THE INFLUENCES OF NURTURE 107 



factors — one which he calls excitability, its absence 

 spelling placidity, the other which he calls cheerfulness, 

 its absence spelling depression. With rare exceptions 

 the offspring of two excitable parents are excitable ; 

 out of 133 such offspring, only 6 were well-balanced, 

 quiet, douce, placid, sensible people, like you and me. 

 The excitable types correspond to the old * nervous ' 

 types : active, energetic, irritable, excitable, ambitious, 

 given to planning, optimistic, talkative, and jolly. An 

 extreme of this is the old ^ choleric ' type : overactive, 

 fussy, shifting from one thing to another, usually hila- 

 rious, passionate, even violent. 



Similarly the man without the cheerful factor corre- 

 sponds to the old * phlegmatic ' : he is quiet, serious, 

 conservative, and a little pessimistic. If this goes too 

 far it becomes the old ' melancholic ' — unresponsive, 

 taking things lying down, weak, given to worry, and 

 even to tears. His life is rather a burden to him, and 

 certainly to other people. It often looks as if a dicho- 

 tomy ran through our whole population — between the 

 quickly reacting, with low arterial tension, and the slowly 

 reacting, with high arterial tension, which again may 

 have to do with the secretion of adrenalin by the supra- 

 renal bodies. We know the dichotomy between the 

 enthusiast and the reflective, the romantic and the classic, 

 the radical and the conservative, the feebly inhibited and 

 the strongly inhibited, the Bohemian and the conven- 

 tional, the tender-minded and the tough-minded, the 

 idealist and the matter-of-fact man, the free-wiUist and 

 the fatalist. As Dr. Davenport says, the two contrasted 



