William Sheldon,Aldous Huxley,and the Dartington connection: Body typing schemes offer a new path to a utopian future

Abstract

When George Bernard Shaw described Dartington Hall as a ‘salon in the countryside’, he was referring to the maelstrom of ideas, conversations, and experimentation around psychology, mysticism, and spirituality within the estate's larger ethos of community living and rural reform. Disenchanted with the effects of industrialization and the ravages of the First World War, American railway heiress Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, purchased the extensive Devonshire estate in 1925 and began to encourage regular visits and social and spiritual advice from prominent British interwar intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. As the estate's activities expanded during the 1930s, Dorothy enlisted the help of visiting American constitutional psychologist William Sheldon to assess and advise upon the well-being of children attending Dartington's experimental school. Sheldon's ‘Promethean Psychology’ and ‘Somatotyping’ body classification system offered the Dartington group, a social, spiritual, and ‘scientific’ alternative to Freudian understandings of the mind. Visitors such as Huxley, decades later, relied on Sheldon's somatotyping system to fashion a utopian education in Pala (in his last novel, Island) where the population might live in nonmaterialistic cooperative harmony. Dartington's attraction to the use of Sheldon's Promethean psychology in supporting a utopian view of progressive education was as short-lived as were Pala's utopian ambitions decades later. In years to come, however, elements of Sheldon's views continued to find an audience among physical educators and sports scientists, who saw in somatotypes a useful guide for assessing talent identification and future sporting success.

Introduction

In 1962, a year before his death, Aldous Huxley published his last novel, Island, bringing together a range of ideas, philosophies, and techniques to portray his vision of a utopian society and a genuinely progressive education system to facilitate it (Huxley, 1962). Though never as well known as his hugely popular and prophetic dystopian satire, Brave New World, written three decades before, Island was a comprehensive, albeit eclectic synthesis of those religious, political, social, scientific, and educational ideologies that had long intrigued Huxley. And while Charles Holmes, one of Huxley's early biographers, called the characters in Island ‘flat, stereotyped, and oversimplified’, he nevertheless deemed the novel a ‘challenging and courageous’ synthesis of East and West and a frankly didactic statement about cosmic truth and the nature of man (Holmes, 1970: 180).

Undergirding Huxley's efforts to articulate a ‘perennial philosophy’ describing the universal truths he had long been in search of (particularly within certain Hindu and Buddhist spiritual traditions) was an equally enduring interest in understanding the connections between mind and body (Kripal, 2008: 86–91). ¹ In Island, the citizens of the remote community of Pala practiced a form of Mahayana Buddhism ‘shot through and through with Tantra’, structuring their society around a contemplative form of sexuality called maithuna, as well as the regular use of hallucinogenic substances known as moksha-medicine (ibid.: 90). ² Children on Pala were educated in hypnotism, autosuggestion, and bodily techniques (including F. M. Alexander's technique to improve posture) as ways to acquire ‘a training in applied physiology and psychology … a training of the whole mind-body in all its aspects’ (Huxley, 1962: 237).

Like the physically distinct Alphas, Gammas, and Epsilons in Huxley's Brave New World, the citizens of Pala were also organized around their distinct ‘types’ of physiques and corresponding temperaments (personality types), though with more benevolent intentions. Such classifications reflected Huxley's enduring interest in body typing schemes and their meanings—particularly the ‘somatotype’, which he learned about from American constitutional psychologist William Sheldon in the 1930s and whose views he later called upon in many of his writings. In Island, Palanese children were categorized according to their body type such that an onlooker might understand ‘precisely who or what, anatomically, biochemically and psychologically is this child? In the organic hierarchy, which takes precedence—his gut, his muscles, or his nervous system? And how near does he stand to the three polar extremes?’ (Huxley, 1962: 231).

Here, Huxley referred closely to Sheldon's system of body classification, which used detailed anthropometric measurements and posture photographs to underscore the three primary components believed to compose an individual's body build or somatotype: endomorphy (body roundness and softness), mesomorphy (body muscularity), and ectomorphy (thinness and linearity; Sheldon, Stevens, and Tucker, 1940). ³ Sheldon's research also claimed to demonstrate how those born as endomorphs tended to be lazy, social, and relaxed (viscerotonia), mesomorphs were typically vigorous and liable to aggressiveness (somatotonia), and ectomorphs were quiet and hypersensitive (cerebrotonia; Sheldon and Stevens, 1942). In Pala, children with specific somatotypes were understood to have corresponding personalities and were therefore assigned tasks and activities based on their ‘inborn wish’ to either dominate or control others, be sociable, or retreat shyly into their own inner worlds. It was particularly crucial, for example, to identify potential ‘Peter Pans’ (late maturing, sexually repressed introverts) or ‘Muscle People’ (large, muscular extroverts) among Palanese children and divert their attention to productive pursuits (such as rock climbing) in order to redirect otherwise dangerous and delinquent physiological tendencies.

In fact, Huxley's interest in adopting Sheldon's theories of physique and character (as well as his advocacy for their use in utopia-building) had steadily grown throughout the postwar period, alongside his long-standing interests in posture improvement and bodily transformation (Calcraft, 1980; Leavey, 2015). He had, for instance, been an enthusiastic supporter of the Alexander technique on mind–body re-education since 1935, and fully endorsed W. H. Bate's method for managing poor eyesight, a system he was pressed to adopt after damage to his eyes during his student years. ⁴ After his arrival in California, Huxley also became interested in the therapeutic and mind-expanding capabilities of hallucinogenic substances such as mescaline and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD; Bisbee et al., 2018). Others in his circle, including the British public intellectuals Gerald Heard and psychologists Abraham Maslow and Humphry Osmond also took an active interest in Sheldon's ideas and their perceived implications for scientifically (and holistically) articulating the relationships between mind and body. Huxley and Heard in particular, who arrived in California shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, played an important role in introducing a range of ideas around spiritualism and psychic phenomena, mysticism, pacifism, and self-help therapies to the American public and shaping the 1960s counterculture (Lawrence and Weisz, 1998; Tracy, 1998).

Knowing this, it is worth considering how, why, and where Sheldon's influence among this small yet significant group of 20th-century intellectuals came from. How were Sheldon's ideas about the connections between mind and body sustained for so many years in the writings of Huxley, who brought them into frequent conversation with his interests in alternative spirituality? Sheldon remained relatively absent from his supporters’ efforts to extend his theories in later years. By the 1950s, he was relegated by his colleagues to the annals of pseudoscience for his interests in criminal anthropology and increasingly virulent eugenicist and racist views. In fact, Sheldon's ‘preoccupation with the minutiae of anthropometric techniques’ and increasingly reactionary political views have been critiqued for leading 20th-century constitutionalism in a ‘radically reductionist and politically unpopular direction that ultimately destroyed its credibility’ (Lawrence and Weisz, 1998: 22; Tracy, 1998: 162). Today, Sheldonian ideas about holistically assessing the connections between mind and body have been deemed false and pseudoscientific. Nevertheless, Stephen Gatlin notes, Sheldon's efforts to bring psychology and medicine into meaningful conversation with modernist impulses merit serious scholarly attention—impulses he suggests were ‘derived from cultural forces very like those motivating literary modernists [such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard]’ (1997: 12).

In the spirit of bringing to light a now unorthodox intellectual hinterland, which once shadowed (and frequently butted heads with) a more mainstream history of the human sciences across the 20th century, our study focuses upon the far-reaching resonances of Sheldon's theories about mind and body. As early as the 1930s and for decades following, a small but nevertheless influential group of British intellectuals introduced his theories and perspectives into radically new arenas (to varying extents)—namely in the literary realm, as well as the burgeoning fields of psychedelics research and humanistic psychology. In our discussion, we suggest that Huxley and his circle's desire to provide scientific underpinnings for theories about mind–body connections (which, in turn, informed and bolstered their increasingly mystical worldviews during the postwar period) emerged out of conversations and collaboration at the experimental utopian community of Dartington Hall, led by American railway heiress Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her Yorkshire squire husband, Leonard Elmhirst, in Devonshire, England.

Arriving at Dartington Hall during the mid 1930s, Sheldon's convictions spoke to the Elmhirsts’ and their friends’ growing disenchantment with the effects of industrialization and the ravages of the First World War, and added fodder to their broad search for new pathways to a utopian future (Neima, 2022: 92). In fact, Dartington Hall was a ‘utopia with a difference’, as Leonard described it, since economics and psychology were offering new yardsticks of measurement that old utopias never possessed (Young, 1982: 100). While both the Elmhirsts were persuaded that mankind could be liberated through education, Leonard was ‘going better than the old utopias’, reflected former Dartington pupil Michael Young, by also putting faith in the methods of science (ibid.). Strongly influenced by his rural New England upbringing, extensive scientific training in psychology and medicine, and expansive interest in a variety of American and European holistic traditions, Sheldon's ideas fell quite comfortably in line with the Dartington group's preexisting philosophical leanings. These included understanding the connections between mind and body, the relationship of the self to a rapidly modernizing society, and the espoused implications for children's education and the development of ‘psychologically balanced’ adults. Sheldon, for his part, was more than ready to assert his influence on the broader links many of them perceived between psychology and religious and educational reform—not least their growing dissatisfaction with Freudian approaches to understanding the human mind.

Next, we examine how the activities at Dartington during the interwar years continued to provide inspiration for Huxley and his circle's utopian thinking and ensuing projects during the 1960s. We outline Huxley's efforts to introduce and popularize the somatotype to other countercultural figures and the American public more broadly, as well as his ambitious attempts at integrating the somatotype into a broader set of interests in Eastern and Western spiritual philosophies and practices and mind–body therapies. While Island exemplifies the clearest model of such a synthesis, we illustrate other examples along the way—some of which were abandoned or otherwise redirected along new lines (particularly in response to Sheldon's worsening professional reputation). In doing so, we suggest that Sheldon's theories—which he first entitled ‘Promethean Psychology’ (Sheldon, 1936: 5) ⁵ and later incorporated into his system of body classification called ‘Somatotyping’—offered this group of interwar intellectuals and postwar mystical expatriates a romantic yet practical and scientific ‘everyday theology’ that might support the kind of self-realization necessary to ‘transcend the materialist, atomised individualism of industrial civilization’ (Thomson, 2006: 120).

Dartington Hall and the Elmhirsts’ pedagogical vision

When William Sheldon became a guest of Dartington Hall's wealthy owners, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, in 1934, he was soon introduced to their ‘shared dream of shaping an alternative, holistically fulfilling and communitarian model for living’ (Neima, 2022: 1). In many respects, the couple had emerged from observing the brutal events of the First World War unmoored from their orthodox Anglican faith, but with their shared ethos of public service largely intact, helped along with Dorothy Elmhirst's immense inherited wealth to prime their ideas. ⁶ Christianity, Leonard Elmhirst believed fervently, could no longer ‘escape from the challenge that science and psychology and the war were to make to us, to know our own minds, to mature our own thought … to link devotion and religious purpose to the new situation of today’. ⁷ Thus the Elmhirsts opened their doors and wallets to a multifaceted array of idealistic schemes and experiments in the arts, agriculture, and social organization, all emanating from their espoused enthusiasm for communitarian living and ‘learning by doing’. ⁸ An especially appealing approach during these years was to engage with new forms of religiosity, spiritual quests, pacifism, and a range of performing arts with the hope of reinfusing daily life with alternative socio-spiritual frameworks. These were encouraged by Leonard's great friendship and discussions with Rabindranath Tagore, whom he had worked with closely in India and who became a frequent visitor to the estate, as well as regular visits from Gerald Heard (then a popular writer and scientific broadcaster for the BBC), Aldous and Julian Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, and many others. The appetite for experimentation also opened Dartington to a growing number of conversations around Eastern spirituality and new developments in psychology that blossomed within Heard's ‘generating cell’ meetings, where he articulated the socio-spiritual guide he hoped the community might learn to follow. ⁹

Indeed, while the plurality of British psychological cultures at the time tend to be overshadowed by the perceived influence of Freud, Matthew Thomson and Jenny Hazelgrove both emphasize how psychology's interactions with spirituality, mysticism, and the occult highlighted the messiness of its modernization process—particularly as these movements promised to satisfy their otherwise skeptical adherents’ hunger for a new, post-Christian morality and guide to life (Hazelgrove, 2000; Thomson, 2006). During the interwar years, the domain of the psychological thus became increasingly dynamic and protean, challenging many boundaries and trafficking in numerous directions such as an increasing open-mindedness toward Eastern religion as a counterpart to Western psychology, and later on in the American counterculture's experiments with altered states induced by substances such as LSD. In fact, Dartington Hall was only one among a number of utopian establishments to emerge in the interwar period—driven by a growing desire to find alternative social models focusing on the improvement of the inner life through psychological theories or spiritualism rather than the previous generation's concerns with economic growth and material well-being. As Neima notes, there have been few other periods in history where the world saw the organization and development of so many ‘practical utopias’—real, experimental communities acting as models for social change (Neima, 2021).

One such example was Tagore's rural utopian community of Sriniketan, in Bengal, with which Leonard had been closely involved in organizing and building during the 1920s—with generous financial support from Dorothy. Leonard had learned about and admired efforts at Sriniketan to provide each child with support to develop ‘along his own line’ within certain social bounds (Parsons, 1989; Tagore and Elmhirst, 1961). ¹⁰ According to Leonard, Tagore reminded him that ‘however deeply men may immure themselves in cities … you have no right to deprive growing children of a natural beauty in their surroundings’ (Elmhirst, 1961). Moreover, Dorothy's earlier experiences with progressive education in America included sitting on the General Education Board, a Rockefeller Foundation-funded organization promoting American public education (particularly in rural areas). She had also attended John Dewey's lectures at Columbia University, leading to her support of the Lincoln School's experimental laboratory at Teacher's College (Neima, 2022: 96; Rauchway, 2001). In many respects, then, the Elmhirsts encouraged the school to become Dartington's animating center, in spite of the fact that the early results were uneven at best. Indeed, one of the school's earliest teachers, John Wales, complained that it was less an educational than a social experiment in the art of living. ¹¹ Neima also suggests that Dartington was driven more by ambitious social ideals than new educational techniques—and that it was really the ‘environment of humanitarian international exchange’ that allowed for an ‘intense cross-fertilisation’ of progressive education with other holistically minded programs. This yielded a place where ruralists, eugenicists, socialists, and pacifists could imagine and put their utopian ideals into action—enabled, of course, by Dorothy's seemingly unlimited financial resources (Neima, 2022: 91). Certainly, the concern with reforming education in Britain was palpable during this period. Laura Tisdall points out that changing attitudes to childhood and youth were driven not only by the war but by falling birthrates, growing unemployment, and shifting views on crime and punishment for juveniles (2019: 3). The interwar period thus saw the mushrooming of diverse utopian progressive schools across Britain, including A. S. Neill's Summerhill, which first opened in 1921, Bertrand and Dora Russell's Beacon Hill in 1927, and Kurt Hahn's Gordonstoun in 1934. Despite differences in their pedagogical approaches, they could all agree that educational reform was a critical approach to achieving a more harmonious future, and that their optimal pathway required championing the self-directed learning of children in a school in rural surroundings such as those at Dartington (Kidel, 1990).

In spite of these bold ideas, the Elmhirsts struggled to find an optimal path to learning for Dartington school's pupils, and when a decision was made to seek a headmaster who could provide firmer leadership, W. B. Curry enthusiastically accepted the job, celebrating his ability ‘to take up an opportunity which only occurs about once a century’. ¹² Curry's Anglo-American background, his degree in physics, and his teaching experiences at the Oak Lane School in Philadelphia and Bedales, one of the best-known schools in Britain, combined to help Dartington become better known for its school. His arrival signaled a softening of Dartington's radicalism on the one hand, but on the other it opened the school to a wider variety of children from well beyond the estate, many of whom had wealthy and/or progressive parents with particular and at times disparate views—including Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and Ernst Freud (Punch, 1976). In addition, the Elmhirsts’ efforts to build a model of democratic, lifelong learning (through adult education programs in addition to the school) attracted the approval and interest of leading community educators, including Henry Morris, secretary of education for Cambridgeshire; Sir Michael Sadler, vice chancellor of the University of Leeds and a leader in the university extension movement; and Eduard Lindeman, a pioneering figure in 20th-century adult education who joined the board of directors of the Whitney Committee and remained the Elmhirsts’ longtime friend and adviser (Neima, 2022: 92).

Sheldon brings Promethean psychology to Dartington Hall

Curry's arrival did not, however, close off the Elmhirst's pedagogical vision, including their ongoing questions about the handling of sex education and its relation to social reform, hence psychologists were brought in for advice on how to best handle Dartington's social-educational experiment. Two psychologists in particular were asked to offer an informed assessment of the situation and provide a potential path forward. When approached, Frederick Bartlett, professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge University, warned particularly against the ‘non-Englishness of German gestalt psychologists and Freudian-type models’. ¹³ As an early pioneer of the history of emotions, Bartlett pointed out that while humans had basic drives such as the drive to self-transcendence, those drives could take different forms depending upon their temperament, physique, and culture. ¹⁴ He was well aware that the Elmhirsts and some of their circle had become increasingly disenchanted with the dominance of Freudian thinking in academic psychology, and with psychoanalysis more generally, which they felt focused too much on the mind (and its unconscious sexual impulses) to the detriment of the body. ‘Even when they do admit, rather reluctantly, that the mind always trails its carcass behind it’, Aldous Huxley complained later in Harper's Magazine, Freudians ‘have little or nothing to tell us about the ways in which mental and physical characteristics are related’ (Huxley, 1944: 512).

Matthew Thomson has described how the idea of a ‘self-consciously British way’ in psychology—which claimed to eschew continental authorities such as Freud, Adler, and Jung in the same breath—was, in fact, deeply influenced by various Eastern and American systems of thought (Thomson, 2006: 10). The ‘project of the psychological subject’, therefore, had a distinct potential to collapse national cultural boundaries (ibid.). In fact, the second psychologist to attract the Elmhirsts’ and their circle's attention was an American—William Sheldon—who had a great deal to say about Dartington's approach to education in light of the perceived relationships of a body's mental and physical characteristics. Like a number of British counterparts, Sheldon believed that Freud ignored the biological reality of the body in his psychoanalytic theory, claiming that his grounding of human nature in sexual impulses was a ‘violation of very real religious and biological directives’ (Gatlin, 1997: 9). Indeed, a number of British intellectuals of the 1930s were more likely to regard William James's work on religion and the human self as important and worthwhile than to accept a psychoanalytic ‘dismissal of religious behaviour’ (Thomson, 2006: 73). Sheldon, who grew up on a farm in rural Rhode Island and was intellectually influenced by American Transcendentalists such as James (who he claimed was his godfather) and Ralph Waldo Emerson, was particularly interested in merging religious ideas with a ‘biologically grounded social psychology’ (Griffith, 2004: 135). Sheldon's growing interest in and familiarity with German and Italian constitutional and biotypology studies during the 1920s and 1930s—through the works of Ernst Kretschmer, Achille de Giovanni, Giacinto Viola, and his former doctoral supervisor Sante Naccarati—also helps explain his reaction to the narrowness of Pasteurian theories of illness and disease, and mainstream American laboratory medicine more generally (Gatlin, 1997: 80). He was also strongly influenced by the growing eugenics movement of the early 20th century, and, along with his fellow American constitutionalists, increasingly looked ‘inward’ for explanations of disease, using anthropometric techniques to establish a scientific correlation between physique and temperament in the early decades of the 20th century. These ideals lent themselves easily—particularly for Sheldon—to notions of a ‘biological aristocracy’, as well as a reaction to the perceived ills of modernity and industrialization—views that were largely shared by his wealthy British supporters. ¹⁵

Sheldon's efforts to develop theories around the empirical correlations between physique and temperament (or personality) thus found a willing and eager, if eclectic, audience at Dartington, where he stayed for some weeks. Fresh from completing his PhD and medical degree at the University of Chicago, he had acquired a grant from the National Council on Religion in Higher Education (funded in part by Dorothy Elmhirst's charitable trust in New York, the William C. Whitney Foundation) to visit European psychologists Ernst Kretschmer and Carl Jung as well as Sigmund Freud, and to come to Dartington as a visiting psychologist. Dorothy, especially, showed a keen interest in finding ways to combine psychological thinking with the spirituality and mysticism offered by regular visitors such as Gerald Heard and American painter and Baha’i convert Mark Tobey, both of whom claimed to offer ‘the best modern approach to human problems’. ¹⁶ Sheldon's ideas clearly resonated with Dorothy, for they developed a substantial correspondence following his visit, exchanging lengthy letters about their views on psychology, his plans for writing and teaching, and his intermittent advice to help her manage her anxieties over her own children's education, and their career prospects and marital relationships. Nor was he slow to make his personal views on psychology known more widely. Upon meeting Frederick Bartlett in Cambridge at a discussion group on the ‘psychological nature of the religious function’, ¹⁷ Sheldon criticized his inability to translate his theoretical interests into tangible social outcomes. Bartlett, he told Dorothy, ‘has found his salvation by escaping from practical implications and he can no more be dragged back into it … than you can drag a wounded badger out of a stonewall. It will be a generation before academic psychology will produce anything really meaningful to you I am afraid.’ ¹⁸

Sheldon thus offered an alternative, practical vision that was more attractive to the Elmhirsts—an evidence-based psychology with ‘Promethean’ ambitions that used a panel approach to assess an individual's (or group's, or institution's) economic, social, sexual, religious, and aesthetic ‘balance’. Sheldon's choice of an interconnected ‘panel psychology’ to represent a working picture of the mind, with each panel indicating an ‘institutionalized idea structure’, was popular among American constitutionalists of the period, such as George Draper and Walter Freeman, both of whom used such approaches to diagnose illness in the context of their medical practices (Tracy, 1992). ¹⁹ The Elmhirsts were thus persuaded that Sheldon's approach, which he called the ‘ground plan of a psychology adapted to the study of conflict’, could be used to gauge and manage the psychological health and well-being of the residents at Dartington, especially the children in Dartington's school (Sheldon, 1936: 92). Moreover, their views resonated with Sheldon's searing critiques of modern psychology and urban society, as well as his interest in developing a ‘humanist religion out of the Promethean possibilities for splendor, vitality, and social order invested within the human physique’. ²⁰

As a result, Sheldon became an influential informal resident psychologist during his time at the Dartington estate, providing his insights into the mental state of the other residents and guests, as well as his hosts’ relatives while offering practical advice and suggestions about how to enhance the community's ‘spiritual development’ (Neima, 2022: 81). He also performed several analyses using his panel criteria to assist Ena Curry (nee Isherwood), estranged wife of the Dartington school's headmaster, Bill Curry, and to counsel Leonard Elmhirst's younger brother Richard, who later followed him back to America to study at the University of Chicago and prepare for a potential career in Promethean psychology. ‘The mind needs a system to follow’, Sheldon reflected later. ‘Imagine the mind spread out in a convenient number of panels of consciousness yielding a usable diagram by which to study mind and society in terms of each other.… Education thus derives from and contributes to all of the panels—economic, political, sexual, religious and aesthetic.… The call is for a human hero of endotonic Epimethean compassion, of mesotonic Herculean courage and of ectotonic Promethean cognition. Such a hero may be hard to find’, he admitted, ‘but life is for looking’ (Sheldon, 1975: 133, 140). Such was Dorothy's enthusiasm for Sheldon's ideas and his panel system that she provided him, through her New York Whitney Foundation, the financial support to work on his first manuscript, Psychology and the Promethean Will, and continued to bankroll his somatotype research into the early 1940s. Over the course of nearly seven years, she provided Sheldon with thousands of dollars to support his ongoing constitutional research. ²¹

Sheldon's ‘Promethean’ analysis of Dartington Hall's school and estate: Following the hens!

As a result of his close involvement and active interest in developing a ‘socio-spiritual’ framework by which to guide the estate's operations, Sheldon was invited to conduct his comprehensive ‘Promethean analysis of the Dartington Hall School and Estate’ in 1935. ²² One of his stated priorities in this analysis was to protect ‘those shy, introverted students’ who embodied the type of Promethean virtues of the rural, agrarian environment in which he had grown up, and which had generated in him a particular appreciation for the kind of pastoral simplicity and honesty advocated by figures like Emerson, James, and Henry David Thoreau. ²³ Sheldon reflected often—and publicly—upon his own upbringing in the Rhode Island countryside, which he viewed as a shining example of how ‘naturalistic’ moral and intellectual development could be made possible in rural settings. In a meeting with Gerald Heard, Leonard Elmhirst, and child psychologist Geraldine Coster, for instance, he recounted how ‘as a small child I played in a backyard full of hens. Each had a name and a distinct personality. In ordinary human situations I used to relate experiences to the behavior of hens and I still see people in terms of hens today.’ ²⁴

It is no surprise, then, that Sheldon warned of the dangers of allowing urban overstimulation and chaos to infiltrate his vison of an ‘essentially simple and humble’ environment at Dartington Hall. He took exception, for example, to Dorothy Elmhirst's deep interest in and patronage of modern art, music, and dance (Young, 1982: 217–52), as well as the emphasis she placed on ‘arty’ pursuits within and outside of the school. Her time as a drama student in Michael Chekhov's Theatre Studio at Dartington was so meaningful to her that she had briefly followed him to Connecticut when he relocated to the United States prior to the Second World War. Indeed, according to Michael Young, poetry was Dorothy's bible, the theatre her church (ibid.: 204). Sheldon, however, was clear that most forms of art, especially modern art, represented the apex of urbanity, and he sharply criticized the school for providing ‘very little provision for the intimate association of young minds with real maturity.… I think it is a tragic mistake to let immature minds run the danger of getting primarily interested in arty things, before they have developed a good solid hierarchy of aesthetic grounding in things of the earth and in ideas.’ ²⁵ Such influences, he continued, might ultimately either pressure the sensitive child into adapting to the extrovert's ‘baser patterns’ or press them to become neurotic altogether. ‘Children should be cultivated with almost as much care as a tree’, Sheldon advised, and ‘they should, above all, never be crowded nor forced to adapt too much to each other in wholesale lots’. ²⁶

One of the most important purposes of education, therefore, was to separate the rare Promethean child from the scourge of the ‘Epimetheans’—those students and teachers whom he disparaged as aggressive and ‘unchastened’—in educational as well as social settings. It was Dartington's imperative, he insisted, to protect ‘natively superior children from other children, like the protection of a thoroughbred dog from mongrels’. ²⁷ Indeed, to introduce the problems of urban culture (exemplified most clearly in modern art, music, and dance) to the countryside was to commit the ultimate ‘progressive school error’. It was his panel system that would allow for its identification, systematic analysis, and correction.

At the heart of Sheldon's critique of modern progressive education, then, was the notion that happiness in adulthood could be achieved only through ‘orienting’ children toward the development of an holistic personality—one that entailed thinking, analyzing, feeling, and emoting in equal measure. While the ideal purpose of education was supposed to facilitate the development of these ‘conative’, ‘affective’, and intellectual qualities early on in children and youth, in reality, he claimed, educators rarely moved beyond ‘transmitting facts and techniques’. Universities and colleges in particular, he believed, had gone so far as to ‘throw off Christianity as one might throw off an uncomfortable garment in hot weather’. ²⁸ During Gerald Heard's generating cell discussions, for example, Sheldon joined in by criticizing mainline Protestantism for its orthodoxy and its dogmas, and for projecting ‘all hope of understanding into an after-life, a vale of tears in which childhood was the only time it was possible to be happy’. ²⁹ He thus concluded that while academic psychology had the potential to strike a balance between the objective and subjective aspects of human life, and to build bridges across the study of religion and science, the majority of psychologists had either committed themselves to the idea that psychology must aim to become a wholly objective science, or turned to ‘the violently anti-religious theology of the Freudian psychoanalysts’. ³⁰ Sheldon's solution to this dilemma lay in the development of an applied social psychology that would form the basis of all higher education—including an ‘orientational’ element designed to teach students about religion in the same breath as biology, economics, and political science. ³¹

Moving West: Aldous Huxley discovers the somatotype as Sheldon faces professional difficulties

When George Bernard Shaw described Dartington Hall as a ‘salon in the countryside’, it was to underscore the maelstrom of ideas circulating there around how these new forms of psychology and other social sciences were being adopted to support religious or spiritual impulses and mysticism within the estate's larger ethos of community living, progressive education, and rural agricultural reform. Gerald Heard embellished Shaw's view, claiming that the Dartington school was ‘destined to become one of the most highly regarded progressive co-educational boarding establishments in the world’ (Kidel, 1990: 31). Indeed, David Bradshaw underscores how a number of British intellectuals during this period took an upbeat view of progressive education in response to both a ‘lingering dissatisfaction with their own more conventional schooling … and a conviction that a new approach to education was the most effective way of fast-tracking their version of utopia’ (Bradshaw, 2015: 1). With headmaster Curry's leadership, the school became an attractive destination for visiting speakers from the progressive establishment such as Bertrand Russell, A. S. Neill, H. G. Wells, Gerald Heard, and the Huxley brothers (Bonham-Carter, 1958). It also became the school of choice for the children of a number of progressive parents, including Aldous Huxley, who enrolled his son Matthew in the school in 1932.

Despite Huxley's ideologies and distaste for his own formal education at Eton and Oxford, Matthew's ongoing poor performance at the Dartington school and obvious lack of interest in most academic subjects in favor of carpentry brought to a head the tensions between his utopian aspirations and his more conventional notions of educational success (such as gaining his son's admission to Balliol College, Oxford). Huxley admitted his worry that ‘modern schools may be too modern by half’, given their move from an instructional mode toward one in which a student, under sympathetic guidance, might ‘cultivate his own garden’. Realizing that ‘Jack and Jill, not Mathematics, English or Science were the subjects in a new era of education’, he abruptly withdrew Matthew to enroll him in a more traditional school in Switzerland (Bradshaw, 2015: 13; Thomson, 2006: 126). As a result, he spent several months in 1935 angrily corresponding with Curry about outstanding tuition fees and ended his association with Dartington Hall for the next three decades. No doubt he was also spurred on in this decision by Gerald Heard, who similarly severed his ties with the estate in 1935 amid the controversy surrounding headmaster Curry's highly publicized and divisive extramarital affair with a teacher at the school and subsequent divorce. Moreover, in the face of the threat of an increasingly likely war in Europe, Huxley, Heard, and their close associate Christopher Isherwood—all of whom harbored strong pacifist leanings and were involved in H. L. R. Sheppard's Peace Pledge Union, as well as the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals—relocated to California in 1937 and remained there for the rest of their lives (Hall, 2015). In fact, in the midst of the Second World War Gerald Heard, drawing upon his earlier efforts to enhance a spiritual awakening among the residents of Dartington Hall in his ‘generating cells’, set up his own utopian community in Trabuco Canyon, California, where adherents followed a spartan regime of celibacy, vegetarianism, and silent meditation. Despite having to shut its doors by 1949, Trabuco College served as an important early source of inspiration for a number of influential countercultural projects, including Michael Murphy and Dick Price's Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Alan Watts's ‘The Way of Zen’, and Huston Smith's ‘The Religions of Man’ (Neima, 2021; Robb 1985).

It was also in 1937 that Aldous Huxley developed a more personal relationship with William Sheldon, although it is likely that they were first introduced at Dartington Hall by Heard. In a letter to his brother Julian, Huxley noted later how he had met up with Sheldon in Chicago ‘a very remarkable man … who has been working for 10 years in the field that Kretchmer [sic] worked in and who has evolved, I believe, a genuinely scientific conception of human types’ (Smith, 1969: 428). In fact, Sheldon's somatotype—fundamentally a modernist retooling of physiognomy, despite its links to psychology, medicine, and statistics and claims to scientific objectivity, and dating back to Johann Kaspar Lavater's and Carl Linnaeus's systems of classification in the 18th century and Hippocrates's theory of the four humors—was so attractive to Huxley precisely because it answered the age-old question about the relationship between physique and temperament in a sufficiently detailed and scientifically sound manner. Like Heard, who wrote a glowing review of Sheldon's book on the Promethean Will for the progressive periodical Time and Tide in 1936 (Heard, 1936), Huxley was impressed with the breadth of Sheldon's knowledge about religion, psychology, and medicine and their intersections. ‘[Sheldon] seems to me to have evolved a genuine algebra in terms of which to discuss the problem [of body classification], so that it now becomes possible to talk concretely, quantitatively and scientifically on a subject about which one could only speculate in a vaguely intuitive, personal way’ (Smith, 1969: 428).

Sheldon had returned to America after spending several weeks at Carl Jung's clinic in Zürich, where he attended to and helped treat visiting patients. He resumed his research and teaching responsibilities with the National Council on Religion in Higher Education at Columbia University in New York, and during this period visited several universities across the East Coast, including Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and Duke, to lecture about the connections he drew between religion and medical psychology (Vertinsky, 2002). He also completed his manuscript Psychology and the Promethean Will: A Constructive Study of the Acute Common Problem of Education, Medicine and Religion, which was published in 1936. It was increasingly clear, however, that Sheldon was having difficulties in finding an academic audience or university location interested enough to fund his research, for he tried unsuccessfully to solicit support from departments of religion and psychology at the University of Chicago, Yale, and the University of Minnesota. ³² ‘I have had much doubt and skepticism to overcome’, he complained, ‘both from the scientific and from the religious side. This has been complicated by a violent schism and hostility already active … between these same two groups.’ ³³ As a result, he remained largely reliant on Dorothy Elmhirst's financial support for his work throughout the rest of the 1930s.

Indeed, Sheldon's extensive letters to both Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst during these years give the impression that he was unable to find a permanent academic home in America because of a lack of interest in his brand of humanistic, spiritually oriented psychology. While his early supporters at the University of Chicago had continued to offer him residencies in psychiatry and psychology (he had a doctorate in psychology and a medical degree, but it is unclear if he was qualified to practice psychiatry), it was subject to moving away from his focus on religion. This was a direction Sheldon seemed unwilling to take and resulted in his remaining affiliated with the university's rather orthodox Theological Seminary, where he felt alienated from most of his colleagues. Moreover, it was increasingly clear that the Elmhirsts and their Whitney funding committee in New York were growing impatient with Sheldon and wary of his constantly changing plans and consequent delays in the publication of his next book. ‘What you and I believe he needs’, wrote Eduard Lindeman in a letter to Leonard, ‘namely discipline … is precisely what will be most difficult for him’. ‘His whole idea needs ripening, maturing. This holds for him as a person, as well as for his ideas.’ ³⁴

A series of personal difficulties also chipped away at Sheldon's professional reputation. In a 1936 letter to Gerald Heard, he recounted how comments about his short-lived first marriage during the 1920s had appeared in the gossip column of local newspapers, resulting in him losing his job as an instructor at the University of Chicago. ³⁵ His relationship troubles resurfaced when he left his new fiancée behind in 1934 to visit Europe (and Dartington Hall) and, upon returning to America a year later, discovered she had married someone else. In response, he wrote a threatening letter to the new husband—a prominent economist at Columbia University, who circulated it to some of his academic colleagues (Heath and Hughes, 1994). The Whitney Committee and the Elmhirsts all received reports of this letter, along with added complaints about Sheldon's frequent quarrels with Leonard's brother Richard, whom he had befriended at Dartington and who had been staying with him in America for some months. Anna Bogue, longtime secretary of Dorothy's Whitney Committee, finally felt compelled to point out that ‘I have been at times disturbed by rumors of Dr. Sheldon's instability and knowledge of his personal difficulties in his contacts with people.… There seems to be definite evidence of mental instability.’ ³⁶

The final straw to Sheldon's reputation came when, increasingly frustrated with his colleagues at Chicago and the lack of academic support for his research, he attempted to arrange a professorship at Harvard University with physical anthropologist Earnest Hooton. Hooton had earlier expressed interest in the potential applications of his constitutional research to problems of social deviance and mental illness and was persuaded by Sheldon to request financial support for the position from the Whitney Committee. In a testy response from board member Lindeman, however, Hooton was informed that ‘Sheldon must have told you that our Committee has been underwriting his work for some time, and we are extremely eager to bring this phase of his research to some sort of consummation’. ³⁷ Hence, while the Whitney Committee ultimately relented and agreed to provide some support for Sheldon's research at Harvard, likely at Dorothy Elmhirst's behest, their generous support (and Sheldon's relationship with the Elmhirsts) came to an end following the publication in 1942 of the second book in Sheldon's ‘Constitutional Series’: The Varieties of Temperament: A Psychology of Constitutional Differences.

Aldous Huxley and his friends continue to champion the somatotype: ‘Psycho-physical wholes’ or ‘mind bodies’ for countercultural utopians

Sheldon's imploding academic career in the USA amid a variety of troubling personal issues did not, however, cause Huxley and his friends (including Gerald Heard, who retained a relationship with Sheldon and even lectured at the University of Chicago at his invitation) to lose interest in his ideas. In fact, while Sheldon's predecessors—including Kretschmer, anthropologists Giacinto Viola, Nicola Pende, and Earnest Hooton, as well as constitutionalists such as George Draper—had already proposed several body classification systems, they were primarily descriptive and typological. Sheldon's somatotype was quantitative (and thus seen to be more objective), flexible, and continuous because it was based on the notion that all humans possess varying amounts of each of the three somatotype components (endomorphy, ectomorphy, and mesomorphy), leading to the identification of over 80 possible body types. His efforts to outline a systematic approach to photographing, measuring, and assessing physique and temperament thus remained attractive to his supporters, for they were assured that the somatotype had uncovered the ‘universal biological reality’ they had long sought for in their writings about religion, spirituality, and mysticism. Stephen Gatlin, for example, underscores how Sheldon's ‘Prometheanism’, as well as his earlier discussions about self-development and self-overcoming, were of considerable interest to many countercultural utopians anxious to expand their consciousness. ‘Sheldon considers human beings as they really are’, Huxley explained to a friend in 1945, ‘psycho-physical wholes or mind bodies’ (Smith, 1969: 516).

In fact, upon their arrival in America, Huxley, Heard, and Isherwood all became deeply involved with a number of countercultural figures in California, including the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson; Esalen's Michael Murphy and Dick Price; and two-time Nobel Prize winner and political activist Linus Pauling. In line with their growing interest in Eastern religions, they were also attracted to the teachings and philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti (who was once part of the Theosophical Society in India), as well as those of Swami Prabhavananda, founder of the Vedanta Society of Southern California (Normand and Winch, 2013). Christopher Isherwood, in particular, became a dedicated Vedantist, studying under the tutelage of Prabhavananda, and in 1949 published a collection of essays from a number of British, Indian, and American contributors with the title of Vedanta for the Western World (Isherwood, 1961). In a section entitled ‘Vedanta as the Scientific Approach to Religion’, Gerald Heard employed Sheldon's descriptions of cerebrotonic, viscerotonic, and somatotonic temperaments to explain how individuals with different physiques (and corresponding personality types) ‘inherit different methods whereby they must make their initial approaches to the Inexpressible Ultimate’ (ibid.: 55). He further suggested that an individual's spiritual needs could be met by prescribing the right kind of worship for their specific body type—‘Jnana Yoga for the intellectual [the cerebrotonic ectomorph], Bhakti for the predominantly devotional [the viscerotonic endomorph], and Raja Yoga for those who combine in their natures the need for a balanced approach, mental, emotional and physical, to the divine [somatotonic mesomorphs]’ (ibid.).

Huxley also contributed a chapter to the collection entitled ‘Religion and Temperament’ (republished from his 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy), where he expanded upon Gerald Heard's attempts to draw connections between Vedanta and Sheldon's somatotyping system. Indeed, Sheldon's Constitutional Series, which Huxley described as the ‘most important of recent contributions to the science of Man’, allowed him to convincingly walk the line between free will and ‘predestination’ (Isherwood, 1961: 95). In his view, the ‘psycho-physical pattern’ laid out by the somatotype was one of the fundamental expressions of an individual's karma and, if recognized, taken seriously, and acted upon, could form a basis for greater pacifism through a tolerance and respect for the wide range of physiques (and temperaments) within and across societies. Sheldon's approach to psychology thus lent legitimacy to those ‘hereditarian and anti-Freudian opinions Huxley had held since the 1920s’ (Gatlin, 1997: 155). Like the Elmhirsts, Huxley was skeptical of psychoanalysis, dating back to the time of his undergraduate degree in English literature at Oxford University, and frequently labelled Freud's supporters ‘uninspired, unilluminating, and soundly dull’ for ignoring the somatic reality of the human body (Huxley, 1944: 512). As a self-professed tall, thin, and introverted ectomorph, Huxley viewed the somatotype as a useful way to understand the fundamental differences between human beings, make sense of their social experiences, and categorize them accordingly by directing them to activities and careers most suited to their somatotype. He was concerned that he was not a ‘born novelist’ because ‘the fertile inventors and narrators have all been rather burly genial fellows’. Since ‘Balzac and Dumas were florid to the point of fatness’, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a ‘barrel’, and science fiction writer H. G. Wells was a ‘tub’, ‘what chance’, he complained, ‘has an emaciated fellow on stilts?’ And of course, he added, ‘this is no joke. There is a real correlation between shape and mind’ (Smith, 1969: 516). Thus over the course of nearly 25 years, Huxley organized numerous characters in his books according to their somatotypes, beginning with Ends and Means in 1937, but elaborated most clearly in Time Must Have a Stop, which he considered to be his best novel (Leavey, 2015: 119–20). In later novels such as The Perennial Philosophy, The Doors of Perception, and, most comprehensively, Island, Huxley brought the somatotype together with the expansive range of religious and scientific philosophies and somatic therapies he had come to admire throughout his career as a writer.

Body classification informs the arena of psychedelics research

While Sheldon, discouraged by his academic colleagues, was shifting his earlier efforts to connect physique, temperament, and religion to a focus on measuring social deviance, criminality, and mental illness, as outlined in Varieties of Delinquent Youth (Sheldon, 1949), Huxley was introducing the somatotype to the public in his novels and contributions to magazines such as Esquire and Harper's Magazine. He also introduced Sheldon's research on somatotypes to his friend Humphry Osmond, an English psychiatrist at the forefront of psychedelics research who was director of the Weyburn Mental Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada (Dyck and Deighton, 2017; Mills and Dyck, 2008). Huxley was first introduced to hallucinogenic substances by Osmond, who administered a dose of mescaline to him in California during the early 1950s. ³⁸ Like his initial enthusiasm with the somatotype, Huxley's newfound interest in psychedelics formed an important part of the nexus of mind–body theories he had accumulated since the 1930s, for it quickly fell in line with his other philosophical and spiritual interests. Both men were united not only through their mutual interest in the potential mind-expanding qualities of psychedelics (a term they coined during one of their frequent exchanges), but also through their desire to understand human psychology from a more physiological perspective in an environment where Freudian approaches and psychopharmacological interventions were competing for greater academic legitimacy (Healy, 2004).

Indeed, Osmond spent most of his career attempting to develop biochemical explanations for schizophrenia and adopt a psychopharmacological lens through which to study mental illness. Like Huxley and Sheldon, he was immensely concerned about the ‘long shadow’ he believed Freudian psychoanalysis had cast over the psychiatric unit at St. George's Hospital in London, where he had worked as a physician before moving to Canada in 1951 (Bisbee et al., 2018: xl). His experience there had left him with a strong view of the limits of Freudian interpretations and treatments of mental illness (which he viewed as ‘metaphysical rather than scientific’), since he felt they downplayed the mind's physiological underpinnings and were thus less effective in treating debilitating mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Receiving little encouragement from his colleagues at St. George's Hospital, who were largely uninterested in his development of a biochemical hypothesis for schizophrenia, he joined Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan (Hoffer, 2004).

When first introduced to Sheldon by Huxley in 1955, Osmond had been immediately impressed with the empirical, quantitative nature of the somatotype, noting his own (and other psychiatrists’) ‘folly’ in neglecting the idea, which now allowed him to ‘look at human beings as they are for possibly the first time’ (Bisbee et al., 2018: 185). ‘Of course, it is easy to see why your book does not appeal to psychiatrists who are not commonly scientifically trained’, Osmond wrote to Sheldon, after reading Varieties of Delinquent Youth. ³⁹ ‘To the analytically orientated psychiatrists who temporarily dominate the scene, the idea that man has a body apart from his ego, super-ego and id is just one of those tiresome facts to be suppressed without delay.’ ⁴⁰ It was clear from the start that Sheldon's brand of psychology was compatible with Osmond's own predilections for biologically oriented theories of mental illness. ‘If instead of peering uncertainly in the psychoanalytic underbrush we took a good look at the Sheldonian wood, the size, shape, color and variety of the trees’, Osmond wrote to Huxley in 1955, ‘it allows one to understand the dramatis personae better and to see that there are other plays as well as Hamlet and Oedipus’ (ibid.: 193). He quickly added body typing to his list of therapeutic efforts at Weyburn in order to assess the relationships among a person's physique, temperament, and response to psychedelics (see e.g. Osmond, 1958). ‘I am trying very roughly to type our subjects’, he told Huxley, ‘for I am sure that among other things the cerebrotonic and the viscerotonic are likely to be much more susceptible to hallucinogens than the powerfully somatotonic’ (ibid.: 429). When he brought a copy of Sheldon's Atlas of Men (Sheldon, Dupertuis, and McDermott, 1954) with him on a visit to Jung in Zürich in 1955, Jung received this ‘offering from an old pupil’, noting that ‘the body must always be given its due’ (Bisbee et al., 2018: 233–4).

It is likely that Sheldon's deteriorating reputation among mainstream academics, his ‘mordant and biting wit’, and his penchant for getting into trouble with his colleagues discouraged Osmond from further promoting Sheldon's ideas, despite his interest and strong private support of them to Huxley and others. ‘William Sheldon’, he later told Huxley, ‘should have someone to sell his splendid work, and water his potent thoughts down to the mild brew which his more extroverted colleagues now require’ (Bisbee et al., 2018: 326). And although Osmond later abandoned his ready reliance on Sheldon's somatotyping scheme, he continued to research and write about the relationships among temperament, personality, and mental illness throughout the 1970s and 1980s (see e.g. Bisbee, Mullaly, and Osmond, 1983).

Back on Island's psychedelic utopia

On his return to Dartington Hall for a weekend in 1963, shortly before his death, Huxley underscored how it was ‘one of the few places in the world where one can feel an almost unqualified optimism’. In many ways, the close attention he had paid to the details of Pala's education system in his final novel, Island, demonstrated the somewhat outsized influence of the ethos and philosophy of progressive education as it was envisioned and exemplified by British elites of the 1930s such as the Elmhirsts in their ‘salon in the countryside’. ‘I was spending the week-end at Dartington and talked much with L. Elmhirst about his experiences with Tagore at Santiniketan and elsewhere’, Huxley wrote to Tagore's biographer Krishna Kripalani. ‘He himself has done wonderful things’ (Kidel, 1990: vii). Indeed, for Huxley and his close friends, many of whom felt they had been personally scarred by their conventional, elite schooling at Oxford or Cambridge, a genuinely progressive system of education such as they had discussed so often at Dartington had seemed exciting precisely because of the potential to actualize a broad swath of mind–body therapies, psychospiritual philosophies, and holistic approaches to scientific inquiry, which had long captivated their utopian aspirations.

Sheldon's somatotype system stood out among Huxley's many influences because the connections drawn between physique and temperament had rung so true to him throughout his career as a writer, acting as a set of core fundamental tenets upon which he could build the socio-spiritual edifice outlined in novels such as Island and Time Must Have a Stop. They provided an empirical, biological basis for a ‘thoroughly realistic caste system’, Huxley once recounted in Harper's Magazine (Huxley, 1944: 513), such that in Island, in a manner reminiscent of Francis Galton's earlier eugenic novel Kantsaywhere, the citizens of Pala were not only organized by their somatotype but used body classification systems to identify and manage children with sociopathic tendencies. Through education and training appropriate for their somatotype, as well as the regular consumption of psychedelic drugs, the problem child's negative energies could be directed toward productive pursuits such that he or she could grow into a well-adjusted adult.

And while Island was panned by a number of literary critics for its simplistic and prescriptive understanding of Eastern religions, it was received with enthusiasm by intellectuals further afield. The psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was highly influential in the early years of the Esalen Institute and a founder of humanistic psychology, not only endorsed Huxley's envisioned pedagogical system in Island as the ‘epitome of cogent thinking in this domain’ but admired him ‘as an exemplar of self-actualization’ (Hoffman and Bey, 2021: 459). ‘The most revolutionary ideas in [Island] are those pertaining to education, for the educational system in Huxley's Utopia is aimed at radically different goals than the educational system in our own society’ (Maslow, 1993: 173). Through his positive contacts with Huxley, as well as with Sheldon (who had supervised him during his studies at the University of Wisconsin) and other countercultural figures, Maslow articulated a theory of self-actualization that prioritized ‘finding the real self, the biological core … discovering one's body’ (Maslow et al., 1982: 584). Like Huxley and Osmond, Maslow also saw the generative potential of drawing connections between his own work and Sheldon's somatotypes. ‘I cannot resist expressing … the possibility that transcenders seem to me somewhat more apt to be Sheldonian ectomorphs while less often-transcending self-actualizers seem more often to be mesomorphic’ (Maslow, 1993: 285). Human nature was not a blank state, he said, but had biological inbuilt tendencies such that children must first be educated to understand their ‘subjective biology’ before moving on to actualize their potential through cooperative education. He would adopt the label ‘eupsychia’ to refer to the culture (and community) generated by ‘a thousand of these (self-actualizing) mature individuals … placed on a desert island and not confronted with outside cultural forces’, where everyone would be psychologically healthy (Maslow, 1961: 4). It would take a Huxley to see the potential of his work on eupsychia, said Maslow (whose untimely death in 1970 cut this work short), but he noted how they were both deeply inspired by their contacts with William Sheldon, who first developed and then shared his theories about mind and body with Dorothy Elmhirst and her guests at Dartington Hall in their utopian-tinged discussions and experiments in progressive education.

Utopia undone: The longevity of Sheldon's influence

In many respects, one can see how William Sheldon wielded a more substantial, far-reaching influence than historians have credited upon those interested in following the science of body classifications and its implications during and after the interwar years. The scores of enthusiastic letters written to and from Sheldon and his friends and supporters found in Dartington Hall's archives; his ready access to discussions with 20th-century thinkers such as Carl Jung, Gerald Heard, and Aldous Huxley; and the extensive financial support he received from Dorothy Elmhirst's Whitney Foundation testify to the widespread early appeal of his ideas around the deep connections between body and mind and their utopian potential. After a long and checkered career riddled with personal and professional controversies, Sheldon made a final attempt to return to his earlier interests in religion and psychology in Prometheus Revisited: A Second Look at the Religious Function in Human Affairs, and a Proposal to Merge Religion With a Biologically Grounded Social Psychiatry (Sheldon, 1975). The book was finally published two years before his death in 1977, and in the preface he noted that he had been encouraged to write this manuscript by none other than Aldous Huxley. By this time, however, almost all of Sheldon's early supporters were either dead or had moved on in their various ventures, and his explicitly eugenic views and discussions about urban ‘cancers’ found few takers in a postwar political atmosphere that was increasingly wary of hereditarian views concerning human characteristics such as race, intelligence, and temperament.

In essence, it took a stripping away of Sheldon's direct influence (as well as an end to the close involvement of Huxley and Heard and the support of Dartington's founders) for the somatotype to survive into the second half of the 20th century and beyond and prove potentially useful to groups of physical educators and competitive sports trainers. Maslow's focus upon the wisdom of the body as vital to education for transcendence slipped easily to mind–body training in physical education and also to competitive sport, where one needs to identify and develop one’s talents in order to use them to the full. Whether or not they had stumbled upon and enjoyed reading Huxley's Island or had the slightest idea about the views contained in Sheldon's Prometheus Revisited, it was coaches and physical educators who found the somatotype useful in identifying the potential sporting talent of their pupils and their chances for elite athletic performance (Ramachandran and Vertinsky, 2022).

In a number of ways, 1963 marked an important—if symbolic—transitional moment for the history of the somatotype and its decisive movement away from elucidating mind–body approaches to education with its utopian potential on islands such as Pala. It was the year that saw the death of Aldous Huxley, whom Sheldon once labelled as ‘one of the very few people who really understood what he was getting at’, and who extensively promoted Sheldon's hereditarian theories about the relationships between physique and temperament in his writings and among his friends. It was also the year that Barbara Honeyman Heath, Sheldon's former secretary and erstwhile collaborator, developed a new and modified version of the somatotype and distanced herself publicly from Sheldon's views and measurement techniques. In her article in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, she repurposed the somatotype as a useful, quantitative tool, without discernable connection to temperament or personality type (Heath, 1963). In this and her many other studies throughout the rest of the 20th century, she and like-minded physical educators associated the morphological characteristics of physique with success in sport (see e.g. Carter and Heath, 1990).

This was a much narrower view of the vision that William Sheldon brought to Dartington Hall in 1934 with his Promethean psychology and its support of Dartington's experiments to promote a utopian progressive education on the estate. Dartington, said Michael Young, was an experiment, ‘floating through the humid Devon air’, and the Elmhirsts were ‘pioneers ahead of their time, with their main ideas picked up from the progressive circles in which they moved … more like a happening’ (Young, 1982: 334). Despite the broad reach and cache of Sheldon's ideas from the interwar intellectual circle of Dartington Hall through to the postwar ‘salon’ culture in places like California, there were failures and limitations at every juncture, more often than not resulting from Sheldon's professional and personal difficulties. In the end, it was perhaps in Aldous Huxley's fiction that the somatotype (and its Promethean implications) was—and remained—commemorated for its utopian potentialities.