s one
of the great hopes for a chemical perfectability of human life and
nature.

NATURE'S EXPERIMENTS VS. MAN'S

The kinds of personality described, as prototypes and variants and the
fundamental facts supporting the view that they are the reaction types
of the human beings we meet in everyday life, represent simply a
beginning of the work to be done. Putting into our hands a new
powerful searchlight that penetrates the interiors of body and soul, a
fresh attitude toward the complicated problems of Man in society grows
imminent. The normal and the abnormal become illuminated with an
effect as if our retinas were suddenly to get sensitive to the
ultraviolet rays to which we are now blind. An apparatus is put in our
hands which shows us not only a static condition at a given moment,
but the whole life process of an individual, normal or abnormal, his
past and his future.

Upon that fetich of the biologists, the struggle for existence, the
struggle for survival, the struggle for possessions and satisfactions,
for happiness, victory and virility, in short, for success, as success
is measured by the biologists, a searching spectroscope can play, with
a yield for our understanding and control of life, that will stand
comparison with the astronomer's analysis of the stars. Toward the
process of adjustment and adaptation, of the environment to the
individual, as well as of the individual to the environment, attitudes
will change from _hopeless acquiescence in the inevitable to a
complete self-determination of the self and its surroundings._ The
adventures of the personality, strung along as the episodes of his
career, his friendships and sex reactions, his mishaps and diseases,
and the final fate or fortune that overtakes him, be he normal,
subnormal, supernormal, or abnormal, begin to become comprehensible,
and hence controllable.

CHAPTER XI

SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES

THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS IN HISTORY

According to the views, facts and guesses concerning human
personality, as a body-mind complex dominated by the internal
secretions, outlined in the preceding pages, biography, and human
history as the interaction of biographies, become capable of
interpretation from a new standpoint. If human life, in its
essentials, is so much the product of the internal messenger system we
speak of as the endocrines, then biography should present us with a
number of illustrations of their power and influence. What is the