In more recent times—from the very end of the eighteenth century on—we get a more scientific approach to the problem. The French were pioneers in this field: Leon Rostan spoke of three types of people, the type digestive, the type musculaire, and the type cérébral—the digestive, muscular, and cerebral types. It is an extremely acute observation. Later in the century there was G. Viola in Italy, also talking about a tripartite division into what he called macro-splanchnic, normo-splanchnic, and micro-splanchnic body types. These terms are very much the same, when they are explained, as those used by Rostan; they refer to the short trunk of the long-legged thin person, the medium trunk of the muscular person, and the heavy, relatively long trunk of the bulky person.
In our own time we have the important studies of Ernst Kretschmer, who made some very interesting correlations between body types and different kinds of insanity. He started with a tripartite division—the athletic, the pyknic, and the asthenic type—but reduced it (unfortunately) to two, the pyknic, or fat, bulky type, and the leptosome, or thin, light type.
More recently, and more scientifically and thoroughly, the matter has been gone into by Dr William H. Sheldon and his collaborators, whose powerful technique for analysing and quantifying the physical differences between human beings in terms of a tri-polar frame of reference we discussed briefly a few days ago.
Sheldon calls the three poles endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy. Endomorphy is the pole which at its extreme gives very big, fat, soft people with slow reactions and with a tendency to put on weight and become extremely fat in old age. These people are in a sense ‘gut people’. Their gut is very often twice as heavy and twice as long as the gut of an extreme ectomorph. They have an amazing power of assimilation, and they are at home on the earth inasmuch as they have an immense capacity to absorb food and to remain alive. The mesomorphs are ‘muscle people’ with heavy bones and powerful muscles. You can see their pictures any day in the sporting pages of the newspaper; the professional footballers all belong to this terrific type.
They tend to have a powerful neck and a rather coarse skin with very heavy folds showing in the face. They have great endurance and striving force, and, as we shall see when we come to the correlations of temperament, they tend to be aggressive—politicians, businessmen, soldiers, and so on. The ectomorphs are the thin, light, stringy-muscled people whose ratio of surface area to mass is extremely high and whose nervous system is consequently much closer to the surface than either the mesomorph’s or the endomorph’s. They are, so to speak, built around a nervous system which is much more vulnerable, being nearer the outside, and much more sensitive than those of the other two.
Sheldon devised a method for quantifying the different amounts of each component in every human being. The amount varies on a 7-point scale between 1 and 7, and any individual’s pattern can be expressed in terms of three digits. I happen to be a 1-2-7. That is to say, I have a minimum of endomorphy, a little mesomorphy, which permits me to get around, and the maximum of ectomorphy. This is not a very common type; the types near the middle are commonest. Sheldon once told me that most members of my type are in asylums—I am extremely lucky to be out.
Something which Sheldon stresses as being very important in the physical set-up is what he calls ‘dysplasia’, a disharmony between different regions of the body. Certain regions of the body may exhibit a proportion of the three factors quite different from that of other regions. This is a typical sort of would-be athlete’s tragedy: a boy who has enough mesomorphy to feel the desire to become an athlete may unfortunately have much more ectomorphic extremities, so that he simply doesn’t have the strength in his arms and wrists and ankles to support his athletic ambitions; he would like to be an athlete but he just cannot be. These dysplasias probably play a very important part in juvenile delinquency.
There is another dysplasia, which is also very common, and which may likewise cause very severe psychological disturbance. It can probably be found in Elizabeth Arden’s Arizona Maine Chance, for ladies who have a classical torso but unfortunately complete dysplasia in the hips, which tend to bulge out and which have to be treated locally as strenuously as possible. Another factor which Sheldon emphasizes is what he calls ‘gynandromorphy’. All of us display some degree of resemblance to the opposite sex, but some of us may have a good deal of it. A high degree of gynandromorphy acts as a kind of total dysplasia and may cause, again, great psychological trouble.
We have now to consider the relationship between these physical differences and the temperament of the people who have them. Sheldon has been able to establish a fairly high level of correlation between the physical pattern of any given individual and a pattern of temperament which he measures on a point scale in terms of intensity. Using about sixty different fundamental psychological traits, twenty for each of the three components, he has found that there is a fairly close relationship—the deviation is usually no more than one point—between the physical and the temperamental patterns. In cases where the deviation between the temperamental pattern and the physical pattern is as much as two points, the person is under very great permanent stress. Deviations of more than two points apparently are never found except in mental institutions.
The reason for the deviations is that sociological pressures demand that people behave in a certain way which doesn’t happen to be the way in which their physique would normally ‘ask’ them to behave. Anthropologists have shown how powerful this trend can be, particularly in primitive societies which exercise a prodigious pressure upon their members. For example, Margaret Mead showed in her study of the Pueblo Indians that the Pueblos have a profound disapproval of anybody who shows a typical mesomorphic pattern of behaviour. They don’t like people who, in our terms, are aggressive, show leadership, have drive. They want people who conform, who behave as other people in the tribe behave.
In our own culture, progressive education represents an almost exclusive valuation of the mesomorphic, and to some extent the endomorphic, points of view. Unfortunate children who were born with introverted tendencies are made to share and to rush around with others, and they are absolutely miserable, because what they want is privacy, and not to be pushed around with a great herd of other people. But this has become fashionable now, just as it was fashionable in an earlier age to try to repress the mesomorph and the endomorph, to impose stoical restraints upon the overflowing, spill-the-beans endomorph and to impose quasi-physical restraints on the exuberant energy of the mesomorph. You can look at earlier civilizations and see the social patterns which were created for doing precisely this.
There has always been a great problem of what to do with powerful muscular men with a tremendous drive for domination. One of the answers in the Middle Ages was to put them into religious orders of knighthood and send them out to fight with the Mohammedans. This kept them out of the way as far as Europeans were concerned, and they were bound and kept in very good order by all kinds of traditions and codes. At the same time means were found for protecting the introverted people without much muscular energy by establishing convents into which they could retire. This permitted the various people to find the niches in society most suitable to them, and the more violent were prevented from doing a lot of mischief to their fellow men.
It does happen that the internal categorical imperatives of temperament and physique are so strong in certain individuals that in spite of profound sociological pressure they start trying to behave like Napoleons, with the result that they get severely slapped down by the rest of society. This shows that even under the greatest sociological pressures the fundamental, physically determined drives of temperament may carry people into very great social trouble. And the moral is that we shouldn’t try to mould or squeeze people into the procrustean bed of our popular conception of human virtue of the moment, but permit them as far as possible to develop along their own temperamental lines.
Let us now give a very brief account of the main temperamental traits connected with the three physical traits, endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy. Endomorphs—the round, fat, gut people—are distinguished by relaxation, by a love of comfort, a love of ceremoniousness, and a love of eating—above all, eating in public. They are good routineers and they have a universal, indiscriminate amiability. They are very good mixers, they like people, and they have no difficulty in communication. In fact, they communicate all the time. They have an extreme extroversion of affect. Under the influence of alcohol, they become even more genial and amiable than they were before.
The extreme mesomorph is a driving person who loves power, is indifferent to others, and tends to be callous and to trample on other people. He is the typical aggressive go-getter. He may do it very politely, but he is still an aggressive go-getter. He tends to make a great deal of noise. He laughs loudly. He snores loudly. He speaks loudly and he has all the traits of an effective soldier and politician. If you look
