CHAPTER XI 



SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES 



The Internal Secretions in History 



According to the views, facts and guesses concerning human 

 personality, as a body-mind complex dominated by the internal 

 secretions, outlined in the preceding pages, biography, and human 

 history as the interaction of biographies, become capable of 

 interpretation from a new standpoint. If human life, in its 

 essentials, is so much the product of the internal messenger sys- 

 tem we speak of as the endocrines, then biography should present 

 us with a number of illustrations of their power and influence. 

 What is the evidence that, as Huxley anticipated, "the introduc- 

 tion into the economy of a molecular mechanism which, like a 

 cunningly contrived torpedo, shall find its way to some par- 

 ticular group of living elements, and cause an explosion among 

 them, leaving the rest untouched," and the multiplication of such 

 cunningly contrived mechanisms, were responsible for those per- 

 sonalities, magnificent chemical compounds, with whose adven- 

 tures historians are concerned? 



The Case of Napoleon 



As a unique will and intelligence, Napoleon Bonaparte the First 

 must be classed as one of the Betelegeuses of the race. H. G. 

 Wells has called his career the "raid of an intolerable egotist 

 across the disordered beginning of a new time." "The figure of an 

 adventurer and wrecker." "This saturnine egotist." "Are men 

 dazzled simply by the scale of his flounderings, by the mere vast- 

 ness of his notoriety?" "This dark little archaic personage, 

 hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vul- 

 gar." There are other opinions. The Man of Destiny was wor- 

 shipped by millions. Napoleona bring fortunes today. Interest 

 in the man as a man has multiplied with every year. And 

 certainly no one can deny him the quality of individuality in its 

 most exaggerated form. 



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