinations of all kinds. The latter symptom is so prominent as to give the reason for the popular name of the "snakes." In alcoholic hallucinosis the patient has delusions of persecution and hears voices accusing him of all kinds of wrong-doing. Very frequently, as all the medical writers note, these voices are "conscience exteriorized"; that is, the voices say of him just what he has been saying of himself in the struggle against drink. Then there is Alcoholic Paranoia, a disease in which the main change is a delusion of jealousy directed against the mate, who is accused of infidelity. It is interesting that in the last two diseases the patient is "clear-headed"; memory and orientation are good; the patient speaks well and gives no gross signs of his trouble. As the effects of the alcohol wear away, the patient recovers,--i.e., his character returns to its normal.
It becomes necessary at this point to take up a reverse side of our study, namely, what is often called the influence of "mind over matter." Such cures of disease as seem to follow prayer and faith are cited; such incidents as the great strength of men under emotion or the disturbances of the body by ideas are listed as examples. This is not the place to discuss cures by faith. It suffices to say this: that in the first place most of such cures relate to hysteria, a disease we shall discuss later but which is characterized by symptoms that appear and disappear like magic. I have seen "cured" (and have "cured") such patients, affected with paralysis, deafness, dumbness, blindness, etc., with reasoning, electricity, bitter tonics, fake electrodes, hypnotism, and in one case by a forcible slap upon a prominent and naked part of the body. Hysteria has been the basis of many a saint's reputation and likewise has aided many a physician into affluence.
Nor is the effect of coincidence taken into account in estimating cures, whether by faith or by drugs. Many a physician has owed his start to the fact that he was called in on some obscure case just when the patient was on the turn towards recovery. He then receives the credit that belonged to Nature. Medical men understand this,--that many diseases are "self-limited" and pass through a cycle influenced but little by treatment. But faith curists do not so understand, and neither does the mass of people, so that neither one nor the other separates "post hoc" from "propter hoc." If the truth were told, most of the miracle and faith cures that are not of hysterical origin are due to coincidence. Faith curists report in detail their successes, but we have no statistics whatever of their failures.
If thought is a product of the brain activated by the rest of the organism, it would be perfectly natural to expect that thought would influence the organism. That thought is intimately associated with impulses to action is well known. This action largely takes place in the speech muscles but also it irradiates into the rest of the organism. Especially is this true if the thought is associated with some emotion. Emotion, as we shall discuss it later, is at least in large part a bodily reaction, a disturbance in heart, lungs, abdominal organs, blood vessels, sympathetic nervous system, endocrines, etc. The effect of thought and emotion upon the body, whether to heighten its activity or to lower its activity, is, from my point of view, merely the effect of one function of the organism upon others. We are not surprised if digestion affects thinking and mood, and we need not be surprised if thought and mood disturb or improve digestion. And we may substitute for digestion any other organic function.
As a working basis, substantiated by the kind of proof we use in our daily lives in laboratories and machine shops, we may state that mind, character and personality are organic in their origin and are functions of the entire organism. What a man thinks, does and feels (or perhaps we should reverse this order) is the result of environmental forces playing upon a marvelously intricate organism in which every part reacts on every other part, in which nervous energy influences digestion and digestion influences nervous energy, in which enzymes, hormones, and endocrines engage in an extraordinary game of checks and balance, which in the normal course of events make for the individual's welfare. What a man thinks, does, and feels influences the fate of his organism from one end of life to the other.
We have not adduced in favor of the organic nature of mind, character and personality the facts of heredity. This is a most important set of facts, for if the egg and the sperm carry mentality and personality, they may be presumed to carry them in some organic form, as organic potentialities, just as they carry size,[1] color, sex, etc. That abnormal mind is inherited is shown in family insanity in the second, third and fourth generation cases of mental disease. Certain types of feeble-mindedness surely are transmitted from generation to generation, as witness the case of the famous (or infamous) Jukes family. In this group vagabondage, crime, immorality and other character abnormalities appeared linked with the feeble-mindedness. But there is plenty of evidence to show that normal character qualities are inherited as well as the abnormal.[2] Galton, the father of eugenics, collected facts from the history of successful families to prove this. It is true that he failed to take into account the facts of SOCIAL heredity, in that a gifted man establishes a place for himself and a tradition for his family that is of great help to his son. Nevertheless, musical ability runs in families and races, as does athletic ability, high temper, passion, etc. In short, at least the potentialities, the capacities for character, are transmitted together with other qualities as part of the capital of heredity.
[1] I have collected and published from the records and wards of the State Hospital at Taunton, Mass., many such cases. The whole subject is to be reviewed in a following book on the transmission of mental disease, but no one seriously doubts that there is a transference of "insane" character from generation to generation. In fact, I believe that a little too much stress hag been laid on this aspect of mental disease and not enough on the fact that sickness may injure a family stock and cause the descendants to be insane. Any one who has seen a single case of congenital General Paresis, where a child has a mental disease due to the syphilis of a parent, and can doubt that character and mind are organic, simply is blinded by theological or metaphysical prejudice.
[2] See his book "Genius."
This means that in studying character and personality, we must start with an analysis of the physical make-up of the individual. We are not yet at the point in science where we can easily get at the activities of the endocrinal glands in normal mentality. We are able to recognize certain fundamental types, but more we cannot do; nor are we able to measure nervous energy except in relatively crude ways, but these crude ways have great value under certain conditions.
When there has been a change in personality, the question of bodily disease is always paramount. The first questions to be asked under such circumstances are, "Is this person sick?" "Is the brain involved?" "Are endocrinal glands involved?" "Is there disease of some organ of the body, acting to lower the feeling of well-being, acting to slacken the purposes and the will or to obscure the intelligence?"
There are other important questions of this type to answer, some of which may be deferred for the time. Meanwhile, the next equally fundamental thesis is on the effect of the environment upon mind, character and personality.