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The evolution of man from the lower biological types is sufficient reason for giving the primitive autonomic apparatus the greatest emphasis in formulating a conception of the personality. The lowest biological organisms have a relatively highly developed autonomic apparatus but a poorly developed projicient apparatus as the instrument by which the autonomic apparatus masters its environment. The old assumption that “the brain is the organ of the mind” is entirely unsatisfactory for localizing or explaining the dynamic forces that make up the personality.
The autonomic apparatus, as herein conceived is constituted of the digestive, circulatory, respiratory and urinary systems, the glands of internal and external secretion and their ganglionic nervous systems; i.e., the ganglionic nervous systems lying outside of the brain and spinal cord and those ganglionic types of centers imbedded in the brain stem and spinal cord. It is obvious that this is the apparatus that regulates the accumulation and assimilation of energic products from the environment, regulates their transformation, distribution and use, and the elimination of the waste products. It might be said that these processes constitute about all the fundamental functions of living and growth, and that the striped muscle apparatus and its cerebrospinal nervous system has been developed in order to obtain the necessary means from the environment.
The physiological researches of Cannon and Carlson on the peripheral origin, in the stomach, of the craving for food, as a typical acquisitive-assimilative compulsion, and Mosso's and Pellacani's experiments on the postural tonus of the bladder, showing that when the grip of the bladder wall on the inert fluid contents raises the pressure to over eighteen cubic centimeters (water), a type of localized itching is aroused which constitutes the desire or craving to urinate, and which, as it becomes vigorous, compels the organism to behave so as to relieve the hypertension of