THE TYPES OF PERSONALITY 223 



ment almost impossible or completely impossible, is that his 

 pituitary frequently cannot react to assist him. Often, as empha- 

 sized, it is bound in by bone on all sides and neither ante-pituitary 

 nor post-pituitary can adequately secrete for his needs. So social 

 instinct and the capacity for inhibition, the ability to control 

 himself conceptually and somatically, are poor. As a child it is 

 difficult to train him along the lines of the elementary habits and 

 customs. He is into late childhood a bed-wetter, and steals and 

 lies quasi-unconsciously. 



His mother realizes soon that he cannot be made to acquire a 

 sense of responsibility either for himself or for others. She 

 becomes afraid to let him go into the street because of his 

 inability to take care of himself, to acquire the right attitude 

 toward street cars, autos, strangers, in short, danger. She dreads 

 to take him to places because no sooner would they be out of 

 them, than she would discover that he had taken something that 

 did not belong to him, quite as a matter of course. He will 

 fabricate stories with no motive, fabricate them out of whole 

 cloth for the pure fun of it. In a word, moral irresponsibility 

 is the keynote of the volitional traits of the thymo-centric per- 

 sonality from childhood up. 



With so much against them, physical inferiorities, mental de- 

 fects, moral lacks of every sort, it is little wonder that the thymo- 

 centrics die young. Infections hit them badly. The cases of flu 

 that went off in twenty-four hours belonged to the type. Ful- 

 minant meningitis, pneumonia, diphtheria, scarlet fever, the 

 varieties that are supposed to kill in twenty-four to forty-eight 

 hours because of the terrible virulence of the attacking microbe, 

 are probably so malignant only because the organism attacked 

 is a thymus subject. 



In the alcohol and drug habitue wards of hospitals as well as in 

 medicolegal cases of degenerates, gunmen and other criminals, 

 the characteristic conformation and diagnostic stigmata of the 

 thymo-centric are often encountered. Life treats them badly. 

 Misunderstood and misjudged, they are the hopeless misfits of 

 society. If the pituitary and the thyroid can enlarge to com- 

 pensate for their defects, they may become the queer brilliants, 

 the eccentric geniuses of the arts and sciences. Should they not, 

 mental deficiency and delinquency are their portion. Epilepsy, 

 then, is sometimes their mode of escape from the terrors of an 

 utterly foreign world. Should they survive all other hazards, 

 suicide may still be their most frequent fate. A study of 122 



