GLANDS AS AN INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATE 107 



own level, so will conduct flow to reduce intravisceral pressure 

 to its own level. A physics of the soul comes into prospect, in 

 which a mathematical analysis will state the process quanti- 

 tatively in terms of some common unit of pressure. 



Not only conduct, but also character, because it is past con- 

 duct repeated, associated, and fixed, will be so statable. For 

 intravisceral tonus or pressure is not simply or only an acute or 

 passing affair. There is for it a persistent or average figure, the 

 so-called normal for it, below which or above which the acute 

 situation will bring it. Character is a matter then of standards 

 in the vegetative system. Character, indeed, is an alloy of the 

 different standard intravisceral pressures of the organism, a 

 fusion created by the resistance or counter pressure of the ob- 

 stacles in the environment. Character, in short, is the grand 

 intravisceral barometer of a personality. 



Thus the comfortable, healthy, happy, well-balanced, progres- 

 sive, constructive, virile personality is one in whom there is a 

 continuously harmonious reduction of the intravisceral pressures 

 in the environment called society. For in a gregarious creature, 

 like man, fellow beings are the most powerful determinants of 

 negative and positive vegetative pressures. Not so well rounded 

 are other types existing because of inferiorities or excesses of the 

 Standard visceral tone. There is, for instance, the sexually cold 

 type, comfortable by creating for itself an anaphrodisiac en- 

 vironment composed of pressures that can be fitted into its own. 

 Or there may be an insufficiency of standard pressure in the 

 alimentary tract, and we have the ascetic, mal-nourished, striv- 

 ing, uplifting type. Different types will be made by the permu- 

 tations and combinations of factors that determine the intra- 

 visceral pressure and the environmental, i. e., social resistances 

 or counter pressures. 



Internal Secretions Determinants of Vegetative Pressures 



Now of all the different factors which determine the tones, that 

 is to say, the internal pressures, of the various parts of the vege- 

 tative apparatus (including all structures not controlled by the 

 will in the term), the internal secretions or hormones are by 

 far the most important. This significance is conferred upon them 

 because it is by their activities primarily that these pressures 

 are produced, regulated, lowered and heightened; in short, con- 

 trolled. We have seen how the thyroid and adrenal hold the 



