The Newer Knowledge of the Nature of Personality

During this past week, scientists of international reputation met at a convention, and one great Christian man made this important observation. He said, “Dr.Price, I am very much concerned, indeed I am alarmed, that public sentiment is not keeping pace with the revelations of God.”

I said, “Just what do you mean by that?”

He said, “I mean this. In the discussions that took place this past week in session, the details were passed by. If those details shall in any way show relationships between different types of life, is it an index that the people are not ready for the revelation of God as far as they have come?” “And,” he said, “a meeting that is being called in Chicago for this week or next, at which time they are to lay their plans for thwarting and organizing against advancement in the scientific revelation of God, is thwarting the very thing that they themselves are devoted to check.”

That man’s heart was sad, and he was depressed to think that the effort that he is making is being thwarted, for his work is in a purely scientific field.

I felt at that time glad that I might have some little part, and that I was having some little part, in trying to harmonize these things that are tending to make a great rift in our social structure.

This morning we are discussing “Personality, its origin and nature.” I want to tell you frankly that there is nothing in science that need distress anyone with regard to personality, for if we can learn how to create that kind of a personality which will be Christlike, which will be capable of living the Christ life, we will have adapted ourselves to those laws of our being that establish and create our personality. We need have no fear.

So, I will ask you to approach this question with me from the standpoint of the attitude of some of our great thinkers. Perhaps no book has appeared within the last five years that is more worthy of our careful perusal and careful criticism and analysis than a review of this whole field by Bishop Grant, in which he has undertaken to express in terms in which we should see Christianity in the light of this newer knowledge; and if we might have our slides to start at this point, we will see a declaration which he quoted in his new book New Horizons of Christian Faith, which says, “If the church is to be anything more than a booster’s club of Zenity City there has got to be something done by those at the head of it during the next twenty years. Somebody has got to seize hold of these new conceptions of science and point out their moral applications; otherwise, somebody else will make the immoral application of them.”

Bishop Grant goes on to apply this great principle, and he says of this impending danger, “I congratulate the people of Epworth-Euclid Church (not that they are having this course of lectures by me, but that you are here in perfect sympathy and accord, for this thing we are doing in this group could not be done in many places in this country).” Why? They have not conceived yet of the fact that there is complete harmony between these two great bodies of truth.

In our next slide we will see a chart that is produced under the organization of the Institute for Juvenile Research, and Dr. Rich working in that institution on the chemistry of personality that is a rather pretentious undertaking, isn’t it–finds that when he divides personalities into good-naturedness, perseverance, leadership, aggressiveness, excitability, and intelligence, that certain fluids of the body will show a difference in certain chemical reactions that will be a measure of the characteristics of these types of intelligence. Why?

If we take the next slide, we see here a picture of a boy with a violin. I am not going to discuss this boy. Like any boy, like your boy, like our boy was a great boy, an ordinary boy, and a good boy at the same time, and I am using that boy for two or three purposes. I want you to see that at this young age of something like four years of age–no, only two and a half–he holds a fiddle and plays the tunes, and he can do lots of things that most boys can not do. Why?

It is a question now of personality. What is the origin of those characteristics that make that possible? There is coming to the city this coming week and appearing in a lecture recital in Masonic Auditorium a boy of very extraordinary development along such a line as this, he being also a violinist. He will also appear Friday afternoon in the Symphony program. This boy who is coming had the remarkable development that at four years of age, when given a violin, he was able to orient himself on the strings very rapidly. In six months’ time he was able to play heavy concertos. At ten years of age, that boy who will come here and give recitals and play the most difficult of music was able to criticize and take up other languages and do things that people twenty and thirty years of age would have difficulty in doing. Why is that boy so skillful at that age? What has made it possible for him to have that unique personality? Many things will be contributing. I am using him as an introduction in order that you may see that these species which may be extreme in certain things really may be the expression of that which takes place, to some degree, in all of our lives.

I would have you think of this circumstance, that this boy, now twelve years of age, when ten years of age was given a certain lesson by his teacher, and he had one week to get that lesson; and in it was included the memorizing and playing for his teacher of a heavy concerto. But he took the influences and had to go to bed, and couldn’t have his violin. He asked if he could see that music. They said, “No.” He said, “I would just like to look at it.” When that boy got up from his bed at the end of the week, he played that heavy concerto almost without practice on his violin, having been able to memorize it by looking at the sheet of music.

Well, if such capacities as that are possible, it is very important that we learn somewhat of the procedure that God uses in making a personality like that. There are a lot of other incidents that I could tell you about that boy that is coming. I will only use one more illustration. A certain child developed very rapidly at two or three years of age, and instead of that adolescent change that comes at twelve years of age, appearing at the normal time, it began coming at two and three years of age. At five years of age that boy was discussing immorality. What had happened? A tumor had formed in his brain, in one of the little glands, and that happened to be a gland enlarged and had higher concussion. Well, the great change in the development of that child and his personality was modified by an extra…

That boy’s life terminated because of this tumor, and the postmortem gave the opportunity for the study of this tissue, and it is that kind of evidence that has made it possible to know something of the origin of these unusual developmental processes.

Let’s have the next. We will see the brain and the cortex of a rabbit where I inoculated into the rabbit the culture, the germs that had grown in the teeth of a child where the child had been suffering from St. Vitus dance. This disease is the inability to make the hand or finger do the thing that is necessary. And we have the typical lesions, the breaking down in certain parts of the brain because the bacterial growth has gone to those centers. But while those jerky motions had developed, very important changes had also taken place in the disposition of the boy. When that child was brought to me by his mother she made a statement like this. She said, “Dr. Price, why have my husband and I been cursed by a child that is so possessed of the devil as that child is? I wish he had never been born.”

I said, “Tell me about it,” and this little boy sat there. He was fidgeting and jerking and kicking things over.

“Why,” the mother said, “look at this note,” and handed me a piece of paper. It was a note from this child’s teacher saying to the mother that she was sending the boy home because he was so bad, and she said, “If this boy comes back to this school, I will leave the school. I will not be the teacher in this room.”

The mother said, “Just this morning his father asked him to pass the butter, and he threw the plate in his face.”

Oh, how my heart aches for those boys and girls, and some of them are not bad enough to be recognized; but enough of it is there to make them do unnatural and abnormal things. And I said to this little boy, “Billy, let’s see you put your fingers together this way and I will stand in front of the light.” Now I know that if a person has chorea, he can not bring his fingers · together and touch them on end. This boy couldn’t do that. They would go right past. He just couldn’t do that, and I was able to appreciate that that boy had chores. It is very likely a streptococci infection, and in this case where would it be? Probably in his tonsils or teeth. I looked at his mouth, and as I went to look in his mouth he slapped me in the face. He didn’t mean to do it and I knew he didn’t mean to do it, but he couldn’t help it. And these centers that are under the control of our nervous system can not respond. The nerve reactions go through the wrong channels.

I found that infected teeth in this little boy were the cause and told the mother so. “You don’t need to feel so badly; he isn’t worse than other boys, and it is going from here into his system, affecting his brain.” “But,” I said, “Here is another thing. Has this boy had rheumatism or heart trouble?” Because that is liable to occur. “Have the members of his family?”

“Oh, yes, I have had heart trouble very badly,” and I know because I had seen her with heart trouble, because she was bedridden.

Now then, the story in that boy was as simple and clear as could be. When the dental infections were removed, that boy came back to normal and in two weeks’ time was back to school, and the teacher sent a note home that Billy was as good a boy as any boy in the school.

Here is what we are talking about. The origin of personality. If we were fundamentalists we would say, “These things are the will of God, and God is cursing this boy.” Why, we would be doing what they are doing in many places in Europe. We would take a switch and drive them to the tomb of St. Antony in order that that patron saint might do something to change them. Does that look sensible to you? Isn’t that absolutely nauseating to you? Those children should be in bed, because if there is physical exertion at the time there is that infection, then the heart becomes involved. Among all these funerals we see, one out of every ten involves the heart, because the people have gone out too soon.

We are going to take these different glands that control personality. The thyroid, and its secretion thyroxin, the gland of energy production, controller of growth of special organs and tissues. The pituitary gland is in the anterior lobe, and its secretion is unknown. It has to do with the growth of the skeleton and support tissue. The posterior is known as pituitrin. It is nerve cell, and is in involuntary muscle cells, brain and sex cells.

Recently a price of one thousand dollars was given to a chemist working in the Parke Davis Company because he discovered in the posterior lobe another gland which controls ohild-birth and the amount of water in the cell.

The next slide will show us a continuation of this, for here we have adrenal glands situated above the kidneys. One of their secretions, that from the medulla, is adrenalin. That front cortex has not been named. That is the cortex, the gland of combat. It gives the power to tackle a big job and go through and do it. These people who haven’t the personality enough to stick at it haven’t the cortex. The medulla furnishing adrenalin has the energy for emergency situations. The pineal controls brain and sex development, adolescence and puberty, life and maturity. The thymus gland, its secretion, has not been isolated. It is the gland of childhood. It gives the child all those characteristics of childhood–playing with blocks, and sometimes it lingers and persists on into adult life, and you have a great big child. These are the interstitial glands of the testes in the male and ovaries in the female, the glands of secondary sex strength. The perithyroid, the controller of lime or calcium in the body. It transfers insulin and is a controller of sugar in the body.

Here we have the thyroid gland of this boy and thymus at this point. If you take away the collarbone, the thymus line there, the thyroid bridging across the windpipe and on each side of the thyroid four little glands, two on each side, are the parathyroids controlling the calcium. Now if we take this thymus gland and dissect it, it is like this; and if we unravel this string of beads, it unravels like that–a roll of little glands.

Now we are talking about how much it takes to make a difference in personality. Had you realized that there is only three and one-half grains of the extract of this gland between you and idiocy? That is idiocy. Take out of your body three and one-half grains of thyroxin and you would be an idiot, and you would come right back and have mentality again as soon as that was put into your body. You can never take away all of the thyroid gland; you must have it, but its absence has certain effects upon the thyroxin that makes that particular substance that gives us so much of our mentality–sixty-five per cent of three and one-half grains would be enough.

Supposing now, we were growing up in a climate where there was very little iodine. We would have a disturbance of the functioning of that gland. As you know from the recent work that has been done by Kendall and Kimball and others, the people living along the Great Lakes District here are at a disadvantage because there isn’t very much iodine, the iodine from this Great Lakes District having gone to the ocean; and the iodine is scarce, so we have to give it to children. Most of your children are getting it in the spring of the year by means of an iodized salt. Too much of it would do the wrong thing.

Next. To remind you that too much thyroid given to little tadpoles may make them develop into frogs when they were so young that they would sit on your little finger, or too little of the thyroid and too much of the thymus would would make them grow as long as your hand and they would always stay babies, like people.

Now then, here are two sheep. The thyroids and parathyroids have been removed, and they are the same age; but the difference here is very distinct because the effect of the removal of the glands in fourteen months made this difference in their size. There is a very marked difference. This lamb could not develop its bones, could not produce skeleton because it didn’t have perithymus.

Passing to the next we see two children. There were estimated to be 30,000 children in the condition that child is in in Switzerland about twenty years ago, due to the lack of iodine in the soil that would make it possible for thyroxin to be formed in their glands; and by inheritance these children came finally to have an absence of the gland itself. There was a sad thing happened. The Catholic Church of that district insisted that these children should have the privilege of marrying and propagation, and they would reproduce their kind and they married their kind. With the coming of the newer knowledge so that these children were given thyroxin in proper form they were changed; and this idiotic child didn’t come from Switzerland. Such children develop in this country complete idiots, so far as mentality is concerned. A few months later here is this same child with perfect mentality, leading all those in her class. The difference is the three and one-half grains of thyroxin. Some people say they are not going to have any more sins when we remember that God made us in one day. We are losing God’s story, for Christ very distinctly tried to emphasize that truth was God’s way of working.

The difference in this child is important, but if the same thing developed in an older person, it would show up more. Here is a man. He was normal as a man, but something happened that finally affected his mentality–why, his thyroid failed to function properly, and the lack of alertness and a lot of characteristics show up now. I am afraid to review these in detail because you will turn around and look at somebody else and see if he has the same characteristics. This is myxoedema. The mind is developed, the organization is there, the machine is there, but it isn’t working. They can not function properly, but this man was given the extract of thyroxin and in six weeks’ time he has changed over, and you can see his personality coming back.

That difference, then, is the difference in the chemistry of personality. Now, having that in mind, you remember to have not such a person as that with starey eyes like that. That is due to the functioning of the thyroid gland. You would have this maybe at the death of a child, the sickness of a friend. A great catastrophe may make the difference that you will break, for here we have a typical illustration of how infection may enter into it. This woman had marked, bulging eyes. Here she is without the bulging oyes. The difference was due to infection, for the culture taken from infected teeth was inoculated into a series of rabbits, and in a few days’ time they had bulging eyes due to the localization of that kind of infection in the eyes. And it is not an uncommon thing. We often have as much as seventy-five per cent of the animals develop a localization when the culture is from a person.

Now coming again to the perithyroid. This dog which I showed you before is in a state of convulsions, the same thing as the convulsions of childhood due to a lowering of the calcium. In this case due to the removal of the parathyroid glands, because the calcium level of the body can not possibly stay up to a normal amount if the perithyroids are not functioning. If they are taken out entirely, you can not live. In the case of operation, they can not remove all the thyroid because the perithyroids are buried in each one. In giving the thyroid to the dog, it comes out of the convulsions and stays out as long as they give it injections.

This is a typical illustration. Here is a boy with a lack of union of these bones, lack of development, delayed development skeletally. This is related to a lack of calcium, and that lack of calcium is related to a lack of those chemicals that stimulate the development and the utilization of calcium.

In the next we will see a typical illustration. You see a little depression in that skull. That is the celitersical, a little chamber in the base of the skull that holds an organ called the pituitary. By the way, the ancients were related in some way to personality and knew something about it for they said, “The organ residence of the soul.” Now this skull is of a little girl that I found in a traveling show that came to the city. She was only half my height, came to my belt. She had been brought up in a community of fundamentalists, a little more fundamental and a little more ignorant than the average. They had put a board on each side of this child’s head, and it grew with the pressure of boards on the head and made it impossible for the pituitary to develop properly, and with the suppression of the growth of that gland there was a suffocation of the chemical it produced, and that girl at twenty-two years of age was in an infantile state. There was no development of the sex organs. Here is a picture of her hands. She still has a lack of union between those bones infantile. Here is a girl’s hand which is approximately normal. You note this bone is so unlike this. Look at the difference in the size of the hands.

The next slide I have here is a man that had the opposite of that, a tumor in the pituitary, and he has grown to be eight feet tall, and all these bones lengthened and he is out of proportion. When you see those cases, don’t blame the Lord for them. These are laws that are within our bodies, and that determine the size and structure of development.

Some of you may remember a man that used to go up and down on the carlines of Euclid Avenue; and one of my problems was to keep making readaptations that would keep a set of teeth in his mouth, for his lower jaw grew so much faster than the upper that it was way offside. What was going on? Why, this man’s pituitary gland comes to the base of the brain, and it had a tumor in such a position that it was stimulating that. That made this abnormal growth.

Some of you remember this boy. When he was brought to us he was like this. You see the typical characteristic expression. A lack of development of the pituitary and of the thyroid and this typical Mongolian type of idiocy has the important type of characteristics we mentioned. He had this in part at birth.

Here is the difference that occurred in six months’ time. Here is the front view before and after, and side views before and after. He grew a mustache, and a lot of things happened in that six months’ time. When that boy came to us he was playing with blocks on the floor. He didn’t read. He wasn’t interested in anything but those things three and six year olds are interested in. But the operation that was made was this: his upper arch was locked inside the lower arch and couldn’t develop these maxillary bones. An appliance was put on which forced the development, and while he hadn’t been able to get any air at all from his left nostril, in ten daysꞌ time by forcing open those with an attachment that was very rigid, he could maintain life entirely by breathing through that nostril that had never let air through before. Instead of breathing through his mouth, he breathed through his nose.

I want you to see the most important thing that relates to personality. This boy who was playing with blocks when he came, changed. He was bending pins in a triangle and putting them in chairs. Now girls never did a trick like that. Boys pass through a stage like that. There is a way you can bend a pin so the point won’t be seen. I didn’t teach him how to do it. He got the idea of getting behind the doors and trying to scare the nurses. My office was at the corner of 105th and Euclid, and one day a policeman came up to the room and said, “Is there somebody up here squirting water on me in the street?”

I said, “I don’t think so.” This boy used to come in and spend time in the office and he would get past me. Here he was working and shooting through a water syringe, which he had taken off the bracket and charged with water, and when the traffic man below turned his back, he would give him a shot in the neck. He was sharp enough to do that and not let me catch him. A number of you members know his people. He was one of the secretaries at that time. When they came to my place, he wanted to put his arm around Miss Beaman. All this is important because we are talking about personality. He changed from a boy that was only interested in what children are interested in. He passed through the boyhood stage and got to be interested in things men are interested in. He came up to Miss Beaman and put his arm around her neck. He asked her to go out with him, if you please, where so many of the girls and boys were going just about that time, to Euclid Beach. In less than six months’ time that boy changed from being infantile as far as sex development is concerned, and he changed mentally from being that child interested in blocks to the boy and man interested in taking a girl like a hero to Euclid Beach. He wanted the privilege of hiring my auto and the privilege of using the telephone to call people, and learned to read.

But now something else happened. There was a boy that had moved from this man up to this man with all the urge of a sex life development, and with only a mentality of about eight years of age, and as he was taken back to his home down in the state, one hundred or so miles from Cleveland, I lost track of him, except keeping a little track by correspondence; and his sister who had charge of him got married, and to make it easier to care for the boy he was put into the institution at Columbus. One time when I was in Columbus, I went to the institution and asked to see this boy. They said at the door that they wouldn’t know him by his name. “What is his number?” I finally got the room where he was. I had a little difficulty because they all look pretty much alike that have this infection. As I saw this boy, here he was like all the others of that type, with that depressed mentality where they hadn’t been awakened to fit into the purpose of life and he was locked in that institution so that he might not become a sex perverter. A lot of the boys and girls in our institutions are there particularly for the protection of society. So that thing now relates to the development that is a very important relationship to the development of the glands.

Now there are two other glands–the adrenal and these glands which have to do with the capacity for fighting, the ability for reaction. It comes to the cortex, two different sections–the cortex and the medulla, which I will speak of later. They lock in just above the kidney in this position.

The next one. This refers to the development of the sex glands. These are from a pigeon. The testes may be normally large or atrophied so they are insignificant and can’t be seen, depending on a little difference in the food given to the pigeons. It makes a complete difference in the attitude, in the personality of the birds; and then passing quickly to another phase, I would have you see there are certain characteristics of the lower development–bright eyes, clean teeth, temerity, florid skin. There is a different mental attitude toward life. It sends energy to the heart and intestines.

One is the adrenal centered type–hairy, masculinity, marked tendency toward hernia.

I am going to skip over quite a lot that I would like to say. We want to run through these. I want you to see this characteristic pose of this cat. What has happened? That cat isn’t afraid of any dog. Indeed you have a little pet kitten running around the house. It wanders around. A big Newfoundland or Dane dog comes bounding up to drive it away. Your dog stops and your cat takes the attitude of aggressor. Your kitten never runs; it is a descendent of ancestors that didn’t run. There is a general impulse there that makes the cat take that position, and it has no fear. It has by inheritance a type of personality that makes it that way, The way it gets its food is by attack, and the characteristics of that cat were all the cat kind, and are so unique that we know at a glance some of their temperamental possibilities.

Here is a snake in a tree and a bird on a limb. Why, that bird has an ideal chance to get away from there. All it has to do is raise its wings and soar away to some other bush, but the bird is helpless. It is paralyzed by fear. That fear has to do with the internal glands of secretion and the snake is dominated similarly by a gland control.

Here is an individual in a great sense of terror, fear and overwhelming anger expressed by the controlling mechanism of the body; not a curse of God, but a measurement of the unbalance of these glands of internal secretion.

We have here a tiger and it is approaching a boa constrictor. Neither one of them have fear. Why? The tiger knows how strong it is and it doesn’t think anything of a little snake, and the boa constrictor has the venom and thinks, “Just try it, now, if you like. I am not afraid of you. I know what I have.” You see that sense of calm. No fear. Why? They each know its power, and that thing that gives us a sense of power is the thing that gives us capacity to go through life and do the big things because we are equipped to do them.

Next we have the deer making its violent attack on the dog, and that deer can make such an attack as that because of the tremendous impulse that comes into life from the adrenal and sex glands, because the very development of these horns has to do with a great impelling force related to the period of the year, being more apparent in the routing season. The dog with all its bravery is collapsed with fear. He can’t make that kind of a fight. Neither can the female deer make that kind of a fight, the rabbit can’t make that kind of a fight. It is the difference in the balance of secretions. The male of the deer will form a court around the females because they have a different arrangement of secretions, and they do the fighting for the entire body.

We have here two men in a race. We find these men entirely different. This man knows he is going to win the race. Why? There is a stimulation, a tonic comes from feeling confidence. This man shows terror, anguish. He has lost the race. You see it everywhere you go, with that spirit of confidence in themselves and others who have lost the race. It goes back to a lot of things.

In just a moment I will close. I think that is the last slide. I want to tell you this in closing. You are familiar with the fact that they have found it practically impossible to grow wild animals in captivity until just recently, and the newer knowledge came about in this interesting way. That member of the group of scientists connected with the British Zoological Gardens that saw that lion killing the deer, and saw that lion take just certain organs out of that animal’s body, got the key to one of the most important advances that has been made because, as I told you, now they are able to raise not only lots of lions but they have a great opportunity for improving the health of all of that group. That thing, then, that makes it possible for life in all its expressions is only one of which we are dealing with this morning. Personality has its place in this great change of events in which our bodies are reinforced with certain chemicals, and in a sense we are chemical laboratories and our reactions are perfectly normal and important, but we have the power to modify those chemicals. When we can control largely the impulses that are going to dominate, and the highest opportunity of the Christian Church is going to be to find out how to do this, the will of God, by making a body that will be calm, Christlike, don’t be afraid; there isn’t any conflict at all between religion and science. Science is revealing God’s laws.