he psychic attributes. It
is not the least important of the lessons of endocrine analysis
that there is no soul, and no body, either. Rather a soul-body, or
body-soul, or the patterns of the living flame. The closer tracking of
the internal secretions leads us into the secrets of the living
flame, why it lives, and how it lives, the strange diversities of its
colorings and music and the odd variations in its energy, vitality
and longevity. Why it flickers, why it flares and glares, spurts,
flutters, burns hard or soft, orange-blue or yellow.

The medieval scholiasts, who fought as fiercely about names as nations
about territories, divided men into the sanguine, the bilious, the
lymphatic and the nervous. It was a pretty crude classification of
different constitutions. The endocrine criteria, more exact and
concrete, divide them into the adrenal centered, the thyroid centered,
the thymus centered, the pituitary centered, the gonad centered, and
their combinations.

THE ADRENAL PERSONALITIES

An adrenal personality is one dominated by the ups and downs of his
adrenal gland. In the large, the curve of his life is the curve of
secretion by this gland, both of its Cortex and medulla. Such an
adrenal personality is entirely normal, within the definition of
the normal as something not threatening the duration of life, nor
comfortable adaptation to it. So are the other glandular types. No
sharp line can be drawn between the normal and the abnormal in any
case, the borderland is wide, the transitions many.

The skin is one of the chief clues to the adrenal personality. The
relation between the adrenal and the skin dates way back in the
evolutionary scale, for adrenalin has been isolated directly from
pigment deposits in the epidermis of frogs. Skin pigment bears a
direct relation to the reaction of the organism to light, especially
the ultraviolet rays, to the radiation of heat, and hence to the
fundamental productions and consumptions of energy by the cells. So
the gland of energy for emergencies writes its signature always all
over the skin.

In an adrenal personality, the epidermis is always slightly, somewhat,
or deeply pigmented. The pigmentation is due to a dark brown deposit
lightly or thickly scattered over the skin. With the general diffuse
pigmentation or darkening there are often the black spots, the
pigmented birth marks, or the lighter ones of freckles. The latter
signify some permanent or transitory adrenal