Perennial Phil Ch 8 RELIGION AND TEMPERAMENT

Perennial Phil. Ch 8. RELIGION AND TEMPERAMENT  [11, 584]

IT seems best at this point to turn back for a moment from ethics to psychology, where a very important problem awaits us—a problem to which the exponents of the Perennial Philo­sophy have given a great deal of attention. 

What precisely is the relation between individual constitution and temperament on the one hand and the kind and degree of spiritual knowledge on the other? 

The materials for a comprehensively accurate answer to this question are not available—except, perhaps, in the form of that incommunicable science, based upon intuition and long practice, that exists in the minds of experienced 'spiritual directors.' But the answer that can be given, though incomplete, is highly significant.

All knowledge, as we have seen, is a function of being. Or, to phrase the same idea in scholastic terms, the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. In the Introduction reference was made to the effect upon knowledge of changes of being along what may be called its vertical axis, in the direction of sanctity or its opposite. But there is also variation in the horizontal plane.

 Congenitally by psycho-physical constitution, each one of us is born into a certain position on this horizontal plane. It is a vast territory, still imperfectly explored, a continent stretching all the way 

from imbecility to genius, 

from shrinking weakness to aggressive strength, 

from cruelty to Pickwickian kindliness, naive, generous

from self-revealing sociability to taciturn misanthropy and love of soli­tude, 

from an almost frantic lasciviousness to an almost Un-tempted continence. 

From any point on this huge expanse of possible human nature an individual can move almost indefi­nitely up or down, 

towards union with the divine Ground of his own and all other beings, 

or towards the last, the infernal extremes of separateness and selfhood. 

But where horizontal movement is concerned there is far less freedom. 

It is impos­sible for one kind of physical constitution to transform itself into another kind; and 

the particular temperament associated with a given physical constitution can be modified only within narrow limits. 

With the best will in the world and the best social environment, 

all that anyone can hope to do is to make the best of his congenital psycho-physical make-up; to change the fundamental patterns of constitution and temperament is beyond his power.

In the course of the last thirty centuries many attempts have been made to work out a classification system in terms of which human differences could be measured and described. 

For example, 

1. there is the ancient Hindu method of classifying people according to the psycho-physico-social categories of caste. 
2. There are the primarily medical classifications associ­ated with the name of Hippocrates, classifications in terms of two main 'habits'—the phthisic and the apoplectic—or of the four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) and the four qualities (hot, cold, moist and dry). 
3. More recently there have been the various physiognomic systems of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the crude and merely psychological dichotomy of introversion and extra­version;
4. the more complete, but still inadequate, psycho-physical classifications proposed by Kretschmer, Stockard, Viola and others; and
5.  finally the system, more comprehensive, more flexibly adequate to the complex facts than all those which preceded it, worked out by Dr. William Sheldon and his collaborators.

In the present section our concern is with classifications of human differences in relation to the problems of the spiritual life. Traditional systems will be described and illustrated, and the findings of the Perennial Philosophy will be compared with the conclusions reached by the most recent scientific research.

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In the West, the traditional Catholic classification of human beings is based upon the Gospel anecdote of Martha and Mary. 

The way of Martha is the way of salvation through action, 

the way of Mary is the way through contemplation. 

Following Aristotle, who in this as in many other matters was in accord with the Perennial Philosophy, 

Catholic thinkers have regarded contemplation (the highest term of which is the unitive know­ledge of the Godhead) as man's final end, and therefore have always held that Mary's was indeed the better way.

Significantly enough, it is in essentially similar terms that Dr. Radin classifies and (by implication) evaluates primitive human beings in so far as they are philosophers and religious devotees. 

For him there is no doubt that the higher mono­theistic forms of primitive religion are created (or should one rather say, with Plato, discovered) by people belonging to the first of the two great psycho-physical classes of human beings 

—the men of thought. To those belonging to the other class, the men of action, is due the creation or discovery of the lower, unphilosophical, polytheistic kinds of religion.

This simple dichotomy is a classification of human differ­ences that is valid so far as it goes. But like all such dichoto­mies, whether physical (like Hippocrates' division of humanity into those of phthisic and those of apoplectic habit) or psycho­logical (like Jung's classification in terms of introvert and extravert), 

this grouping of the religious 

into those who think and those who act, 

those who follow the way of Martha and those who follow the way of Mary, 

is inadequate to the facts. 

And of course no director of souls, no head of a religious organization, is ever, in actual practice, content with this all too simple system. 

Underlying the best Catholic writing on prayer and the best Catholic practice in the matter of recog­nizing vocations and assigning duties, 

we sense the existence of an implicit and unformulated classification of human differ­ences more complete and more realistic than the explicit dichotomy of action and contemplation.
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In Hindu thought the outlines of this completer and more adequate classification are clearly indicated. The ways leading to the delivering union with God are not two, but three—

• the way of works, 
• the way of knowledge and 
• the way of devotion. 

In the Bhagavad-Gita Sri Krishna instructs Arjuna in all three paths—

• liberation through action without attachment; 
• liberation through knowledge of the Self and the Absolute Ground of all being with which it is identical; and 
• liberation through intense devotion to the personal God or the divine incarnation.

Do without attachment the work you have to do;

 for a man who does his work without attachment attains the Supreme Goal verily. By action alone men like Janaka attained perfection.

But there is also the way of Mary.

Freed from passion, fear and anger,

absorbed in Me, taking refuge in Me, and purified by the fires of Knowledge, many have become one with my Being.

And again:

Those who have completely controlled their senses and

are of even mind under all conditions

and thus contemplate the Im­perishable, the Ineffable, the Unmanifest, the Omnipresent, the Incomprehensible, the Eternal—they, devoted to the welfare of all beings, attain Me alone and none else.

But the path of contemplation is not easy.

The task of those whose minds are set on the Unmanifest is the more difficult;

for, to those who are in the body, the realization of the Unmanifest is hard. But those who consecrate all their actions to Me (as the personal God, or as the divine Incarnation), who regard Me as the supreme Goal, who worship Me and medi­tate upon Me with single-minded concentration—for those whose minds are thus absorbed in Me, I become ere long the Saviour from the world's ocean of mortality.

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These three ways of deliverance are precisely correlated with the three categories, in terms of which Sheldon has worked out what is, without question, the best and most adequate classification of human differences. 

Human beings, he has shown, vary continuously between the viable extremes of a tri-polar system; and physical and psychological measure­ments can be devised, whereby any given individual may be accurately located in relation to the three co-ordinates. Or we can put the matter differently and say that any given individual is a mixture, in varying proportions, of three physical and three closely related psychological components. 

The strength of each component can be measured according to empirically determined procedures. To the three physical components Sheldon gives the names of endomorphy 내배엽 , mesomorphy 중형  and ectomorphy 외배엽 . 

The individual with a high degree of endo-morphy is predominantly soft and rounded and may easily become grossly fat. 

The high mesomorph is hard, big-boned and strong-muscled. 

The high ectomorph is slender and has small bones and stringy, weak, unemphatic muscles. 

The endomorph has a huge gut, a gut that may be more than twice as heavy and twice as long as that of the extreme ectomorph. In a real sense his or her body is built around the digestive tract. The centrally significant fact of mesomorphic physique, on the other hand, is the powerful musculature, while that of the ectomorph is the over-sensitive and (since the ratio of body surface to mass is higher in ectomorphs than in either of the other types) relatively unprotected nervous system.

With endomorphic constitution is closely correlated a tem­peramental pattern, which Sheldon calls viscerotonia. Signifi­cant among the viscerotonic traits are love of food and, characteristically, love of eating in common; love of comfort and luxury; love of ceremoniousness; indiscriminate amia­bility and love of people as such; fear of solitude and craving for company; uninhibited expression of emotion; love of childhood, in the form of nostalgia towards one's own past and in an intense enjoyment of family life; craving for affec­tion and social support, and need of people when in trouble. The temperament that is related to mesomorphy is called somatotonia. In this the dominating traits are love of muscular activity, aggressiveness and lust for power; indifference to pain; callousness in regard to other people's feelings; a love of combat and competitiveness; a high degree of physical courage; a nostalgic feeling, not for childhood, but for youth, the period of maximum muscular power; a need for activity when in trouble.

From the foregoing descriptions it will be seen how inade­quate is the Jungian conception of extraversion, as a simple antithesis to introversion. 

Extraversion is not simple; it is of two radically different kinds. 

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There is the emotional, sociable extraversion of the viscerotonic endomorph—the person who is always seeking company and telling everybody just what he feels.

And there is the extraversion of the big-muscled soma-totonic—the person who looks outward on the world as a place where he can exercise power, where he can bend people to his will and shape things to his heart's desire. 

One is the genial extraversion of the salesman, the Rotarian good mixer, the liberal Protestant clergyman. 

The other is the extraversion 

• of the engineer who works off his lust for power on things, 
• of the sportsman and the professional blood-and-iron soldier, 
• of the ambitious business executive and politician, 
• of the dictator, whether in the home or at the head of a state.

With cerebrotonia, the temperament that is correlated with ectomorphic physique, we leave the genial world of Pickwick, the strenuously competitive world of Hotspur, and pass into an entirely different and somewhat disquieting kind of universe —that of Hamlet and Ivan Karamazov. 

The extreme cerebrotonic is the over-alert, over-sensitive introvert, 

who is more concerned with what goes on behind his eyes—with the con­structions of thought and imagination, with the variations of feeling and consciousness—than with that external world, to which, in their different ways, the viscerotonic and the soma-totonic pay their primary attention and allegiance. 

Cerebro-tonics have little or no desire to dominate, nor do they feel the viscerotonic's indiscriminate liking for people as people; 

on the contrary they want to live and let live, and their passion for privacy is intense. 

Solitary confinement, the most terrible punishment that can be inflicted on the soft, round, genial per­son, is, for the cerebrotonic, no punishment at all. 

For him the ultimate horror is the boarding school and the barracks. 

In company cerebrotonics are nervous and shy, .tensely inhibited and unpredictably moody. (It is a significant fact that no ex­treme cerebrotonic has ever been a good actor or actress.) 

Cerebrotonics hate to slam doors or raise their voices, and suffer acutely from the unrestrained bellowing and trampling of the somatotonic. 

Their manner is restrained, and when it comes to expressing their feelings they are extremely reserved. 

The emotional gush of the viscerotonic strikes them as offen­sively shallow and even insincere, nor have they any patience with viscerotonic ceremoniousness and love of luxury and magnificence. They do not easily form habits and find it hard to adapt their lives to the routines which come so naturally to somatotonics. 

Owing to their over-sensitiveness, cerebrotonics are often extremely, almost insanely sexual; but they are hardly ever tempted to take to drink—for alcohol, which heightens the natural aggressiveness of the somatotonic and increases the relaxed amiability of the viscerotonic, merely makes them feel ill and depressed. 

Each in his own way, the viscerotonic and the somatotonic are well adapted to the world they live in; but the introverted cerebrotonic is in some sort incommensurable with the things and people and insti­tutions that surround him.

 Consequently a remarkably high proportion of extreme cerebrotonics fail to make good as normal citizens and average pillars of society. But if many fail, many also become abnormal on the higher side of the average. In universities, monasteries and research laboratories —wherever sheltered conditions are provided for those whose small guts and feeble muscles do not permit them to eat or fight their way through the ordinary rough and tumble—the percentage of outstandingly gifted and accomplished cerebro-tonics will almost always be very high. Realizing the im­portance of this extreme, over-evolved and scarcely viable type of human being, all civilizations have provided in one way or another for its protection.

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In the light of these descriptions we can understand more clearly the Bhagavad-Gita's classification of paths to salvation.

The path of devotion is the path naturally followed by the per­son in whom the viscerotonic component is high. 

His inborn tendency to externalize the emotions he spontaneously feels in regard to persons can be disciplined and canalized, so that a merely animal gregariousness and a merely human kindliness become transformed into charity—devotion to the personal God and universal goodwill and compassion towards all sentient beings.

The path of works is for those whose extraversion is of the somatotonic kind, those who in all circumstances feel the need to 'do something.' In the unregenerate somatotonic this craving for action is always associated with aggressiveness, self-assertion and the lust for power. 

For the born Kskatrya, or warrior-ruler, the task, as Krishna explains to Arjuna, is to get rid of those fatal accompaniments to the love of action and to work without regard to the fruits of work, in a state of complete non-attachment to self. Which is, of course, like everything else, a good deal easier said than done.

Finally, there is the way of knowledge, through the modi­fication of consciousness, until it ceases to be ego-centred and ]ecomes centred in and united with the divine Ground. 

This is the way to which the extreme cerebrotonic is naturally drawn. His special discipline consists in the mortification of his innate tendency towards introversion for its own sake, towards thought and imagination and self-analysis as ends in themselves rather than as means towards the ultimate tran­scendence of phantasy and discursive reasoning in the timeless act of pure intellectual intuition.

Within the general population, as we have seen, variation is continuous, and in most people the three components are fairly evenly mixed.

Those exhibiting extreme predominance of any one component are relatively rare. And yet, in spite of their rarity, it is by the thought-patterns characteristic of these ex­treme individuals that theology and ethics, at any rate on the theoretical side, have been mainly dominated. 

The reason for this is simple. Any extreme position is more uncompromis­ingly clear and therefore more easily recognized and understood than the intermediate positions, which are the natural thought-pattern of the person in whom the constituent components of personality are evenly balanced. 

These intermediate positions, it should be noted, do not in any sense contain or reconcile the extreme positions; they are merely other thought-patterns added to the list of possible systems. The construction of an all-embracing system of metaphysics, ethics and psychology is a task that can never be accomplished by any single individual, for the sufficient reason that he is an individual with one par­ticular kind of constitution and temperament and therefore capable of knowing only according to the mode of his own being. Hence the advantages inherent in what may be called the anthological approach to truth.

The Sanskrit dharma—one of the key words in Indian formulations of the Perennial Philosophy—has two principal meanings. 

The dharma of an individual is, first of all, 1] is essential nature, the intrinsic law of his being and develop­ment. 

But dharma also signifies 2] the law of righteousness and piety. 

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In Hinduism, dharma is the religious and moral law governing individual conduct and is one of the four ends of life. ... In Buddhism, dharma is the doctrine, the universal truth common to all individuals at all times, proclaimed by the Buddha

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The implications of this double meaning are clear: 

a man's duty, how he ought to live, what he ought to believe and what he ought to do about his beliefs—these things are 

conditioned by his essential nature, his constitution and tem­perament. 

Going a good deal further than do the Catholics, with their doctrine of vocations, the Indians admit the right of individuals with different dharmas 

to worship different aspects or conceptions of the divine. 

Hence the almost total absence, among Hindus and Buddhists, 

of bloody persecutions, religious wars and proselytizing imperialism.

It should, however, be remarked that, within its own ecclesi­astical fold, Catholicism has been almost as tolerant as Hindu­ism and Mahayana Buddhism. 

Nominally one, each of these religions consists, in fact, of a number of very different reli­gions, covering the whole gamut of thought and behaviour from fetishism, through polytheism, through legalistic mono­theism, through devotion to the sacred humanity of the Avatar, to the profession of the Perennial Philosophy and the practice of a purely spiritual religion that seeks the unitive knowledge of the Absolute Godhead. 

These tolerated religions-within-a-religion are not, of course, regarded as equally valuable or equally true. 

To worship polytheistically maybe one's dharma; nevertheless the fact remains that man's final end is the unitive knowledge of the Godhead, and 

all the historical formulations of the Perennial Philosophy are agreed that every human being ought, and perhaps in some way or other actually will, achieve that end. 

'All souls,' writes Father Garrigou-Lagrange, 'receive a general remote call to the mystical life; and if all were faithful in avoiding, as they should, not merely mortal but venial sin, if they were, each according to his condition, docile to the Holy Ghost, and if they lived long enough, a day would come when they would receive the proximate and efficacious vocation to a high perfection and to the mystical life properly so called.

' With this statement Hindu and Buddhist theologians would probably agree; 

but they would add that every soul will in fact eventually attain this 'high perfection.' 

All are called, but in any given generation few are chosen, because few choose themselves. 

But the series of conscious existences, corporeal or incorporeal, is indefinitely long; there is therefore time and opportunity for everyone to learn the necessary lessons. Moreover, there will always be helpers. 

For periodi­cally there are 'descents' of the Godhead into physical form; and at all times there are future Buddhas ready, on the threshold of reunion with the Intelligible Light, to renounce the bliss of immediate liberation in order to return as saviours and teachers again and again into the world of suffering and time and evil, until at last every sentient being shall have been delivered into eternity.

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The practical consequences of this doctrine are clear enough. 

The lower forms of religion, whether emotional, active or intellectual, are never to be accepted as final. 

True, each of them comes naturally to persons of a certain kind of constitution and temperament; 

but the dharma or duty of any given individual is not to remain complacently fixed in the imperfect religion that happens to suit him; 

it is rather to transcend it, not by impossibly denying the modes of thought, behaviour and feeling that are natural to him, but by making use of them, so that by means of nature he may pass beyond nature. 

Thus the introvert uses "discrimination" (in the Indian phrase), and so learns to distinguish the mental activities of the ego from the principial Consciousness of the Self, which is akin to, or identical with, the divine Ground. 

The emotional extravert learns to 'hate his father and mother' (in other words, to give up his selfish attachment to the pleasures of indiscriminately loving and being loved), concentrates his devotion on the per­sonal or incarnate aspect of God, and comes at last to love the Absolute Godhead by an act, no longer of feeling, but of will illuminated by knowledge. 

And finally there is that other kind of extravert, whose concern is not with the pleasures of giving or receiving affection, but with the satisfaction of his lust for power over things, events and persons. 

Using his own nature to transcend his own nature, he must follow the path laid down in the Bhagavad-Gita for the bewildered Arjuna—the path of work without attachment to the fruits of work, the path of what St. François de Sales calls 'holy indifference,' the path that leads through the forgetting of self to the discovery of the Self.

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In the course of history it has often happened that one or other of the imperfect religions has been taken too seriously and regarded as good and true in itself, instead of as a means to the ultimate end of all religion. 

The effects of such mistakes are often disastrous. For example, many Protestant sects have insisted on the necessity, or at least the extreme desirability, of a violent conversion. 

But violent conversion, as Sheldon has pointed out, is a phenomenon confined almost exclusively to persons with a high degree of somatotonia. 

These persons are so intensely extraverted as to be quite unaware of what is hap­pening in the lower levels of their minds. If for any reason their attention comes to be turned inwards, the resulting self-knowledge, because of its novelty and strangeness, presents itself with the force and quality of a revelation and their metwwia, or change of mind, is sudden and thrilling. 

This change may be to religion, or it may be to something else for example, to psycho-analysis. To insist upon the necessity of violent conversion as the only means to salvation is about as sensible as it would be to insist upon the necessity of having a large face, heavy bones and powerful muscles. To those natujally subject to this kind of emotional upheaval, the doctrine that makes salvation dependent on conversion gives a complacency that is quite fatal to spiritual growth, while those who are incapable of it are filled with a no less fatal despair.

 Other examples of inadequate theologies based upon psycho­logical ignorance could easily be cited. 

One remembers, for instance, the sad case of Calvin, the cerebrotonic who took his own intellectual constructions so seriously that he lost all sense of reality, both human and spiritual. 

And then there is our liberal Protestantism, that predominantly viscerotonic heresy, which seems to have forgotten the very existence of the Father, Spirit and Logos and equates Christianity with an emotional attachment to Christ's humanity or (to use the currently popular phrase) 'the personality of Jesus,' worshipped idola­trously as though there were no other God. 

Even within all-comprehensive Catholicism we constantly hear complaints of the ignorant and self-centred directors, who impose upon the souls under their charge a religious dharma wholly unsuited to their nature—with results which writers such as St. John of the Cross describe as wholly pernicious. 

We see, then, that it is natural for us to think of God as possessed of the qualities which our temperament tends to make us perceive in Him; but unless nature finds a way of transcending itself by means of itself, we are lost.

 In the last analysis Philo is quite right in saying that those who do not conceive God purely and simply as the One injure, not God of course, but themselves and, along with themselves, their fellows.

The way of knowledge comes most naturally to persons whose temperament is predominantly cerebrotonic. By this I do not mean that the following of this way is easy for the cere-brotonic. His specially besetting sins are just as difficult to overcome as are the sins which beset the power-loving soma-totonic and the extreme viscerotonic with his gluttony for food and comfort and social approval.

 Rather I mean that the idea that such a way exists and can be followed (either by discrimin­ation, or through non-attached work and one-pointed devo­tion) is one which spontaneously occurs to the cerebrotonic. 

At all levels of culture he is the natural monotheist; and this natural monotheist, as Dr. Radin's examples of primitive theo­logy clearly show, is often a monotheist of the tat tvam asi, inner-light school. Persons committed by their temperament to one or other of the two kinds of extraversion are natural polytheists. 

But natural polytheists can, without much diffi­culty, be convinced of the theoretical superiority of mono­theism. The nature of human reason is such that there is an intrinsic plausibility about any hypothesis which seeks to explain the manifold in terms of unity, to reduce apparent multiplicity to essential identity. 

And from this theoretical monotheism the half-converted polytheist can, if he chooses, go on (through practices suitable to his own particular tem­perament) to the actual realization of the divine Ground of his own and all other beings. 

He can, I repeat, and sometimes he actually does. But very often he does not. There are many theoretical monotheists whose whole life and every action prove that in reality they are still what their temperament inclines them to be—polytheists, worshippers not of the one God they sometimes talk about, but of the many gods, national­istic and technological, financial and familial, to whom in practice they pay all their allegiance.

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In Christian art the Saviour has almost invariably been represented as slender, small-boned, unemphatically muscled. Large, powerful Christs are a rather shocking exception to a very ancient rule. Of Rubens' crucifixions William Blake contemptuously wrote:

I understood Christ was a carpenter

And not a brewer's servant, my good sir.

In a word, the traditional Jesus is thought of as a man of predominantly ectomorphic physique and therefore, by impli­cation, of predominantly cerebrotonic temperament. The central core of primitive Christian doctrine confirms the essen­tial correctness of the iconographic tradition.

 The religion of the Gospels is what we should expect from a cerebrotonic—not, of course, from any cerebrotonic, but from one who had used the psycho-physical peculiarities of his own nature to transcend nature, who had followed his particular dharma to its spiritual goal.

 The insistence that 

• the Kingdom of Heaven is within; 
• the ignoring of ritual; 
• the slightly contemptuous attitude towards legalism, 
• towards the ceremonial routines of organized religion, 
• towards hallowed days and places; 
• the general other-worldliness; 
• the emphasis laid upon restraint, not merely of overt action, 
• but even of desire and unexpressed intention; 
• the indifference to the splendours of material civil­ization and the love of poverty as one of the greatest of goods; 
• the doctrine that non-attachment must be carried even into the sphere of family relationships and that even devotion to the highest goals of merely human ideals, even the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees, may be idolatrous distractions from the love of God

—all these are characteristically cerebrotonic ideas, such as would never have occurred spontaneously to the extraverted power lover or the equally extraverted viscerotonic.



Primitive Buddhism is no less predominantly cerebrotonic than primitive Christianity, and so is Vedanta, the metaphysi­cal discipline which lies at the heart of Hinduism. 

Confucian­ism, on the contrary, is a mainly viscerotonic system—familial, ceremonious and thoroughly this-worldly. And in Moham­medanism we find a system which incorporates strongly soma-totonic elements. Hence Islam's black record of holy wars and persecutions—a record comparable to that of later Christian­ity, after that religion had so far compromised with unregener­ate somatotonia as to call its ecclesiastical organization 'the Church Militant.'

So far as the achievement of man's final end is concerned, it is as much of a handicap to be an extreme cerebrotonic or an extreme viscerotonic as it is to be an extreme somatotonic. But whereas the cerebrotonic and the viscerotonic cannot do much harm except to themselves and those in immediate contact with them, the extreme somatotonic, with his native aggres­siveness, plays havoc with whole societies. 

From one point of view civilization may be defined as a complex of religious, legal and educational devices for preventing extreme somatotonics from doing too much mischief, and for directing their irre­pressible energies into socially desirable channels. 

Confucian­ism and Chinese culture have sought to achieve this end by inculcating filial piety, good manners and an amiably viscero-tonic epicureanism—the whole reinforced somewhat incon­gruously by the cerebrotonic spirituality and restraints of Buddhism and classical Taoism. 

In India the caste system represents an attempt to subordinate military, political and financial power to spiritual authority; and the education given to all classes still insists so strongly upon the fact that man's final end is unitive knowledge of God that even at the present time, even after nearly two hundred years of gradually acceler­ating Europeanization, successful somatotonics will, in middle life, give up wealth, position and power to end their days as humble seekers after enlightenment. 

In Catholic Europe, as in India, there was an effort to subordinate temporal power to spiritual authority; but since the Church itself exercised tem­poral power through the agency of political prelates and mitred business men, the effort was never more than partially success­ful. 

After the Reformation even the pious wish to limit temporal power by means of spiritual authority was com­pletely abandoned. Henry VIII made himself, in Stubbs's words, the Pope, the whole Pope, and something more than the Pope,' and his example has been followed by most heads of states ever since. Power has been limited only by other powers, not by an appeal to first principles as interpreted by those who are morally and spiritually qualified to know what they are talking about. 

Meanwhile, the interest in religion has everywhere declined and even among believing Christians the Perennial Philosophy has been to a great extent replaced by a metaphysic of inevitable progress and an evolving God, by a passionate concern, not with eternity, but with future time. And almost suddenly, within the last quarter of a century, there has been consummated what Sheldon calls a 'somatotonic revolution,' directed against all that is characteristically cerebro-tonic in the theory and practice of traditional Christian culture. Here are a few symptoms of this somatotonic revolution.

In traditional Christianity, as in all the great religious formu­lations of the Perennial Philosophy, it was axiomatic that contemplation is the end and purpose of action. Today the great majority even of professed Christians regard action (directed towards material and social progress) as the end, and analytic thought (there is no question any longer of integral thought, or contemplation) as the means to that end.

In traditional Christianity, as in the other formulations of the Perennial Philosophy, the secret of happiness and the way to salvation were to be sought, not in the external environment, but in the individual's state of mind with regard to the environ­ment. 

Today the all-important thing is not the state of the mind, but the state of the environment. Happiness and moral progress depend, it is thought, on bigger and better gadgets and a higher standard of living.

In traditional Christian education the stress was all on restraint; with the recent rise of the 'progressive school' it is all on activity and 'self-expression.'

Traditionally Christian good manners outlawed all expres­sions of pleasure in the satisfaction of physical appetites. 'You may love a screeching owl, but you must not love a roasted fowl'—such was the rhyme on which children were brought up in the nurseries of only fifty years ago. 

Today the young unceasingly proclaim how much they 'love' and 'adore' differ­ent kinds of food and drink; adolescents and adults talk about the 'thrills' they derive from the stimulation of their sexuality. 

The popular philosophy of life has ceased to be based on the classics of devotion and the rules of aristocratic good breeding, and is now moulded by the writers of advertising copy, whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extraverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell. 

Technological progress is in part the product of the somatotonic revolution, in part the producer and sustainer of that revolution. The extraverted attention results in technological discoveries. (Significantly enough, a high degree of material civilization has always been associated with the large-scale and officially sanctioned practice of polytheism.) 

In their turn, technological discoveries have resulted in mass-production; and mass-production, it is obvi­ous, cannot be kept going at full blast except by persuading the whole population to accept the somatotonic Weltanschauung and act accordingly.

Like technological progress, with which it is so closely associated in so many ways, modern war is at once a cause and a result of the somatotonic revolution. Nazi education, which was specifically education for war, had two principal aims: to encourage the manifestation of somatotonia in those most richly endowed with that component of personality, and to make the rest of the population feel ashamed of its relaxed amiability or its inward-looking sensitiveness and tendency towards self-restraint and tender-mindedness. 

During the war the enemies of Nazism have been compelled, of course, to borrow from the Nazis' educational philosophy. All over the world millions of young men and even of young women are being systematically educated to be 'tough' and to value 'toughness' beyond every other moral quality. 

With this system of somatotonic ethics is associated the idolatrous and polytheistic theology of nationalism—a pseudo-religion far stronger at the present time for evil and division than is Chris­tianity, or any other monotheistic religion, for unification and good. 

In the past most societies tried systematically to dis­courage somatotonia. This was a measure of self-defence; they did not want to be physically destroyed by the power-loving aggressiveness of their most active minority, and they did not want to be spiritually blinded by an excess of extra­version. 

During the last few years all this has been changed. What, we may apprehensively wonder, will be the result of the current world-wide reversal of an immemorial social policy? Time alone will show.

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somatotonic

Designating a personality type characterised as aggressive and extroverted.