Boris Sidis

“ Yes, there sits the savage with a brain far surpassing the needs of his environment, harboring powers of a Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, of a Shakespeare, Goethe, Darwin, and Newton. The ancient German and Briton hardly differed in their mental powers from their contemporaries, the civilized Egyptian and Babylonian. What, then did those Aryan savages do with their richly endowed mental energies? Nothing. The mental energy was lying fallow―it was reserve energy―energy for future use, for the use of future ages of coming civilization. ”

“ In the study of functional nervous and mental diseases, in the study of neurasthenia, or psychasthenia, hysteria, and insistent or recurrent mental states, one becomes more and more impressed with the fact that beyond the psycho-physiological limits of energy, available for the habitual adjustments to the ordinary external conditions of life, there is a vast store of reserve energy whose depths one cannot gauge. ”

“ We must remember that civilization is but of yesterday, and that the reserve energy is hardly touched upon.
In the treatment of the phenomena of psycho-physiological dissociation, in the protean symptoms of nervous and mental exhaustion, we should not forget this biological principle of reserve energy, and should make attempts to use it. In many cases the inhibitions become too heavy and the thresholds too high. We must loosen the grip of some of the inhibitions and lower the thresholds, thus utilizing a fresh supply of reserve energy. ”

“ Biologically regarded, we can well see the importance of such stored or reserve energy. In the struggle for existence, the organism whose energies are economically used and well guarded against waste will meet with better success in the process of survival of the fittest, or will have better chances in the process of natural selection. ”

“ The constant wars and national misfortunes of the Jews released their reserve energy making of them a race of prophets, apostles and martyrs, deeply affecting the course of human civilization. The wars of the Reformation open a new era of free development of modern European civilization. The English, American, and French revolutions have released new supplies of energies and have opened a new arena for the free development of political, social, and industrial forces. ”

“ The normal is either the usual, the habitual, the customary, or is, at best, an ideal construction of the variations of life more or less successfully adjusted to the conditions of the external environment. ”

“ But what about the cultivated man? Does he suffer from neurasthenia, from nervous impotence, because, as some would have it, on account of the strain of civilized life he has exhausted his store of nervous energy? ”

“ Reserve energy becomes manifested under the influence of radical changes in the environment, just as we have found that psycho-physiological systems react and start into function under the influence of special conditions and special appropriate qualitative stimuli. ”

“ All the experiments in physiology consist practically in the production of so many pathological conditions and states. When the physiologist makes injections, sections and stimulations by various agencies, what else does he effect if not the production of the pathological, in order to learn the physiological action of the various tissues and organs? ”

“ It is not likely that acquired characteristics brought about by social life will change so radically the brain in the course of some forty or fifty generations that separate the civilized man from his savage progenitor ”

“ In the river where the animals have to starve, the reproductive organs become large, while the muscles waste away. Here, in time of affluence, the muscles store up nutritive material for the purpose of maintaining the life of the animal during influence on the destiny of humanity. ”

“ The liberal ingestion of proteid might be another instance of the principle of abundance ruling the structure and energies of the animal body. There is, however, a theory that in just this single instance the minimum is meant by nature to be also the optimum. ”

“ We have pointed out the significance of inhibitions in keeping back the systemic neuron energy from fully being discharged under normal conditions of life, and we have also shown that the removal of inhibitions results in the full liberation of the accumulated neuron energy. ”

“ From this standpoint pathology is of the utmost importance in the study of organic life. The pathological being the normal out of place, the abnormal being the normal under special conditions, pathology that deals with the abnormal gives us a deep insight into the general laws of normal physiological activity. ”

“ In starvation, nitrogenous products continue to be eliminated in the urine, which, according to Folin, are derived from exogenous sources, that is, from ingested proteid and not from broken-down organ tissues. ”

“ But it is a theory for the support of which there is not a single fact. On the contrary, some facts seem to indicate that Nature meant differently. Such facts are, for instance, the abundance of proteolytic enzymes in the digestive canal and the great capacity of the canal for absorption of proteids. ”