"The Thinker"
ll those in whom the nervous system is more highly developed than any other are Cerebrals.
This system consists of the brain and nerves. The name comes from the cerebrum or thinking part of the brain.
Meditation, imagining, dreaming, visualizing and all voluntary mental processes take place in the cerebrum, or brain, as we shall hereinafter call it. The brain is the headquarters of the nervous system—its "home office"—just as the stomach is the home office of the Alimentive system and the heart and lungs the home office of the Thoracic.
Your Freight System
¶ The Thoracic system may be compared to a great freight system, with each of its tributaries—from the main trunk
arteries down to the tiniest blood vessels—starting from the heart and carrying its cargo of blood to every part of the body by means of the power furnished by the lungs.
Your Telegraph System
¶ But the nervous system is more like an intricate telegraph system. Its network of nerves runs from every outlying point of the body into the great headquarters of the brain, carrying sense messages notifying us of everything heard, seen,
touched, tasted or smelled.
As soon as the brain receives a message from any of the five senses it decides what to do about it and if action is
decided on, sends its orders back over the nerve wires to the muscles telling them what action to perform.
Your Working Agents
¶ This latter fact—that the muscles are the working agents of the body—also explains why the Muscular type is naturally more active than any of the others.
Source of Your Raw Materials
¶ The body may be compared to a perfectly organized transportation system and factory combined. The Alimentive
system furnishes the raw materials for all the systems to work on.
Stationary Equipment
¶ The bones of the body are like the telegraph poles, the bridges and structures for the protection and permanence of
the work carried on by the other systems of the body.
Now poles, bridges and structures are less movable, less alterable than any of the other parts of a transportation system, and likewise the bony element in man makes him less alterable in every other way than he would otherwise be. A
predominance of it in any individual indicates a preponderance of this immovable tendency in his nature.
Mind and matter are so inseparably bound up together in man's organism that it is impossible to say just where mind
ends and matter begins. But this we know: that even the mind of the bony person partakes of the same unbending
qualities that are found in the bones of his body.
"Every Cell Thinks"
¶ Thomas A. Edison, as level-headed and unmystical a scientist as lives, says, "Every cell in us thinks." Human Analysis proves to us that something very near this is the case for it shows how the habitual mental processes of every individual are always "off the same piece of goods" as his body.
Thus the fat man's mind acts as his body acts—evenly, unhurriedly, easefully and comfortably. The florid man's mind has the same quickness and resourcefulness that distinguish all his bodily processes. The muscular man's mind acts in the
same strenuous way that his body acts, while the bony man's brain always has an immovable quality closely akin to the
boniness of his body.
He is not necessarily a "bonehead," but this phrase, like "fathead," is no accident.
The Large Head on the Small Body
¶ As pointed out before, the larger any organ or system the more will it tend to express itself. So, the large-headed, small-bodied man runs more to mental than to physical activities, and is invariably more mature in his thinking. (See
Chart 9) Conversely, the Alimentive type gets its traits from that elemental stage in human development when we did little but get and assimilate food, and when thinking was of the simplest form. In those days man was more physical than
mental; he had a large stomach but a small head.
So today we see in the pure Alimentive type people who resemble their Alimentive ancestors. They have the same
proportionately large stomach and proportionately small head,—with the stomach-system dominating their thoughts,
actions and lives.
The Cerebral is the exact opposite of this. He has a top-heavy head, proportionately large for his body, and a
proportionately undeveloped stomach system.
His Small Assimilative System
¶ The extreme Cerebral differs from other types chiefly in the fact that while his head is unusually large compared to the body, his alimentive, thoracic, muscular and bony systems are smaller and less developed than the average. The latter
fact is due to the same law which causes the Alimentive to have a large body and a small head. Nature is a wonderful
efficiency engineer. She provides only as much space as is required for the functioning of any particular organ, giving extra space only to those departments that need it.
The Cerebral-Alimentive is the combination which makes most of the "magnates" and the self-made millionaires. Such a man has all the Alimentive's desires for the luxurious comforts and "good things of life," combined with sufficient brains to enable him to make the money necessary to get them.
Nature doesn't give the pure Alimentive a large skull because he doesn't need it for the housing of his proportionately small brain, but concentrates on giving him a big stomach fitted with "all modern conveniences." On the other hand, the head of the Cerebral is large because his brain is large. The skull which is pliable and unfinished at birth grows to
conform to the size and shape of the brain as the glove takes on the shape of the hand inside it.
Stomach vs. Brain
¶ Because the Alimentive and Cerebral systems are farthest removed from each other, evolutionally, a large brain and a large stomach are a very unusual combination. Such an individual would be a combination of the Alimentive and Cerebral types and would have the Alimentive's fat body with a large highbrow head of the Cerebral. The possession of these two highly developed but opposite kinds of systems places their owner constantly in the predicament of deciding between the big meal he wants and the small one he knows he should have for good brain work.
We are so constructed that brain and stomach—each of which demands an extra supply of blood when performing its
work—can not function with maximum efficiency simultaneously.
Why Light Lunches
¶ When your stomach is busy digesting a big meal your brain takes a vacation. This little fact is responsible for millions of light luncheons daily. The strenuous manual worker can empty a full dinner pail and profit by it but the brain worker long ago discovered that a heavy midday meal gave him a heavy brain for hours afterwards.
Clear Thinking and a Clear Stomach
¶ Clear thinking demands a clear stomach because an empty stomach means that the blood reserves so necessary to
vivid thinking are free to go to the brain. Without good blood coursing at a fairly rapid rate through the brain no man can think keenly or concentratedly. This explains why you think of so many important things when your stomach is empty that never occur to you when your energy is being monopolized by digestion.
Heavy Dinners and Heavy Speeches
¶ All public speakers have learned that a heavy dinner means a heavy speech.
Elbert Hubbard's rule when on his speaking tours was one every orator should follow. "Ten dollars extra if I have to eat,"
said Fra Elbertus—a far cry from the days when we "fed up" the preacher at Sunday dinner with the expectation of hearing a better sermon!
Uses His Head
¶ Just as assimilation is the favorite activity of the Alimentive type, head work is the favorite activity of the large-headed Cerebral. He is so far removed, evolutionally, from the stomach stage that his stomach is as much a remnant with him as the brain is a rudiment with the extreme Alimentive.
The extra blood supply which nature furnishes to any over-developed part of the body also tends to encourage him in
thinking, just as the same condition encourages the fat man in eating.
Forgets to Eat
¶ An Alimentive never forgets dinner time.
But the Cerebral is so much more interested in food for his brain than food for his body that he can go without his meals and not mind it. He is likely to have a book and a cracker at his meals—and then forget to eat the cracker!
Physical Sensitivity
¶ We are "mental" in proportion to the sensitiveness of our mental organization. The Cerebral possesses the most highly developed brain center of any type and is therefore more sensitive to all those stimuli which act upon the mind.
His whole body bespeaks it. The fineness of his features is in direct contrast to some of the other types. The unusual size of his brain denotes a correspondingly intricate organization of nerves, for the nerves are tiny elongations of the brain.
The intellectual sensitiveness of any individual can be accurately estimated by noting the comparative size of his brain and body.
His Triangular Head and Face
¶ A triangle is the geometrical figure approximated by the Cerebral's front face and head.
If he is a pure, extreme Cerebral a triangle is again what you are reminded of when you look at his head from the side, for his head stands on a small neck, his forehead stands out at the top, while his back head is long. These bring the widest part of his head nearer the top than we find it in other types.
Delicate Hands
¶ A thin, delicate hand denotes a larger-than-average Cerebral element. (See Chart 10)
Smooth Fingers
¶ What have long been known as "smooth fingers" are typical of the Cerebral. These are not to be confused with the fat, pudgy babyish fingers of the Alimentive, for though the latter's fingers are smooth around, they do not present straight outlines at the sides. They puff out between the joints.
Smooth fingers are characteristic of the extreme Cerebral type. They are called this because their outlines run straight up and down.
The joints of the Alimentive finger (See Chart 2) mark the narrowest places owing to the fact that the joints are not
changeable. In the Osseous fingers (See Chart 8) the opposite is true. The joints mark the widest spots and the spaces between are sunken.
The fingers of the Thoracic are inclined to be pointed like his head, while the Muscular's fingers are square at the end and look the power they possess.
¶ But the Cerebral has fingers unlike any of these. There is no fat to make them pudgy and no muscle to make them firm.
Neither are there large joints to make them knotty. Their outlines therefore run in almost straight lines and the whole hand presents a more frail, aesthetic appearance.
Meditation His Keynote
¶ Thinking, contemplating, reflecting—all the mental processes coming under the head of "meditation"—constitute the keynote of this type.
The Alimentive lives to eat, the Thoracic to feel, the Muscular to act, the Osseous to stabilize, but the Cerebral lives to meditate.
Air Castles
¶ He loves to plan, imagine, dream day-dreams, visualize and go over and over in his mind the manifold possibilities,
probabilities and potentialities of many things.
When he carries this to extremes—as the person with a huge head and tiny body is likely to do—he often overlooks the
question of the practicability of the thing he is planning. He inclines to go "wild-catting," to dream dreams that are impossible of fruition.
Thought for Thought's Sake
¶ He will sit by the hour or by the day thinking out endless ultimates, for the sheer pleasure it gives him. Other men blame him, criticise him and ridicule him for this and for the most part he does fail of the practical success by which the efficient American measures everything.
But the fact must never be forgotten that the world owes its progress to the men who could see beyond their nose, who
could conceive of things no one had ever actually seen.
This type, more than any other, has been the innovator in all forms of human progress.
The Dreamer
¶ "Everything accomplished starts with the dream of it," is a saying we all know to be true. Yet we go on forever giving all the big prizes to the doers. But the man who can only dream lives in a very hostile world. His real world is his thoughts but whenever he steps out of them into human society he feels a stranger and he is one.
Doesn't Fit
¶ The world of today is ruled by people who accomplish. "Putting it over," "delivering the goods," "getting it across," are a part of our language because they represent the standards of the average American today.
The Cerebral is as much out of place in such an environment as a fish is on dry land. He knows it and he shows it. He
doesn't know what the other kind are driving at and they know so little of what he is driving at that they have invented a special name for him—the "nut."
Doing isn't his line. He prefers the pleasures of "thinking over" to all the "putting over" in the world. This type usually is a failure because he takes it all out in dreaming without ever doing the things necessary to make his dream come true.
A "Visionary"
¶ These predilections for overlooking the obvious, the tangible and the necessary elements in everyday existence tend
to make of the Cerebral what he is so often called—a "visionary."
For instance, he will build up in his mind the most imposing superstructure for an invention and confidently tell you "it will make millions," but forget to inform himself on such essential questions as "will it work?" "Is it transportable?" or "Is there any demand for it?"
Ahead of His Time
¶ "He was born ahead of his time" applies oftenest to a man of this type.
He has brains to see what the world needs and not infrequently sees how the world could get it. But he is so averse to action himself that unless active people take up his schemes they seldom materialize.
What We Owe to the Dreamers
¶ Men in whom the Cerebral type predominated anticipated every step man has made in his political, social, individual, industrial, religious and economic evolution. They have seen it decades and sometimes centuries in advance. But they
were always ridiculed at first.
The Mutterings of Morse
¶ History is replete with the stories of unappreciated genius. In Washington, D. C., you will have pointed out to you a great elm, made historic by Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph. He could not make the successful people of his day give him a hearing, but he was so wrapped up in his invention that he used to sit under this tree whenever the weather permitted, and explain all about it to the down-and-outers and any one else who would stop. "Listen to the mutterings of that poor old fool" said the wise ones as they hurried by on the other side of the street. But today people come from everywhere to see "The Famous Morse Elm" and do homage to the great mind that invented the telegraph.
"Langley's Folly"
¶ Today we fly from continent to continent and air travel is superseding land and water transportation whenever great
speed is in demand. A man receives word that his child is dangerously ill; he steps into an airplane and in less than half the time it would take trains or motors to carry him, alights at his own door.
Commerce, industry, war and the future of whole nations are being revolutionized by this man-made miracle. Yet it is but a few short years since S. P. Langley was sneered at from one end of this country to the other because he stooped to
the "folly" of inventing a "flying machine."
The Trivial Telephone
¶ Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. But it was many years before he could induce anybody to finance it,
though some of the wealthiest, and therefore supposedly wisest, business men of the day were asked to do so. None of
them would risk a dollar on it. Even after it had been tested at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and found to work perfectly, its possibilities were so little realized that for a long while no one could be found to furnish the funds necessary to place it upon the market.
The Wizardry of Wireless
¶ Then after the world had become accustomed to transacting millions of dollars worth of business daily over the once
despised telegraph and telephone it took out its doubts on Marconi and his "wireless telegraphy." "It's impossible," they said. "Talk without wires? Never!"
But now the radio needles pierce the blue from San Diego to Shanghai and from your steamer in mid-ocean you can say
good night to your loved one in Denver.
Frank Bacon's Play
¶ Ideas always have to go begging at first, and the greater the idea the rougher the sledding.
The most successful play ever put on in America was "Lightnin'," written by Frank Bacon, a typical Cerebral-Osseous. It ran every night for three years in New York City. It has made a million people happy and a million dollars for its sponsors.
But when Mr. Bacon, who also plays the title role, took it to the New York producers they refused it a try-out. But
because he had faith in his dream and persisted, his name and his play have become immortal.
An Ideal Combination
¶ The ideal combination is a dreamer who can DO or a doer who knows the power of a DREAM. Thinking and acting—
almost every individual is doing too much of one and too little of the other!
The World's Two Classes
¶ The world is divided roughly into these two classes: those who act without thinking (and as a result are often in jail); and those who think without acting (and as a result are often in the poorhouse).
To be a Success
¶ To be a successful individual today you have got to dream and then DO; plan and then PRODUCE; contemplate and
then CONSTRUCT; think it out and then WORK it out.
If you do the latter at the expense of the former you are doomed to work forever for other people, to play some other
man's game. If you do the former at the expense of the latter you are doomed to know only the fringes of life, never to be taken seriously and never to achieve.
Pitfalls for Dreamers
¶ If you are inclined to take your pleasure out in cerebrating instead of creating; if it suffices you to see a thing in your imagination whether it ever comes to pass or not, you are at a decided disadvantage in this hustling world; and you will never be a success.
Pitfalls for the Doer
¶ On the other hand if you are content to do what other men dream about and never have dreams of your own you will
probably always have a berth but will never have a million. You will exist but you will never know what it is to live.
The Hungry Philosopher
¶ The extreme Cerebral can sit on a park bench with an empty purse and an empty stomach and get as much pleasure
out of reflecting on the "whichness of the what and the whitherness of the wherefore" as an Alimentive gets out of a planked steak. Needless to say, each is an enigma to the other. Yet most people imagine that because both are human
and both walk on their hind legs they are alike. They are no more alike than a cow and a canary.
His Frail Body
¶ The extreme Cerebral type finds it difficult to do things because, as we have seen, he is deficient in muscle—one of the vital elements upon which activity and accomplishment are based. This type has little muscle, little bone, and little fat.
Deficient in "Horse Power"
¶ He is not inactive for the same reason that the Alimentive is; his stomach processes do not slow him down. But his
muscles are so undeveloped that he has little inward urge toward activity and little force back of his movements. His
heart and lungs are small, so that he also lacks "steam" and "horse power."
He prefers to sit rather than to move, exactly as the Muscular prefers to be "up and doing" rather than to sit still.
The Man of Futile Movements
¶ Did you ever look on while a pure Cerebral man tried to move a kitchen stove? Ever ask the dreamer in your house to
bring down a trunk from the attic?
Will you ever forget the almost human perversity with which that stove and that trunk resisted him; or how amusing it
looked to see a grown man outwitted at every turn by an inert mass?
"I have carried on a life-long feud with inanimate things," a pure Cerebral friend remarked to us recently. "I have a fight on my hands every time I attempt to use a pair of scissors, a knife and fork, a hammer or a collar button."
His Jerky Walk
¶ Because he is short the Cerebral takes short steps. Because he lacks muscle he lacks a powerful stride. As a result he has a walk that is irregular and sometimes jerky.
When he walks slowly this jerk is not apparent, but when hurried it is quite noticeable.
Is Lost in Chairs
¶ The Cerebral gets lost in the same chair that is itself lost under the large, spreading Osseous; and for the same
reason. Built for the average, chairs are as much too large for the Cerebral as they are too small for the big bony man.
So the Cerebral's legs dangle and his arms don't reach.
Dislikes Social Life
¶ Though a most sympathetic friend, the Cerebral does not make many friends and does not care for many. He is too
abstract to add to the gaiety of social gatherings, for these are based on the enjoyment of the concrete.
Enjoys the Intellectuals
¶ Readers, thinkers, writers—intellectuals like himself—are the kinds of people the Cerebral enjoys most.
Another reason why he has few friends is because these people, being in the great minority, are not easy to find.
Ignores the Ignorant
¶ People who let others do their thinking for them and those who are not aware of the great things going on in world
movements, are not popular with this type. He sometimes has a secret contempt for them and ignores them as
completely as they ignore him.
Avoids the Limelight
¶ Modesty and reserve, almost as marked in the men as in the women, characterize this extreme type. They do things of
great moment sometimes—invent something or write something extraordinary—but even then they try to avoid being
lionized.
They prefer the shadows rather than the spotlight. Thus they miss many of the good things less brainy and more
aggressive people gain. But it does no good to explain this to a Cerebral. He enjoys retirement and is constantly missing opportunities because he refuses to "mix."
Cares Little for Money
¶ Friends mean something to the Cerebral, fame sometimes means much but money means little. In this he is the exact
opposite of the Osseous, to whom the pecuniary advantages or disadvantages of a thing are always significant.
The pure Cerebral finds it difficult to interest himself in his finances. He seldom counts his change. He will go away from his room leaving every cent he owns lying on the dresser—and then forget to lock the door!
This type of person almost never asks for a raise. He is too busy dreaming dreams to plan what he will do in his old age.
He prefers staying at the same job with congenial associates to finding another even if it paid more.
Very Often Poor
¶ Since we get only what we go after in this world, it follows that the Cerebral is often poor. To make money one must want money. Competition for it is so keen that only those who want it badly and work with efficiency ever get very much of it.
The Cerebral takes so little interest in money that he gets lost in the shuffle. Not until he wakes up some morning with the poorhouse staring him in the face does he give it serious consideration. And then he does not do much about it.
Almost Never Rich
¶ History shows that few people of the pure Cerebral type ever became rich. Even the most brilliant gave so much more
thought to their mission than the practical ways and means that they were usually seriously handicapped for the funds
necessary to its materialization.
Madame Curie, co-discoverer of radium, said to be the greatest living woman of this type, is world-famous and has done humanity a noble service. But her experiments were always carried on against great disadvantages because she had not
the financial means to purchase more than the most limited quantities of the precious substance.
About Clothes
¶ Clothes are almost the last thing the Cerebral thinks about. As we have seen, all the other types have decided
preferences as to their clothes—the Alimentive demands comfort, the Thoracic style, the Muscular durability and the
Osseous sameness—but the extreme Cerebral type says "anything will do." So we often see him with a coat of one color, trousers of another and a hat of another, with no gloves at all and his tie missing.
Often Absent-Minded
¶ We have always said people were "absent-minded" when their minds were absent from what they were doing. This often applies to the Cerebral for he is capable of greater concentration than other types; also he is so frequently
compelled to do things in which he has no interest that his mind naturally wanders to the things he cares about.
A Cerebral professor whom we know sometimes appeared before his Harvard classes in bedroom slippers. A Thoracic
would not be likely to let his own brother catch him in his!
Writes Better than He Talks
¶ The poor talker sometimes surprises us by being a good writer. Such a one is usually of the Cerebral type.
He likes to think out every phase of a thing and put it into just the right words before giving it to the world. So, many a Cerebral who does little talking outside his intimate circle does a good deal of surreptitious writing. It may be only the keeping of a diary, jotting down memoranda or writing long letters to his friends, but he will write something. Some of the world's greatest ideas have come to light first in the forgotten manuscripts of people of this type who died without
showing their writings to any one. Evidently they did not consider them of sufficient importance or did not care as much about publishing them as about putting them down.
An Inveterate Reader
¶ Step into the reference rooms of your city library on a summer's day and you will stand more chance of finding
examples of this extreme type there than in any other spot.
You may have thought these extreme types are difficult to locate, since the average American is a combination. But it is easy to find any of them if you look in the right places.
In every case you will find them in the very places where a study of Human Analysis would tell you to look for them.
Where to Look for Pure Types
¶ When you wish to find some pure Alimentives, go to a restaurant that is famous for its rich foods. When you want to
see several extreme Thoracics, drop into any vaudeville show and take your choice from the actors or from the audience.
When you are looking for pure Musculars go to a boxing match or a prize fight and you will be surrounded by them.
When looking for the Osseous attend a convention of expert accountants, bankers, lumbermen, hardware merchants or
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