106 THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY 



tonus. Tonus can be experimentally watched and measured. 

 Thus hunger, the most primitive of the wish- feelings, has been 

 found to be simultaneous with certain characteristic contractions 

 of the stomach. Stop those contractions, and you stop the hunger. 

 The contractions begin slowly and weakly, and no awareness of 

 them occurs in the mind. As they grow stronger, consciousness 

 becomes a sensation rather like an itch somewhere in the upper 

 abdomen, and accompanied sometimes by a sense of general 

 weakness. The vegetative activity going on as a current almost 

 on the outside of the stream of feeling has swelled and warmed, 

 and so forced itself, in a manner of speaking, into the center of 

 the stream. Or if you will, the rest of the stream has to arrange 

 itself around it as the center. A similar mechanism for the tonus 

 of the other members of the vegetative system, and how they 

 determine consciousness and behaviour is understandable. It has 

 been shown that when the bladder tone and the intestinal tone 

 are of a definitely measurable size, one has the desire to empty 

 them. The same applies to the sex glands. The pressure within 

 a viscus is dependent upon the ratio between the amount of 

 contraction of the involuntary muscle in its walls, the external 

 pressure, and the quantity of its distending contents, the internal 

 pressure. The resultant quotient, the internal pressure divided 

 by the external pressure, measures the intravisceral pressure. 

 The primitive wish-feelings are the direct expressions of the 

 various intravisceral pressures, or tones. The primitive soul is 

 an awareness of the fused primitive wish-feelings of themselves 

 as a whole, and of the struggle between them for recognition, 

 isolation, and, as we say, satisfaction. This satisfaction consists 

 in a degradation of the highest intravisceral pressure to a point 

 at which some other intravisceral pressure becomes higher and 

 therefore predominant. 



Physics of the Wish 



Mind, consciousness, may then be portrayed as an ocean com- 

 prised of mobile current layers, complexes built up around the 

 awareness of different intravisceral pressures. A shifting hier- 

 archy of such pressures form the points of focusing of conscious- 

 ness that result in conduct. Behaviour may be defined as the 

 resultant of the organism's pressure against the environment's 

 counter pressure until there is a sufficient reduction of the specifi- 

 cally exciting intravisceral pressure. Just as water flows to its 



