THE TYPES OF PERSONALITY 209 



man as the ape-parvenu, which completed the disintegration of 

 the old restraints. 



Man seemed to see himself now for the first time stark and 

 naked. But Man consists of many varieties, and all reacted 

 differently to the image in the clouded mirror. There was uni- 

 versal attempt at suppression. But slowly the anti-adrenal forces 

 infiltrated every activity and every soul. Like a hidden focus of 

 infection in the body, it germinated and poisoned. A slow feve r 

 crept into life. A f ebril e quality tinged the acquisition of wealth, 

 theconcentration upon sex, and the desperate pursuit of the novel 

 stimulus. 



Then, like the hand that appeared at Belshazzar's Feast, came 

 the War, only it was a hand that stayed with a long flashing light- 

 ning sword in its grip, sweeping pitilessly among the erstwhile 

 dancing multitudes to mutilate and destroy. A good many peo- 

 ple, with that sturdy animality George Santayana speaks some- 

 where of as a trait of mankind, set out to enjoy the War. It 

 was a new sort of good time upon an incredibly large scale. It 

 was an undreamed-of opportunity. The mechanisms of suppres- 

 sion of the mind render it incapable of appreciating horror until 

 encountered. And so thousands with dangerously unstable 

 adrenals were plunged into the most trying conditions possible. 

 Hundreds of them, already shaken, on the borderland of insta- 

 bility, reacted with the phenomena of b reakdown o f_control, 

 lumped with a host of other phenomena, under the general rubric 

 of "shell shock." 



That alone was not all. If hundreds collapsed, thousands ap- 

 proached the verge of collaps e. They survived and were dis- 

 charged from the armies as normal. They reappear in civil life 

 as cases of "nerves." Ordinarily that would mean that they would 

 be classed as'Tailures. But such have been the psychologic reac- 

 tions to the war that all kinds of compensations in the way of 

 dangerous mental states have become frequent in these inade- 

 quate adrenal types. A trend to violence and a resentful emotion- 

 alism are combined with desperate attempts to spur the jaded 

 abTrenals with arti ficial excitements. Consequent melancho lia and 

 depression, the "blues," are inevitable. A s urvey of drug addicts 

 would probably show a definite percentage of this type. The 

 same applies to certajnj)ettyjcrjm^ break ers. 



The adre nal element in the personality must baxonsidered in 

 every disturbance, morbif^personal^ or_sjadaiinvolving brunette 

 tvjDes, Tluxley's" dark white, Mediterranean-Iberians, red-haired 



