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Title: Senescence, The Last Half of Life
Author: G. Stanley Hall
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SENESCENCE, THE LAST HALF OF
LIFE ***
SENESCENCE
THE LAST HALF OF LIFE
BY G. STANLEY HALL
SENESCENCE
RECREATIONS OF A PSYCHOLOGIST
MORALE
ADOLESCENCE
YOUTH
EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
FOUNDERS OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY
ASPECTS OF CHILD LIFE AND EDUCATION
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Publishers New York
SENESCENCE
THE LAST HALF OF LIFE
BY
G. STANLEY HALL, PH.D., LL.D.
AUTHOR OF “ADOLESCENCE,” “EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS,” “FOUNDERS
OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY,” “MORALE,” “RECREATIONS
OF A PSYCHOLOGIST,” ETC.
[Illustration]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: MCMXXII :: LONDON
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
FOREWORD
In this book I have tried to present the subjects of Old Age and
Death from as many viewpoints as possible in order to show how the
ignorant and the learned, the child, the adult, and the old, savage and
civilized man, pagans and Christians, the ancient and the modern world,
the representatives of various sciences, and different individuals have
viewed these problems, letting each class, so far as I could, speak
for itself. This part of the task has been long and arduous and my
conspectus is not entirely encyclopedic, as it set out to be. I have
also tried to develop an idea of death, and especially of old age,
which I believe to be, if not essentially new, more true to the facts
of life and mind than those now current, and which I think much needed
by the world just now. Despite the great and growing interest that has
impelled this study, its themes have proved increasingly depressing, so
that its conclusion brings a unique relief that I may now turn to more
cheerful occupations, although it would be craven to plead this as an
extenuation of the shortcomings of which I am increasingly conscious.
If I have at certain points drawn too frankly upon my own personal
experiences with age I realize that this does not compensate for my
limitations in some of the special fields I ventured to enter. I have
had in mind throughout chiefly the nature and needs of intelligent
people passing or past middle life quite as much as of those actually
entering old age. It is hoped that the data here garnered and the
views propounded may help to a better and more correct understanding
of the nature and functions of old age, and also be a psychologist’s
contribution to the long-desired but long-delayed science of
gerontology.
It is a pleasant duty to express my personal obligations to the Library
of Clark University and its staff, and particularly to my secretary,
Miss Mary M. McLoughlin, who has not only typed and read the proof of
all the book but has been of great assistance in finding references and
made many helpful suggestions.
G. STANLEY HALL
INTRODUCTION
Our life, bounded by birth and death, has five chief stages, each of
which, while it may be divided into substages, also passes into the
next so gradually that we cannot date, save roughly and approximately,
the transition from one period to that which succeeds it. These
more marked nodes in the unity of man’s individual existence are:
(1) childhood, (2) adolescence from puberty to full nubility, (3)
middle life or the prime, when we are at the apex of our aggregate of
powers, ranging from twenty-five or thirty to forty or forty-five and
comprising thus the fifteen or twenty years now commonly called our
best, (4) senescence, which begins in the early forties, or before in
woman, and (5) senectitude, the post-climacteric or old age proper. My
own life work, such as it is, as a genetic psychologist was devoted for
years to the study of infancy and childhood, then to the phenomena of
youth, later to adulthood and the stage of sex maturity. To complete
a long-cherished program I have now finally tried, aided by the
first-hand knowledge that advancing years have brought, to understand
better the two last and closing stages of human life.
In fact ever since I published my _Adolescence_ in 1904 I have hoped to
live to complement it by a study of senescence. The former could not
have been written in the midst of the seething phenomena it describes,
as this must be. We cannot outgrow and look back upon old age, for the
course of time cannot be reversed, as Plato fancied life beginning
in senility and ending in the mother’s womb. The literature on this
theme is limited and there are few specialists in gerontology even
among physicians. Its physiological and pathological aspects have
been treated not only for plants and animals but for man, and this
has been done best by men in their prime. For its more subjective and
psychological aspects, however, we shall always be dependent chiefly
upon those who are undergoing its manifold metamorphoses and therefore
lack the detachment that alone can give us a true and broad perspective.
Again, youth is an exhilarating, age a depressing theme. Both have
their zest but they are as unlike as the mood of morning and evening,
spring and autumn. Despite the interest that has impelled the
preparation of these chapters there is, thus, a unique relief that they
are done and that the mind can turn away from the contemplation of the
terminal stage of life. An old man devoting himself for many months to
the study of senectitude and death has a certain pathetic aspect, even
to those nearest him, so that his very household brightens as his task
draws toward its close. It was begun, not chiefly for others, even for
other old people, but because the author felt impelled upon entering
this new stage of life and upon retirement from active duties, to make
a self-survey, to face reality, to understand more clearly what age was
and meant for himself, and to be rightly oriented in the post-graduate
course of life into which he had been entered. The decision to publish
came later in the hope that his text might prove helpful, not only to
fellow students in the same curriculum but to those just passing middle
life, for the phenomena of age begin in the early forties, when all
should think of preparing for old age.
Resent, resist, or ignore it as we will, the fact is that when we are
once thought of as old, whether because of mental or physical signs or
by withdrawal from our wonted sphere of activities, we enter a class
more or less apart and by ourselves. We can claim, if we will, certain
exemptions, privileges, immunities, and even demand allowances; but,
on the other hand, we are liable to feel set aside by, or to make room
for, younger people and find that even the new or old services we have
a new urge to render may be declined. Many things meant or not meant
to do so, remind us of our age. Friends and perhaps even critics show
that they take it into consideration. Shortcomings that date from
earlier years are now ascribed to age. We feel, often falsely, that we
are observed or even spied upon for signs of its approach, and we are
constantly tempted to do or say things to show that it is not yet upon
us. Only later comes the stage of vaunting it, proclaiming openly our
tale of years and perhaps posing as prodigies of senescence. Where the
transition from leadership toward the chimney corner is sudden, this
sense of aloofness and all its subjective experiences becomes acute,
while only if it is very gradual may we pass into innocuous desuetude
and hardly know it. Thus in all these and other ways isolation and
the enhanced individuation characteristic of age separate us until in
fact we feel more or less a caste apart. Despite all, however, there
is a rapport between us oldsters, and we understand each other almost
esoterically. We must accept and recognize this better knowledge of
this stage of life as part of our present duty in the community.
Thus the chief thesis of this book is that we have a function in
the world that we have not yet risen to and which is of the utmost
importance--far greater, in fact, in the present stage of the world
than ever before, and that this new and culminating service can only
be seen and prepared for by first realizing what ripe and normal age
really is, means, can, should, and now must do, if our race is ever to
achieve its true goal. For both my purposes, the personal and later
public one, it has seemed wisest to give much space to a conspectus of
opinions by way of epitomes of the views of those who have considered
the subject from the most diverse standpoints, and thus to let them
speak for themselves. Both my own standpoint and my conclusions I
believe to be justified by these data.
But, first, in a lighter and more personal vein and by way of further
introduction, let me state that after six years of post-graduate study
abroad, two of teaching at Harvard, and eight of professoring at the
Johns Hopkins, I found myself at the head of a new university, from
which latter post, after thirty-one years of service, I have just
retired and become a pensioner. In this last left position I had to do
creative educational work and shape new policies. I was given unusual
freedom and threw my heart and soul into the work, making it more or
less of a new departure. I nursed the infancy of the institution with
almost maternal solicitude, saw it through various diseases incident
to the early stages of its development, and steered it through several
crises that taxed my physical and mental powers to their uttermost. In
its service I had to do, as best I could, many things for which I was
little adapted by training or talent and some of which were personally
distasteful. But even to these I had given myself with loyalty and
occasionally with abandon, as my “bit” in life, remembering that while
men come and go, good institutions should, like Tennyson’s brook, “go
on forever.”
There is always considerable publicity in such work and one has always
to consider, in every measure, its effects upon the controlling board
in whom the prime responsibility for its welfare is vested, the public,
the faculty, and the students; and between the points of view of these
four parties concerned there are often discrepancies so wide that if
any of them knew how the others felt there might be serious trouble.
Occasionally, too, my own opinion differed from all the others, and
this involved a fifth factor to be reckoned with. Thus, much effort
had to be directed toward compounding different interests and not
infrequently the only way open seemed to be concealment, temporary
at least, of the views of one of these elements, because untimely
disclosure might have brought open rupture. However, I had muddled
on as best I could, learning much tact and diplomacy and various
mediatorial devices as the years rolled by.
And now I have resigned, and after months of delay and with gratifying
expressions of regret, another younger captain, whom, happily, I can
fully trust, is in my place. I had always planned that my retirement,
when it came, should be complete. I would do my full duty up to the
last moment and then sever every tie and entirely efface myself, so far
as the institution I had served was concerned, and would distinctly
avoid every worry, even as to the fate of my most cherished policies.
This was only fair to my successor and all my interests must henceforth
be vested elsewhere. But what a break after all these decades! It
seemed almost like anticipatory death, and the press notices of my
withdrawal read to me not unlike obituaries. The very kindness of all
these and of the many private letters and messages that came to me
suggested that their authors had been prompted by the old principle,
_De mortuis nil nisi bonum_.
For more than forty years I have lectured at eleven o’clock and the
cessation of this function leaves a curious void. My friends have
already fancied that I tend to grow loquacious at that hour. If I
speak or write now, it must be to a very different clientele. During
all these years, too, I have held a seminary nearly every Monday
night, and now when this evening comes around my faculties activate,
even if _bombinantes in vacuo_. On those evenings I have been greatly
stimulated by familiar contact with vigorous student minds, for on
these occasions they and I have inspired each other to some of our best
_aperçus_. But now this contact is gone forever. My _Journal_, which
for more than thirty years had taken so much of my care and, at first
in its nursling period, of my surplus funds and had become for me an
institution in itself, is also now transferred to better hands.
Thus, I am rather summarily divorced from my world, and it might seem
at first as if there was little more to be said of me save to record
the date of my death--and we all know that men who retire often die
soon afterwards. So my prayer perhaps should be _Nunc dimittis_.
Ex-presidents, like founders of institutions, have often lived to
become meddling nuisances, so that even those whom they have most
profited, secretly and perhaps unconsciously long to participate in an
impressive funeral for them. What can remain but a trivial postscript?
And would not some of the suggested forms of painless extinction be
worthy of consideration? Of course it is bitter to feign that I am
suddenly dead to these interests I have so long lived for, as all the
proprieties demand I should do and as I inexorably will to do for my
very heart and soul went into them. But I did not build a monument to
myself in any sense but strove only to fashion an instrument of service
and such I know it will remain--and, I hope, far more effectively than
under my hand.
But I thank whatever gods there are that all this painful renunciation
has its very satisfying compensations and that there are other counsels
than those of despair, seeing which I can take heart again, and
that these are so satisfying that I do not need to have recourse to
wood-sawing, like the Kaiser, though I have a new sympathy even for him.
My very first and hardest duty of all is to realize that I am really
and truly old. Associated for so many years with young men and able
to keep pace with them in my own line of work, carrying without scathe
not a few extra burdens at times, and especially during the war,
and having, varied as my duties were, fallen into a certain weekly
and monthly routine that varied little from year to year, I had not
realized that age was, all the while, creeping upon me. But now that
I am out the full realization that I have reached and passed the
scripturally allotted span of years comes upon me almost with a shock.
Emerson says that a task is a life-preserver, and now that mine is gone
I must swim or go under. To be sure, I had been conscious during half a
decade of certain slight incipient infirmities and had had moments of
idealizing the leisure which retirement would bring. But when it came
I was so overwhelmed and almost distracted by its completeness that
I was at a loss, for a time, to know how to use it. I might travel,
especially in the Orient, as I had long wanted to do, for I feel that I
have a certain right to a “good time” for myself since my life has been
a very industrious one and almost entirely in the service of others. I
might live much out-of-doors on my small farm; read for pleasure, for I
have literary tastes; move to a large city and take in its amusements,
of which I am fond; devote myself more to my family, whom I now feel
I have rather neglected; or give more time to certain avocations and
interests in which I have dabbled but have never had time to cultivate
save in the crudest way. Or, finally, I could do a little of all or
several of these things in turn. But no program that I can construct
out of such possibilities seems entirely satisfactory. I surely may
indulge myself a little more in many ways but I really want and ought
to do something useful and with a unitary purpose. Thus, I might have
spent much time as _Senex quærans institutum vitæ_ but for the saving
fact that there are certain very specific things which for years I
have longed to do, and indeed have already well begun, and to which,
with this new leisure, I can now devote myself as never before.
As preliminary to even this, it slowly came to me that I must, first
of all, take careful stock of myself and now seek to attain more of
the self-knowledge that Socrates taught the world was the highest,
hardest, and last of all forms of knowledge. I must know, too, just
how I stand in with my present stage of life. Hence I began with a
physical inventory and visited doctors. The oculist found a slight
but unsuspected defect in one eye and improved my sight, which was
fairly good before, by better glasses. The aurist found even the less
sensitive ear fairly good. Digestion was found to be above the average.
I had for years been losing two or three pounds a year, but this rather
than the opposite tendency to corpulence was pronounced good (_Corpora
sicca durant_), and I was told that I might go on unloading myself of
superfluous tissue for fifteen or twenty years before I became too
emaciated to live, which humans, like starving animals, usually do on
losing about one-third of their weight. My heart would probably last
about the same length of time if I did not abuse it, and smoking in
moderation, a great solace, was not forbidden. A little wine, “the milk
of old age,” was not taboo and I was given a prescription to enable me
to get it if I desired, even in these prohibition days. One suggested
that I insure my life heavily and another advised an annuity; but I
thought neither of these quite fair in view of the above findings, for
I did not wish to profiteer on my prospects of life.
This hygienic survey reinforced what I had realized before, namely,
that physicians know very little of old age. Few have specialized
in its distinctive needs, as they have in the diseases of women and
children and the rest. Thus the older a man is, the more he must
depend upon his own hygienic sagacity for health and long life. The
lives of nearly all the centenarians I have been able to find show that
they owe their longevity far more to their own insight than to medical
care, and there seems to be a far greater individual difference of
needs than medicine yet recognizes. Of the philosopher, Kant, it was
said that he spent more mentality in keeping his congenitally feeble
body alive and in good trim to the age of eighty than he expended in
all the fourteen closely printed volumes of his epoch-making _Works_.
Thus, again, I realized that I was alone, indeed in a new kind of
solitude, and must pursue the rest of my way in life by a more or
less individual research as to how to keep well and at the top of my
condition. In a word, I must henceforth, for the most part, be my own
doctor. All of those I consulted agreed that I must eat moderately,
slowly, oftener, less at a time, sleep regularly, cultivate the
open air, exercise till fatigue came and then promptly stop, be
cheerful, and avoid “nerves,” worry, and all excesses. But with
these commonplaces the agreement ceased. One said I needed change,
as if, indeed, I was not getting it with a vengeance. One suggested
Fletcherizing, while another thought this bad for the large intestine,
which needed more coarse material to stimulate its action. One thought
there was great virtue in cold, another in warm baths. Two prescribed
a diet, while another said, “Eat what you like, with discretion.”
One suggested thyroid extract and perhaps Brown-Sequard’s testicular
juices, and there seemed to be a more general agreement that a man
is as old, not as his heart and arteries as was once thought, but
as his endocrine glands. One would give chief attention to the
colon and recommended Metchnikoff’s tablets. One prescribed Sanford
Bennett’s exercises which made him an athlete at seventy-two. Rubbing
or self-massage on rising and retiring was commended. Battle Creek
advises bowel movements not only daily but oftener, while others
insist that constipation should and normally does increase with old
age. Pavlovists, especially Sternberg in his writings, would have us
trust appetite implicitly, believing that it always points true as the
needle to the pole to the nutritive needs of both sick and well and
that it gives the sole momentum to all the digestive processes, even
down to the very end of the alimentary canal; while others prescribe
everything chemically, calculating to a nicety the proportions of
carbohydrates, fats, calories, and the rest, with no reference to
gustatory inclination.
Perhaps I should try out all these suggestions in turn and seek to
find by experiment which is really best for me. I almost have the will
to do so because I certainly illustrate the old principle that as
life advances we love it not less but more, for the habit of living
grows so strong with years that it is ever harder to break it. All
things considered, however, it would rather seem that the longer we
live the harder it is to keep on doing so, and that with every year of
life we must give more attention to regimen if we would put off the
great life-queller, which all the world fears and hates as it does
nothing else, beyond its normal term, which most generally agree is
very largely hereditary. In fact, as Minot shows, all creatures begin
to die at the very moment when they begin to live. All theories of
euthanasia ignore the fact that death is essentially a negation of the
will-to-live, so that a conscious and positive will-to-die is always
only an artifact.
So much I gathered from the doctors I saw or read. Their books and
counsels cost me a tidy sum but it was well worth it. I now know
myself better than they, and it is much to realize that henceforth an
ever-increasing attention must be given to body-keeping if one would
stay “fit” or even alive. Now that the average length of human life
is increased and there are more and more old people, a fact that marks
the triumph of science and civilization, there is more need of studying
them, just as in recent decades children have been studied, for
medically, at least after the climacteric, they constitute a class in
the community that is somewhat alien, its intrinsic nature but little
known, and the services it was meant to render but little utilized.[1]
As my horizon changed and I became more at home with myself, and
personal problems grew nearer and clearer, I realized that I must
make a new plan of life, in which both tasks and also a program of
renunciation played a very prominent initial part. This began with
a literal house-cleaning. My home, from attic to cellar, and even
the large barn were more or less full of disused articles of every
kind--furniture and even wearing apparel, still serviceable but
displaced by better ones, which it was now plain could never be of
use to us but might be so to others. About some of these so many old
associations clustered that it was a pang to part with them, but it
was selfish to keep them longer. And so, by distribution to persons
and institutions, then by sales, and finally by dumpage, they were
rigorously gotten rid of, room by room, and we all felt relieved
physically, mentally, and morally, by this expropriation, even though
a few heirlooms were sacrificed. This process has many analogies with
those by which the body is rid of waste material.
Next came books, of which my purchases, when I was enthusiastic and
had a passion for ownership and completeness in my favorite topics,
had been extravagant for my means and which, by many hundreds of
publisher’s gifts for review in my journals, had overflowed from both
study and library into nearly every room. These, in open shelves for
greater accessibility and laboriously and systematically arranged,
could not be disturbed often or dusted and are a housekeeper’s
abomination. I had for years collected pamphlets and bound volumes
on many topics in the vague hope of some future use, but which I now
realize will never be warmed up again. So, section by section, shelf
by shelf, I went over them, reserving all on topics I might yet study,
and after inviting colleagues and the Library to take freely what they
would I shipped the residue in boxes to antiquarian and second-hand
dealers and accepted with equanimity the pittance they paid. This work
done in leisure hours for months, was a wrenching process because every
step in it involved the frustration of activities once thought possible
but which now seemed to be no longer so. Little, thus, remained outside
my own quite definitely narrowed field of work which I hope yet to do,
and only a few gifts and sets, along with texts studied in younger and
those taught in later days in which my descendants may sometime come to
feel an interest, remain. This riddance of the residue of superfluous
printed matter is not unlike anti-fat regimens, which are disagreeable
but strengthening.
Next, I attacked a formidable pile of old lecture notes, beginning
with a few small and faded records of college exercises in bound
sheets, including the _Heften_ of European courses, and finally the
far more voluminous memoranda of my own lectures for nearly two-score
years. How crude and impossible now were these earlier reminders of
my professorial activity! What a prodigious amount of work, time,
and even manual labor they involved! What hardihood of inference and
conclusion! What immaturity and even foolhardiness of judgment on
some of the greatest problems of life! If I wanted to dignify or even
glorify my old age at the expense of my youth, here are abundant
data for so doing. But I do not, and so I found peculiar pleasure
in consigning, with my own hands, armfuls of such manuscript to the
flames. How hard I rode my own hobbies! What liberties I took--and
all with perfect innocence of intent--with the ideas of others, which
insinuated themselves unconsciously into all of my mental complexes!
And yet, at the same time, how voraciously I read, how copiously I
quoted, and how radically I changed the form, substance, and scope of
my favorite courses each year, slowly improving them in clarity and
coherence! And how many special themes in my field, once central, have
lapsed to secondary importance or become obsolete! Such breaks with
the past, which psychology regards as analogues of a catharsis that
relieves constipation, have a certain insurance value not only against
ultra-conservatism but against the inveterate tendency of the old to
hark back to past stages of life.
As a part of the process of reorientation I felt impelled, as I think
natural enough for a psychologist, to write my autobiography and get
myself in focus genetically. To this I devoted the first year after
my retirement. It is now complete and laid safely away and may or may
not be published sometime, although certainly not at present. Its
preparation served me well in advancing my understanding of the one I
know best of all, and I would earnestly prescribe such an occupation as
one of the most pleasant and profitable services intelligent old people
can render to themselves and perhaps their posterity and friends, if
not to the world at large. The reading of “lives,” too, is often one
of the most absorbing and sometimes almost exclusive intellectual
occupation of the old.
Incidental to this work I unearthed many written data of the past--my
youthful diaries, school exercises, some two feet of letters from my
parents, especially my mother, for more than a quarter of a century
after I left home and before her death; and several hundred large
envelopes of carefully filed correspondence with many friends and
strangers on many topics. All these had to be at least cursorily
glanced over. Part of this voluminous material no one, I am convinced,
will ever care to reperuse. My own offspring have no interest in it,
so why not consign it to oblivion now that it has served its final
purpose? There is little of value to the living or of special credit to
the dead in it all; so I conclude there is more of real piety, even to
the memory of my mother, to select a number of the best of her missives
which most clearly show her constant and affectionate solicitude and
love, and burn all the rest. I am sure that both she and my father
would heartily commend this course. So, as I watched them burn in
the grate one solitary spring at evening twilight, I felt that I had
completed a filial function of interment of her remains. No profane ear
can now ever hear what she whispered into mine. She tried to convey
everything good in her beautiful soul to me, her eldest, wanted me to
do everything commendable that she could not and realize all her own
thwarted ambitions. I hope that I may yet do something more worthy of
her fondest hopes. If I seem to have cremated her very soul, or so much
of it as she gave me, I feel that I have thus done the last and most
sacred act of service which such a son can render such a mother.
By all this purgation I have, at any rate, saved my offspring from a
task that could not be other than painful and embarrassing to them,
and relieved them from inheriting a burden of impedimenta which they
themselves would not have the hardihood to destroy, at least for years
after my demise, and which could be of no earthly use to them or any
one else.
And now it only remained for me to make my last will and testament and
bequeath all that I have left where I hope it may do most good. This
should have been done long ago but I have been withheld from this duty,
partly by preoccupation but far more by the instinctive reluctance all
feel to thus anticipate their own death. A dozen modes of disposing
of my modest estate had occurred to me and there were countless
considerations to be weighed. Some provisions were obvious but more
were beset with a puzzling array of _pros_ and _cons_. But the time was
over-ripe, and so I nerved myself for this ordeal, feeling sure there
would be regrets, revisions, or perhaps codicils every year I lived.
But when it was duly signed and witnessed there was, on the whole,
great relief, as from having accomplished a long-looming and difficult
task.
For myself, I feel thrice fortunate in having really found my _goru_,
the one thing in which I am up to date and seething with convictions,
which I have never before had the courage to express, and that I can
now hope to devote myself to with all my spirit and understanding and
with the abandon the subject really demands. I will not accept the
subtle but persistently intrusive suggestion that it will do no good
or that former colleagues whom I esteem, and whose judgment I greatly
prize, will ignore it because other old men have written fatuously. I
can, at least, speak more honestly than I have ever dared to do before,
and if I am never read or even venture into print, I shall have the
satisfaction of having clarified and unified my own soul.
But before I can enter fully into the functions or the service age
ought to render and begin the one thing I have always planned for this
stage of life, I would know more about what it really is, find out its
status, estimate its powers, its limitations, its physical and mental
regimen; and especially, if I can, look death, which certainly cannot
be very far off, calmly in the face. It is in this final stage of
preparation for what I yet hope to do later that I invite the reader
to accompany me through the following pages in the fond hope that not
only the old may be helped to better realize their estate and their
responsibilities and duties in the world of to-day but that those just
emerging from middle life and for whom the shadows have just begun to
lengthen may be better fitted to meet old age when it overtakes them.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
I. THE YOUTH OF OLD AGE 1
The turn of the tide of life--Relative amount and
importance of work accomplished before and after forty--
The sexual life at the turn of the tide in man and woman--
Osler’s views and critics (E. G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland,
E. S. P. Haynes)--Illustrations from Tolstoi, Fechner,
Comte, Swedenborg--The typical cases of Segantini, Lenau,
von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel, Ruskin, and
Nietsche--Michaëlis’ “dangerous age” in women--The
difficulty of determining this age--The nature of the
changes, conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that
people in this stage of life should lay to heart--H. G.
Wells and Ross.
II. THE HISTORY OF OLD AGE 32
The age of plants and animals--The Old Stone Age--
Treatment of old age among existing savage tribes--
The views of Frazer--The ancient Hebrews and the Old
Testament--The Greeks (including Sparta, the Homeric
Age, the status of the old in Athens, the views of Plato,
Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)--The Romans--
The Middle Ages--Witchcraft and old women--Attitude
of children toward the old--Mantegazza’s collection of
favorable and unfavorable views of age--The division of
life into stages--The relation of age groups to social
strata--The religion of different ages of life--The
Vedanta--The Freudian war between the old and the young--
History of views from Cornaro to our own time--Bacon--
Addison--Burton--Swift.
III. LITERATURE BY AND ON THE AGED 100
Harriet E. Paine--Amelia E. Barr--Mortimer Collins--
Col. Nicholas Smith--Byron C. Utecht--J. L. Smith--
Sanford Bennet--G. E. D. Diamond--Cardinal Gibbons--
John Burroughs--Rollo Ogden--James L. Ludlow--Brander
Matthews--Ralph Waldo Emerson--Oliver Wendell Holmes--
Senator G. F. Hoar--William Dean Howells--H. D.
Sedgwick--Walt Mason--E. P. Powell--U. V. Wilson--D. G.
Brinton--N. S. Shaler--Anthony Trollope--Stephen Paget--
Richard le Gallienne--G. S. Street--C. W. Saleeby--
Bernard Shaw--A few typical poems and quotations.
IV. STATISTICS OF OLD AGE AND ITS CARE 154
I. Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands
where data are available--Actuarial and other mortality
tables--Expectation of life and death-rate at different
ages--Longevity and fecundity--Death-rate in different
occupations--Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the Middle
Ages--Diversity of statistical methods and results.
II. Growing need of care for the indigent old--Causes of
improvidence--Ignorance and misconception of what old
age is and means--Why the old do not know themselves--
Old age pensions in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and
her colonies, France, Belgium, United States--Industrial
pensions and insurance, beginning with railroads--Trades
unions--Fraternal organizations--Retiring pensions in the
army and navy--Local and national insurance--Teachers’
pensions--The Carnegie Foundation--Criticism of pension
systems--Growing magnitude, urgency, and diversity
of views and methods--The Life Extension Institute--
“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs--Should the old
organize?
V. MEDICAL VIEWS AND TREATMENT OF OLD AGE 195
The self-knowledge that doctors give--Insidious approach
of many diseases--Medical views of the old of body and
mind (senile dementia)--Charcot--G. M. Humphrey--Sir
James Crichton-Browne--H. M. Friedman--H. Gilford--H.
Oertel--A. S. Warthin--W. Spielmeyer--I. L. Nascher--
Sir Dyce Duckworth--Robert Saundy--Arnold Lorand--T. D.
Crothers--C. G. Stockton--W. G. Thompson--M. L. Price--
G. S. Keith--J. M. Taylor--C. W. Saleeby--C. A. Ewald--
Raymond Pearl--Protest against the prepotence of heredity
in determining longevity.
VI. THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF BIOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 248
Weismann’s immortality of the germ plasm and his denial
of the inheritance of acquired qualities--The truth and
limitations of his views--The theories of Hering and
Simon--Metchnikoff’s conception of the disharmonies in
man, of the rôle of intestinal fauna and their products,
of euthanasia, and of the means and effects of prolonging
life--C. S. Minot’s conception of the progressive arrest
of life from birth on as measured by declining rate of
growth, and his neglect to consider the dynamic elements--
C. M. Child’s studies of rejuvenation in lower and higher
forms of life in the light of the problems of senescence--
J. Loeb’s studies of the effects of lower temperature, of
toxins and ferments--The preservation of cells of somatic
tissues potentially immortal under artificial conditions--
Account of the studies of Carrel, Pozzi, and others--
Investigations upon the effects on sex qualities and age
of the extracts and transplantations of glands, from
Claude Bernard--Investigations of Eugene Steinach on the
interchange of sex qualities and rejuvenation by glandular
operations in animals and man--G. F. Lydston’s work--
Serge Voronoff’s experiments and his exposition of the
achievements and hopes of glandular therapy--Some general
considerations in view of work in this field.
VII. REPORT ON QUESTIONNAIRE RETURNS 319
Their value suggestive but only for a class--(1) Age and
effect of the first realization of the approach of old
age--(2) To what do you ascribe your long life?--(3) How
do you keep well?--(4) Are you troubled by regrets?--(5)
What temptations do you feel, old or new?--(6) What duties
do you feel you still owe to others or to self?--(7) Is
interest in public affairs for the far future and past, as
compared with what is closer at hand, greater or less?--
(8) In what do you take your greatest pleasures?--(9) Do
you enjoy the society of children, youth, adults, those of
your own age more or less than formerly?--(10) Would you
live your life over again?--(11) Did you experience an
“Indian summer” of renewed vigor before the winter of age
began?--(12) Do you rely more or less upon doctors than
formerly?--(13) Do you get more or less from the clergy
and the church than formerly?--(14) Do you think more or
less of dying and the hereafter?--A few individual returns
from eminent people.
VIII. SOME CONCLUSIONS 366
The early decades of age--The deadline of seventy--
The patheticism of the old--The attitude of physicians
toward them--Fluctuations of youth--Erotic decline--
Alternations in the domain of sleep, food, mood,
irritability, rational self-control, and sex--The dawn of
old age in women--Dangers of the disparity when December
weds May--Sexual hygiene for the old--Mental effects
of the dulling of sensations--Lack of mental pabulum--
The tedium vitæ--Changes in the emotional life--Age
not second childhood--Women in the dangerous age--Need
of a new and higher type of old age--Aristotle’s golden
mean and the magnanimous man--The age of disillusion--
Increased power of synthesis--Nature’s balance between old
and young--Superior powers of the old in perspective and
larger views--New love of nature and the country--Their
preëminence in religion, politics, philosophy, morals, and
as judges--Looking within and without--Merging with the
cosmos.
XI. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH 439
The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as
recapitulating that of the race--Suicide--The
death-wish--Necrophilism--The Black Death--Depopulation
by the next war--The evolutionary nisus and death as its
queller--Death symbolism as pervasive as that of sex--
Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of death--
Schopenhauer’s view of death--The separation of ghosts
from the living among primitive races--The thanatology of
the Egyptians--The journey of the soul--Ancient cults of
death and resurrection in the religions about the eastern
Mediterranean, based on the death of vegetation in the
fall and its revival in the spring, as a background of
Pauline Christianity--The fading belief in immortality and
Protestantism which now at funerals speaks only of peace
and rest--Osler’s five hundred deathbeds--Influential,
plasmal, and personal immortality and their reciprocal
relations--Moral efficacy of the doctrine of future
rewards and punishments--Belief in a future life for the
individual being transformed into a belief in the future
of the race on earth and the advent of the superman--Does
man want personal immortality--Finot’s immortality of the
decomposing body and its resolution into its elements--The
Durkheim school and the mana doctrine--Schleiermacher--
The Schiller-James view of the brain and consciousness as
repressive of the larger life of the great Autos--The
views of Plato and Kant--Have God and Nature cheated and
lied to us if the wish to survive is false?--Noetic and
mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of
general ideas--Views of Howison, Royce, and others--Is
there a true euthanasia or thanatophilia?--Diminution of
the desire for personal immortality with culture and age.
SENESCENCE
CHAPTER I
THE YOUTH OF OLD AGE
The turn of the tide of life--Relative amount and importance of
work accomplished before and after forty--The sexual life at the
turn of the tide in man and woman--Osler’s views and critics (E.
G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland, E. S. P. Haynes)--Illustrations
from Tolstoi, Fechner, Comte, Swedenborg--The typical cases of
Segantini, Lenau, von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel,
Ruskin and Nietzsche--Michaëlis’s “dangerous age” in women--The
difficulty in determining this age--The nature of the changes,
conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that people in this
stage of life should lay to heart--H. G. Wells and Ross.
The easiest division of every whole is into two halves. Thus day
and night are bisected by noon and midnight, the year by both the
solstice and the equinox; the racer turns in the middle of his course;
curricula, apprenticeships, and long tasks have, from immemorial time,
celebrated the completion of their first moiety, and halfway houses
divide established courses of travel. So, too, we speak of middle age
and think vaguely of it as half way between birth and death or between
adolescence and senescence. If we think of life as a binomial curve
rising from a base line at birth and sinking into it at death, midway
is the highest point with the longest ordinate; and as the crest of a
wave has its spindrift, so life at this point often foams, or at least
shows emulsive tendencies. We come in sight of the descent while the
ascent behind is still visible. The man of thirty-five hopes to live
the allotted span of seventy and at forty he knows that in another
two-score years his work will cease; and thus some comparison of the
past and future is inevitable. Some begin taking stock of what has been
and what remains to be done, reckoning only from the date of entering
upon their careers and trying thus to judge its future by its past.
Thus sooner or later there comes to all a realization that the tide
that “drew us from out the boundless deep” begins to “turn again home.”
These meridional perturbations usually come earlier in women than in
men, and this has been called their “dangerous age.” Both sexes realize
that they face the bankruptcy of some of their youthful hopes, and
certain temperaments make a desperate, now-or-never effort to realize
their extravagant expectations and are thus led to excesses of many
kinds; while others capitulate to fate, lose heart, and perhaps even
lose the will-to-live. Osler was the evil genius, the croaking Poe
raven of this period. If such pronouncements as his stimulate talent,
which is longer lived, they depress genius, which blossoms earlier. On
the height of life we ought to pause, circumspect, turn from the dead
reckonings of the start, and ascend as into an outlook tower to see,
before it is too late, if we need to reorient our course by the eternal
stars. Here we begin the home stretch toward the finish. Change, or
at least thoughts of change, arise even in those most successful, as
biography so abundantly shows, while even partial failure impels many
to seek new environments and perhaps callings and some are driven to
mad new ventures. Most, however, despite a certain perturbation, go on
perhaps a score of years, and instead of anticipating old age wait till
it is upon them and they have to restrict their activities or retire;
then only do they accept the burden of years. The modifications in the
_vita sexualis_ which middle life brings are only now beginning to be
understood in their true significance. Its first flush has come and
gone and some settle to the tranquil fruition of a happy married life,
while others stray into secret and forbidden ways or yield to the
excitements of overindulgence just when Nature begins to suggest more
moderation, so that love often grows gross just when its sublimation
should begin to be most active. One close and experienced observer
points out that the forties is the decade of the triangle, of the
paramour, and of divorces for men, and that the preceding decade is so
for women; but of course we have no confirmatory statistics for such a
conclusion save only for divorce. The following epitomes represent the
chief aspects and treatments of this period, although illustrations of
its phenomena might be indefinitely multiplied.
The sensational press has so perverted the statements made by Dr.
William Osler in his farewell address on leaving the Johns Hopkins
University in 1905, and his remarks are so pithy, thinly and
ineffectively as he tried to mask his earnestness with humor, that it
seems worth while to quote his words, as follows:[2]
I have two fixed ideas well known to my friends, harmless
obsessions with which I sometimes bore them, but which have
a direct bearing on this important problem. The first is the
comparative uselessness of men above forty years of age. This
may seem shocking, and yet, read aright, the world’s history
bears out the statement. Take the sum of human achievement in
action, in science, in art, in literature--subtract the work of
the men above forty, and, while we should miss great treasures,
even priceless treasures, we should practically be where we
are to-day. It is difficult to name a great and far-reaching
conquest of the mind which has not been given to the world by
a man on whose back the sun was still shining. The effective,
moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages
of twenty-five and forty years--these fifteen golden years of
plenty, the anabolic or constructive period, in which there is
always a balance in the mental bank and the credit is still
good.
In the science and art of medicine there has not been an
advance of the first rank which has not been initiated by
young or comparatively young men. Vesalius, Harvey, Hunter,
Bichat, Laennec, Virchow, Lister, Koch--the green years were
yet on their heads when their epoch-making studies were made.
To modify an old saying, a man is sane morally at thirty, rich
mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty--or never. The
young men should be encouraged and afforded every possible
chance to show what is in them. If there is one thing more than
another upon which the professors of the university are to be
congratulated, it is this very sympathy and fellowship with
their junior associates, upon whom really in many departments,
in mine certainly, has fallen the brunt of the work. And
herein lies the chief value of the teacher who has passed his
climacteric and is no longer a productive factor; he can play
the man midwife, as Socrates did to Theætetus, and determine
whether the thoughts which the young men are bringing to the
light are false idols or true and noble births.
My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty
years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in
commercial, political, and in professional life if, as a
matter of course, men stopped work at this age. Donne tells us
in his “Biathanatos” that by the laws of certain wise states
sexagenarii were precipitated from a bridge, and in Rome men
of that age were not admitted to the suffrage, and were called
_depontani_ because the way to the senate was _per pontem_
and they from age were not permitted to come hither. In that
charming novel, the “Fixed Period,” Anthony Trollope discusses
the practical advantages in modern life of a return to this
ancient usage, and the plot hinges on the admirable scheme
of a college into which at sixty men retired for a year of
contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform. That
incalculable benefits might follow such a scheme is apparent
to any one who, like myself, is nearing the limit, and who has
made a careful study of the calamities which may befall men
during the seventh and eighth decades!
Still more when he contemplates the many evils which they
perpetuate unconsciously and with impunity! As it can be
maintained that all the great advances have come from men
under forty, so the history of the world shows that a
very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the
sexagenarians--nearly all the great mistakes politically and
socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a
majority of the bad novels, and not a few of the bad sermons
and speeches. It is not to be denied that occasionally there
is a sexagenarian whose mind, as Cicero remarks, stands out of
reach of the body’s decay. Such a one has learned the secret
of Hermippus, that ancient Roman, who, feeling that the silver
cord was loosening, cut himself clear from all companions of
his own age, and betook himself to the company of young men,
mingling with their games and studies, and so lived to the age
of 153, _puerorum halitu refocillatus et educatus_. And there
is truth in the story, since it is only those who live with the
young who maintain a fresh outlook on the new problems of the
world.
The teacher’s life should have three periods--study until
twenty-five, investigation until forty, professional until
sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double
allowance. Whether Anthony Trollope’s suggestion of a college
and chloroform should be carried out or not, I have become a
little dubious, as my own time is getting so short.
E. G. Dexter[3] disputes Osler’s conclusions by referring to such
well-known cases as Gladstone, Bismarck, von Moltke, Rockefeller,
Morgan, etc., and finds that according to the last census there are
4,871,861 persons over sixty in the United States. He recognizes the
fact, however, that many corporations refuse to add new men to their
working force who are beyond forty years of age. Dexter had previously
tabulated the age of the nearly 9,000 persons mentioned in the 1900
edition of _Who’s Who_ and found that comparatively few who were under
forty attained the distinction of being included in this list. Of 6,983
men the median age was 54, only one in six being below 40; that is,
some 16 per cent were within Osler’s period of most effective work.
But he concludes that in _Who’s Who_ younger men did not receive the
recognition given to their older _confrères_. This ratio he finds to be
as follows:
20–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69
3.9% 39.5% 36.4% 17.6% 2.4%
Thus the decade from 30 to 39 shows only very slightly greater
productivity than the next one, and less than one-half made good, so
far as public recognition is concerned, before the age of 40. This is
irrespective of vocation.
In all the studies of genius[4] it would seem that musicians do their
best work earliest and prodigies are most common in this field. In
those callings that require a long preparation, science promises
earliest recognition because this line of work is entered with better
intellectual equipment. Here, too, belong professors, librarians, and
teachers. Next come actors and authors, in whom ability is partly
born and partly made. Compared with science, inventive genius gains
a foothold on the ladder of fame late in life. The business man
and financier, the lawyer, doctor, and minister, must often enter
their profession from the bottom, and almost no great inventor is
below forty. For woman, however, recognition comes earlier, and
attractiveness of person has a greater premium here than with her
brother. Having outlived her youth, however, progress is harder.
W. A. Newman Dorland[5] studied the histories of four hundred great
men of modern times and concluded that they refute Osler’s theory,
the large majority of them being still active at sixty, although he
distinguishes between workers and thinkers. He tells us that only
that which is fittest survives and almost seems to imply that man
became man when he was able to live and work productively after 40.[6]
He considers old age one of the choicest products of evolution. His
painstaking article is divided into three sections: (1) enumerating
the great things done by men after 70; (2) by those between 60 and 70;
(3) by those between 50 and 60. He thinks that if Osler’s dictum has
any validity, it is found among manual laborers. It doubtless had its
influence in the practice of so many industries that employ no new men
above the age of 40.
E. S. P. Haynes[7] resents the idea that people should retire from
public affairs at forty, although he recognizes that near this age in
both men and women there is often an impatience with a future that
promises to be just like the past and there is a peculiar liability
to amorous, financial, or other adventures. If people do anything,
they are labeled and so get into grooves, and their friends, if they
break out in new lines, as for example, Ruskin did, are shocked. But
the groove is liable to grow narrow, and when this is realized, abrupt
changes may occur. Nature protests against decay and hence it is that
we often see the spectacle of impatient old people who are in a hurry,
due perhaps to a subconscious effort to feel young again. This is akin
to the “dangerous age” in women. Life is not a bed of roses for those
who have succeeded, for it is sometimes as difficult to retain as it is
to achieve success. Very often our ideas, when we are young, are ahead
of our age but the world may catch up with us in middle or later life.
Very often, too, by ostentatiously turning their backs upon some new
movement the old thereby compel the young to take it up in order to
deploy themselves.
In this connection one may reflect, with Louise Creighton, that as
older people caused the late war, while the younger fought it, when the
latter came home the places that had to be found for them involved a
great deal of displacement, so that the tension between old and young
has been greatly increased since the close of the war. We also recall
the view of George R. Sims,[8] that the effect of the war upon the
old was depressing because they felt they must die when the world
was in darkness and without realizing the prayer of Simeon. The young
anticipated the harvests of peace, but for the old the prospect of
dying before this harvest was garnered was often pathetic.
Charles W. St. John[9] résumés the experimental studies of Ranschenburg
and Balint which show that all activities of judgment, association,
etc., are retarded, errors increased, and ideas impoverished in old
age. De Fursac tabs the traits of normal senile dementia as (1)
impaired attention and association; (2) inaccurate perception of the
external world, with illusions and disorientation; (3) disordered
memory, retrograde amnesia, and perhaps pseudo-reminiscence; (4)
impoverishment of ideas; (5) loss of judgment; (6) loss of affectivity,
along with morbid irritability; and (7) automatism. There may be ideas
of persecution or delusions of greatness. Youthful items of experience
hitherto only in the fringe of consciousness now press to the center,
and youthful contents are revived. There is a tendency to depart from
inductive procedure toward a priori methods, where feelings and beliefs
are criteria, and especially, as Fechner showed, to introversion. There
is less control and regression first shows itself in the intellect,
which is last to develop.
St. John proceeds to characterize four eminent men who underwent more
or less radical transformations in the early stages or youth of old
age, as follows. Tolstoy[10] was a typical convert. He witnessed the
horror of his grandmother’s death, which profoundly affected all his
later views. When he was about twelve, a schoolmate told him that there
was no God and that all thought about Him was an invention; and he
accepted this news and went on in a few years to Nihilism. In later
life he asked himself if he should become “more famous than Gogol,
Pushkin, Shakespeare, and Molière, what then?” and he could not answer.
The ground crumbled under him. There was no reason to live. Every day
was bringing him nearer to the precipice and yet he could not stop. He
felt he could live no longer and the idea of suicide as a last resort
was always with him and he had to practice self-deception to escape
it. Yet he had a pagan love of life. He found his status summed up in
an Eastern fable of a traveler who is attacked by a wild beast and
attempts to escape by letting himself down into a dried-up well, at the
bottom of which he finds a dragon, and so is forced to cling to a wild
plant that grows on the wall. Suddenly he sees two mice (one black and
one white--day and night) nibbling the plant from which he hangs and
in despair he looks about, still with a faint hope of escape. On the
leaves of this wild plant he sees a few drops of honey and even with
fear at his heart he stretches out his tongue and licks them. Thus the
dragon of death inevitably awaits him, while even the honey he tries
to taste no longer rejoices him for it is not sweet. “I cannot turn my
eyes from the mice or the dragon. Both are no fable.”
Thus the fear of death which had long haunted him now excluded
everything else and he was in despair. He turned to the working people,
whom he had always liked, to study them and found that although they
anticipated death they did not worry about it but had a simple faith
that bridges the gulf between the finite and the infinite, although
they held much he could not accept. Thus for a year while he was
considering whether or not to kill himself, he was haunted by a feeling
he describes as searching after God, not with his reason but with his
feelings. Kant and Schopenhauer said that man could not know Him.
Tolstoy at first feared that these experiences presaged his own mental
decline. He had joined the church and clung to orthodoxy for three
years but in the end left and was later excommunicated. He became a
peasant and finally left his pleasant home for a monastery, and as the
church had failed he turned to the Gospels, the core of which he found
in the Sermon on the Mount. Here was the solution of his problem. If
everyone strives for self there is no happiness. Nor is there any love
of family and friends alone, but love must extend to all mankind and
even to being, and this must be all-embracing. No doubt of immortality
can come to any man who renounces his individual happiness. Instead of
God he now worships the world-soul and attains the goal of perfection
he once sought in self-development.
Fechner,[11] born in 1801, made professor of physics in 1833, turned
to more psychological studies in 1838. He had visual troubles and
could not work without bandaging his eyes, lived in a blue room, had
insomnia, and seemed about to die. But in 1843 he improved and felt
he was called by God to do extraordinary things, prepared for by
suffering. His philosophical inclinations now came into the foreground.
He was on the way to the secret of the universe. He believed in
insight rather than induction, and this was in the decades when German
philosophy was at its lowest ebb. So his works fell dead. Not only
Buchner and Moleschott but Kant belonged to what he called the “night
side,” for the latter’s _Ding-an-Sich_ was a plot to banish joy.
Fechner knew no epistemology and thought we could come into direct
contact with reality itself. Man lives three times: once before birth
and in sleep; second alternating; and finally in death comes to the
eternal awakening. The spirit will then communicate with others without
language and all the dead live in us as Christ did in His followers.
The earth will return its soul to the sun. Visible phantoms may be
degenerate souls. In his _Zendavesta_ (Living Word) he gives us a
philosophy that he deems Christian and that really sums up his final
view of things. The childish view is nearest right and the philosopher
only reverts to it. Fechner died November 18, 1887, at the age of
eighty-six, and after his crisis was really more poet than scientist.
Auguste Comte, born 1798, married at the age of twenty-seven and was
divorced at forty-four. He experienced losses by the failure of his
publisher and had his first crisis when he was forty. He met Clotilde
de Vaux when he was forty-seven but she died a year later. He then
became the high priest of humanity, developing his _Politique Positive_
and a new religion. His father, a government official, had given
him an excellent scientific education, but during his early years
his emotional life was entirely undeveloped and this now took the
ascendency.[12]
Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688. He had his first vision in London
in 1745 at the age of 57, became a seer and mystic, and changed from a
subjective to an objective type of thought and developed his doctrine
of correspondencies. The change was due to overwork and eye-strain, as
was the case with Comte.[13]
Giovanni Segantini[14] affords us perhaps the very best picture of
a man who died at the age of forty-three of what might be called
meridional mental fever. His life was a struggle against an obsessive
death thought and a compensatory will-to-live. His first painting, at
the age of twelve, was of a child’s corpse, which he tried to paint
back into life. Haunted by the idealized image of his mother, who died
when he was very young, and which he fancied he at length found in a
peasant girl whom he made his model for years, this life-affirming
motif was always in conflict with the thought of death, which in later
years became an obsession. His struggle for sublimation was typified
by his removal from the world and retirement to a high Alpine village
where the mountains, in the ideal of which it was his final ambition
to embody all the excelsior motives of life, so drew him that he had a
passion for exploring their heights and once slept in the snow, to the
permanent impairment of his health. He had several narrow escapes from
death, which afterwards always provoked greater activity. He painted an
upright corpse, the fall of which he thought (with the characteristic
superstition of neurotics) was ominous. Death became, in the end, his
muse as his mother had been in the earlier stages of his development.
He seemed fascinated with the idea of anticipating death in every way,
even though this was a more or less unconscious urge. It was as if he
revolted against the ordinary fate of man to await its gradual approach
with the soporific agencies that old age normally supplies, and was
anxious to go forth and meet it face to face at the very summit of his
powers. At times he let down all precautions and took great risks,
so characteristic a result of acute disappointments or of general
disenchantment with life.
He seemed to revel in the stimulus of the hurry-up motive that so
often supervenes, but far more slowly, in those who realize that they
have reached the zenith of their powers. Love of his mother made him
an artist and he early married a wife who was the mother-image, which
was never marred by any childish jealousy of his father, of whom he
had known little, but was sublimated into love of mankind and even of
animals. But his later greater love of death obscured the mother image
and even overcame his passion for home, which he had idealized, and
dominated his exquisite feeling for and worship of nature, which he
always regarded as charged with symbolic meanings.
At a crisis in the early thirties a prevalent depressive mood gave
way to the joy of creation, and his character and the method of his
art seemed to undergo a transformation. His resentment at his own
fate seemed to vent itself in the desire to banish if not, as Abraham
thinks, to punish his mother by representing her in scenes of exquisite
suffering; and when at the age of thirty-six his Alpinism made him at
home only with the mountains the break with his past life became more
and more marked. The ordinary vicissitudes of life were not sufficient
and he wished to gamble not with the mere abatement or reinforcement of
life but with life and death themselves. Even his dreams were haunted
by a thanatic mood, and his superstitions were such that they almost
made life itself a hateful dream. He tells us of fancying himself
sitting in a retired nook that was at the same time like a church,
when a strange figure stood before him, a creature of dreadful and
repulsive form, with white gleaming eyes and yellow flesh tone, half
cretin and half death. “I rose, and with impressive mien ordered it
away after it had ogled me sideways. I followed it with my eye into
the darkest corner until it had vanished.” And this vision he thought
ominous. When he turned around he shuddered, for the phantom was again
before him. Then he arose like a fury, cursed and threatened it, and
it vanished and did not return, for it was more obedient than Poe’s
Raven. His ambivalent reaction against this was not only to work harder
but to affirm that there was no death and thus to revive much of the
earlier religiosity of his childhood. One of his pictures was of a
dying consumptive which he transformed into one of blooming life. More
and more the death thought mastered his consciousness--almost as much
as it did the soul of the insane painter, Wertz--and provoked him to
greater enthusiasm and ever longer and more arduous programs for his
future life. But from the subconscious he was always hearing more and
more clearly the call of death, for which his deeper nature seems to
have passionately longed, while the opposite will-to-live became more
and more impotent. All his prodigious activity in later life seems to
have been thus really due to a subdominant will to die. When he fell
ill for the first time in his life, “the dark powers of his unconscious
nature came in to help the disease and make the disintegrative process
easier and to invite death,” as if love of it were the consummation of
his love of all things that lived, and the latter would not have been
complete without the former.
Another case of a genius who hurried through the table d’hôte Nature
provides and left the table sated to repletion when her regular guests
were but half through the course was the German poet, Lenau.[15] Born
in 1802, he studied philosophy, law, and medicine successively, sought
contact with primeval nature in America at thirty, returned to find
himself famous, and, after a period of prolonged chastity, became
promptly infected with syphilis, falling a victim to insanity at
forty-two and dying of progressive paralysis at forty-eight. Syphilis
is perhaps the most psychalgic of all diseases that afflict man, for it
not only poisons the arrows of love and makes its ecstasy exquisite
pain but weakens all the phyletic instincts, like the climacteric,
and like it brings hyperindividuation in its train. He knew both the
joys and the pains of life, the depths of misery and the heights of
euphoria. Eros and Thanatos were inseparable in his soul, and both
had their raptures and inspired him by turns. Amorousness brought
acute religiosity, and between his erotic adventures he lapsed far
toward the negation of all faiths and creeds. When not in love his
violin was treated as a paramour, and he forgot it when the tender
passion glowed again in his soul. I doubt if any poet ever had a truer
and deeper feeling for nature or was a more eloquent interpreter of
all her moods and aspects. He exhausted both homo- and heterosexual
experiences, remaining through a series of love affairs, however,
true to his Sophie, who was like his mother and with whom his
relations were pure and whose influence was beneficent. Even before
his infection megalomania alternated with misanthropy, and he had
all the fluctuations of mood that are such characteristic stigmata
of hysteria. Spells of lassitude alternated with Berserker energy;
masochism with sadism; excesses, including those of drink, with spells
of depression. In his aggressive moods he stormed up mountains, which
to him were symbols of mental elevation, until he was completely
exhausted. Sometimes he fancied himself a nobleman or even a monarch
and always strove to reduce all about him to servile satellites. The
Job-Faust-Manfred motive often took possession of him, and sometimes he
played his violin half the night, dancing in rapt ecstasy and unable
to keep time. In his periods of self-reproach after orgasms of ecstasy
he became ascetic. His poetry and converse were, especially for such a
man, singularly pure. He said he carried a corpse around within him.
Most insanities are only an exaggeration or breaking out of previous
traits, and this was exceptionally so in his case. At one time he
seemed to want to break with all his old and to find a new set of
friends.
In the high temperature at which he lived, with so many impulses that
were either frustrated or crucified, always hot with love or its
ambivalent hate, he died--not like Segantini, because he was hypnotized
by death at the very acme of his power and willed it actively, though
unconsciously, as surely as if he had committed suicide, but he rather
turned to it from sheer repletion of life, most of the experiences
of which he had exhausted. It was as if a congeries of souls took
possession of him by turns, so that in middle life he had himself
already played most of the parts in the drama and thus knew it far more
exhaustively than those who lead more unitary lives, however prolonged
they may be. He was by no means theoretically a miserabilist or even
a pessimist but was simply burned out (_blasé_, _abgelebt_). As if to
anticipate the _Weltschmerz_ that his diathesis made it certain would
later become acute, his passionate love for nature, deep and insightful
as it was, did not prove an adequate compensation, and we cannot but
wonder whether, if he had lived more normally and without infection to
four-score, his life would not inevitably have ended with the same,
though less acute, general symptoms. Yet even he never cursed the fate
that brought him into life or inveighed against his parentage. His
life was like a candle in the wind blown every way by turns, now and
then flaring up and emitting great light and heat, now almost put out,
smoking, sputtering, and malodorous in a socket like a blue flame just
before its final extinction.
The psychograph of the poet Heinrich von Kleist (d. 1811, _a.e._ 34)
affords another example of a genius who died of premature old age near
the period of its dawn or at the critical turn of the tide.[16] In the
University his passion for omniscience impelled him to enroll for
so many and diverse courses that his professors protested. Later he
actually tried eight and attempted to sample other callings. “He would
have liked to be everything.” In the space of fourteen years no less
than nine women had engaged his fancy, although none had made a deep
or lasting impression. He had also a veritable _Lust_ for traveling
and after every important event in his life resorted to this kind of
fugue from reality to lose himself in new scenes. “There is nothing
consistent in me save inconsistency.” His demands on his friends, and
also his ambitions, knew no bounds. He would “tear the crown from
Goethe’s brow.” He felt he must storm all heights and do it now or
never.
He, too, was bisexual in his instincts. He glorified purity and
sobriety as over-compensation for his shortcomings in both these
respects. Much as he did, he never could complete the great work he had
long planned, and despair at his impotence to achieve his ambitions
made him at last take flight to insanity as a refuge and finally
to joint suicide with a woman. Late in life he lost the power to
distinguish between fact and fancy, so fully had his writing become a
surrogate for life. Wagner said that if life were as full as we wish
it to be, there would be no need of art, and von Kleist’s biographer
seems to doubt whether to call his end a victory or a surrender.
His wooing of death was not, like Segantini’s, a continuation and
consummation of the thanatopsis mood of adolescence but was rather due
to a growing endogenous lethargy and apathy. He lost his appetite for
life, from which he had expected more than it has to give even to the
most favored, and thus at the critical age when men are prone to weigh
themselves in the balance, he found incompleteness and inferiority both
within and without and so threw himself into the arms of the Great
Silencer. Everything conventional had long since palled upon him. “His
early fixation upon an unattainable goal was broken down and he pursued
the unattainable until he fancied he found it in death.” The outbreak
of the Franco-Prussian War seemed, for a time, to afford him an outlet
for his pent-up desires without compelling him to resort to illness.
In his ground _motif_ De Maupassant[17] belongs to the same category
as Lenau and von Kleist. He inherited neurotic trends from both
parents and died in 1893 at the age of forty-three, having experienced
most of the episodes of life and during his twelve productive years
written fourteen volumes and climbed to the very summit of the
French Parnassus. His morbidity was partly congenital and partly
metasyphilitic. Had he lived his simple life in his Normandy home,
instead of coming to Paris, he might have survived but he fell a victim
to narcotics, ether, hashish, morphine, cocaine, Bacchus, and Venus.
Like so many great men afflicted with the same disease, his symptoms
showed many marked departures from its ordinary course, and before
its active stage his divarications in the fields of various abnormal
symptom-groups were many. His passion for the horrible is perhaps best
illustrated in his shuddering “Horla.”
Gogol’s[18] life (d. 1852, _a.e._ 43) was full of contradictory
completeness and incompleteness. He, too, desired not only to touch
but to express life at every point, and his realism was in fact only
self-expression. He lived through life as a fiction and tried to cast
this fiction into the mold of actuality. He was a failure in nearly
every department of life he tried and was a man whose character was
made up of samples of every type of human nature. In him the creative
impulse was not a retreat from life but was an attempt to make
a bridge between it and his soul. He was haunted by a feeling of
inferiority which it was the passion of his life to overcome. When his
aggressive feelings were strongest, he produced most, and failed as
actor, teacher, clerk, and succeeded as poet and novelist because thus
he could best wreak his inmost self upon expression. He was finally
obsessed by a religious mania, became a mystic, and sought salvation by
fasting and self-denial. Fear of death was a life-long obsession and he
strove to conquer both love and death together by seeking and defying
the latter. He decided to die by fasting and kneeling before the
picture of the Mother of God. “Groaning and crying out with his last
strength, he had dragged himself to the symbol of the highest feminine
completeness, and when he found the ‘Glorious Virgin’ of his dreams
his dissolution came.” In his last moment he seems to have felt that
he had overcome both death and woman, but only by yielding to them,
and believed himself to be a martyr. It was the difficulty he found in
bridging the chasm between his solitary, child-like self and the real
world that made him a great creator of fiction, a practical failure,
and a madman.
J. V. von Scheffel[19] exhibited a range of moods from humor and
jollity to melancholia, and showed in his poems an entire absence of
eroticism which was more or less compensatory. The bisexual instinct
(he not only looked like a girl but sometimes disguised himself in
woman’s attire) was evoked by an earnest effort to see the world
as woman did. He had an extraordinary variety of morbid attacks,
hypochondria, delusions, headaches, morbid fear of death, anxiety,
nightmares, weeping, etc. Schurmann even goes so far as to think that
a cyclothymic diathesis or a tendency to periodic attacks of various
psychic morbidities is characteristic of genius, which finds occasional
relief in attacks of insanity, like Cowper, Rousseau, Tasso, Hölderlin,
and many others; and ascribes this in part to a hunger for a life
larger and fuller than normality or sobriety can afford. This, however,
is forbidden fruit, for nature punishes the enjoyment of it, if not by
premature death at least by premature satiety with life.
John Ruskin’s lifeline had marked nodes, the chief of which may be
characterized as follows. Up to the early forties he had lived and
written under the dominant influence of his father, who held very
conservative views of religion; but the foundations of the son’s faith
were shaken and the tenet “which had held the hopes and beliefs of his
youth and early manhood had proved too narrow. He was stretching forth
to a wider and, as he felt, a nobler conception of life and destiny,
but the transition was through much travail of soul.”[20] He wrote,
“It is a difficult thing to live without hope of another world when
one has been used to it for forty years. But by how much the more
difficult, by so much it makes one braver and stronger.” And again,
“It may be much nobler to hope for the advance of the human race only
than for one’s own immortality, much less selfish to look upon oneself
merely as a leaf on a tree than as an independent spirit, but it is
much less pleasant.” Cook says that “he had been brought up as a Bible
Christian in the strictest school of literal interpretation but he had
also become deeply versed in some branches of natural science, and the
truths of science seemed inconsistent with a literal belief in the
Scriptures.” He had been much influenced by Spurgeon, whom he knew
well in private life, but made no secret of his adhesion to Colenso’s
heresies.
No one understood the inmost causes of his muse as he grew melancholic.
He was exhausted, dyspeptic, wanted to reconstruct society, had “the
soul of a prophet consumed with wrath against a wayward and perverse
generation,” but also the heart of a lover of his fellowmen filled with
pity for the miseries and follies of mankind. His mother recognized
his tendency to misanthropy, and only at forty-two did he break away
from parental discipline. “A new epoch of life began for me in this
wise, that my father and mother could travel with me no more, but
Rose [La Touche, the young girl with whom he was in love and who died
when he was in the early fifties and left him forlorn] in heart was
with me always, and all I did was for her sake.” This was his first
“exile.” The clouds that had more than once lowered over his life
settled in old age and he died in 1900 at the age of eighty-one. During
most of the last ten years he presented one of the saddest of all the
spectacles of old age, “dying from the top downward.” He was apathetic,
monosyllabic, could write little, and spoke less; and but for the
kindly ministrations of Mrs. Severn and the thoughtfulness of Kate
Greenaway almost nothing either in Brantwood or the great world without
retained interest for him.
The middle-age crisis in Friedrich Nietzsche’s life began when he
left Bayreuth in August, 1876, after the performance of _The Ring of
the Niebelung_. He was then thirty-two years of age. Now it was that
his disenchantment with Wagner, whom he had regarded as a superman
and often called Jupiter, “one who might bring the type of man to a
higher degree of perfection,”[21] began. He had thought Wagner “near
to the divine,” but he now found much of his music dull and recitative
and thought that in _Parsifal_ he had violated his own atheism as a
concession to the public; and so he “refused to recognize a genius who
was not honest with himself.” He abhorred Wagner’s new “redemption
philosophy” but for months and years could not bring himself to an
open break with him and was for a long time plunged in the depths of
gloom. He now became truly lonely and went through a complete inner
revolution. He realized that he must henceforth stand alone and work
out the problem of life by himself. His anxiety as to how the venerable
Wagner would receive his _Human, All Too Human_ was pathetic. When
he found he could not publish it anonymously, he revised and toned
down many of his criticisms; and deep, indeed, was his grief when,
despite the almost fawning letter that accompanied a copy of his book
to Wagner, the latter lacked the greatness of soul to understand
his sincerity and broke with him forever. At the same time he was
emancipating his thought from Schopenhauer, who had hitherto been his
sovereign master in the philosophic field.
Now it was that he almost completely wrecked his life by living
according to the precepts of Cornaro, and his letters show the intense
struggle with which he finally resolved to find his own way through
life and to abandon his soul to self-expression. He finally resigned
his chair of classic literature at Bâle and a little later sorted his
manuscripts and commissioned his sister to burn half of them. This she
refused to do, and it was just these that were the basis of some of
the best things he wrote later. After trying residence in many places
and various cures, and experimenting with many regimens, he finally
resolved to become his own doctor, and it was by his own efforts that
he succeeded in prolonging the efficient period of his life. But he
felt he had at last struck the right road in _The Dawn of Day_, which
marked the opening of his campaign against popular morality. From this
time on, too, he had a deep, new, intense love of nature and was
inspired henceforth by the conviction that he must be the midwife of
the superman in the world. This apostle of a “New Renaissance” was not
unlike his Zarathustra, who retired to the mountains at thirty and at
forty came down to the haunts of men with a new message for them.
The theme of Rostand’s _Chanticleer_ is the disillusion of that
gorgeous barnyard fowl from the fond and at first secret conviction,
which he later confessed to the pheasant hen, that it was his crowing
that brought in the dawn and that if he failed in this function the
world would lie in darkness. The tragedy of the play is the slow
conviction that the sun could rise without him. In Nietzsche we see the
exact reverse of this process. His delusions of greatness grew with
years and eventually passed all bounds of sanity. He became jealous
of Jesus and came to believe that he had brought the world a new
dispensation and that his own work would some time be recognized as the
dawn of a new era.
Robert Raymond[22] thinks it is pleasant to lie at anchor a while in
port before setting sail for the last long voyage to the unknown. The
passage from late youth to middle age has many of the same traits as
growing old. We suddenly realize, perhaps in a flash, that life is no
longer all before us. When youth begins to die it fights and struggles.
The panic is not so much that we cannot do handsprings, but we have to
compromise with our youthful hopes. We have been out of college perhaps
twenty years. Napoleon lost Waterloo at 45, Dickens had written all his
best at 40, and Pepys finished his diary at 37. We lose the sense of
superfluous time and must hurry. We feel the futility of postponements
and accept the philosophy of the second best as not so bad. We become
more tolerant toward others and perhaps toward ourselves. We must not
be too serious or yearn too much for a lost youth. It is like the first
anticipations of fall in the summer.
F. von Mueller of Munich[23] says that we can never tell when old age
begins. Involution is closely connected with evolution from the start.
The lymphatics, tonsils, and thymus begin to atrophy as soon as the
development of the sex organs comes. Among English button workers
it was found that young men did most; between the ages of 40 and 45
they did 80 per cent of the work they formerly did; 60 per cent in
the fifty-fifth year, and 40 per cent after sixty-five. The power of
observation is so great in youth that seventy per cent of all our
acquisitions are made at this stage. Originality comes later. Age
is more serious. There is less adaptation because habit is growing
rigid. The emotional life stiffens and the intellectual narrows. There
are more doubts. There is a stronger-felt need of recognition from
others that is very deeply experienced in many ways. The capacity for
producing original ideas comes latest of all. It is generally thought
that the highest physical development is before 30. Some investigators
think that physical deterioration begins with the brain but this is
doubtful.
Bruce Birch[24] thinks the wreckage of youth spectacular; that of old
age less discernible because more subtle and internal. The old should
come to the fullest possible maturity. Youth must be served. The
church focuses on young men. The old age here chiefly regarded is from
forty-five on. Most lack intelligent encouragement to go on. They are
thought too old to need advice and to only want comfort. Habits are
supposed to be formed. The old are not thought to be heart-searchers.
The fact is, senescence has very new and great temptations, namely,
to go on in the old way of habit and belief. The temptations of the
old are largely of the spirit but sometimes also of the flesh and the
devil. It is hard to keep up the struggle for personal righteousness
and there are periods of storm and stress. The church has not done
its duty here. Most think the most dangerous period is that of wild
oats--between 16 and 26--but this writer says it is between 45 and 65
when there is the most wreckage.
1. There is a tendency to low ideals. Youth tends to lofty ideals and
to realize them, but now hope often fails. With the abbreviation of
life there is loss of initiative, perhaps sickness of hope deferred.
Age thinks it has become all it can hope to be; so enthusiasm wanes
and the _tedium vitae_ makes us feel the game is not worth the candle
and we are not willing to pay the price of sacrifice and struggle to
maintain high ideals. So we aim lower. The _excelsior_ motive is lost.
So there is often a degeneration of moral character. Cheap pleasures
satisfy--perhaps even those of the table, for this is the easiest way
of reviving some of the tendencies of former life.
2. Hence lowering and liberalizing of conduct creeds. The frontal lobes
shrink as the period of endeavor wanes. The edge of desire is dulled
and so is the power to distinguish right and wrong, true and false.
“Twice a child, once a man.” The powers of imagination, aggression, and
resistant effort flag, and we are content with the beaten path because
the motor areas have decayed. There is ruttiness, the brain is set for
habitual reactions, there are fixed points of view, the apperceptive
mass is allowed to interpret all new ideas, and these cannot change
it. Thus it is hard to adjust to progress. There is less resistance,
self-control, courage for great deeds and high purposes, less tendency
to ask advice of and be influenced by younger men. Politicians
often recognize this in putting forward respectable elderly, pliant
candidates. One is often weak where he thinks himself strong because
there is no fool like an old one. He may yield to selfishness,
acquisitiveness, curiosity, secretiveness, envy, jealousy, avarice, and
other primitive traits. There is too frequent moral collapse here.
3. There is a lessening of emotional intensity or stodginess. The
imitative, religious, adventurous, belligerent, imaginative, initiative
traits are developed early, and the younger man is the greater in the
dominion of the emotions. But later poets turn to prose and others
to more didactic activities. Scientists, philosophers, and statesmen
are best when they are through this period. Disappointed men now
become cynical, morose, petulant, or vicious as the intellect only
rules. If the social and gregarious instinct fails, society may bore,
friendships decline, and age may be lonely. Or, again, it may fall a
prey to many dispositional, emotional, and obsessive feelings which may
become insane. The patient may live in a logic-tight compartment. The
obsession may be a hobby or a system of connected ideas with a strong
emotional tone (complex). These are tendencies arising from instinct.
When the social and sane instincts lose in the conflict, interest in
the present may decline to indifference, and the obsessions may focus
on real or fancied errors of the past--duty to a dead child, a business
failure, etc. At any rate, there is a tendency to indulge temperament.
4. Failure in religious teaching. Versus “Be sure your sin will find
you out” all the old realize that they have done much sin that is
not found out and which, if it were exposed, would bring suffering,
disgrace, public execration, and loss of vocation, property and
friends. To fear only the consequences of evil is bad, and since they
have escaped they feel a certain contempt of secular and moral law
and take greater risks. The old man prefers to be respectable and
righteous, but he does not care if his unrighteousness is known or
suspected if it is not made too public. Thus the old dread exposure
more than they do sin.
5. The church offers too little to the old but wants to see old age tap
new reservoirs of energy, vigor, joy, and enthusiasm. The best it can
offer is faith in Jesus. Many would say it offers a larger intellectual
view.
Karin Michaëlis[25] tells her story in the form of letters and a
running journal. A poor girl, she early came to feel that with her
beauty she could do anything and supremely longed for wealth. After
just escaping marriage with a rich old man who educated her, she
married a wealthy and most exemplary husband whom she divorced, after
having lived tranquilly with him for a score of years, with no cause
on either side but because she felt a growing passion for solitude.
She retired to a desert island in a spacious new villa planned by an
architect friend eight years younger than herself. After a year of
isolation, slowly realizing that she is in love with the architect,
as she had long been, she offers herself to him on any terms and is
rejected. She then proposes to rejoin her husband but finds him engaged
to a girl of nineteen.
The remarkable merit of this book that made it something of a sensation
through all western Europe ten years ago is the masterly descriptions
of the state of mind of women of a certain type, and perhaps to some
extent of all, at the turn of life. While there is not a phrase in it
that could shock the most fastidious, it is evident throughout that
the author’s soul is permeated with a sex consciousness that finds
numberless indirect expressions and that she knows life and man chiefly
from this standpoint, condones most of woman’s errors, advises her
friends to courses that convention forbids, etc. No one ever began to
write such a book, not even Octave Feuillet in his _La Crise_. It all
reads like a marvelous confession of things no woman ever said before
or could say to a man. She says:
Somebody should found a vast and charitable sisterhood for
women between forty and fifty, a kind of refuge for the victims
of the years of transition, for during that time women would be
happier in voluntary exile or at any rate entirely separated
from the other sex.... We are all more or less mad, even though
we struggle to make others think us sane.
There are moments when I envy every living creature who has the
right to pair--either from hate or from habit. I am alone and
shut out.
Women’s doctors may be as clever and sly as they please but
they will never learn any of the things women confide to each
other. Between the sexes there lies not only a deep, eternal
hostility but the involuntary abyss of a complete lack of
reciprocal comprehension.
It would be better for woman if she walked barefoot over
red-hot ploughshares for the pain she would suffer would be
slight, indeed, compared to that which she must feel when, with
a smile on her lips, she leaves her own youth behind and enters
the region of despair we call growing old.
It may safely be said that on the whole surface of the earth
not one man exists who really knows woman. If a woman took
infinite pains to reveal herself to a husband or a lover just
as she really is, he would think she was suffering from some
incurable mental disease. A few of us indicate our true natures
in hysterical outbreaks, fits of bitterness and suspicion, but
this involuntary frankness is generally discounted by some
subtle deceit.
If men suspected what took place in a woman’s inner life after
forty, they would avoid us like the plague or knock us in the
head like mad dogs.
Are there honest women? At least we believe there are. It is a
necessary part of our belief. Who does not think well of mother
or sister, but who _believes entirely_ in a mother or sister?
Absolutely and unconditionally? Who has never caught mother or
sister in a falsehood or a subterfuge? Who has not sometimes
seen in the heart of mother or sister, as by a lightning flash,
an abyss which the boundless love cannot bridge over? Who was
ever really understood by mother or sister?
I envy every country wench or servant girl who goes off with
her lover while I sit here waiting for old age.[26]
The author has been spoken of as a traitor to her sex, revealing all
its freemasonry. Certainly no female writer ever emancipated herself
more completely from man’s point of view. There is no masculine note
here. It would seem as if she aspired to be a specialist in feminine
psychology. M. Prévost calls it a cinematograph of feminine thought
set down without interposing between the author’s mind and the paper
the vision of a man. No extracts or epitome can do justice to the
precision of style, the acuteness of self-observation, the range of
social experience, and the depth of insight here shown in depicting the
psychological processes that attend the beginnings of old age in women.
It is well at any stage of life, and particularly at its noonday, to
pause and ask ourselves what kind of old people we would like, and
also are likely, to be--two very different questions. In youth we have
ideals of and fit for maturity. Why not do the same when we are mature
for the next stage? Why should not forty plan for eighty (or at least
for sixty) just as intently as twenty does for forty? At forty old age
is in its infancy; the fifties are its boyhood, the sixties its youth,
and at seventy it attains its majority. Woman passes through the same
stages as man, only the first comes earlier and the last later for her.
If and so far as Osler is right, it is because man up to the present
has been abnormally precocious, a trait that he inherited from his
shorter-lived precursors and has not yet outgrown, as is the case with
sexual precocity, which brings premature age. Modern man was not meant
to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming
more and more so, an afternoon and evening worker. The coming superman
will begin, not end, his real activity with the advent of the fourth
decade. Not only with many personal questions but with most of the
harder and more complex problems that affect humanity we rarely come to
anything like a masterly grip till the shadows begin to slant eastward,
and for a season, which varies greatly with individuals, our powers
increase as the shadows lengthen. Thus as the world grows intricate
and the stage of apprenticeship necessarily lengthens it becomes
increasingly necessary to conserve all those higher powers of man that
culminate late, and it is just these that our civilization, that brings
such excessive strains to middle life, now so tends to dwarf, making
old age too often _blasé_ and _abgelebt_, like the middle age of those
roués who in youth have lived too fast.
There are many who now think more or less as does H. G. Wells[27] that
the human race is just at its dangerous age and has, within the last
few years, passed its prime; also that henceforth we must trust less to
nature and place all our hope in and direct all our energy to nurture
if the race is to escape premature decay. There is only too much to
indicate that mankind, in Europe at least if not throughout the world,
has reached the “dangerous age” that marks the dawn of senescence and
that, unless we can develop what Renan calls “a new enthusiasm for
humanity,” a new social consciousness, and a new instinct for service
and for posterity, our elaborate civilization with all its institutions
will become a Frankenstein monster escaping the control of the being
that devised and constructed it and will bring ruin to both him and to
itself. Progressive eugenics, radical and world-wide reëducation, and
the development of a richer, riper old age, are our only sources of
hope for we can look to no others to arrest the degenerative processes
of national and individual egoism. At any rate, we have to face a new
problem, namely what is the old age of the world to be and how can we
best prepare for it betimes?
As contrasted with Ireland, in which Ross[28] tells us “one-eighth of
her people are more than sixty-five years old,” we have considered
ourselves as _par excellence_ the land of young people and ideas. Our
growth has been phenomenal and began and proceeded most opportunely,
so that we profited to the full by steam, rapid transportation,
invention, by our coal, oil, forests, and virgin soil, and especially
by the ideals of liberty that were brought here by the first waves of
immigrants to our shores. These were followed later, however, by those
who had failed in the old world, by inferior and often Mediterranean
stocks imported as tools or coming only in the hope of gain; but even
this tide is now ceasing to flow. We are within measurable distance
of the limits of our natural resources. Although the great war, the
most stupendous, was also the most inconclusive ever fought, and
although we reached our pinnacle in the idealism of Wilson’s first
visit to Europe, when the world came nearer than ever before since
early Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire, and Comenius, to a merger of
national sovereignty and a new world law backed by a new world power,
this brief vision of a federated world has faded and we now realize
that if we cannot make a break with history and leave much of it to the
dead past, if we cannot transcend the boundaries that, especially in
Europe, are now far too narrow for modern conditions, and if we cannot
fearlessly enter upon the longer apprenticeship to life, which is now
too short for mastery, we shall drift into far more disastrous wars
that will leave even the victors exhausted, and mankind will either
sink into an impotent senility or into a Tarzan bestialism, which from
the standpoint of Clarence Day (_The Simian World_) would seem not
impossible.
CHAPTER II
THE HISTORY OF OLD AGE
The age of plants and animals--The Old Stone Age--Treatment of
old age among existing savage tribes--The views of Frazer--The
ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament--The Greeks (including
Sparta, the Homeric Age, the status of the old in Athens, the
views of Plato, Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)--The
Romans--The Middle Ages--Witchcraft and old women--Attitude of
children toward the old--Mantegazza’s collection of favorable and
unfavorable views of age--The division of life into stages--The
relation of age groups to social strata--The religion of
different ages of life--The Vedanta--The Freudian war between
the old and the young--History of views from Cornaro to our own
time--Bacon--Addison--Burton--Swift.
Some plants live only a few hours; others, a few days; and very many
only for a season. But trees are the oldest of all things that live.
In the Canary Islands is an immense dragon tree, forty-five feet in
circumference, which grows very slowly. This was vital enough to
continue living fifty years after a third of it was destroyed. It must
have been several thousand years old, but as its trunk was hollowed
there was no way of ascertaining its age. In the Cape Verde Islands
stood a tree thirty feet in diameter which Adanson estimated to be
5,150 years of age. Some of the old cypresses in Mexico are thought to
be quite as old. The big trees of California are several thousand years
old, the largest of which Sargent estimates to have lived 5,000 years.
We have all seen cross-sections of the trunks of these monsters of the
vegetable world with their concentric rings marked--“this growth was
made during the year the Magna Charta was granted,” “this when Christ
was born,” etc. Many botanists believe that trees of this sort do
not die of old age as such, but of external accidents like lightning,
tempests, etc.
As to animal longevity, no doubt there are real ephemerids. Life
can also be prolonged by desiccation or by freezing. Certain it is
that many species do not live to see their offspring. In many of the
lower forms of life the larval is far longer than the adult stage.
The seventeen-year locust, for example, lives out most of its time
underground, the imago form continuing but little more than a month.
Most butterflies are annual, although those that fail to copulate may
hibernate and live through another season, while some are known to have
lived several years. Worker bees do not survive the season but queens
live from two to five years. J. H. Gurney[29] thinks the passerines are
the shortest-lived birds, averaging from eight to nine years, that the
lark, canary, bullfinch, gull, may live forty years, the goose fifty,
and the parrot sixty. To the latter bird a mythical longevity is often
assigned, one being said to have spoken a language that had become
extinct. As to animals, domestication prolongs while captivity shortens
their normal length of life. Longevity is often related to fertility.
Beasts of prey breed slowly and live to be old, while the fecund rabbit
is short-lived. But for increased fecundity species subject to high
risk would die out. While there is a certain correlation between size
and age, since large animals require more time to grow, it is extremely
limited. Bunge thinks that in mammals the period the new-born take to
double in size is an index of the normal duration of life; but this,
too, has its limitations. Some stress diet as an essential factor and
others think that length of life may be inversely as the reproductive
tax levied upon the system. But of all these questions our knowledge is
still very limited.
When Alexander conquered India, he took one of King Porus’s largest
elephants, Ajax, and labeled it, “Alexander, the son of Jupiter,
dedicates this to the sun.” This elephant is said to have been
found 160 years later. This is the earliest record I find of animal
longevity. We have many tables since Flourens attempted, with great
pains, to construct one, and from the latest of these at hand I select
the following of those animals popularly supposed to be able to
attain one hundred years or more: carp, 100 to 150; crocodile, 100;
crow, 100; eagle, 100; elephant, 150 to 200; parrot, 100; pike, 100;
raven, 100; swan, 100; tortoise, over 100. In point of fact, as E.
Ray Lankester[30] says, we know almost nothing definite of the length
of life of larger animals. Flourens considered that in mammalia we
could find a criterion of the end of the growth period in the union
of the epiphyses of the bones throughout the skeleton, and laid down
the law that for both mammals and man longevity is, on the average,
about five times that of this period of growth. We know far more as
to the span of the shorter- than of the longer-lived members of the
brute creation. We also know far more of domestic animals than of their
wild congeners. The former doubtless have lived longer because better
protected. Darwin wrote that he had no information in regard to the
longevity of the nearest wild representatives of our domestic animals
or even of quadrupeds in general, and various experts whom Lankester
addressed upon the subject informed him that almost nothing was known
of reptiles or crustacea, while the ichthyologist, Gunther, said,
“There is scarcely anything known about the age and causes of death
of fishes,” and Jeffreys, a molluscan expert, says the same of them.
Insects, on the other hand, are a remarkable exception. Their life is
so short that it can sometimes be observed almost continuously from
ovum to ovum. There is in general, however, Lankester believes, a much
closer relation between the life span of individuals of the same than
between those of different species, specific longevity meaning the
average length of life of the individual of the species. Of all this we
know far more of man than of any other creature.
If age went with size, the extinct saurians would have attained the
greatest age of all animals, and in fact they seem to have grown all
their lives. However it may have been in past geologic ages, it may yet
appear that man, on the average, lives longer than any brutes. This he
should do if the civilization he has evolved really gives him a more
favorable environment than nature and instinct have provided for him.
Species, like individuals, very probably have a term of life and become
extinct with age, as paleontology shows us not a few have done. But
here, too, there is no sufficient basis of fact at present to warrant
the generalizations so often met with concerning phyletic immortality
or senescence. To some aspects of this theme I shall recur later in
this volume.
Of the length of life of the predecessors of modern man we know almost
nothing. In evolving as he did from anthropoid forms, he probably also
considerably increased his span of life. It would seem, too, as if
again in the transition from the unsocial, short, and still somewhat
simian Neanderthal to that of the tall and more gregarious Crô-Magnon
type he must have still further increased his longevity. But through
all the paleolithic ages (lasting some 125,000 years as H. F. Osborn
calculates[31]) there are no data either in the skeletal remains or
in the implements he used that shed any clear light upon the subject;
and the same is true of the neolithic cults that flowered in the lake-
or pile-dwellings. Bones show different stages of development, and
teeth, always remarkably well preserved, often show the effects of use;
a very few represent children but not one illustrates extreme old age
according to the osseous or dental criteria of modern times. Hence we
may conjecture that the attainment of great age under the conditions of
life then prevailing was very rare. It would seem also that if life had
been long and its experiences well ripened, preserved, and transmitted
(so that each new generation would not merely repeat the life of that
which had preceded it but profit by its lessons), progress would not
have been so very slow, as it was. On the other hand, it might be urged
perhaps with equal force that if, as with lower races now, most of the
people who made prehistory not only matured but grew old early, and
since age always tends to be conservative and unprogressive, it would
make for retardation, even though it came in years that seem premature
to us. Very probably even in these rude stages of life men who felt
their physical powers beginning to abate--at least the more sagacious
of them--had already hit upon some of the many devices by which the
aging have very commonly contrived to maintain their position and
even increase their importance in the community by developing wisdom
in counsel, becoming repertories of tribal tradition and custom, and
representatives of feared supernatural forces or persons, etc. But of
all this paleo-anthropology has, up to date, almost nothing to tell us.
Nor do we see much reason to believe it ever will. All these culture
stages of the Old Stone Age have left us little but material vestiges
of its industries--bones, a few carvings on cave walls or on bones and
ivory, and very many chipped flints. Nothing of wood, skin, fiber or
other material for binding, which must have been used, survives.[32]
Much as these bones and stones tell us, they have really done more to
increase our curiosity than to satisfy it. We know almost nothing of
how these thousands of generations of men viewed life or nature, or in
what spirit and with what knowledge they met disease, age, and death.
What is called belief in another life is for primitives or children
only inability to grasp completely the very difficult fact of death and
to distinguish it from sleep. The disposition of some of the troglodyte
skeletons suggests that these ancient forbears of our race were unable
to realize that death ends all. Despite the close analogy and even
kinship between human and animal life so deeply felt in early days, it
was probably always somewhat harder for early man to conceive death for
himself as complete cessation than to so conceive it for the higher
forms of animal life with which his own was so intimately associated.
Our ignorance of all these stages of human evolution becomes all the
more pathetic as we are now coming to understand that it was then that
all the deeper unconscious and dispositional strata of Mansoul, which
still dominate us far more than we are even yet aware, were being
laid down, and it is upon these traits that the later and conscious
superstructure of our nature has been reared. Only hard things survive
the ravages of time, and psychic traits and trends are the softest
of all soft things, although they are no less persistent by way of
biological and social inheritance than skeletons and flints.
Turning to the lower races of mankind that now survive and are
accessible to study, we find only very few scattered, fragmentary, and
often contradictory data as to old age. Yarrow has made a comprehensive
study of mortuary customs, both of savages and man in the earlier
stages of civilization. Mallory brought together what we know of sign
language. Ploss has given us a compend on the child among primitives
and, with Bartels, on woman. I have tried to compile the customs and
ideas of pubescent initiation;[33] while animism, marriage rites,
property and ownership, systems of kinship, mana concepts, hunting and
trapping, war weapons, dances, ideas of disease and the function of
the “medicine man,” dwellings, dress, ornamentation, number systems,
language, fire-making, industries, food, myths, and ceremonies galore,
and many other themes have had comprehensive and comparative treatment.
But I am able to find nothing of the kind (and Professor F. Boas, our
most accomplished American scholar in this field, knows of nothing
compendious) on old age in any language. Anthropology, therefore, has
so far produced no gerontologists. I have looked over many volumes of
travel and exploration among the so-called lower races of mankind,
only to find nothing or brief and more or less incidental mentions of
senescence. This neglect is itself significant of the inconspicuous
rôle the old play in rude tribal life and also of the lack of vital
interest in the theme by investigators.
From my own meager and inadequate gleanings in this field the
unfavorable far outweigh the favorable mentions. The Encyclopedia
Britannica tells us that from Herodotus, Strabo, and others we learn
of people like the Scythian Massagetæ, a nomad race northeast of the
Caspian Sea, who killed old people and ate them. For savages the
practice of devouring dead kinsfolk is often regarded as the most
respectful method of disposing of their remains. In a few cases this
custom is combined with that of killing both the old and sick, but it
is more often simply a form of burial. It prevails in many parts of
Australia, Melanesia, Africa, South America, and elsewhere.
Reclus[34] tells us that among the various Siberian tribes aged and
sickly people who are useless are asked if they have “had enough of
it.” It is a matter of duty and honor on their part to reply “yes.”
Thereupon an oval pit is roughly excavated in a burial ground and
filled with moss. Heavy stones are rolled near, the extremities of
the victim are bound to two horizontal poles, and on the headstone
a reindeer is slaughtered, its blood flowing in torrents over the
moss. The old man stretches himself upon this warm red couch. In the
twinkling of an eye he finds that he is securely bound to the poles.
Then he is asked “Art thou ready?” At this stage of the proceeding it
would be folly to articulate a negative response. Moreover, his friends
would pretend not to hear it. So his _moriturus saluto_ is “Good night,
friends.” They then stop his nostrils with a stupefying substance
and open his carotid and a large vein in his arm, so that he is bled
to death in no time. Among most races, Reclus tells us, children are
killed by being exposed; the old, by being deserted.
In Terra del Fuego, Darwin tells how Jimmy Buttons, a native, described
the slaughter of the aged in winter and famine. Dogs, he said, catch
otters; old women, not. He then proceeded to detail just how they were
killed, imitated and ridiculed their cries and shrieks, told the parts
of their bodies that were best to eat, and said they must generally be
killed by friends and relatives.
Among the Hottentots, when their aged men and women can “no longer be
of any manner of service in anything,” they are conveyed by an ox,
accompanied by most of the inhabitants of the kraal, to a solitary hut
at a considerable distance and, with a small stock of provisions, laid
in the middle of the hut, which is then securely closed. The company
returns, deserting him forever. They think it the most humane thing
they can do to thus hasten the conclusion of life when it has become a
burden.
With at least one of the Papuan races in New Guinea, people when old
and useless are put up a tree, around which the tribe sing “The fruit
is ripe” and then shake the branches until the victim falls, tearing
him to pieces and eating him raw. Among the Damaras the sick and aged
are often cruelly treated, forsaken, or burned alive. In some of the
East African tribes the aged and all supposed to be at the point of
death are slain and eaten. One author tells us that among the Fijians
the practice of burying alive is “so common that but few old and
decrepit people are to be seen.” In Herbert Spencer’s anthropological
charts we are told that among the Chippewas “old age is the greatest
calamity that can befall a northern Indian for he is neglected and
treated with disrespect.”
C. Wissler[35] says, “As to the aged and sick, we have the formal
practice of putting to death among some of the Esquimaux and other
races.” On the other hand, among all hunting people who shift from
place to place the infirm are often of necessity left behind to their
fate. Yet the reported examples of such cruelties can usually be
matched by instances of the opposite tenor. He goes on to say that
since the mythologies of various tribal groups contain rites showing
retribution for such cruelties we must regard them as, on the whole,
exceptional.
S. K. Hutton[36] says,
I found age a very deceptive thing. “Sixty-two” might be the
answer from a bowed old figure crouching over the stove. I
would have guessed twenty years more than that. The fact is,
the Eskimo wears out fast. After fifty he begins to decline,
and few live long after sixty. I have known a few over seventy,
and the people told me with wonderment about an old woman who
lived to be eighty-two and who worked to the last. But these
are great rarities. It must be a unique thing in one’s lifetime
to meet with an Eskimo great-grandmother. The very old people
seem always to be active to the last. They have an unusual
amount of vitality and die in the harness, dropping out like
those too tired to go any further and passing away without
illness or suffering. These are always those who have clung
most closely to their own native foods and customs. Women who
are too old and toothless to chew the boot-leather can still
scrape the seal-skins, perhaps with a skill which the younger
women lack; if they are too blind and feeble to scrape, they
can sit behind a wall of snow upon the sea-ice and jig for the
sleepy rock-cod through a hole.
C. A. Scott[37] tells us that in certain south Australian tribes it
is taboo to catch or eat certain animals until a man has reached a
prescribed advanced age, these animals being easiest to catch and the
most wholesome and thus best adapted to old people’s use. One of the
chief maxims in Tonga is to reverence the gods, the chief, and old
people. In Java, among the Iroquois, Dakotas, Comanches, the Hill
tribes of India (Santals and Kukis), the Snakes and Zunis, much respect
is shown to the aged.
K. Routledge[38] says, “part of the deference paid to advancing years,
whether in men or women, is due to fear. Old age has something uncanny
about it, and old persons could probably ‘make medicine’ or work
havoc, were they so inclined.” One chief said that in councils the old
women would have their way because “it is a great work to have borne
a child.” A young warrior is taught to get out of the road for an old
woman. She does not, however, take part in the sacrifices, although one
called herself the wife of God and seemed to have established a sort
of cult. This was because she was a woman of much character. Here the
mothers take full part in initiations. The dignity and self-reliance
of the older women is remarkable. When a woman is so old that she has
no teeth she is said to be “filled with intelligence” and on her death
receives the high honor of burial instead of being thrown out to the
hyenas.
A. L. Cureau[39] tells us that the Negro is short-lived and that
if some lucky star enables him to reach forty he becomes a man of
importance, although death does not usually permit him to enjoy this
distinction long. “During more than twenty years I never knew more
than four or five who could have been considered sixty-five or seventy
years of age, and even persons who were from fifty to sixty are very
uncommon. At the age of thirty-five or forty they all exhibit signs
of premature decrepitude.” He thinks the death rate from forty to
forty-five very high. Disease among the Africans is limited to only a
few general troubles. Burial is usually by interment, although in some
districts the dead are eaten, while elsewhere they are thrown into the
river or left lying on the ground in some remote spot. Respect for the
chief, however, continues to be observed even after his death. But
customs are growing mild, and “if human sacrifice still takes place in
locations that are most remote from our stations, the fact is kept a
profound secret.”
H. A. Junod[40] gives a melancholy picture of old age, especially for
the leading man of the tribe. His wives die, his glory fades, his crown
loses its luster and if it is scratched or broken he cannot repair it,
he is forsaken, less respected, and often only a burden unwillingly
supported. “The children laugh at him. If the cook sends them to
their lonely grandfather with his share of food in the leaky old hut,
the young rascals are capable of eating it on the way, pretending
afterwards that they did what they were told.” When, between two huts,
under the shelter of the woods the old man warms his round-shouldered
back in the rays of the sun, lost in some senile dream, his former
friends point to him and say, “It is the bogie man, the ogre.” Mature
people show little more consideration for the old than do the young
ones. Junod knew personally an old man and woman who, when their
children moved to another part of the country, were left under a roof
with no sides, without food, and were almost imbecile. “In times of war
old people die in great numbers. During the movements of panic they
are hidden in the woods, in the swamps or palm trees, while all the
able-bodied population runs away. They are killed by the enemy, who
spare no one, or they die in their hiding places of misery and hunger.
Thus the evening of life is very sad for the poor Thonga.” There are,
however, children who to the end show devotion to their parents. Those
old people are most to be pitied who fall to the charge of remote
relatives.
A. Hrdlicka[41] says, “The proportion of nonagenarians, and especially
centenarians, among the Indians is far in excess of that among
native white Americans.” As to the source of error, he thinks this
is somewhat offset by the “marked general interest centering about
the oldest of every tribe.” He found twenty-four per million among
the Indians as against three per million among native whites who had
reached a hundred, and says, “The relative excess of aged persons
(80 years and above) among the Indians would signify only that the
infirmities and diseases known ordinarily as those of old age are less
grave among them, a conclusion in harmony with general observation.”
Among the fifteen tribes embraced in this very careful and valuable
investigation, Hrdlicka found in the old far less grayness and
baldness and far better teeth than among the whites. They had
more wrinkles but their muscular force was better preserved. Many
debilitating effects among the whites are less so among the Indians. In
general there is some bending and emaciation and the hair grows iron
gray or yellowish-gray, but never white. Nor did he find among those
of ninety a single one who was demented or helpless. The aged were
generally more or less neglected, and had to care for themselves and
help the younger. Owing to the diminution of the alveoli and adipose
tissue, “the jaw looks more prominent, prognathism disappears, and
the face looks shorter.” There is an increase in the nasal index, the
nose becomes broader and shorter, the malar bones more prominent. The
eyes lose their luster and generally become narrowed, with adhesions
at the canthi, particularly the external. The hardening of arteries is
certainly not common. Of 716 well preserved males of 65, only 4 per
cent showed baldness; and among 377 women there was but one slightly
bald, the baldness being about equally common on vertex and forehead.
In W. I. Thomas’s _Source Book for Social Origins_ containing articles
by various authors, we are told that among some of the Australian
tribes old age is a very prominent factor in preëminence. After they
have become feeble the old may have great authority, somewhat in
proportion to what they know of ancient lore, magic, medicine, and
especially if they are totem heads. Their authority is not patriarchal,
and yet among the Yakuts, whether they are rich or poor, good or
bad, the old are sometimes beaten by their children, especially if
feeble-minded. On the other hand, a weak man of seventy may beat his
forty-year-old son who is strong and rich but in awe of his parent
because he has so much to inherit from him. The transfer of authority
and property to the son often comes very late. The greatest number of
suicides is among the old people. A man who beat his mother said, “Let
her cry and go hungry. She made me cry more than once and beat me for
trifles,” etc.
In this volume we are told, too, that even the Fuegians, who in times
of scarcity kill and eat their old women for food, are generally
affectionate, and until the whites interfered with their social order
the old often had considerable authority. They sometimes prepare
programs for ceremonials, which are very strictly observed by a
hundred younger men. In some Australian tribes, too, a man’s authority
generally increases with age; and this is true, though less frequently,
of women. The old enforce the strictest marriage rules and have much
influence over the thoughts and feelings of the tribes. The old men
often sit in a circle and speak on public matters, one after another,
the young men standing outside in silence. A few old men may retire
to discuss secret matters of importance. Offenders are often brought
before them for trial and sentence. The old men of a tribe often band
themselves together and by working on the superstitions of the tribe
secure for themselves not only comfort but unbounded influence. In the
famous Duk-Duk ceremonial they alone were in the secret, and all others
were impressed with the supernatural character of the actors in these
rites.
Ploss and Bartels[42] amplify the great changes senescence brings to
women. Age not only obliterates race but sex. It often makes the most
beautiful into the most ugly, for handsome old women among primitives
are unknown. Children dread them. They often become careless of looks,
the hand is claw-like, etc. A widespread German superstition is that
if an old woman crosses the path of a hunter he will get nothing.
They are ominous for marriages and some neurotics cannot look at
them. They are sometimes said to have seven lives. Hans Sachs in
poetry and Cranach in painting, in describing the fountains of youth,
represent chiefly old women entering on the one side with every sign
of decrepitude and coming out on the other beautiful, with wonderful
toilets, and sometimes immediately engaging in orgies. Old women in
early times sometimes had a guild, devised means of conjuration, made
pacts or leagues with the devil, presided over the Walpurgis festivals,
conjured with magic words, had evil eyes, knew strange brews, sometimes
committed all kinds of lasciviousness with devils, might transform
themselves into shapes as attractive as Circe for Ulysses or Medea
for Jason, or take the more ominous forms of Hecate and Lamea. These
maleficent creatures often allied themselves with black cats, serpents,
owls, bats, had their salves and witch sabbaths, etc.
Frazer approaches this subject from a different angle. In the second
chapter of his volume entitled _The Dying God_ he tells us that in Fiji
self-immolation is by no means rare, and the Fijians believe that as
they leave this life they will remain ever after. This is a powerful
motive to escape from decrepitude or from a crippled condition by
voluntary death. “The custom of voluntary suicide on the part of the
old men, which is among their most extraordinary usages, is connected
with their superstitions regarding a future life.” To this must be
added the contempt that attaches to physical weakness among a nation of
warriors, and the wrongs and insults that await those who are no longer
able to protect themselves. So when a man feels age creeping on, so
that he can no longer fully discharge the duties or enjoy the pleasures
of life, he calls his relations, tells them he is worn out and useless,
that they are ashamed of him, and he is determined to be buried. So on
an appointed day they meet and bury him alive. In the New Hebrides
the aged were buried alive at their own request. “It was considered
a disgrace to a family of an old chief if he was not buried alive.”
A Jewish tribe of Abyssinia never let a person die a natural death,
for if any of their relatives was near expiring the priest of the
tribe was called to cut his throat. If this ceremony was omitted, they
believed the departed soul had not entered the mansions of the blessed.
Heraclitus thought that the souls of those who die in battle are purer
than those who die of disease. In a South American tribe, when a man
is at the point of death his nearest relatives break his spine with
an axe, for to die a natural death is the greatest misfortune. In
Paraguay, when a man grows weary of life, a feast is made, with revelry
and dancing, and the man is gummed and feathered with the plumage of
many birds and a huge jar is fixed in the ground, the mouth of which is
closed over him with baked clay. Thus he goes to his doom “more joyful
and gladsome than to his first nuptials.”
With a tribe in northeastern Asia, when a man feels his last hour has
come, he must either kill himself or be killed by a friend. In another
tribe he requests his son or some near relative to dispose of him,
choosing the manner of death he prefers. So his friends and neighbors
assemble and he is stabbed, strangled, or otherwise slain. Elsewhere,
if a man dies a natural death, his corpse must be wounded, so that he
may seem to be received with the same honors in the next world as if he
had died in battle, as Odin wanted for his disciples. The Wends once
killed their aged parents and other kinsfolk and boiled and ate their
bodies, and the old folk “preferred to die thus rather than drag out
a weary life of poverty and decrepitude.” Kings are killed when their
strength fails. The people of Congo believed that if their pontiff died
a natural death, the earth would perish, since he sustained it by
his power and merit, and that everything would be annihilated. So his
successor entered his house and slew him with a rope or club. “The king
must not be allowed to become ill or senile lest with his diminishing
vigor the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the
crops should rot in the field, and man, stricken with disease, should
die.” So the king who showed signs of illness or failing strength was
put to death.
One of the fatal symptoms of decay was taken to be incapacity
to satisfy the sexual passion of his wives, of whom he has very
many distributed in a large number of huts at Fashoda. When
this ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives reported
it to the chiefs, who were popularly said to have intimated
to the king his doom by spreading a white cloth over his face
and knees as he lay slumbering in the heat of the sultry
afternoon. Execution soon followed the sentence of death. A
hut was especially built for the occasion, the king was led to
it and laid down with his head resting on the lap of a nubile
virgin, the door of the hut was then walled up, and the couple
were left without food, fire, or water, to die of hunger and
suffocation.
This custom persisted till five generations ago.
Seligmann shows that the Shilluk king was “liable to be killed with
due ceremony at the first symptoms of incipient decay.” But even while
he was yet in the prime of health and strength he might be attacked
at any time by a rival and have to defend his crown in a combat to
death. According to the common Shilluk tradition, any son of a king had
a right thus to fight the king in possession, and if he succeeded in
killing him he reigned in his stead. As every king had a large harem
and many sons, the number of possible candidates for the throne at any
time may well have been not inconsiderable, and the reigning monarch
must have carried his life in his hand. But the attack on him could
only take place by night with any prospect of success. Then, according
to custom, his guards had to be dismissed; so the hours of darkness
were of special peril. It was a point of honor for the king not to call
his herdsmen to his assistance. The age at which the king was killed
would seem to have been commonly between forty and fifty. The Zulus put
a king to death as soon as he began to have wrinkles and gray hair.
Elsewhere kings were often killed at the end of a fixed term, perhaps
because it was thought unsafe to wait for the slightest symptom of
decay.
A unique and transformed survival of many such customs, according to
Frazer, lingered in the vale of Nemi, idealized in Turner’s picture.
He tells us how in ancient times and long persisting there, like a
primeval rock jutting out of a well shaven lawn, the priest-king
watched all night with drawn sword. He was a murderer and would himself
sooner or later be slain by his successor, for this was the rule of
the sanctuary. The candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to
office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he retained office
until he himself was slain by one stronger or craftier. Although he
held the title of king, no crowned head was ever uneasier. The least
relaxation of vigilance put him in jeopardy. This rule had no parallel
in historic antiquity but we must go farther back. Recent studies show
the essential similarity with which, with many superficial differences,
the human mind elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Hence
we must study outcrops of the same institution elsewhere, and Frazer
tells us that the object of his book is, by meeting these conditions,
to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi. Once,
only a runaway slave could break off the mistletoe from the oak, and
success in this enabled him to fight the priest in single combat; if he
won he would become King of the Woods.
There are many unique features in the attitude of the Jewish mind
toward old age. In Genesis 5:3 _et seq._ the ages of the antediluvian
patriarchs are given. Adam lived 930 years; Seth, 912; Enos, 905;
Cainan, 970; Mahalaleel, 895; Jared, 962; Enoch, 365; Methuselah, 969;
Lamech, 777. All but four of them “begat” between 65 and 90--Adam
at 130, Methuselah at 187, Jared at 182, Noah at 500. By nearly all
modern scholars these great ages have been regarded as mythical, but
so scientific and modern a student as T. E. Young,[43] who is very
skeptical about all later records of great longevity, devotes a long
chapter to these records, which he is almost inclined to credit. He
goes to original sources, gives various hypotheses, epitomizes diverse
writers on the subject, and finally raises the question whether or not
in ancient days atmospheric conditions, food, and a different and more
uniform climate might not have caused an unprecedented prolongation
of human life. He does not, of course, credit the ancient literature
of India, where holy men are said to have lived eighty thousand years
and where in the most flourishing period of Indian antiquity the term
of one hundred thousand was regarded as the average length of the life
of saints. He fully recognizes, too, the influence of mystic numbers
here, which persisted until the age of the higher criticism, and is
incredulous about most of the modern records of centenarians. His point
of view is that man has now passed his acme and that a slow decline of
the human race, which will end in its extinction, has already begun,
masked as it is by modern hygiene, which prolongs life beyond the
average term it would otherwise have reached. Thus human vitality as
measured by length of life is slowly but irresistibly waning.[44]
The correspondence between organism and environment, which makes
life perfect, was probably once better than now. Bacteriology is
a factor never to be forgotten and there may be a new acidity of
juices. Perhaps the energy of the sun is decreasing and also the
productivity of the earth. Indeed, it is very probable that the solar
system has attained its maturity or midway stage. From such data Young
concludes, “The average intellectual condition of the present period,
I should be inclined to surmise, exhibits no sign whatever of an
ampler development.” Knowledge has become mechanical and has lost its
capacity as the instrument of self-cultivation. The highest faculties
are decaying from cessation of activity and coherent function. Man has
reached his limit. The utilities of civilization are also hindrances,
so that the forces of evolution have spent their power.
The Hebrew conception of Yahveh generally made him old, the ancient of
days without beginning or end; and the art of early Christendom where
God the Father appears, usually represents Him as venerable with age,
this trait being probably accentuated by contrast with His son, Jesus,
who died in the prime of life. The ancient Hebrews had great respect
for age, and many Biblical heroes from Abraham to Moses and some of
the prophets were old in years and wisdom. The exhortation was to rise
up before the hoary head and honor the face of the old man, and this
has its nursery echo in the story of Elisha (II, Kings, 2:23–24) whom
little children came out of the city and mocked, saying “Go up, thou
bald-head.” He “turned back and cursed them in the name of the Lord,
and there came forth two she-bears out of the wood and tare forty and
two children of them.” No passage in all the literature of the world
has had such influence as Psalms 90:10.[45] It is pathetic to see how
incessantly this passage is quoted in the literature on old age and how
not only among the Jews but perhaps quite as much, if not more, among
the Christians, bibliolatry has made it accepted almost as a decree of
fate.
Next most influential is the pessimistic view of senescence represented
in Ecclesiastes, 12:1–8. We quote Professor Paul Haupt’s version,[46]
with his explanations in parentheses:
Remember thy well (the wife and mother of thy children) in the
days of thy vigor, ere there come the days of evil, and the
years draw nigh in which thou wilt say I have no pleasure. Ere
is darkened the sun (sunshine of childhood), and the light of
the day, and the moon (more tempered light of boyhood and early
manhood), and the stars (the sporadic moments of happiness in
mature age), and the clouds return after the rain (for the old,
clouds and rainy days increase); when the keepers of the house
(hands) tremble, and the men of power (the bones, especially
the backbone) bend themselves; the grinding maids (teeth) cease
and the ladies that look out through the lattices (eyes) are
darkened; the doors are shut toward the street (secretion and
excretion cease); he riseth at the voice of the birds (awakens
too early), and all the daughters of song are brought low
(grows deaf), he is afraid of that which is high, and fears
are in the way (avoids climbing and high places); the almond
tree blossometh (he grows gray), the locust crawleth along with
difficulty, the caper-berry breaketh up (the soul is freed),
the silver (spinal) cord is snapped asunder, the golden bowl
(brain) crushed in, the bucket at the well smashed (heart grows
weak), and the wheel breaketh down at the pit (machinery runs
down). Man is going to his eternal house (the grave), and the
mourners go about in the street. Vanity of vanities (all is
transitory), saith Ecclesiastes, all is vanity, and all that is
coming is vanity.
L. Löw[47] collects from the Scripture and post-Biblical Talmud,
German and other literature, instances of rejuvenescence in the old
which ancient Hebrew writers seem to have stressed. We all know that
sight sometimes comes back, perhaps to a marked degree, but Löw quotes
cases where wrinkles vanished, the hair was restored to its youthful
shade and increased in quantity, while teeth, after years of decay,
have sometimes grown from new roots--occasionally more than once. In
many cases sex potency has been restored as well as muscular strength,
freshness of complexion, and, more rarely, hearing. Myths, of course,
of many races detail cases where magic sleep lasting many, perhaps a
hundred, years has converted age into youth, and in Semitic folklore
this is often connected with the passage, “The righteous shall renew
their strength like the eagle.” The Hebrews were perhaps even more
fond than other people of dividing life into periods, usually in
conformity to the magic numbers 3, 4, 7, etc. The comparison of age
with the four seasons was very common, and here we may perhaps mention
Lotze’s effort to harmonize the life span with the four temperaments.
For him, childhood is sanguine on account of the ease of excitation,
the keenness of response to sensation, the ready passage of impulse
to action, and the fluctuations of mood. Youth he calls melancholic
and emotionally characterized by _Stimmungen_. It judges the items of
experience by their effect upon feeling and upon self, and oscillates
readily and widely from pleasure to pain. Mature manhood is choleric,
practical, executive, with definiteness of aim and fulfillment of ideas
and even phantasies but with less excitability of emotion; while old
age is phlegmatic, seeks repose, and has been taught by experience to
abate the life of affectivity and take the attitude of _laissez faire_.
In the modern Jewish family the authority of and respect for the father
is great, more among the orthodox and conservative than the liberal
and reformed wing of Judaism. The grandfather and -mother are always
provided for, although their authority and influence are generally
greatly diminished.
Perhaps mention should here be made of the very interesting medieval
legend of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, although it is of Christian
origin. This cobbler, past whose shop Jesus bore the Cross on the
way to Calvary, reproached Him, and Jesus, turning, sentenced him to
“tarry till I come,” which meant that his punishment was to remain
alive on earth until the second coming of the Messiah. In some of the
many forms of this tradition he is represented at the time as being
of about Jesus’ age and every time he reached a hundred as being set
back again to this stage of life; while in others he is described
with ever increasing symptoms of age, and in Doré’s illustrations he
is depicted as wandering the earth, appearing here and there and, when
recognized, generally mysteriously vanishing, ever seeking death,
visiting graveyards and regions smitten with plague and famine, rushing
into the mêlée of battles, etc.--but all in vain. He longs with an ever
increasing passion to pay the debt of nature but is unable to do so and
must rove the earth until the Judgment Day, when he hopes his penalty
may be remitted and that he may keep some “rendezvous with Death.”[48]
In ancient Greece we may begin with Sparta and its very unique
_gerousia_, the council of twenty-eight old men who must be over sixty,
when the duty to bear arms ceased and when by the original law of
Sparta men were put to death. This council of old men at the height
of its power is sometimes compared with that of the boulé in Athens
but was even greater, for although it held its mandate from the people
and its members were annually elected, they could depose the five
ephors and the kings and even cause them to be put to death. J. P.
Mahaffy[49] condemns the parochial politics of Sparta, where ignorant
old men watched over and secured the closest adhesion of the state to
the system of a semifabulous legislator, and compares the rigidity of
the Spartan system, not based on written laws, with the effects of
excessive reverence of ancestors in China in retarding progress.[50] He
thinks that here we have “one of the most signal instances in history
of the vast mischief done by the government of old men. All the leading
patriots, nay all the leading politicians, were past their prime. There
was not a single young man of ability taking part in public affairs.”
This, he thinks, was more or less true of Athens in the early days, and
he goes on to say that if any young orator tried to advance new ideas,
the old masters, who had the ear of the assembly, were out upon him as
a hireling and traitor so that he had to retire from the agora into
private life, and some were thus driven into exile. He even holds that
the sudden growth of the philosophic schools a little later was due to
the activities that but for this diversion would have been directed to
politics.
But in Greece at its best opposite influences were at work and
generally predominated. In the Homeric age “the king or chief, as soon
as his bodily vigor passed away, was apparently pushed aside by younger
and stronger men. He might either maintain himself by extraordinary
usefulness, like Nestor, or be supported by his children, if they
chanced to be affectionate and dutiful; but except in these cases
his lot was sad indeed.”[51] Achilles laments that nearby chiefs
are ill-treating the aged Peleus, and we see Laertes, the father of
Ulysses, exiled to a barren farm in the country and spending the later
years of his life in poverty and hardship. Hence when we see princes
who had sons that might return any day to avenge them treated in such
a way, we must infer that unprotected old age commanded very little
veneration among the Homeric Greeks, so that worn-out men received
scant consideration. Among friends and neighbors in peace and in good
humor they were treated with consideration, but with the first clash of
interests all this vanished. Interference of the gods to protect their
weakness was no longer believed in. Thus the exact prescription of the
conduct of the young toward the elders in Sparta was an exception,
and their treatment of old age as illustrated by the well-worn story
of an old man coming into the theater at Athens and looking in vain
for a seat until he came near the Spartan embassy, which at once rose
and made room for him, was suggestive. It was well added that while
the Athenians applauded this act it is doubtful if they imitated it.
Probably the disparagement of old age prompted Athenian gentlemen to
resort to every means to prolong their youth. Zeus came to rule the
turbulent and self-willed lesser gods on Olympus, who were perpetually
trying to evade and thwart him, by occasionally terrifying them, and he
seemed to be able to count on no higher principle of loyalty.
The Greeks loved wealth because it gave pleasure, and perhaps in this
fact we have one key to another horror that old age had for them.
Mimnermus tells us to enjoy the delights of love, for “when old age
with its pains comes upon us it mars even the fair, wretched cares
besiege the mind; nor do we delight in beholding the rays of the sun
but are hateful to boys and despised among women, so sore a burden have
the gods made old age.” “When youth has fled, short-lived as a dream,
forthwith this burdensome and hideous old age looms over us hateful and
dishonored, which changes the fashion of man’s countenance, marring
his sight and his mind with its mist.” Pindar asks why those who must
of necessity meet the fate of death should desire “to sit in obscurity
vainly brooding through a forgotten old age without sharing a single
blessing.” He and Aeschylus take a somewhat less unfavorable view of
age, although even Pindar calls it “detested.” Sophocles is the only
dramatist who, at least in one passage, welcomes its approach, although
there are nowhere bitterer words concerning it than those of the chorus
of Œdipus at Coloneus, “That is the final lot of man, even old age,
hateful, impotent, unsociable, friendless, wherein all evil of evil
dwells.” Thus, in general, Greek writers take a very gloomy view of it,
never calling it beautiful, peaceful, or mellow, but rather dismal and
oppressive. The best they say of it is that it brings wisdom.
R. W. Livingstone[52] says:
When youth wore away, he [the Greek] felt that what made life
most worth living was gone. In part perhaps it was that old
age had terrors for the Greeks which we do not feel. They were
without eyeglasses, ear-trumpets, bath-chairs, and an elaborate
system of _apéritifs_, which modern science has devised to
assist our declining years. Yet even with these consolations it
may be doubted whether the Greek would have faced old age with
pleasure. At least to judge from Greek literature, he lamented
its minor discomforts less than the loss of youth’s intense
capacity for action and enjoyment. People who prize beauty and
health so highly can hardly think otherwise when age comes.
Again, old men in Greece had to contend with the younger generation
upon even terms and without the large allowance conceded them by modern
sentiment and good manners. At Athens legal proceedings of children
to secure the property of their parents were very common--and that,
too, without medical evidence of incapacity. Aristophanes complains of
the treatment of older men by the newer generation and in his _Wasps_
makes an old man say that his only chance of respect or even safety
is to retain the power of acting as a juryman, so exacting homage
from the accused and supporting himself by his pay without depending
on his children. When he comes home with his fee they are glad to see
him. Indeed, thus he might support a second wife and younger children
and not be dependent for his daily bread upon his son’s steward. In
the tragedies the old kings are represented as acquiescing, though not
without complaint, in the weakness of their position and submitting
to insults from foes and rivals. There seems no such thing as patient
submission for an aged sovereign. Nor did his own excellence nor the
score of former battles secure for him the allegiance of his people
when his vigor had passed. This was all because in spite of the modicum
of respect that all must yield to old age at its best, the violent
nature of the Periclean politics and the warlike temper of early days
made vigor in their leaders a necessity. The nation was strong, always
seeking to advance and enlarge, and its maxim seemed to be that of
Hesiod, “Work for youth; counsel for maturity; prayers for old age.”
The Greeks, realizing the danger of relying too much upon experience
as the source of wisdom, saw that when the maturity of age is passed
and the power of decision begins to wane, trusting to the leadership of
the old may be dangerous. By a law often relied on, old men could be
brought into court by their children and be found incapable of managing
their property, which was then transferred to their heirs; and this
helps to explain why sometimes old people, beginning to feel their
uselessness, committed suicide rather than become an encumbrance.
Plato[53] makes one of his characters say:
I and a few other people of my own age are in the habit of
frequently meeting together. On these occasions most of us
give way to lamentations and regret the pleasures of youth,
and call up the memory of love affairs, drinking parties,
and similar proceedings. They are grievously discontented at
the loss of what they consider great privileges and describe
themselves as having lived well in those days whereas now
they can hardly be said to live at all. Some also complain of
the manner in which their relations insult their infirmities
or make this a ground for reproaching old age with the many
miseries it occasions them.
Plato did not himself agree with this view but thought the cause of
this discontent lay not in age itself but in character. Still the
humanist view of life does tend to some such position, and the Greeks
really felt that it was better to be the humblest citizen of Athens
than to rule in Hades.
Two unique characters stand out with great clearness and significance.
The first is that of the Homeric Nestor, who had lived through three
generations of men and in whom Anthon says Homer intended to exemplify
the greatest perfection of which human nature is capable. His wisdom
was great, as was his age, and both grew together. In his earlier
years he had been as great in war as he became in counsel later. Very
different is the figure of Tithonus, whom Tennyson has made the theme
of one of his oft-quoted poems. He was a mortal, the son of a king, but
Aurora became so enamored of him that she besought Zeus to confer upon
him the gift of immortality. The ruler of Olympus granted her prayer
and Tithonus became exempt from death. But the goddess had forgotten to
crave youth along with immortality and accordingly, after his children
had been born, old age slowly began to mar the visage and form of her
lover and spouse. When she saw him thus declining she still remained
true to him, kept him “in her palace, on the eastern margin of the
Ocean stream, ‘giving him ambrosial food and fair garments.’ But when
he was no longer able to move his limbs she deemed it the wisest course
to shut him up in his chamber, whence his feeble voice was incessantly
heard. Later poets say that out of compassion she turned him into a
cicada.”
It is gratifying to turn from the depressing attitude toward old age
that was characteristic of the Hellenic mind as a whole, because it
came nearer than any other to being the embodiment of eternal youth,
and to glance at the unique and, we must believe on the whole, very
wholesome and suggestive relation that so often subsisted between men,
not to be sure very old (unless in the case of Socrates) but aging and
young men and even boys.
It was assumed that every well-born and -bred young male must have an
older man as his mentor and to be without one was, to some degree,
regarded as discreditable. Thus juniors sometimes came to vie with each
other in their efforts to win the regard of their seniors, especially
if they were prominent; while the latter, in turn, felt that it was
a part of their duty to the community and to the state to respond to
such advances, even to make them. These friendships between ephebics
and sages were, at their best, highly advantageous to both. The man
embodied the boy’s ideal at that stage of life when he realized
that all excellencies were not embodied in his father and when home
relations were merging into those of citizenship. To win the personal
attention and interest of a great man who would occasionally exercise
the function of teacher, foster parent, guardian, godfather, adviser,
or patron, brought not only advantage but distinction if the youth was
noble and beautiful. On the other hand, Plato thought no man would
wish to do or say a discreditable thing in the presence of a youth who
admired him but would wish to be a pattern or inspirer of virtue. He
seems to have been the first to realize that there is really nothing in
the world quite so worthy of love, reverence, and service, as ingenuous
youth fired with the right ambitions and smitten with a passion to
both know and be the best possible. The period between the dawn of sex
and complete nubility has always been the chief opportunity of the true
teacher or initiator of its apprentice into life.
Here we must recall the very pregnant sense in which, as I have tried
in my _Adolescence_ to set forth at greater length, education in its
various implications began in the initiations of youth by their elders
into the pubertal stage of life and slowly extended upward toward the
university, and downward toward the kindergarten, as civilization
advanced. The world has always felt that these pre-marital years,
when the young have such peculiar needs and are subjected to so many
dangers, are the great opportunity for the transmission of knowledge
and influence from the older to the younger generation.
Thus while Socrates loved to mingle with men of all classes and ages,
his most congenial companions were those of a younger generation. With
the gracious boy, Charmides, “beautiful in mind and body, a charming
combination of moral dignity and artless sprightliness,” he discussed
temperance in the presence of his guardian, Critias. With Theætetus,
“the younger Socrates,” like his master more beautiful in mind than
in body, he conversed about the nature of knowledge, in the presence
of his tutor. With the fair and noble young Lysis, invoked to do so
by his lover, Hypothales, he discourses on the right words or acts
best calculated to ingratiate himself with his ward, and the theme is
friendship. In the presence and with the coöperation of four youths
he discusses courage with General Laches, and to young Clineas and
his adviser he narrates his amusing encounter with Euthydemus and his
brother, the bumptious young Sophists, the “eristic sluggers.” He
explains the true nature of his own art to Ion, the Homeric rhapsodist.
In the Meno he brings out the essential points of the forty-seventh
proposition of Euclid from the mind of an ignorant slave boy.[54]
This relation of old and younger men was thought to keep youth plastic,
docile, and receptive, if not a trifle feminine. Plato would have
these pairs of friends fight side by side to inspire each other with
courage. But this relation, as we all know, had its dangers and often
lapsed to homosexuality and inversion. In the Symposium, Alcibiades,
that most beautiful and alluring of male coquettes, describes Socrates
as a paragon of chastity because he remained cold and unmoved by all
the seductive blandishments he could bring to bear upon him. This vice,
now so fully explored by Krafft-Ebing, Tarnowski, Moll, Ellis, and
Freud and his disciples, is favored by war, the seclusion of women as
in Turkey, and even by female virtue; but the Platonic view was that
true love was a wisdom or philosophy, although possibly they did not
realize that even the custom of the Sophists, who first took pay for
teaching--a practice they thought profanation--was nevertheless a step
toward the reform of degraded boy love.
The chief function of wise and older men toward their juniors, they
thought, was to prevent the premature hardening of opinions into
convictions and to keep their minds open and growing. As we now often
say that the chief function of religion and sex is to keep each other
pure, so they thought that wisdom culminated in eros, which in turn
found its highest deployment in the love of knowledge, which Aristotle
later described as the theoretic life, the attainment of which he
deemed the supreme felicity of man. From all this it follows that those
who achieve complete ideal senescence are those who have entirely
sublimated eroticism into the passion for truth and pursue it with the
same ardor that in their prime attracted them to the most beautiful
of the other sex; and that their chief function to the next generation
is to lay in it the foundations for the same gradual transfer and
transformation of it as old age advances.
Aristotle’s[55] physical theory of old age is that heat is lost by
gradual dissipation, very little remaining in old age--a flickering
flame that a slight disturbance could put out. The lung hardens by
gradual evaporation of the fluid and so is unable to perform its
office of heat regulation. He assumes that heat is gradually developed
in the heart. The amount produced is always somewhat less than that
which is given off and the deficiency has to be made good out of the
stock with which the organism started originally, that is, from the
innate heat in which the soul was incorporate. This eventually is so
reduced by constant draughts made upon it that it is insufficient to
support the soul. The natural span of life, he says, differs greatly
in length in different species, due to material constitution and the
degree of harmony with the environment. But still, as a general rule,
big plants and animals live longer than smaller ones; sanguineous or
vertebrates longer than invertebrates; the more perfect longer than the
less perfect; and long gestation generally goes with long duration.
Thus bulk, degree of organization, period of gestation, are correlated.
Great size goes with high organization.
In his _Rhetoric_,[56] as is well known, Aristotle gives old age an
unfavorable aspect. He says in substance that the old have lived
many years and been often the victims of deception, and since vice
is the rule rather than the exception in human affairs, they are
never positive about anything. They “suppose” and add “perhaps”
or “possibly,” always expressing themselves in doubt and never
positively. They are uncharitable and ever ready to put the worst
construction upon everything. They are suspicious of evil, not
trusting, because of their experience of human weakness. Hence they
have no strong loves or hates but go according to the precept of bias.
Their love is such as may one day become hate and their hatred such
as may one day become love. The temper of mind is neither grand nor
generous--not the former because they have been too much humiliated
and have no desire to go according to anything but mere appearances,
and not the latter because property is a necessity of life and they
have learned the difficulty of acquiring it and the facility with
which it may be lost. They are cowards and perpetual alarmists,
exactly contrary to the young; not fervent, but cold. They are never
so fond of life as on their last day. Again, it is the absent which
is the object of all desire, and what they most lack they most want.
They are selfish and inclined to expediency rather than honor; the
former having to do with the individual and the latter being absolute.
They are apt to be shameless rather than the contrary and are prone
to disregard appearances. They are dependent for most things. They
live in memory rather than by hope, for the remainder of their life
is short while the past is long, and this explains their garrulity.
Their fits of passion though violent are feeble. Their sensual desires
have either died or become feeble but they are regulated chiefly by
self-interest. Hence they are capable of self-control, because desires
have abated and self-interest is their leading passion. Calculation
has a character that regulates their lives, for while calculation is
directed to expediency, morality is directed to virtue as its end.
Their offenses are those of petty meanness rather than of insolence.
They are compassionate like the young, but the latter are so from
humanity while the old suppose all manner of sufferings at their door.
When the orator addresses them he should bear these traits in mind.
Elsewhere[57] he says a happy old age is one that approaches gradually
and without pain and is dependent upon physical excellence and on
fortune, although there is such a thing as a long life even without
health and strength.
Thus, on the whole, the Greeks took a very somber view of old age.
They prized youth as perhaps no other race has ever done and loved to
heighten their appreciation of it by contrasting it with life in its
“sere and yellow leaf.” Pindar says in substance that darkness, old
age, and death never seemed so black as by contrast with the glories of
the great festivals and games which every few years brought together
all those who loved either gold or glory. Socrates, who refused to
flee from his fate and calmly drank hemlock at the age of seventy, and
Plato, who lived to be an octogenarian, must, on the whole, be regarded
as exceptions, and conceptions of a future life were never clear and
strong enough to be of much avail against the pessimism that in bright
Hellas clouded the closing scenes of life’s drama.
When we turn to Rome, we have, on the whole, a more favorable view.
Even in the early stages of Roman life, family and parental authority
were well developed and in Roman law the _patria potestas_ gave the
head of the family great dignity and power. This term designates the
aggregate of those peculiar powers and rights that, by the civil law of
Rome, belonged to the head of a family in respect to his wife, children
(natural or adopted) and more remote descendants who sprang from him
through males only. Anciently it was of very extensive scope, embracing
even the power of life and death; but this was greatly curtailed until
finally it meant but little more than a right of the _paterfamilias_ to
hold his own property or the acquisitions of one under his power.[58]
The Roman Senate was, as the etymology of the word suggests, a body
of old men; and as the Romans had an unprecedented genius for social
and political organization, the wisdom necessary for exercising
successfully administrative functions, which age alone can give, had
greater scope. In this respect the Catholic Church later and its canon
law were profoundly influenced by and, indeed, as Zeller has shown in
his remarkable essay on the subject, derived most of its prominent
features directly from the political organization of ancient Rome, also
giving great authority to presbyters, elders, and affording exceptional
scope to the organizing ability that comes to its flower in later life.
Jesus was young and Keim believes that all His disciples were even
younger. Those who created ecclesiastical institutions, however, were
far older.
In Cicero’s _De Senectute_[59] we have a remarkably representative
statement put into the mouth of the old man, Cato, as to how aging
Romans regarded their estate, and I think the chief impression in
reading this remarkable document is the vast fund of instances of
signal achievements of old men that are here brought together. This
will be apparent from the following brief résumé.
Cato in his old age is approached by youths who want to know what he
can tell them about life. He commends their interest in age and tells
them he has himself just begun to learn Greek, on which he spent much
time in later years. After the first few pages the treatise becomes
almost entirely a monologue of Cato. Every state is irksome to those
who have no support within and do not see that they owe happiness
to themselves. We must not say old age creeps on after manhood,
manhood after youth, youth after childhood, etc. Each age has its
own interests--spring for blossoms, autumn for fruit. The wise submit
and do not, like the giants, war against the gods. There are very
many instances of those who outlived enjoyment and found themselves
forsaken, but of more who won notable renown and respect. Perhaps the
greatest merit of this book is the instances of noble old age that
abound.
Many are great owing to the reputation of their country and would
be small in other lands. To the very poor old age can never be very
attractive. Think on your good deeds. When Marcus died, Cato long
knew no other man to improve by. The four evils charged to old age
are: (1) it disables from business, (2) it makes the body infirm,
(3) it robs of pleasure, (4) it is near death. He takes these up in
detail. The downfall of great states is “generally owing to the giddy
administration of inexperienced young men”; and, on the contrary,
tottering states have been saved by the old. The young are all ignorant
orators. Memory fails in age only if not exercised, and this is true of
all abilities. Sophocles wrote his Œdipus to defy those who called him
a dotard. Democritus, Plato, Socrates, Zeno, and Cleanthes are cited.
Many old men cannot submit to idleness but grow old learning something
new every day, like Solon. Although the voice may be low, it may have
more command. We should no more repine when middle life leaves us than
we do when childhood departs. The adult does not mourn that he is no
longer a boy. All must prepare themselves against old age and mitigate
its natural infirmities.
The stage delights in weak, dissolute old fellows worthy of contempt
and ridicule. Age must support its proper rights and dignities and
not give them weakly away. We must recall at night all we have said
or done during the day. As to the third, old age being incapable of
pleasure, the great curse is indulgence of passion, for which men have
betrayed their country. Governments have been ruined by treachery, for
lust may prompt to any villainy. Reason is the best gift of heaven,
but the highest rapture of feeling makes reflection impossible. Cato
then describes with much detail the charm of country life--Cincinnatus,
etc. We might well wish our enemies were guided by pleasure only for
then we could master them more easily. The old man is dead to certain
enjoyments. He does not so much prize the convivium for food as for
talk. We must not choose only companions of our own age for there will
be few of these left. A talk should turn to the subjects proposed by
the master of the feast, the cups be cooling. He says “I thank the gods
I am got rid of that tyranny” (venery). He does not want or even wish
it in any form.
Far above the delights of literature or philosophy are the charms of
country life, and he describes at length the various methods of vine
culture, fertilization, improving barren soil, irrigation, orchards,
cattle, bees, gardens, flowers, tree planting, etc. The farmer can say,
like the ancient Semites when offered gold, that they wanted none for
it was more glorious to command those who valued it than to possess
it. Then follow many instances of old people who have retired to the
country and perhaps even have been called from their farms to great
tasks of state. He advises reading Xenophon. An old age thus spent is
the happiest period if attended with honor and respect. Old men are
miserable if they demand the defense of oratory. In the college of
augurs old men have great dignity. Some wines sour with age but others
grow better and richer. A gravity with some severity is allowed, but
never ill nature. Covetousness is most absurd because what is left of
life needs little.
The young should be trained to envisage death. Youth in its greatest
vigor is subjected to more diseases than old age. If men too young
governed the state, all government would fall. The old have already
attained what the young only hope for, namely, long years. No actor can
play more than one rôle at once. It takes more water to put out a hot
fire than a spent one. The young are more prone to die by violence,
the old by over-ripeness. The old can oppose tyrants because these can
only kill; and their life, being shorter, is worth far less. The young
and old should meditate on death till it becomes familiar and this only
makes the mind free and easy. Many a soldier has rushed into the mêlée,
with no result, when he knew he would be cut to pieces, and Marcus
Atilius Regulus went back to his enemies for certain torture and death
because he had promised. There is a certain satiety of each stage of
life, and always one is fading as another warms up.
Perhaps, Cato concludes, our minds are an efflux of some universal
mind, and there may be an argument for preëxistence. We have not only
interest in, but a kind of right to, posterity. The wisest accept death
most easily, although it is by no means clear whether we are dissolved
or there is a personal continuation.
Roman authors quote “many cases of great longevity,” and Onomocritus,
an Athenian, tells us that certain men of Greece, and even entire
families, enjoyed perpetual youth for centuries. Old Papalius was
believed to have lived 500 years and a Portugee, Faria, 300. Pliny
tells us of a king who died in his eighty-second year. Strabo says that
in the Punjab people lived over 200 years. Epaminondas had seen three
centuries pass. Pliny tells us that when, in the reign of Vespasian,
statistics of all centenarians between the Apennines and the Po were
collected, there were more than a hundred and seventy of them out
of a population of three million, six of whom lived over 150 years.
According to Lucian, Tiresias lived 600 years on account of the purity
of his life, and the inhabitants of Mount Ethos had the faculty of
living a century and a half. He tells us of an Indian race, the Seres
who, because of temperate life and very scanty food, lived 300 years,
while Pliny tells of an Illyrian who lived 500 and the king of Cyprus
who outlived 160 years. Litorius of Aetolia was happiest among mortals
for he had attained 200 years. Apolonius, the grammarian, outdoes all
others and tells of people who lived thousands of years.
Of the condition and status of old people all through the Christian
centuries down to the age of authentic statistics we know very little.
Roger Bacon tells us of a remarkable man who appeared in Europe in 1245
and in whom everyone was interested. He claimed that he had attended
the Council of Paris in A.D. 362 and also the baptism of Clovis.
Bacon’s skepticism reduced the claim of this unknown man to 300 years.
In 1613 was published at Turin the life of a man who is said to have
lived nearly 400 years, enjoying full use of all his faculties; and
in the seventeenth century a Scotchman, MacCrane, lived 200 years
and talked of the Wars of the Roses. So the lives of the saints are
rich in old people--St. Simeon is said to have lived 107 years; St.
Narcissus, 165; St. Anthony, 105; the hermit, Paul, 113; while the
monks of Mount Ethos often reached the age of 150, as did the first
bishop of Ethiopia. Although there are, of course, no vital statistics,
there are many reasons to believe that the average length of human life
was shorter and that old people in general, although, of course, not
without remarkable exceptions, enjoyed little respect. Descriptions
of them sometimes appear in miracle plays, more commonly in the form
of caricatures, as is often the case on the modern stage, where the
personification of old people is often a specialty. There are dotards
and fatuities galore and the more dignified figures like King Lear or
even Shylock are represented as morally perverse or mentally unsound.
Here should be mentioned the remarkable theory of witchcraft elaborated
by Karl Pearson.[60] W. Notestein[61] tells us that by accounting as
carefully as the insufficient evidence permits it would seem that
“about six times as many women were indicted as men,” and also that
there were “twice as many married women as spinsters,” which is less
in accord with tradition. From his account, as well as from the old
chapter of C. Mackay on the “Witch Mania” (in his _Popular Delusions_)
and also from an interesting study by G. L. Kittredge,[62] it would
seem that the first accusations of witchcraft were made against old,
middle-aged, and young women almost indiscriminately, while in a later
stage of the delusion attention focused on old women, influenced by
folklore, which tends to make them hags.
Pearson’s theory, developed with great ingenuity, is that witchcraft
is a revival of a very old and widespread matriarchate wherein woman
not only ruled but society was everywhere permeated by her genius,
and paternity was unknown. The key to this older civilization was
the development of woman’s intuitive faculty under the stress of
child-bearing and -rearing. The mother-age in its diverse forms has
been a stage of social growth for probably all branches of the human
race. With its mother-right customs it made a social organization in
which there was more unity of interest, fellowship, partnership in
property and sex than we find in the larger social units of to-day.
Hence feminists may well look back to this as a golden age, despite the
fact that it was in many respects cruel and licentious. It shows that
those who talk of absolute good and bad and an unchanging moral code
may help to police but can never reform society.
Pearson proceeds to argue that certain forms of medieval witchcraft
are fossils of the old mother-age and more or less perverted rites
and customs of a prehistoric civilization, and even holds that the
confessions wrung from poor old women by torture have a real scientific
value for the historian of a far earlier stage of life. Primitive
woman, thus, once had a status far higher and very different from
anything she has since enjoyed. Man as husband and father had no place
but came later. Aging women in the matriarchate were depositaries of
tribal lore and family custom, and the “wise one,” “sibyl,” or “witch”
passed all this along, as she did her herb-lore. She domesticated the
small animals--goat, goose, cat, hen; devised the distaff, spindle,
pitchfork, broom (but not the spear, axe, or hammer); and presided over
rites in which there were symbols of agricultural and animal fertility
and abundant traces of licentiousness and impurity in the sacred dances
and ceremonies. “Witch” means “wiseacre,” “one who knows,” and some
were good and some bad dames or beldames. The former brought good luck;
the latter, famine, plague, etc. All witches have weather wisdom, and
a descendant of the Vola or Sibyl is, in the Edda, seated in the midst
of the assembly of the gods and could produce thunder, hail, and rain.
Tacitus tells us of men who took the part of priestesses, probably in
female attire. Kirmes is a festival lasting several days, primarily for
dedicating a church, although it has many features of the celebration
of a goddess, who in Christian demonology was first converted into the
devil’s mother or grandmother and invested with most of the functions
of old witches. These, in the witches’ sabbath, came more to devolve
upon her son. In Swabia the witch stone is an old altar and the
ceremonies about it suggest marriage. The devil is a professional
sweetheart; his mother, a person of great importance, was supposed once
to have built a palace on the Danube, to hunt with black dogs, and to
be related to Frau Holda. She watered the meadows in “Twelfth Night”
and punished idle spinsters. The devil’s mother is only a degraded form
of the goddess of fertility and domestic activity and her worship was
once associated not only with licentiousness but with human sacrifice.
It was these women who were primarily in league with the devil and
once a year must dance all night. The hag is the woman of the woods
who knows and collects herbs, especially those that relieve the labors
of childbirth. The priestess of the old civilization became a medicine
woman and midwife, the goddess of fertility being killed in the autumn
that she may be rejuvenated in the spring. Thus the witch is a relic of
the priestess or goddess of fertility, and the hostility they sometimes
exhibit for marriage was because at this stage it was not monogamic but
group marriage.
Thus Pearson thinks that Walpurgis customs bring out most of the
weak and strong points of ancient woman’s civilization, fossils of
which lurk under all the folklore of witchcraft. Here we find the
rudiments of medicine, domestication of small animals, cultivation
of vegetables, domestic and household arts, the pitchfork--which was
once the fire-rake--etc. All of these are woman’s inventions and were
necessary for the higher discoveries. Although he did not invent them,
man later made woman use them. The primitive savage knows nothing of
agriculture, spinning, and herbs, but his wife does. It is not he but
she who made these symbols of a female deity. The fertility, resource,
and inventiveness of woman arose from the struggle she had to make for
the preservation of herself and her child. Man was quickened by warfare
of tribe against tribe, but that came later. The first struggle was
for food and shelter. Thus the father-age rests on a degenerate form
of an older group and is not the pure outcome of male domination.
He thus believes in a direct line of descent from the old salacious
worship of the mother-goddess and the extravagances of witchcraft, and
he finds survivals of this even in the licensed vice of to-day. Thus
this early civilization of woman handed down a mass of useful customs
and knowledge, so that she was the bearer of a civilization that man
has not yet entirely attained. If many things in her life are vestiges
of the mother age, many in his represent a still lower stratum and the
drudgery of the peasant woman in many parts of Europe represents the
extreme of the reaction brought about by male dominance.
Otis T. Mason and A. F. Chamberlain have stressed the significance
of woman’s work in the early stages of the development of the human
race, and if it be true that in witchcraft we have a recrudescence of
the reactions of man to this preëminence of the other sex, in which
woman in her least attractive form--all shriveled, toothless, and as a
vicious trouble-maker--is caricatured in the long war of sex against
sex, we certainly have here considerable confirmation of some of the
views now represented by John M. Tyler[63] that prehistoric woman led
mankind in the early stages of its upward march toward civilization.
In the eternal struggle of old people to maintain their power against
the oncoming generations which would submerge or sweep them away,
witchcraft on this view represents the very latest stage of a long
and losing struggle of old women for place and influence who in the
last resort did not scruple, handicapped though they were by ugliness,
neglect, and contempt, to cling to the least and last remnants of their
ancient prerogatives.
The attitude of children toward old people is interesting and
significant, but it is very difficult to distinguish between their own
indigenous and intrinsic feelings and the conventionalities of respect
and even the outer forms of convention that society has imposed upon
them. Many children live with their grandparents and the attitude of
the latter toward the former makes, of course, a great difference.
Both, especially grandmothers, are prone to be over-indulgent and
often allow children greater liberties than the mother would--under
the influence, doubtless, of the very strong instinct to win their
good-will. But it is very doubtful if the average child loves the
grandmother as much as it is loved by her.
Colin Scott[64] obtained 226 reminiscent answers from adults on the
question of how as children they felt toward old people and found
little difference in the sexes in this respect. No less than eighty
per cent expressed negative or pessimistic views; that is, they
disliked old people because they could not run and play; because they
were sometimes cross, solemn, stupid, conceited; perhaps were thought
to envy the young or interfere with childish pleasures, etc.; while
not a few expressed points of aversion to wrinkles, unsteady gait,
untidiness in dress and habits (particularly of eating), slowness,
uncertain voice, loss of teeth, bad pronunciation, etc. Only twenty
per cent took a favorable view of old people, regarding them as
wise, not only about the weather but about other things; as free to
do what they wished; having great power as storytellers; constantly
doing little acts of kindness and sometimes interceding with parents
in their behalf. For the majority of young children the pleasures of
life seem to be essentially over at forty and they look upon people of
that age as already moribund. Very often children are overcome by a
sudden sense of pathos that old people are facing death, the process
of which with lowered vitality seems to them to have already begun. To
some, the very aged, even conventionally loved, are inwardly repulsive
because their weakness and appearance already begin to seem a little
corpse-like; while a few, on the other hand, are animated by the motive
to make old people happy because their life seems to them so short or
because little things please them so much. It would almost seem from
such data as though the modern child was not sufficiently accustomed to
grandparents to have fully adjusted to them; and, as everyone knows,
there is a very strong and instinctive tendency in children to jeer at
and perhaps attempt ludicrous imitations of old age. At any rate, we
have here two tendencies evidently in greater or less conflict with
each other.
Mantegazza[65] collected very many views from literature concerning
old age and death and grouped them in two classes, favorable and
unfavorable. The majority of his quotations stigmatize it as repulsive,
crumpled in skin and form, perhaps tearful, squinting, with mottled
skin, loose, distorted teeth, emaciation sometimes suggesting a
skeleton, hardness of hearing, croaking voice, knotted veins,
hemorrhoids, tending to drift into an apologetic attitude for living
like a beggar asking alms or craving pity, with no strong desires,
etc., so that even those who love old people in the bottom of their
hearts often do not want them around. These quotations stress the
garrulousness, untidiness in table manners, carelessness in dress or
toilet, moodiness, exacting nature, and disparagement of present times
in always lauding the past. “Old age is pitiable because although
life is not attractive, death is dreaded.” People sometimes “seem to
themselves and to others to live on because the gods do not love
them.” Life is often described as a “long sorrow, the last scene of
which is always death.” “There are only three events--to be born, live,
and die. A man does not feel it when he is born but through life he
suffers and death is painful, and then he is forgotten.” “Every tick
of the clock brings us nearer to death.” “We part from life as from
the house of a host and not from our own home.” “One after another
our organs refuse their service and collapse.” “All that lives must
die, and all that grows must grow old.” “Death begins in the cradle.”
“The harbor of all things good or bad is death.” “The elements are in
constant conflict with man, slowly demolishing everything he does and
in the end annihilating him.”
On the other hand, some, like the Stoics, have not only affected to
accept death with perfect equanimity but call it the highest good that
God has given men. The Epicurean said death was no evil because as
long as we live it is not present and when it is present we are not
there. Pliny said the gods have given us nothing more to be desired
than brevity of life. Others say that the old may have weak bodies
but normally have good will and this compensates. Others stress the
dignity of age or its steadfastness, its fondness for children and the
young. Sometimes the old become epicures in eating and connoisseurs in
drinking. Some commend as a laudable ambition the desire of the old
to live as long, as well, and as fully as possible. Others think the
love of beauty, especially in nature, is greater; still others find a
new love of order, better knowledge of self, both physical and mental.
He suggests that old age should be almost a profession, as we have to
fit to new conditions. It is possible then to take larger views, and
he says that of the three attitudes toward death, (1) not to think
of it at all, the recourse of the common and the weak, (2) belief in
immortality, a very pleasing and comforting delusion, and (3) to face
and get familiar with it, the last is by far the highest and hardest.
Thus the old must realize that they are as brittle and fragile as
glass, cannot do what they once could, become ill from slighter causes
and recover more slowly, must especially guard against colds, fatigue,
change of habit, and must be always on their guard not to accept
others’ precepts about keeping themselves in the top of their condition
but work out those best for themselves.
In all ages since civilization began we have frequent outcrops of
the tendency to divide human life into stages, many or few, more or
less sharply marked off one from the other. L. Löw has given us a
comprehensive survey of this subject. There has never been, however,
any general agreement as to these age demarcations save two, namely,
the beginning and the end of sex life, which divides life into three
stages. Child life, as we all know, has lately been divided into
various epochs--the nursling; the pre-school age; the quadrennium from
eight to twelve; puberty; the age of attaining majority; nubility; the
acme of physical ability (for example, for athletes _circa_ thirty);
the beginning of the decline of life, most often placed between
forty and fifty, a stage that has many marked features of its own;
the development of the senium, marked by impotence, with occasional
subdivisions of this stage, as, for example in Shakespeare:
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Our educational curricula are still far more logical in the sequence
of their subject matter and their method than they are genetic whereas
they should be essentially the latter, as will be the case when the
paidocentric viewpoint has become paramount, as it should, over the
scholiocentric. We have made much progress since Herbart in determining
true culture stages, and while there are very many exceptions to
the law that in general the individual recapitulates the stages of
the race, this great principle has far wider scope than we have yet
recognized. Again, we have made great progress along another line,
namely, in distinguishing physiological and especially psychological
from chronological age, but here we have little consensus of either
method or result beyond the early teens. Yet no observer of life can
fail to doubt that there is the same and perhaps even, on the whole,
greater average diversity among individuals in mental age as they
advance along the scale of years. Some minds are young and growing at
seventy while others seem to cross some invisible deadline at forty.
But of all this we have no settled criteria and the age of customary
or enforced retirement is arbitrary, though very diversely fixed by
various industrial concerns, pension systems, etc., without regard
to mental age or youth. In fact, the world has so far attempted
almost nothing that could be called a curriculum for the later years
of life--physical, intellectual, moral, social, or even hygienic or
religious, after the very variable period when the prime of life is
reached and passed. Happily, however, we do have both vestiges and
modern recrudescences of such a view in the field of religion, as may
be briefly illustrated in the following paragraphs.
Many have held with DuBuy,[66] that different religions best fitted
different ages. He believes that Confucianism, with its stress on
respect for parents and ancestors and on the cultivation of practical
virtues, best fits the nature and needs of young children; that
Mohammedanism, with its passionate monotheism, has a certain affinity
for the next stage of life; Christianity is best from adolescence on to
the age when the marriage relation is at its apex; Buddhism comes next;
and Brahmanism is for old age.
Max Müller[67] says that in very ancient India it was recognized “that
the religion of a man cannot and ought not to be the same as that of
a child, and that the religious ideas of an old man must differ from
those of an active man in the world. It is useless to attempt to deny
such facts,” and we are reminded that we all have to struggle and have
to pass through many stages of clearing up childish conceptions in this
field. Most cultivated men come out of these struggles with certain
rather firm convictions, but these later may be found to need revision.
But when the evening of life draws near and softens the light
and shade of conflicting opinion, when to agree with the
spirit of truth within becomes far dearer than to agree with
a majority of the world without, the old questions appeal
once more like long forgotten friends. The old man learns to
bear with those from whom formerly he differed, and while he
is willing to part with all that is non-essential--and most
religious differences seem to arise from non-essentials--he
clings all the more firmly to the few strong and solid planks
that are left to carry him into the harbor no longer very
distant from his sight. It is hardly creditable how all other
religions have overlooked these simple facts, how they have
tried to force on the old and wise the food that was meant for
babes, and how they have thereby alienated and lost their best
and strongest friends. It is therefore a lesson all the more
worth learning from history that one religion at least, and
one of the most ancient and powerful and most widely spread
religions, has recognized this fact without the slightest
hesitation.
According to the ancient canons of the Brahmanic faith, each man must
pass through several stages. The youth is sent to the house of a
teacher or Guru, whom he must obey and serve implicitly in every way
and who teaches what is necessary for life, especially the Veda and
his religious duties. He is a mere passive recipient, learner, and
believer. At the next stage the man is married and must perform all the
duties prescribed for the householder. But during both these periods
no doubt is ever heard as to the truth of religion or the authority
of laws and rites. But when the hair turns white and there are
grandchildren, “a new life opens during which the father of the family
may leave his home and village and retire into the forest with or
without his wife. During that period he is absolved from the necessity
of performing any sacrifices, although he may or must undergo certain
self-denials or penances, some of them extremely painful. He is then
allowed to meditate with proper freedom on the great problems of life
and death, and for that purpose is expected to study the Upanishads,”
to learn the doctrines in which all sacrificial duties are rejected,
and the very gods to whom the ancient prayers of the Veda were
addressed are put aside to make room for the one supreme impersonal
being called Brahm. These mahatmas, like some medieval hermit-saints
commemorated in the voluminous hagiology of the Bollandist Fathers,
were reputed to have often attained very great age and wisdom and to be
sought out in their retreats to solve great problems by men still in
active life. The bodies of a few of them were fabled to have undergone
a subtle process of transubstantiation and thus to have achieved a true
mundane immortality.
Thus the religion of childhood and manhood for the venerable sage is
transmuted into philosophy or meditation on the most general problems
and the very nature of not only life but being itself, that Plato
described as the cult of death. The old man, thus, in the classic days
of ancient India directed his thoughts toward absorption. His religion
was pantheism, and the theme of his contemplation was the source of all
things and their return to this source as their goal. Perhaps we might
now say that according to this view, if evolution is the inspiration of
the intellect in its youth and its prime, involution was its muse in
the stages of decline as it awaited resumption into the One-and-All.
Modern pragmatists, like the best of the ancient Sophists, hold that
the truth that best fits and expresses Me is and must be held with
the completest conviction, and the genetic idea is that different
philosophies and different faiths fit and express not only different
temperaments but different stages of life, and that, therefore, creeds
can never be fixed and stationary but must be constantly transformed.
There is no absolute or final form of truth for all save in the
dominion of pure mathematical and physical science, and it is one of
the most tragic aspects of our modern culture that we so often find
mature and even aging men and women arrested in infantile or juvenile
stages of their development in regard to the larger problems of life,
for where and just in proportion as the latter is intense there is
incessant change. Christianity is the best of all religions through
the entire stage of the _vita sexualis_ from its inception to its
decline. Its essence is the sublimation of love. It is the religion of
personalization culminating in the faith in another individual life.
It is not the religion for old men, and the revival of its attitudes,
which we often see in them, is a phenomenon of arrest or reversion and
not one of the advance that senescence should mark if the last stage
of life is to have its complete unfoldment.
Some writers believe that age differences constitute one of the
important bases, if not the chief one, in the primitive segmentation
of society into layers. It is a common observation that the young tend
to be progressive and radical, and the old, conservative, intent that
no good thing of the past be lost. Indeed, this is often called the
most natural and wholesome basis of division into parties, religious
as well as political. In a sense there is eternal war between the old
and young, as illustrated, for example, by Turgenev’s _Fathers and
Sons_. The young are always inclined to brush aside their elders and
are psychologically incapable of taking their point of view. So in
many a mixed assemblage we have a clash of temperaments that divides
fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.[68] In some Australian tribes
there is an absolute dominance of the elders, and among some American
Indians of the plain there is incessant antagonism between the young
braves eager to distinguish themselves in raids against hostile tribes
and the older chiefs seeking to prevent a hazardous war. F. Schurtz[69]
thinks this antagonism between the older and younger generation, which
separates parents from children, forms the germ of classifications of
age and is the oldest type of associated groups. Lowie, however, does
not think that the kind of age groupings found in such cultures have
a purer natural basis but rather that they represent a blending of
psychological and conventional factors. It is very hard to transcend
the intuitions of one’s years. Where these segmentations occur they may
or may not be fully organized, but they generally go back to a more
primitive social division into boys, bachelors, and married men, very
common among savages. More elaborated age distinctions probably arose
a little later.
R. S. Bourne[70] also realizes that there is always a half-conscious
war going on between the old and the young and believes this is a
wholesome challenge that both should recognize to justify themselves.
Older men should not be led captive by the younger and should neither
over-emphasize nor waive their own cherished convictions, which are
the best results of age and experience. To-day the older generation is
more inclined to stress duty and service and to hark back to Victorian
ideals. Perhaps in general they tend a little to over-individuation but
they should choose the golden mean between insisting upon their own
point of view and complete capitulation to youth.
Indeed, we may go much further and say that just as, despite the love
of man and woman, there has always been a war of sex against sex, so
despite the love of parents and children, there is also eternal war
between the old and young. The small boy loves, reveres, and obeys his
father but often oscillates to the opposite state of fear and even
hate under the law of the so-called ambivalence of feeling. Each age
tends to assert itself and to resent the undue influence of another
age. Youth pushes on and up and seeks to make itself effective and to
escape or resist control by elders. This is very fully brought out in
the recent literature of psychoanalysis. In primitive society the boy
soon transfers this attitude toward his parents to the chief of the
tribe, and then perhaps to a supreme being, for all gods are made in
the father image. Indeed, we are now told that the primal, generic
sin in its extreme form is patricide, and one of the deepest fears
is directed against authority. The pre-Abrahamic sheik was his own
priest and king and that of his tribe. There was no law save his will.
Enlarged, perfected, and projected into the sky, the patronymic sire
became a deity. Part of the ancient reverence for fathers accumulated
from generation to generation was thus transcendentalized into deities
and part of it developed in the mundane sphere as reverence for rulers,
heroes, the great dead, or perhaps into the worship of ancestors. But
one very essential part of it survives in adult life in the attitude
toward authority, every instrument and bearer of which is thus
generically a father-surrogate. Thus older people feel toward their
deities much as younger children do toward earthly parents and the
greater men in their environment. There is always a measure of love and
dread merging into each other. Ancient tribes that Robertson Smith and
Frazer describe, after selecting and feeding fat their rulers for a
time, ascribing to them divine prerogatives, giving them extraordinary
freedom in certain respects while restricting them by severe taboos and
in other ways, finally slew them ritually as sacrifices offered with
piacular rites. All this illustrates the same dual trend of affectivity
within and so does the fate of every deity who is slain, perhaps with
every indignity and torture, and afterwards resurrected, transfigured,
and glorified.
All government in a sense, too, springs from paternalism, and
so does all human power, dignity, and prerogatives, so that the
French revolutionist and even Nihilist, who is chronically and
constitutionally against all the powers that be and who feels that
every command or prohibition is a challenge to defy or violate it,
only illustrates the extreme of revolt now sometimes designated as
kurophobia.[71]
Of course rebellion against tyranny is commendable. Many fathers are
bad and this cumulative fact has greatly intensified the instinct
of rebellion. In an extreme form this may be expressed in negativism
or anti-suggestibility, but sooner or later there is a revolt of all
sons against all sires. This, too, acts as a challenge to originality
and gives its _élan_ to the passion for boundless freedom, which
may even degenerate into forms of affectation and a passion for
over-individuality. Thus next to hostile nature herself, fathers and
what they symbolize have been the objects of man’s chief opposition in
the world’s history. The very words “obey” and “conform” hardly exist
in the vocabulary of some recusants. The devil, too, always denies and
defies and all through the history of religions has been the typical
rebel. The kurophobe is the evil genius of republics and democracies.
He prates of rights and has little or nothing to say of duties and on
this view he is the product of all the bad fathers in his pedigree.
In many patriarchal and tribal societies the father or chief
monopolized the women, whom the sons dared not approach. Hence we are
told that they were compelled to seek mates outside, whence exogeny
arose. Freudians hold that the son’s rancor against the father is
rooted in this inhibition of the mating instinct. This doubtless did
contribute very much to intensify it as the boy grew to man’s estate
but it is going too far to say that in the very intricate grammar of
revolt, no less complex than Newman long ago showed the grammar of
assent to be, other factors did not come in and that there no other
social inhibitions of the will-to-live than those of the will to
propagate. This rivalry and antagonism, which is probably more deep and
multiform than we have yet realized, is seen at every age from early
childhood--in the hostility of Freshman and Sophomore, those under
and over age for citizenship or for war, in struggles of men in the
meridian of life to depose or supplant those a little older, in the
countless devices of those who are aging to maintain their power and
influence, which perhaps never in history had such an efficient bulwark
as when they became secure in the right of testamentary bequest of
their property as they wished--and is only mitigated in the case of the
very old because they are few and feeble and have already in many ways
been superseded and relegated to inefficiency.
Metchnikoff in his essay on Old Age tells us that at Vate the “old men
have at least this consolation--that during the funeral ceremonies
it is customary to attach to their arms a pig which may be eaten
during the feast given in honor of the departure of the soul for the
other world.” After citing other similar cases, he tells us that
civilized people are not unlike savages for although they do not kill
superannuated members of the community they often make their lives
very unhappy, the old often being considered as a heavy charge, which
causes great impatience at the delay of death. This is expressed in
the Italian proverb that old women have seven lives and the Burgomasks
think that old women have seven souls, besides an eighth soul, quite
small, and half a soul besides; while the Lithuanians complain that
an old woman is so tenacious of life that she can not be even ground
in a mill. He cites the protest of Paris medical students against the
decision of the state superseding the law prescribing a limit of age
for the professors, saying, “We do not want dotards.” A convict in
the Saghalien Islands condemned for the assassination of several old
men said, “What is the use of making such a fuss about them? They are
already old and would die anyway in a few years.” In Dostoievsky’s
_Crime and Punishment_ one student declared in a group of his mates
that he would kill and rob the cursed old woman without the slightest
remorse, and continues, “On the one side we have a stupid, unfeeling
old woman, of no account, wicked and sick, whom no one would miss--on
the contrary, who is an injury to everyone and does not herself
know why she keeps on living and who perhaps will be good and dead
to-morrow; while, on the other hand, there are fresh young lives
wasting for nothing at all, without being helped by anyone, that can be
numbered by thousands.” Old men, too, often commit suicide. Prussian
statistics show that people between 50 and 80 commit suicide about
twice as often as those between 20 and 50, and the same is true of
Denmark. “The young and strong adults furnished, therefore, 36½ per
cent of the suicides, while the number furnished by the aged amounted
to 63½ per cent.” Metchnikoff finds that “the desire to live, instead
of diminishing tends, on the contrary, to increase with age.” “The
old Fuegian women, aware that they are destined to be eaten, flee
into the mountains, whither they are pursued by the men and carried
back home where they must submit to death.” “The philosopher in me
does not believe in death; it is the old man who has not the courage
to face the inevitable.” And so it is that old professors rarely wish
to abandon their chairs. Nor do they even always renounce the tender
passion, a fact illustrated by Goethe, who at the age of 74 fell in
love with a girl of 17, proposed marriage to her, and failing in the
project wrote his pathetic _Elegy of Marienbad_, in which he said “For
me the universe is lost; I am lost to myself. The gods, whose favorite
I lately was, have tried me,” etc. The weakening of his powers in
the latter part of _Faust_ and at the end of _Wilhelm Meister_ was
abundantly shown.
We resume our historical notes with Luigi Cornaro (1464–1566),[72] a
wealthy Venetian nobleman, who, as a result of a wild and intemperate
life, found himself at forty broken in health and facing death and
so radically changed not only his mode of life but his residence
and devoted himself, after this crisis, with the “most incessant
attention” to the securing of perfect health, studying every item of
diet and regimen for its effects upon him. At eighty-three, after more
than forty years of perfect health and undisturbed tranquillity, he
wrote his _La Vita Sobria_, an essay that was later followed by three
others, one written at eighty-six, another at ninety-one, the last at
ninety-five; the four completing a most instructive life history and
one which the most earnest desire and hope of his life was that others
might know and follow. He believed that the kind of life most people
lead is utterly worthless and emphasized the great value of the later
years of life as compared with the earlier ones. His message to the
world has been a classic. He hoped that he had made the moderate life
so attractive that the attitude of the world toward old age and death
would be changed.
In his first discourse he gives many details of how he conceived
life in the simple way nature intended it and how we must learn to
be content with a little and experience all the joys that come from
self-control. When the passions are subdued, man can give himself up
wholly to reason. His physicians told him that he must partake of
no food save that prescribed for invalids but he found that he must
carefully study each article of diet and decide for himself because no
general prescriptions avail. By dint of long observations upon himself
he started with the belief that “whatever tastes good will nourish and
strengthen” and learned that “not to satiate oneself with food is the
science of health.” He guarded particularly against great heat, cold,
and fatigue; allowed nothing to interfere with his rest and sleep,
would never stay in an ill-ventilated room, and avoided excessive
exposure to wind and sun. At the age of seventy he was severely
injured by a carriage accident so that all his friends expected his
death and the physicians suggested either bleeding or purging as
forlorn hopes. He refused both and trusted to the recuperative effects
of his well regulated life. He recovered completely as he, indeed,
fully expected to do, although it was thought by his friends to be
miraculous. Later, yielding reluctantly to the urgency of physicians
and friends, he increased his daily intake of food so that instead
of twelve ounces, including bread, the yolk of an egg, a little meat
and soup, he now took fourteen ounces; and instead of fourteen ounces
of wine, as before, he raised his ration to sixteen ounces. Under
this increased diet he grew seriously ill (at seventy-eight). But on
returning to his old dietary he recovered.
Hence, he concludes that “a man cannot be a perfect physician of
anyone except of himself alone” and that by dint of experimenting
he may “acquire a perfect knowledge of his own condition and of his
most hidden qualities and find out what food and what drink and what
quantities of each would agree with his stomach.” “Various experiments
are absolutely necessary, for there is not so great a variety of
features as there is diversity of temperaments and stomachs among
men.” He found he could not drink wine over a year old, and that
pepper injured but cinnamon helped him, something which no physician
could have anticipated. He shows the fallacy of the notion that such
a life leaves nothing to fall back upon in time of sickness by saying
that such sickness would thus be avoided and that his dietary is
sufficient so that in sickness, when all tend to eat less, he has still
a sufficient margin, although probably the quantity or quality of food
that suits him, he admits, might not suit others. The objection that
many who lead irregular lives live to be old he refutes by saying that
some have exceptional vitality but that all can prolong life by his
method. He tells us that he rides without assistance, climbs hills, is
never perturbed in soul, is occupied during the entire day, changes his
residence in warm weather to the country which he thinks important,
enjoys the society of able, cultivated, and active-minded men, and all
his senses have remained perfect.
He tells us that he improved upon Sophocles, who wrote a tragedy at
seventy-three, for he has written a comedy; of his seven grandchildren,
all offspring of one pair; how he enjoys singing (probably religious
incantations), and how much his voice has improved; that he would not
be willing to exchange “either my life or my great age for that of any
young man,” etc. He praises his heart, memory, senses, brain, and is
certain that he will die, when the time comes, without pain or illness
and hopes to enjoy the other world beyond.
In his later discourses he tells us that although naturally of a very
choleric disposition he entirely subdued it. He corrects the notion
that the old must eat much to keep their bodies warm; says as old age
is a disease we must eat less, as we do when ill; refutes the maxim
“a short life and a merry one” and the fallacy that one cannot much
prolong or shorten life by regimen; tells us exactly what foods he
prefers--soup, eggs, mutton, fowl, fish, etc. At ninety-one he says,
“The more my years multiply, the more my strength also increases,”
and he preaches an earthly paradise after the age of eighty; while at
ninety-five he writes that all his faculties “are in a condition as
perfect as ever they were; my mind is more than ever keen and clear,
my judgment sound, my memory tenacious, my heart full of life,” and
his voice so strong that he has to sing aloud his morning and evening
prayers. He enjoys two lives at the same time, one earthly and the
other heavenly by anticipation.
As Cornaro advanced in years he grew very proud of his age, and
his four discourses give us the impression that regimen and hygiene
were his true religion, although he was very pious according to the
standards of his age. His diet, the houses he built to live in for
each season, his charities, the public works he instituted, and even
the friends he cultivated, like everything else he said and did,
were determined largely by what he thought were their effects upon
his physical and mental health. No young man or young woman was ever
prouder of his youth than he of his age. He gloried in it as manhood
and womanhood do in their prime, and no evangelist was more intent on
convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment than he was
in exhorting men to change their mode of life to make it more sane,
temperate, and abstemious--and that in a day and land when gluttony
and riotous living were rife. For him a feast, rich repast, or a
formal dinner was suicidal; and so were late hours, irregularities,
excitement, and every form and degree of excess. So superior is
senescence to all the other stages of life that he believed men should
be dominated from the first by the desire to attain it as the supreme
mundane felicity, because no one can be truly happy but the old. His
mission was evidently to be the apostle of senescence.
True, he repeats himself, is often very platitudinous, no doubt, like
most old men, greatly overestimates his powers, and if a poor and
ignorant man would have been, very likely, a tedious old dotard. But
as it is, his treatment of the problem of life is of great and lasting
significance.
Lord Bacon[73] was evidently influenced by Cornaro, as he in turn was
by the abstemious practices of monks and ascetics. Among the very
practical suggestions of his paper we strike many quotations that have
become familiar to all--Men fear death as children fear to go into the
dark, and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so
is the other; since life is short and art is long, our chiefest aim
should be to perfect the arts, and the greatest of them all is that of
long life. Diet receives chief consideration. Bacon seems almost to
believe that the ancients acquired a mode of putting off old age to a
degree that has now become a lost art “through man’s negligence.” He
stresses the power of the “spirits” and its waxing green again as the
most ready and compendious way to long life but tells us that it may
be in excess or in defect as, indeed, may every other activity; while
the middle or moderate way is always to be sought. He discourses on the
necessity of sufficient but not too much exercise, which must never
be taken if the stomach is either too full or too empty. “Many dishes
have caused many diseases,” and many medicines have caused few cures.
“Emaciating diseases, afterwards well cured, have advanced many in the
way of long life for they yield new juice, the old being consumed,
and to recover from a sickness is to renew youth. Therefore, it were
good to make some artificial diseases, which is done by strict and
emaciating diets.”
Sleep is an aid to nourishment and it is especially important that
in sleeping the body always be warm. Sleep is nothing but the
reception and retirement of the living spirit into itself. We must
also be cheerful in relation to both sleep and eating and he has many
admonitions upon the advantages of pure air, the right affection, hope
not too often frustrated, and especially a sense of progress, for most
who live long have felt themselves advancing. Old men should dwell
upon their childhood and youth, for this means rejuvenation. Hence
association of the old with others whom they knew when young is most
helpful. Habits, customs, and even diet, must be changed, but not too
often or too much. One must constantly observe and study the effect
upon himself of all the items of regimen. Grief, depression, excessive
fear, lack of patience, are passions that feed upon and age the body.
Each must acquire a wisdom “beyond the rules of physic; a man’s own
observation, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the
best physic to preserve health, and with regard to many things he must
wisely and rightly decide whether or not they are good or bad for him,
and that independently of all precepts and advice.”
Thus in his quaint style, and for reasons most of which science of
to-day would utterly discard, he had the sagacity to reach many of the
conclusions that are quite abreast of and in conformity with the most
practical results of modern hygiene.
Addison,[74] avowedly more or less inspired by Cornaro, after
condemning the prevailing gluttony says, “For my part, when I behold
a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I
see gouts and dyspepsias, fevers and lethargies, and other distempers
lying in ambuscade among the dishes.” He delights in the most plain
and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish--herbs are the
food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of the third. Man alone
falls upon everything that comes in his way. “Not the smallest fruit
or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or mushroom escapes him.”
Hence he advises that we make our whole repast out of one dish and that
we avoid all artificial provocatives, which create false appetites. He
advises, too, that since this rule is so hard, “every man should have
his days of abstinence according as his constitution will permit. These
are great reliefs to nature as they qualify her for struggling with
hunger and thirst and give her an opportunity of extricating herself
from her oppressions. Besides that, abstinence will oftentimes kill a
sickness in embryo and destroy the first seeds of an indisposition.”
He then quotes the temperateness of Socrates, which enabled him to
survive the great plague. He finds that many ancient sages and later
philosophers developed a regimen so unique that “one would think the
life of a philosopher and the life of a man were of two different
dates.”
Robert Burton[75] thinks old age inherently melancholy, for “being
cold and dry and of the same quality as melancholy it must needs come
in.” It is full of ache, sorrow, grief, and most other faults, and
these traits are most developed in old women and best illustrated by
witches. The children of old men are rarely of good temperament and
are especially liable to depression. He expatiates most fully upon the
tragedy of old men and young wives, and gives many long incidents of
jealousy and unfaithfulness of women who, although carefully guarded,
have made old husbands cuckold. This is often worse in dotards, who
become effeminate, cannot endure absence from their wives, etc. On
this theme he elaborates for many pages, with scores of incidents from
literature and history.
Jonathan Swift[76] describes the _Struldbruggs_ or immortals whom he
met in a far country. They were distinguished by being born with a
red circle over the left eye, which changed in color and grew in size
with age. These beings, he thought, must be a great blessing, and he
described to those who had first told him of them what he would do
were it his great good fortune to be born a Struldbrugg. First of all,
he would amass wealth so that in two hundred years he would be the
richest man in the realm. Next he would apply himself to learning,
which in the course of time would make him wisest of all men. Then he
would note all events and become a living treasury of knowledge and
the oracle of the nation. He would be able to warn rising generations
against all impending evils and thus prevent degeneration.
Having heard his ideals, he was told that in fact the state of these
immortals was very different; indeed, so pitiful was it that their
example mitigated the universal desire to live, so that death was no
longer the greatest evil but, on the contrary, undue prolongation of
life was a far greater one. The Struldbruggs acted like mortals till
about thirty, then grew melancholy until four-score, when they had “not
only the follies and infirmities of other old men but had many more
which arose from the dreadful prospects of never dying.” “They were
not only opinionative, peevish, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable
of friendship and dead to all natural affection, which never descended
below their grandchildren.” “Envy and impotent desires are their
prevailing passion, but the objects against which their envy seems
principally directed are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths
of the old. By reflecting on the former they find themselves cut off
from all possibility of pleasure, and whenever they see a funeral they
lament and repine that others are gone to a harbor of rest to which
they themselves can never hope to arrive.” “They have no remembrance of
anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle
age and even that is very imperfect, and for the truth or particulars
of any fact it is safer to depend on the common traditions than upon
their best recollections.” “The less miserable among them appear to be
those who turn to dotage and entirely lose their memories; they meet
with more pity and assistance because they lack many bad qualities
which abound in others.” If they marry one of their own kind, the
marriage is dissolved as soon as the younger comes to be four-score,
for they “should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife.”
“As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years they are
looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their
estates, only a small pittance being reserved for their support, and
the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period
they are held incapable of any employment of trust or privilege,
cannot purchase land or take leases; neither are they allowed to be
witnesses in any cause either civil or criminal.” “At ninety they lose
their teeth and hair, they have at that age no distinction of taste
but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite.”
In talking, they forget the common appellation of things and the
names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and
relatives. “For the same reason they can never amuse themselves with
reading because their memory will not serve to carry them from the
beginning of a sentence to the end. The language of the country, too,
is slowly undergoing a change so that the Struldbruggs of one age do
not understand those of another but live like foreigners in their own
country.” They are despised and hated by all sorts of people. When one
of them is born it is reckoned ominous and the birth is recorded very
particularly, but in general the record is lost after a thousand years.
“They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld, and the women were
more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme
old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness in proportion to their
number of years.”
Thus from what the author saw and heard, his keen appetite for
perpetuity of life was much abated and he realized that there was no
form of death to which he would not run with pleasure in order to
escape such a life. He concludes that it is fortunate that his desire
of taking specimens of these people to his own country was forbidden by
law, and reflects that their maintenance might prove a grievous public
charge, for since “avarice is the necessary consequent of old age,
these immortals would, in time, become proprietors of the whole nation
and engross the civil power, which a want of abilities to manage must
end in the ruin of the public.”
CHAPTER III
LITERATURE BY AND ON THE AGED
Harriet E. Paine--Amelia E. Barr--Mortimer Collins--Col. Nicholas
Smith--Byron C. Utecht--J. L. Smith--Sanford Bennett--G. E. D.
Diamond--Cardinal Gibbons--John Burroughs--Rollo Ogden--James
L. Ludlow--Brander Matthews--Ralph Waldo Emerson--Oliver
Wendell Holmes--Senator G. F. Hoar--William Dean Howells--H.
D. Sedgwick--Walt Mason--E. P. Powell--U. V. Wilson--D. G.
Brinton--N. S. Shaler--Anthony Trollope--Stephen Paget--Richard
le Gallienne--G. S. Street--C. W. Saleeby--Bernard Shaw--A few
typical poems and quotations.
As a psychologist I am convinced that the psychic states of old people
have great significance. Senescence, like adolescence, has its own
feelings, thoughts, and wills, as well as its own physiology, and
their regimen is important, as well as that of the body. Individual
differences here are probably greater than in youth. I wanted to
realize as fully as was practicable how it seems to be old. Accordingly
I looked over such literature, both poetry and prose, as I found within
reach, written by aging people describing their own stage of life, and
by selection, quotation, and résumé have sought, in this chapter, to
let each of them speak for him- or herself.
Some find a veritable charm in watching every phase of the sunset
of their own life and feel even in the prospect of death a certain
mental exaltation. More are sadly patient and accept some gospel of
reconciliation to fate. Some distinctly refuse to think on or even to
recognize the ebb of the tide. A few find consolation in beautifying
age with tropes and similes that divert or distract from the grim
realization of its advance. But perhaps the most striking fact is
that so many not only deliberately turn from the supports offered to
declining years by the Church but have more or less abandoned faith in
physicians, for age is a disease that their ministrations may mitigate
but can never cure. Men of science find least solace in religion, to
which women are much more prone to turn than men. In most, love is
more or less sublimated into philanthropy and very often into a new
and higher love of nature in all her aspects. All, with hardly an
exception, pay far more attention to health and body-keeping than ever
before and many evolve an almost fetishistic faith in the efficacy of
some item of food or regimen to which they ascribe peculiar virtue.
They want to prolong life and well-being to their utmost goal for, with
all the handicaps of age, life is still too sweet to leave voluntarily.
Many old people fortify themselves against the depressions and
remissions of old age by familiarizing their minds with quotations
from the Scriptures, hymnology, poetry, and general literature. We
have a good illustration of this in Margaret E. White’s volume.[77] It
consists mainly of selections, determined of course by the author’s
point of view--that of a liberal religionist--which has given her,
and is well calculated to give others with her point of view, mental
satisfaction. She wants to have “prisms in her window” to fill the room
with rainbows. As the shadows lengthen she believes the climacteric
should supervene without any break at all with the prime of life,
although there are really two curves that run a very different course,
one of physical strength and another of experience. When one stands on
the summit of his years, he is buoyed up by great plans for life; but
when he retires, there is nothing ahead save death and this involves
a great and often critical change. The successful life is one that
solves the problems that meet it here without patheticism and without
self-delusion.
The author’s anthology of quotations and her own reflections are not
a cry in the dark but, on the whole, strike a note of courage and her
book is of psychological value because it gives us a good idea of how
many authors have thought and felt. Most want to be quiet and at home.
They console themselves with intimations of a lofty and spiritual, if
remote, idealism. Perhaps of all the young people we knew not one will
accompany the late survivors. Old age is a benefaction because service
to it ennobles all who render it. When wrinkles come in the mind, one
sings, the old is ever old; another, it is ever young. One conceives
it as the portal to a higher life, while for another it is solely
reversionary.
Harriet E. Paine,[78] a retired maiden teacher, had grown deaf and her
sight was dim at sixty, when this book was written. Her attitude is one
of the very best illustrations of the consolations that are open to
those in whom old age is like a summer night, who can maintain their
optimism when the senses cut us off from the external world and we
have to “economize the falling river” and take in sail. The author has
much to say of old people with defective senses and thinks deafness
particularly irritating both to the individual and to those about,
especially if, as in her case, there is also weakness and diffidence.
These impel one to take refuge in the “Great Comrade.” Like so many
others, she finds great satisfaction in the familiar cases of great
things done by old people and thinks that “the higher powers of the
mind go on ripening to the last,” instancing the remarkable fight made
for life by Pope Leo XIII when he was ninety-four, the chief items in
whose enlightened policy were inaugurated after he was seventy. Samuel
Whittemore, at eighty, killed three British soldiers on April 19, 1775,
and then was himself shot, bayoneted, and beaten seemingly to death but
had vitality enough to live on to the age of ninety-eight. Sophocles
wrote his _Œdipus_ at ninety; Mrs. Gilbert acted till over seventy;
Mrs. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and others furnish examples that
hearten her, etc. When the hair grows white it is possible, especially
for women, to do many things impossible before.
Being herself in straitened circumstances, she is interested in, for
example, the provisions of the New Zealand Parliament in 1898 granting
a pension of eighteen pounds per annum to all people over sixty-five
of good moral character who had resided in the country twenty-five
years and whose income did not exceed thirty-four pounds; and also in
Edward Everett Hale’s plea for a limited old-age pension bill, whereby
a man paying a poll tax for twenty-five years and not convicted of
crime should be given a pension of two dollars a week, the state to
set aside a part of the poll tax for this purpose. He claimed that the
savings to poorhouses would offset the expenditure. But still this
author realizes that the old can be happy in comparative poverty if
they strive to make their corner of the world brighter. At no time of
life are the advantages of culture and experience more precious. She
thinks the relations between old and young, so hard to adjust, need
special attention. The two can live together only by sacrifices on both
sides and this can never be successful unless each is able to take the
other’s point of view. She rather surprisingly concedes that with true
insight the young have more sympathy with the old than the latter, by
memory, can have with the young, perhaps because bodily vigor increases
love. She would mitigate the stage of criticizing mothers, through
which she thinks all girls tend to pass, for old age gives a wisdom
that is far harder to acquire and more precious than knowledge.
The very old are very different from the old; for example, an old lady
of eighty-nine called on one of ninety-eight and felt rejuvenated.
Very few do, when they are old, what they have planned for their old
age. The weapon against loneliness is work. “When the world is cold to
you, go build fires to warm up.” We strive to renew the emotions but
find it very hard to do so and feel burned to the socket. In answering
the question how far we should let the dead past bury its dead, she
deplores the fact that young persons, especially young women, often
give to their elders, particularly mothers or fathers, a devotion
that involves a complete sacrifice of their own lives and thinks that
to accept this is the acme of selfishness in the old. Old age is
especially hard, she thinks, for those who have enjoyed the senses most.
Amelia E. Barr[79] says that on March 29, 1911, she awoke early to see
her eightieth birthday come in. “I wish to master in these years the
fine art of dying well, which is quite as great a lesson as the fine
art of living well, about which everyone is so busy.” A good old age
is a neighbor to a blessed eternity. An English physician said, “If
you wish to have a vigorous old age, go into the darkness and silence
ten hours out of every twenty-four, for in darkness we were formed.”
“Never allow anyone to impose their pleasures upon you; if you have
any rights, it is to choose the way you will spend your time.” “On the
margin gray, twixt night and day,” the author finds special comfort in
the lines
There is no death.
What seems so is transition.
This life or mortal breath is but the suburb of the life elysian
Whose portal we call death.
It is a sin, she says, to become so mentally active that we are unable
to keep quiet and go to sleep. The Greeks knew little of insomnia and
the English have been great sleepers and dreamers, holding perhaps with
Wordsworth that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” etc.
This author is an astrologist and tells us that nine insane rulers were
born when Mercury or the moon, or both, were affected by Mars, Saturn,
or Uranus, and five people of genius were ruled by the same planets and
became insane. She really mourns less for what age takes away than what
it leaves behind.
The tone of her work differs radically from that of Miss Paine. The
latter seeks and finds compensations so satisfactory to herself that
she ventures into print with them, apparently for the first time,
hoping that she may thereby help others to live out their old age
better; while the former indulges her literary instincts to produce
another book and is far more inspired by the muse of Death than that of
Life. The kismet motive, which is expressed in her recourse to astral
fatalism, manifests not a _pis aller_ resource first found when she
was old but one that had long been with her, and it is an interesting
recrudescence of the same psychological motivations that in the East
made fatalism and among Calvinists made the doctrine of divine decrees
and foreordination so attractive.
At the age of eighty-three she worked six hours a day instead of nine
as formerly, avoided routine, tried to give her mind new thoughts, and
thought this mental diet kept her strong. She took two cups of coffee
in the morning and more at night, persisted in lying abed ten hours
although she slept but seven, eschewed all preserved fruits, etc. She
had a constant sense of the Divine and her whole standpoint is very
different from that, for example, of Burroughs.
Mortimer Collins[80] looks back on a prolonged life with calm
philosophic poise and concludes that length of life is wholly dependent
upon ideas. The theory of Asgill that it is cowardly of man to die
appeals to him. Sylvester calculated the lives of nine mathemeticians
with an average age of 79, but Collins finds nine literary men
whose average age was 85, and so concludes that “imagination beats
calculation.” We are islands in an infinite sea; only the instant is
ours. The soul makes the body. He holds that in England there is no
mode of life healthy enough to secure longevity, either in the city or
country, while London is a slow poison. He wants a Utopia, but without
religion. He would have a journal kept in every locality noting length
or brevity of life, with the causes thereof, as a kind of _vade Mecum_
for the inhabitants. All should live in the open, with plenty of water
and hills, enough sleep and good food. Marriage should be congenial
and love a liberal education; in short, marriage should be completion.
Parents early spoil their children and later fear them. Politics should
be eschewed for it shows only the worst side of human nature. We should
have books telling us how to enjoy summers, the secret of which even
the English gentleman has not yet found. Literature, especially the
classics, helps to longevity, and in old age people should do that
which they most love, that is most natural and that gives greatest
freedom to the play instinct--not that which pays best. Gardening
takes us into partnership with God and he prescribes country walks
with the sun and the sea. The country gentleman should live an almost
Homeric life. The large number of octogenarians in Westmoreland, the
lake region of Wordsworth, which has often been noticed, is very
significant. The laziest man usually lives longest, but lazing is an
art.
The style of this author is in places almost lapidary, his views are
quaint and abrupt and the reader is impressed with the idea that he is
supremely satisfied with old age as he has found it. His radicalism
is good-natured and his love of paradox suggests an affectation of
originality that does not, however, much impair his fundamental
sincerity. He illustrates a type of precocious maturity that finds
pleasure in ideas not very well matured.
Colonel Nicholas Smith[81] is a homely philosopher of old age who has
brought together a vast body of items to hearten the old and to support
the thesis that all can greatly prolong their lives if they will. He
thinks that as years advance the average brain does more work, and
the body less. With remarkable industry he has gathered records of
scores and hundreds of old people living, or recently dead, who have
maintained their vigor and remained “invincible children,” who never
became wholly sophisticated but still dream, wonder, and believe. He
almost seems to agree with Emerson that a man is not worth very much
until he is sixty.
Most of his book consists of brief records of men who maintained their
activity to a great age. Many of these are familiar enough but we
sample a few. Mommsen, for example, frail and small, lost his library
by fire when he was sixty, a calamity that all thought would end his
career. But he did much of his best work later, toiling on his _History
of Rome_ nearly to his death in his eighty-sixth year. George Ives,
when his friends congratulated him on attaining his hundredth year, was
found at work in the field and said that even if he knew he were to
die the next day he should “carry on” as if he were immortal. Mrs. H.
W. Truex on her 96th birthday in 1904 finished a quilt of nine hundred
and seventy-five pieces and during the previous year had completed six
such. Sir Joseph Hooker, the botanist, worked almost up to his death
at 87, holding that rich natures develop slowly. Carlyle published the
last volume of his _Frederick the Great_ at the age of 69; Darwin, his
_Descent of Man_ at 62; Longfellow wrote his _Morituri Salutamus_ for
the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation; W. C. Bryant published
his translation of the _Odyssey_ at the age of 76; O. W. Holmes wrote
his “Guardian Angel” at 70 and “Antipathy” at 76, while the “Iron
Gate” was for a breakfast given in honor of his seventieth birthday;
George Bancroft at 82 published his _History of the Foundations of
the Constitution of the United States_; Frances Trollope, failing in
business at the age of nearly 50 and a stranger in this country, turned
to a literary career, and between the ages of 52 and 83 wrote upwards
of a hundred volumes, mostly novels of society; Humboldt, at the age of
74, began his _Cosmos_, the fourth and last volume of which was issued
the year before his death, in 1858, at the age of ninety; Cervantes
published the last part of his _Don Quixote_ at 78; Goethe wrote till
he was 80 and finished the second part of _Faust_ only shortly before
his death; Victor Hugo wrote his _Annals of a Terrible Year_ at 70, and
his _Ninety-Three_, which some regard as his best story, at the age of
72; Mary Sommerville kept up her scientific activities and at 92 said
she could still read books on the higher algebra four to five hours in
the forenoon; Weir Mitchell wrote his _Hugh Wynne_ at 66 and _Constance
Trescot_, a very remarkable psychological study of a woman, when he was
76. A deposed minister began the study of medicine at 72 and practiced
for several years, dying in the harness. A. J. Huntington was acting
professor of classics till he was 82. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney published
her twenty-seventh volume at the age of 80, etc.
There are two views of age. One is Hogarth’s picture--a shattered
bottle, cracked bell, unstrung bow, signpost of a tavern called the
“World’s End,” shipwreck, Phoebus’s horses dead in the clouds, the moon
in her last quarter, the world on fire. It only remained to add to this
the picture of a painter’s palette broken. This was his last work and
he died at 67. Over against this we might place E. E. Hale, who late in
life said his prospects cast no shadow and became very anxious to see
the curtain rise. When he was 80 he published his _Memoirs of a Hundred
Years_ and at 82 was chaplain of the United States Senate. Gladstone
locked every affair of state out of his bedroom and said that when we
sleep we must pay attention to it, for a workless is a worthless life.
This author agrees with J. H. Canfield, who protested that the old
should stay in the harness and not step out to give the young men a
chance, for they never had a better chance than to work with their
elders, as colts are best broken in with old horses. As we grow old we
see that nothing, after all, matters as much as we had thought. Smith
finds comfort in the fact that, according to the census of 1900, one in
every two hundred becomes an octogenarian and that out of a population
of 36,800,000 there were 176,571 reputed to be 80 years of age or over.
He finally gives us his own empirical observations about foods and
concludes that three-fourths of all the poor health in the country is
due to dietary errors or to “carrion and cathartics.” The old should
eat no meat, take no drink with meals, avoid starch, recognize the
error in the belief that they need stimulants, and should not try to be
fat but realize that progressive emaciation is normal. Appetite should
be our guide although we should eat only about half what we want. He,
too, praises laziness as a concomitant of longevity and recognizes
a vast difference in dietary needs. He would never use laxatives but
depends upon two glasses of water half an hour before breakfast and two
in the afternoon, and would never mix cooked vegetables nor fruit.
The popularity and wide sale of this book must have been extremely
gratifying to the author as not only showing wide and deep interest in
the subject but as also supplying, by copious data and illustrations,
the kind of encouragement the old often sorely need. The author makes
no pretenses of being scientific and accepts cases of reputed great age
with no critical scruples.
Byron C. Utecht[82] thinks the day is dawning when one hundred and
fifty years will be the usual span of life. He gives many statistics
to show that the average age is slowly increasing, particularly in
Switzerland, where in the sixteenth century it was 21.2 years whereas
in the nineteenth it was 39.7. He quotes Finkenberg of Bonn, who
concludes that “the average length of life in Europe in the sixteenth
century was 18 years and now it is 40,” the average in India being now
about 23.6 years as against 19, two hundred years ago. These figures,
it should be noted, however, are little more than conjectural.
Utecht, like Colonel Smith, has collected data about many people who
have reached the age of 100, some of whom he photographs. He believes
man not only lives longer but is more vital than formerly. He seems to
accept without proof that a Montana Indian lived to be 134; an Oregon
woman, 120; and a Mrs. Kilcrease of Texas, 136. He tells us of one
Arkansas woman who reached 112 years, keeping a large garden almost to
the end of her life, who at the above age walked six miles and back to
see her great-great-granddaughter married. She claimed her age was
due to clean, honest living, plenty of work, a desire to help, keeping
busy, and caring for others. A. Goodwin of Alabama (106) walks five
miles a day and works several hours in his garden. He eats what he
likes, reads without glasses, and is the head of one of the largest
families in the country, their reunions being attended by more than
eight hundred persons. He had been a hunter and still uses his rifle
and ascribes his longevity to interest in out-of-door sports as a young
man. He has been so busy he can hardly realize he is old, wants fifty
years more of life if possible and feels that he is going to have it.
He has been temperate, sleeps much and regularly, and has a horror
of worry. Mrs. Mary Harrison of Michigan celebrated her hundredth
anniversary and did not seem as tired as any of her two hundred guests.
She had been a humorist and would never look on the dark side of
things. An Ohio lady of 91 who has been devoted to a motorcycle cannot
bring herself to give up her joyrides, although she now has a young man
to guide the wheel. She has always lived in the country and worked hard
and ascribes her longevity chiefly to her rides.
Utecht has collected perhaps two-score more instances of people well
over ninety and concludes that all of them were, in their prime,
more or less athletic--at least none were weaklings. He thinks the
longest-lived people are average men and women who have a good hygienic
sense. None were intemperate, few were highly educated, and most were
inured to hardships and even drudgery in youth, so that the study of
all their lives practically tells the same story of simple life in the
free air, with enough but not too much work and with exemption, for the
most part, from worry.
It would be interesting to know if a more critical study of the actual
age of many of these and other quoted centenarians would substantiate
their claims. No such investigation, however, has ever been made into
the many cases reported by this and the preceding author.
I append a few special records that seem peculiarly challenging. The
first is that of James L. Smith,[83] a veteran of the Civil War.
Twenty years ago he weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, was warned
against excitement, and his friends and physician were horrified when
he proceeded to run his flesh off. It was a great effort for so heavy
a man but in six months he had reduced his weight to one hundred and
ninety and was running more than six miles a day, his daily work being
the directing of two hundred district messengers. Yielding to the
protests of his friends he ceased his exercise, because he was told
that he could not punish his heart and lungs thus and not suffer and
was liable to drop dead. Growing fleshy again, with increased shortness
of breath, he began to run again daily, reducing his weight once more
to a hundred and sixty and developing a physique and complexion like
that of a far younger man. At seventy he ran never less than five and
often ten miles a day, holding that senility is a disease of the mind
and that youth and its vigor can be maintained if one only believes in
himself. He has raced in many parts of the country and has a standing
offer to run any ten survivors of the Civil War in relays of one to a
mile, he himself running the whole ten. His offer used to be accepted;
it is so no longer. The day he was seventy he “covered a half mile
faster than a roller-skating champion,” and at seventy-three ran half a
mile in 2 minutes and 44 seconds. On a dirt road he has run ten miles
in 1 hour, 13 minutes, and 48 seconds, exactly the same time in which
he ran the same distance in the Grand Army marathon at Los Angeles six
years before, and says that he finished in fine condition.
Still more interesting, although perhaps not more authentic, is the
autobiographic record of Sanford Bennett.[84] At the age of fifty he
was broken in health and had to give up his position because of a
feeble heart and dyspeptic stomach. After trying various cures he, like
Smith, developed one of his own, consisting chiefly of very manifold
exercises taken, for the most part, in a recumbent position to lessen
the arterial strain upon his weak heart, and with little and finally no
apparatus. By persistent adherence to this regimen the circulatory and
digestive functions were slowly recuperated and his muscles underwent
remarkable development in bulk and power. Many photographs of himself,
with only a breech-waist, show him to have acquired a symmetry and
fulness of physical development of which any young athlete might well
be proud. Under self-massage wrinkles of face and neck disappeared, the
growth of the hair on his head was somewhat increased, and its grayness
was more or less modified. His spirits and the courage with which he
faced life and reëntered business showed a rejuvenation of mind and
feelings no less remarkable than that of the body. By more or less
systematic methods he strengthened his eyes; improved the condition
of his liver and kidneys; freshened the skin; greatly bettered the
varicosities (photographed) of the veins of his legs; and materially
improved the action of his heart, all the while recognizing the
influences of the unconscious mind upon his physical condition. He has
entirely overcome his tendency to adiposity, strengthened his voice,
increased the girth of his chest and his respiratory capacity, etc.
It is impossible to con this book and its untouched photographs
without the conviction, which has been strengthened by my own
correspondence with the author, that he has undergone a remarkable
physical transformation. We have already enough such instances to
suggest that senescence normally releases in healthy natures new
motivations for the conservation of health and that if these are given
their due expression and if all aging men and women came to realize
that as the decline of life sets in they must be, more and more, not
only their own hygienists but their own physicians, far more might
be accomplished in many if not most cases than the world at present
suspects.
This suggests the lesson that Charles Francis[85] has drawn from
his life, namely, that exercise is the chief cause of his vigor at
seventy. His life in connection with his vocation as a printer has been
extremely active and arduous and he ascribes his present condition to
athletics and his exceptional fondness for dancing. He insists that
next to this comes the avoidance of worry and thinks that every normal
old man develops a more or less full creed of hygienic Do’s and Don’ts.
Charles Cliff thinks the way to eighty is to work hard in youth and
then gradually take it easy.
Many modern writers, like Cicero’s Cato, ascribe great efficacy to the
accumulated examples of old men who have achieved exceptional success
late in life, not only in business, arts, and letters but in the
greatest art of all, that of conserving health and youth. We can easily
conceive of a new temple of fame to immortalize those who have mastered
the art of deferring senility and death.
Captain G. E. D. Diamond[86] claimed to be 103 and in his book tells us
how he lived--no sweets, meats, stimulants, tobacco, tea, or coffee;
had never married; found a panacea in olive oil taken internally and
with which he once or twice daily rubbed his body; found great virtue
in a cup of hot water at breakfast, grapefruit at luncheon, bread
buttered with olive oil; used milk, and fish. He discants at length
upon the kinds, purity, and mode of application of his panacea and is a
polemic vegetarian.
The late Cardinal Gibbons[87] thinks no one ever died of hard work and
says that he almost never had an idle moment. He forced himself to
lie in bed at least eight hours and did not worry if he did not fall
asleep. The foundations of health are laid in youth and he laid the
greatest stress upon plenty of regular exercise suitable to one’s age,
moderation in eating and drinking, plenty of sleep, an occupation, and
avoidance of worry.
John Burroughs[88] said, in 1919, that he was better than thirty years
before. Old age is no bugaboo but is a question of cutting out things,
as he did with tea, coffee, eggs, raw apples, pastry, new bread,
and alcohol, never having used tobacco. He was better by leaps and
bounds when he omitted eggs, a suggestion he derived from Professor
Chittenden. Malnutrition is the door through which most of our enemies
enter. He retired at nine, rose at six in the winter and with the sun
in summer, walked three hours in the forenoon, read from seven to nine
in the evening, was much out-of-doors, and thought he wrote more and
better in the last three than in any other three years of his life. And
yet he did not come of a long-lived ancestry.
Rollo Ogden[89] thinks that in the first call the old man meets to
take himself out of the way there is generally more pity than anger
but he is too proud to accept pity. Nobody is so impetuous as an old
man in a hurry. Vain longings for the sensations of youth make life
after forty often a dangerous age, as physicians know. He believes
there are many intellectual hazards and thinks it a delusion of the
old that the young are different from those they knew in their youth.
In judging the rising generation we oldsters must, at any rate, admit
that they did well in the war. The old must make a serious effort to
penetrate the secret of youth; they must put no end of questions to it
even though they are not able to find answers to them. There must be a
reorganization of life and a reorientation; and also, what is perhaps
often harder, a new subordination. The old are, on the whole, more
curious about the young than afraid of them.
Another suggestion arises from an autobiographic volume of a retired
clergyman, which is dedicated to his grandchildren.[90] The book is
unique in that it gives few details of his life but stresses certain
strong impressions derived from early boyhood, school days, his first
experience with death, gropings to solve the problems of life and of
the choice of a vocation, etc. He confines himself, for the most part,
to experiences that made the deepest and most lasting impression upon
him, the mysteries that have haunted his soul, self-criticisms, the
rest and other cures he has tried, friendships made, and the great
causes he has espoused. On laying aside his ministerial duties he
realized that we must not retire within ourselves but draw closer
to kindred humanity, and felt at liberty to enjoy literature, art,
nature, and travel, realizing that there were many powers that had
not been vented in his vocation. He found himself taking sober and
broader second thoughts of even religion, here discovering a new sense
of freedom, as he believes retired lawyers do in reflecting on the
differences between their own sense of absolute right and duty to their
clients. He was glad, he says, that he could “now break with some of my
past notions, go squarely back on some former, cocksure declarations,”
and he realized that “I did not know a lot of things I once thought I
knew.” There is a wonderful exhilaration in standing at the opening
of views from which one has been previously barred by constitutional
preoccupation and engagements. He realizes that “courtesy to the cloth
leads most men to treat ministers as they would treat women--the seamy
side of life is not shown them.” It is easy, as one grows old, to
retain abstract knowledge and the ripe fruits of philosophy, history,
and even science; and age, too, has its recreations.
Perhaps the chief suggestion of this book is that every intelligent
man, as he reaches the stage of senescence, should thus pass his
life in review and try to draw its lessons, not only for his own
greater mental poise and unity but for the benefit of his immediate
descendants, for whom such a record must be invaluable. Thus the
writing of an autobiography will sometime become a fit hygienic
prescription for a rounded-out old age.
Brander Matthews[91] says that when a man is in sight of Pier No. 70,
as Mark Twain called it, he should take down sail and examine his
log-book. He must not feel that young people are wanting to brush him
aside but should realize that he can help them. He gives a very full
account of his own experiences as a magazine writer and deplores the
fact that many of our twentieth-century editors are newspaper men,
whereas formerly they were literary men. The most serious lesson he
draws from his own experience is that young writers should take only
subjects in which they are profoundly interested and “not take down
the shutters before they have anything to put in the shop windows.” He
rejoices that he has never accepted a dictated subject but has always
labored in fields attractive to him and so, in short, followed an inner
calling.
Ralph Waldo Emerson[92] says the dim senses, memory, voice, etc., are
only masks that old age wears. There are young heads on old shoulders
and young hearts. The essence of age is intellect. “He that can
discriminate is the father of his father” and Merlin as a baby found in
a basket by the riverside talks wisely of all things. Is it because we
find ourselves reflected in the eyes of young people that we feel old?
“The surest poison is time.” Age is comely in coach, chairs of state,
courts, and historical societies, but not on Broadway. We do not count
a man’s years until he has nothing else to count. One says a man is
not worth anything until he is sixty. “In all governments the councils
of power were held by the old--patricians or patres; senate or senes;
seigneurs or seniors; the gerousia, the state of Sparta, the presbytery
of the church, and the like, are all represented by old men.” Almost
all good workers live long. The blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at 84,
storming Constantinople at 94, and afterward recalled again victorious,
was elected at the age of 96 to the throne of the empire, which he
declined, and died Doge at 97. Newton made important discoveries for
every one of his 85 years. Washington, the perfect citizen; Wellington,
the perfect soldier; Goethe, the all-knowing poet; Humboldt, the
encyclopedia of science--all were old.
“All men carry seeds of all distempers through life latent and die
without developing them.” But if we are enfeebled by any cause some
of these sleeping seeds start and open. At fifty we lose headache and
with every year liability to certain forms of disease declines. Now
one success more or less signifies nothing because reputation is made.
Success signifies much to a client but nothing to the old lawyer.
Again, another felicity of old age is that it has found expression.
Things that seethe in us have been born, so that the throes and
tempests subside. “One by one, day by day, he learns to cast his wishes
into facts.” We set our house in order, classify, finish what is begun,
close up gaps, make our wills, clear our titles, and reconcile enemies.
Thus there is a proportion between the designs of man and the length
of his life. In February, 1825, Emerson called on John Adams, who was
nearly 90, just as his son had been elected President at the age of 58,
nearly the same as that of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.
Oliver Wendell Holmes[93] discourses in his clever, self-conscious,
and desultory way upon old age, concerning which he says many smart,
studied, and even quotable things that add, however, no new standpoint
or idea. He personifies old age, for example, as first calling on the
professor and leaving his card, that is, a mark between the eyebrows;
calling again more urgently; and at last, when he is not let in,
breaking in at the front door. He seems to feel that death is a sort
of disgrace and ignominy and compares the child shedding his milk
teeth with the old man shedding his permanent ones. He would divide
life into fifteen stages, each of which has its youth and old age.
As we enter each stage we do so with the same ingenuous simplicity.
Nature gets us out of youth into manhood as old sea captains used to
shanghai sailors. Habits mark old age but we should begin new things
and even take up new studies. He gives an imaginary newspaper report of
the address of Cato on Old Age, and several times lapses into poetry.
He feels that he has less time for anything he wants to do, realizes
neglected and postponed privileges, tells of the great charm he feels
in rowing on the Charles, and gives us all the data for estimating that
he is very proficient in the exercise. He praises walking but says
saddle leather is preferable, though more costly. He is very grateful
that he does not need eyeglasses.
In _Over the Teacups_ he says that at sixty we come within the range
of the rifle pits and describes the nine survivors of his class, which
graduated fifty-nine members. But here he is most impressed with the
amazing progress he has seen--the friction match, the railroad, ocean
steamer, photography, spectroscope, telegraph, telephone, phonograph,
anesthesia, electric illumination, bicycle, etc., telling us that all
his boyish shooting was done with a flintlock and all his voyaging on
a sailing packet. He has a tingling sense of progress that amounts to
a kind of pity for his own youth; and although he cannot conceive how
it is possible, he has a faint hope that progress may go on at the
same rate. The thing to be avoided is automatism, which is habit gone
to seed. We must be sure and take in sail betimes. In deciding between
duties and the desire to rest, many have actually welcomed the decay of
powers in order that they might rest. He bitterly condemns conservative
religious dogmas, which have done so much to disorganize our thinking
powers, and recognizes the happy tendency to soften and then throw off
creeds as one grows old as if in order to return to the source of life
as ignorant and helpless as we came from it. He ends with a meager
array of facts to indicate that poets are not short-lived and that
although their powers may wane, some of the best poems have come from
people of advanced age.
The late Senator G. F. Hoar[94] thinks young people contemplate old
age and death from a distance, as Milton’s “Hymn on Morning” was
written at midnight. “I would indite something concerning the solar
system--Betty, bring the candles.” Old age is a matter of temperament
and not of years. In some, old age is congenital. Lowell says, “From
the womb he emerged gravely, a little old man.” John Quincy Adams
fought the House of Representatives at 83; Josiah Quincy attacked the
“Know-Nothings” at 85--said the bats were leading the eagles. He broke
his hip at 92 and when Dr. Ellis called, he was so charmed that he
forgot to ask him how he was and went back to do so. Quincy said, “Damn
the leg.” Gladstone, aged 83, faced a hostile government, House of
Lords, press, aristocracy, university, and perhaps a hostile queen, and
said, “I represent the youth and hope of England. The solution of these
questions of the future belongs aright to us who are of the future and
not to you who are of the past.” There are certain functions especially
assigned to age, for example, the magistrate passes upon things after
the controversy is over. Senators by law must be at least thirty but
the average age of them is nearly sixty. Methuselah’s days must have
been stupid. Age should cultivate unripe fruit. The greatest penalty
of growing old is losing the friends of youth, dying in the death of
others. But a large capacity for friendship atones. General Sherman’s
friendship was like being admitted to an order of nobility or knighted.
His circle of friends grew throughout the country although no one was
more choice in his selection or more outspoken in his opinions. Of
old, age was marked by splendor in dress and punctilious stateliness in
manner, and art often thus represents it.
Each generation, as it passes, gets from its successor much more
criticism than sympathy; the heir is not on good terms with the king.
“Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” No English monarch ever
built a tomb for his predecessor. We should thank God that Abraham,
Isaac, and David are well dead.
It is young men who deal most courageously with the doctrine of
immortality; old men have made no contribution to it. They are silent
or do not wish to be suspected of cant or hypocrisy, or perhaps fear
striking their heads against a stone wall. If there is no immortality
it is the great souls who will be most disappointed and the world
will be “only the receptacle of a compost heap of the carcasses of an
extinct humanity.” A cruel Highland chief shut his rebellious nephew in
a dungeon, fed him on salt meat, then let down a cup which on opening
contained no water, and left him to die of thirst. The Divine treats
us this way if there is no future. Old men develop individuality.
They reason less and less about the future and trust reason less. But
“beside the silent sea I wait the muffled oar,” assured that “no harm
from Him can come to me on ocean or on shore.”
W. D. Howells[95] said at eighty that he was less afraid of dying than
when he was young. Virtues may become faults, for example, thrift may
make a miser, his love of gold being more tangible than of greenbacks.
It is, indeed, a shame to die rich. We are often young in spots, for
example, on a spring morning. Slight acclivities seem to grow up into
hills. After too long sitting, for example, in the theater, we realize
that we have over-rested. The golden age, he thinks, is between fifty
and sixty. Those who have made themselves wanted are still so. Our
utmost effort is less. We are not dull, as the young think us because
we seem so to them. A reader has exhausted most of the best literature
and yet of rereading old books and reading new ones we never tire and
have our favorite passages. We should interest ourselves in public
questions. It hurts to be always told how young we look. We forget
names we were most familiar with and recall them by their uses or
perhaps by their foreign equivalents. He thinks old women, however,
do not forget words. Tolstoi said that memory is hell and a future
state that recalls all would be a bore. Titian outlived 99 and painted
to the end. His masterpiece, the bronze doors of the sacristy at St.
Mark’s, was done when he was 85. When tired he withdrew to a dark,
warm place. John Bigelow in the nineties gave a charming lecture on
Dumas. Versus the solitude of old age, the young do often seem dull.
We do not help other old men enough. Woman’s sympathy goes far to
bridge this interval. Some grieve that they cannot help with their own
self-support. Howells says he is a great dreamer and forgets where he
puts things, for example, his spectacles.
H. D. Sedgwick[96] thinks Harvard seniors more disposed to answer
questions than to ask them. Youth may be worth living, but is old
age so? Young men know nothing of youth; they cannot realize it
objectively, for they despise it and want to hurry on. The “kid”
would be a Freshman. He feels at first just outside the door of
something delectable. The boy does not enjoy himself so much as the
old man looking on “for such is the kingdom of Heaven.” The young
are individualists absorbed in self. They form cliques excluding hoi
polloi. They over-praise their own college, but their ego is always
the center. It is really the spectator in the theater that gets the
most out of it. Youth is exclusive in its foolish divisions. The old
do not dwell on differences but common qualities. The old man finds
no solace in isolation but in community. He loves humanity; seeks a
refuge for self; passes lightly over differences of speech, clothes,
and customs. Perhaps this is due to the slow approach of night, which
makes all draw together for the warmth of friendship. The old man
snuggles to the breast of humanity and is less prone to lose himself
in random interests. If he cannot get about in space, he turns to the
essential truth of the universe. The gods do not know the words “great”
or “small.” The old see wonders in the iris. Youth seeks the top of
the mountains because it cannot see the wonders in what is common and
what is right about. The old are more religious and less subject to
emotional crises. They do not see God in the fire or smoke but can see
Him in the commonplace, and find beauty in cloud, flower, and tree;
while youth is too busy with its own emotions and their tyranny. The
records of earth tell of bestial cruelty. The globe is cooling and
youth resists it like Prometheus. To youth the energy of the world
is inexplicable. All is the product of brute force. Out of the dust
came the eye and the brain and the mind, and all the turmoil is like
labor-pangs to produce love, beauty, and happiness. Everything is
full of aspiration. Out of the universe will come God, who is slowly
evolving from the material without. If the matter of life has produced
the passions of humanity, it is charged with potential divinity.
Walt Mason[97] says that until his system falls apart he will stay on
deck, with his coat-tails in the air, refusing to be relieved, even
though he may require overhauling every few days. When he was young he
was careless in dress, but as he grew older he became very fastidious
and was inclined to turn a new leaf in dress every day and give the
best imitation possible of a young man. But we who were born during the
Van Buren period cannot look like little Lord Fauntleroys. He studied
old men and found that one did not believe in adding machines while
most hated innovations in general. An old man who criticises anything
present is always very unpopular and when he praises it, the attitude
of everyone changes toward him. The young hate ancient history and want
to lay it away in moth-balls. Eternal vigilance is the price of eternal
youth.
Edison at the age of seventy-two said he worked eighteen hours a day
and that it was hard for him to take a week-end off. When Colonel Death
comes around the corner and says “Time’s up,” Mason says he wants him
to find him in a hand-to-hand conflict with his trusty lyre. Every town
has a coterie of “old boys” who are against everything; they write
letters to the press, etc. Now, idleness is the worst thing for an
old man and for his disposition. If he retires at 50 kindly, he will
grow impossible by 70. The old are always blaming and brooding over
the final showdown. It is always possible that the next cold or bit of
rheumatism may break down the carburetor, but why worry?
E. P. Powell,[98] a Florida clergyman, cannot conceive old age for
young Sidis and others like him. Charity should not help people to get
rid of work but conceive a haven of rest. A workman damns epitaphs
readable a few years hence. Humanity must not be loaded with a mass
of pensions. Old age must not be a luxury. Good sleep should renew
the world. Rev. Tinker improved sweet corn, Rev. Goodrich, potatoes.
Worry is one road to the cemetery and idleness is another. The
working problem is more important than that of diet. The author writes
his sermons lying on the floor and spinning a top. A Florida June
morning, he says, is far better than a month in Paradise. He does not
care for heaven because he is more interested in the divine earth.
The family should include four generations. We should all strive for
perpetual youth. “Few children but better,” should be our motto.
Premature old age is reprehensible. The world is full of half dead
men. We shall never abolish death. Present society is death-hastening
and life-wasting. Fisher would prolong by (1) eugenics, (2) personal
hygiene, (3) public, (4) what might be called domestic hygiene.
U. V. Wilson[99] says that the seasons or nature were never so
pleasant. He has the leisure that he toiled for all his life. Every
year seems shorter (being now only one-seventy-third of all) so that
he feels he is approaching the infinite point of view. Religionists
tell us that it is hard for the Lord to save an old man but now that
the days and years shrink we approach eternity. Seventy-three is
the age of his physical being but he is really centuries older. His
circle of friends is narrow but closer. He had a fad for hunting and
fishing and photography and his sense of youth remains forever. He
dreads decrepitude and helplessness and hates to see his body tumble
down, like a man in a dungeon seeing the world only through a very
small window. Second childhood suggests that if the eye fails, there
are glorious things beyond it can see; that if the ear fails, there
are inner harmonies. He feels like a youth shut up in an old body.
Infirmities are forerunners of immortal health. So he does not fear
death because it only removes barriers between him and the fullness of
life.
D. G. Brinton[100] says “that old age is synonymous with wisdom is a
comical deception which the graybeards have palmed off on the world
because by law and custom they hold most of the property and want most
of the power as well.” “As we grow old, we cease to obey our finer
instincts” (Thoreau). “The experience of youth serves but to lead old
age astray, and this is nowhere so plain as when an old man pretends a
zest for the pleasures of the young. No fool like an old fool.” “Every
age has pleasures sufficient which are appropriate to it, and these
alone should be sought after.” If youth respects the laws of nature,
old age is very tolerable. It brings many compensations for losses,
and although not likely to be so happy as the best of middle life, it
should be and often is superior in this respect to youth. “Probably
it would generally be so were we more willing to learn the lessons
appropriate to it.”
One writer says no man can be happy till he is past sixty, and another,
“He who teaches the old is like one who writes on blotted paper.” A
long life is the desire of all, and old age, which all abhor, is the
hope of all. “It alone justifies a man to himself and before others.”
“The sage is he whose life is a consistent whole and who carries out
in his age the plans which he made in youth.” “The Jews of Frankfurt
average ten years more of life than the non-Jewish citizens because
they avoid unsanitary avocations and observe wiser rules of diet.”
At seventy-five exposure to cold is thirty-two times more dangerous
than it is at thirty years of age. “The sorrows of age are usually
the returns of the investments of youth, these proving of that sort
which levy assessments instead of paying dividends. A short life and
a merry one is the maxim of many a youngster. The hidden falsehood
at the core of this philosophy is the belief that happiness belongs
to youth alone.” “The admiration of the early periods of life is one
of a common class of illusions.” “He who would work securely for his
own welfare will not be led astray by the belief that any one period
of life contains solely or in any large measure the enjoyments of life
as a whole. He will, therefore, not eat to-day the bread of to-morrow.
He will guard the fires of youth that he may not in age have to sit
by the cold ashes of exhausted pleasures.” The price of so doing is
premature senility, loss of zest in life due to the early exhaustion
of irrational enjoyments. “The only malady which all covet is the only
one which is absolutely fatal, old age.” No passion is so weak but that
a little pressed, it will master the fear of death. “He who is haunted
by the dread of dying makes himself miserable for fear he cannot make
himself miserable longer.”
Few modern writers have written more sagely on old age than N. S.
Shaler, late professor of geology at Harvard.[101] He attaches great
importance to the interval between the end of the reproductive period
and death, which in lower creatures is very brief if it exists at all.
In domesticated animals there is hardly any normal old age and they
do not seem to know a climacteric. There is a great variation among
different races in this period of senescence, which is so peculiar to
man. This interval is very brief among savages. But with the beginning
of speech all the relations of the individual to his group change. If
old animals live on, they do so to themselves and not for the benefit
of their kind. But in man the old individual becomes a storehouse of
acquired or traditional knowledge, and wisdom has, for the first time,
a distinct value in organic association. It was in this way that the
reproductive period was shortened, or perhaps we had better say that
life was prolonged beyond it. In civilized society the old are still
members of the species, not aliens or enemies. When a people begins to
have a literature or a religion and a large body of mores as social
inheritance develops, the value of old age increases.
The old have to maintain a more dignified demeanor. They are readapted
and can go on with life as before, especially as they now have eyes and
teeth preserved. The best attitude toward the old is one that assures
a broader view of life and better sense of values and marks the modern
passage from the earlier division of men into ranks and occupations,
in which women, youth, and old men were once separated from the active
and militant class. Thus the position of the aged is now bettered by
keeping in close relation with their fellows.
The growth of wealth has helped democratic individualization and thus
helped old age. “The presence of three or four generations in the
social edifice gives to it far more value than is afforded by one or
two.” They “unite the life of the community and bridge the gap between
successive generations.” “As the body of the tradition which makes the
spirit of a people becomes the greater, it is the more difficult to
effect the transmission of it from stage to stage in the succession.”
Despite the volume of printed matter, including history, there is a
spirit of society that cannot be preserved in books. Who can doubt that
if veterans of our Civil War had been more numerous and influential,
we should have plunged into the late war with Spain. There would have
been more men who really remembered what war meant and its lessons, for
the new generation lacked the true sense of what conflict was and went
about it light-heartedly. So the need of strict military discipline
generally has to be relearned with each war. The same is true of
hygienic policies in the army. There are, thus, many political, social,
and even business follies that would have been avoided had the wisdom
and experience that only old age can bring been more dominant. Thus
we could make our historic records not only more effective and more
complete in regard to its matter but also more perfect as regards the
lessons it conveys. History is often written by men who are separated
from the times they chronicle and the best way to bridge the gulf is to
keep in touch as long as possible with the generation that was making
history.
But the endeavor to retain the aged is not merely an effort to preserve
the lives of the old but part of the problem of avoiding premature
death for everyone. Thus since man came there seems to be a sudden loss
of longevity if we measure it solely in terms of the period of growth.
If this really has occurred, it may be that the term is less fixed than
we should expect it to be if the institution were of more recent date.
Anthony Trollope[102] tells us of a small republic, Britannula,
situated somewhere in the South Pacific and which had freed itself from
England, that had been induced by its leader, Mr. Neverbend, who was
deeply impressed with the sufferings and dangers of old age, to pass a
law that at a fixed period, which after much discussion was fixed at
67½ years of age, everyone in the colony should be taken with great
honor to a college beautifully situated five miles from the capital
city and there spend a final year, at the end of which he was to suffer
euthanasia at the hand of the chief by being placed under an opiate and
bled to death. Details are given of the many discussions that led up
to this legislation, with the justifications for it and descriptions
of the college. When the law was passed, there was no one in the
community of great age. Deposition or relegation to the college was
to be a matter of much pomp and dignity, with bells, banquets, and
processions, and life within the walls was to be made attractive by
every means.
The first to reach the required age, Crasweller, ten years the senior
of the founder, was a man of immense vitality and wealth, the most
efficient proprietor of a very large estate, and when the day of his
deposition drew near he dismayed the founder by insisting that he was
a year younger, although all knew his age, which was to be tatooed
upon the skin of everyone. Meanwhile, an interesting love episode is
described between his daughter and the son of the founder. There was
much bitterness and recrimination and it is realized that it will never
do to compel the withdrawal by force of the first victim, who was to
set a high example to all others; and so finally the year falsely
claimed is allowed to pass and then Crasweller is taken in state to
the college itself, which another citizen was growing weary of tending
because it was untenanted. There were many criticisms of its new and
unfinished state and of the proximity of the cremation furnaces, which
were said even to smell of the bodies of the animals that had been
consumed in them.
Meanwhile, as the others were drawing near to their term, support of
the plan passed over into covert and then overt opposition, and just
as the first victim with his escort entered, an English man-of-war
appeared--in response, it afterwards became known, to a petition of
the citizens to stop such a proceeding, which thus cost the colony its
independence. Thus Crasweller was freed and Neverbend, the founder,
retired to England, where his musings at last convinced him that the
world was not yet quite ready for his great reform. It might work
if and when men were philosophers but it would doubtless have to
be postponed at least during the lives of his grandchildren, and
perhaps indefinitely. Thus the women, who had always opposed it, and
the populace, who welcomed it when they were young but condemned it
as they grew old, had their will and its realization is yet to come.
The reasons that led to the scheme were that the misery, uselessness,
troublesomeness, and often obstructiveness of old age still remain and
are ever increasing in force, so that something like this must surely
sometime be.
Stephen Paget[103] gives us an excellent description of what he thinks
a typical state of mind of old age, but which I deem an excellent
illustration of senile degeneracy. The old man, he says, wonders at
his own existence, is bewildered at the feel of the pen in his hand,
at the taste of his food; that he is alive when so many millions are
dead or unborn; at a funeral is fascinated by someone’s whisper or the
contour of a face or some other irrelevancy; is smitten with momentary
surprise that he is or that it is it; finds an apocalypse on looking
in the glass; is oppressed by a sense of mystery that is very far from
philosophic contemplation; and realizes that when others observe him
thus, they reflect that there is no speculation--“No speculation in
those eyes that thou dost glare with”; finds himself growing out “of
the world, of life, of time”; feels it not unreasonable to consider
the one, the all, the infinite, if his mind drifts that way. His mind
wanders while he wonders whether heaven lies about him in his second
infancy. Perhaps it all brings the kind of smile we call wistful. He
may go crazy over a human eyebrow or a breath of air; common things
seem novel; the dull things fascinate. One enjoys a vagabond ease
on the street; is irked at fine manners; is fond of news. The old
problems of politics and religion lose their charm and in place of
pure art we turn to that of the street. He says we old are thus a
sentimental lot and for the sake of economy live on our emotions, which
cost nothing. This point of view he deems more or less philosophic, etc.
This state of mind the psychologist would call dissociative, if not
dissolutive. It is the dementia præcox of old age and can mean nothing
but disintegration and befuddlement. True, childhood is often lost in
wonder at items of experience that later are synthesized into wholes
and become commonplaces. But this goes with a keen rapport with the
environment, which the senses are developing, while this author’s
musings reveal a falsetto last look before we are melted or diffused
into the cosmos. Such reveries are letting go, not taking hold of life.
They are the decadence of the philosophic spirit and belie the normal
tendency of old age, which is to knit up experiences into synthetic
wholes, to draw the moral of life, and to give integrity to the soul.
Thus Mr. Paget seems to be the victim of a kind of senile Narcissism,
revering its chief traits in his symptoms, yielding himself with a
kind of masochistic pleasure to any chance impressions that present
themselves. He has ceased to strive and to will, and there is no
justification of his point of view, that his state is akin to that of
certain transcendentalists who have fallen into deep puzzlements over
what Bronson Alcott called “the whichness of the what.”
Old age is neither helped nor understood by the cheap and chipper
paradoxes about it of those who tell the old that they are not so save
in years and that these do not count, or who affect to marvel at the
passion to look and seem young. One writer[104] even tells us that
the old are beautiful and thinks it is a perverse precept of social
condition to think of chronological age at all. “We should say eighty
years young;” “properly speaking there is no old age,” etc. All this
is really the state of mind of a mental healer who does not wish
old age, disease, or death, and so denies their existence and turns
his back upon reality. It is the state of mind mythically ascribed
to an ostrich, although the best observers deny that it ever buries
its head in the sand from fear of danger. Such cajolery of the old
is like baby-talk to children, which only infantilism or advanced
second childhood relishes. It suggests infirmary wards and is itself
a product of the type of psychic invalidism and valetudinarianism
that is interesting to the psychologist because the appetite for it
suggests the dreamy state of mind in which delusions become factual if
they embody our desires. The old should be beyond attitudinizing or
affecting a youth that is gone, for this is to live a lie, which is
dangerous not only to their serenity, for old age should be the age of
truth, but to health and even life.
G. S. Street[105] refutes the statement that of late, especially since
the war, there is a great and growing gap between the young and the
old, who speak a different language mutually unintelligible; that the
old can no longer understand the young; etc. This has found frequent
expression in recent literature. The rising generation is said to have
its own interests, ideas, and even language, to have broken away from
the old, and even to have developed a new poetry and art. A generation
ago there was such a gap. The grown-ups were Olympians and there was
little attempt of either young or old to understand each other. There
was little friendship between dons and students but we have now a
popular cult not only of childhood but of adolescence. It is said that
psychoanalysis is becoming a cult of the young generation but Freud
himself was not born yesterday. A very few soldiers have complained
bitterly of the selfishness and stupidity of their elders who sent them
into the trenches, safely staying at home themselves. There are, of
course, aging politicians and diplomats who are little in touch with
the future as represented by the sentiments and aspirations of the
young.
But, on the whole, the war has brought old and young nearer together.
The old have given up their foolish airs of superiority and the young
have been matured by their experience. To be sure, these oldsters often
criticise the young generation, that it is aggressive and free of
speech or conduct; and there are young people who, under the illusion
of new ideas, are aggressive. But such a gulf as has existed between
the old and the young has always been mainly the fault of the old, and
the qualities of the young give them less excuse for this attitude than
they ever had before. Perhaps the world is a little too much in the
hands of people who are a little too old, but this is being rapidly
remedied.
C. W. Saleeby, M.D.,[106] says that young children never worry and
youth does so almost entirely for the future, while the worries of old
age are chiefly retrospective and may take the form of regrets. If
young people feel these, it is only for a brief space, for they are
resilient and soon react. In middle life the struggle for existence is
keener and the “might-have-beens” cannot always be dismissed, although
those in good health can usually soon surmount them. But this is more
difficult in old age unless, indeed, it is “a lusty winter, frosty but
kindly.” Wordsworth describes old age as it should be in this respect
in “The Happy Warrior”:
Who not content that former worth stand fast
Looks forward persevering to the last,
From well to better daily self-surpassed.
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
Forever and to noble deeds give birth
Or he must fail, to sleep without his fame
And leave a dead, unprofitable name--
Finds comfort in himself and in his cause
And while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath of confidence in heaven’s applause.
This is the Happy Warrior, this is he
That every man in arms should wish to be
* * * * *
A being breathing thoughtful breath
A traveler between life and death,
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, forethought, strength, and skill.
There is a vast difference between old age as commonly seen and as
it should be. The average type of humanity is undergoing a change.
Civilization means city-fication and this involves a state of mind
very different from that of the rustic. Worry has become the disease
of the age as it was not formerly when man’s vegetative nature was
stronger. It is a _maladie des beaux esprits_. We are no longer content
to eat, sleep, and sit in the sun. The old always and greatly need
grandchildren and it was never so hard to provide occupation for them,
for their temptation now is to become self-centered, which is perhaps
most common in women. It takes a different form in men superannuated by
some automatic rule. Pitiful is the state of those who withdraw from
occupations that have required and developed great mental activity.
The young, on the other hand, are less tolerant than formerly of the
foibles and frailties of age. We live at such a high speed that it
seems slow, if not stupid, and lack of sympathy adds to its burdens.
The very idea of the family is declining and there is little left of
the old sentiment for the patriarch, so that “the faster we move, the
wider must become the gap between the young and those who, like the
aged, have ceased to move.” Indeed, old age “is probably less tolerated
and less tolerable to-day than ever in the past,” for the old were
never so out of it. It might be expected, as death draws near, that
religious anxieties would increase, but the contrary is true. Youth
was never so unable to apply the principle _Tout comprendre c’est tout
pardonner_ or to make allowances. So it is the young who worry most
about religious matters. “Absence of occupation is not rest. The mind
that’s vacant is a mind distrest.”
If the man who has lived solely for sport is ill prepared to meet old
age, he who has lived solely for business is still less so. He has
had no time to cultivate his more human tastes but has developed his
potentialities in only one direction and when superannuation comes
his soul is bankrupt. He generally now has money as well as time to
spend and so devotes himself to increasing his material comforts in
a way that beckons death, because high living is no substitute for
high thinking. He should discover the least atrophied of his powers
and devote himself to their eleventh-hour development. The man of the
modern nervous type should lay up treasure that age cannot corrupt.
Herbert Spencer said the purpose of education was to prepare for
complete living.
One of the most beautiful and normal attributes of old age is interest
in the young, without which age is lonely and life becomes, as the
preacher said, “vanity of vanities.” “If old people are confined to
the company of other old people, they hasten each other’s downward
course.” There was “even a certain psychological truth symbolized in
the old idea that the company of a young girl was the best means for
the rejuvenescence of an old man.” “Never was the tendency to abandon
old age to its own devices so strong as it is to-day.” Spencer thought
the care of the aged by their dependents was the fit complement for the
care that in earlier years had been devoted to them and regarded the
imperfection of this return the great defect of our practical morals.
Indeed, the author doubts “whether the aged were ever so much to be
pitied as they are to-day.” The psychological needs of old age are
greater than ever.
In his _Health, Strength, and Happiness_,[107] he gives an earnest,
practical caution for all, but especially for the aged, to eat less;
and particularly so in warm weather. “We dig our graves with our
teeth.” Fat is hardly a part of the body at all. Flesh is really
muscle, so that the fat man should be said to be losing flesh. “The
whole secret of prolonging one’s life consists in doing nothing to
shorten it.” The writer profoundly believes in government by the
elderly in years and thinks that the really greatest works in many of
the most difficult fields have been done by them. He stresses the fact
that there is a certain kind of wisdom that nothing but age can bring.
He sees the chief cause of senile degeneration in the hardening of the
arteries, due to the necessity of disposing of superfluous fat. A man
is really as old as his mind and he doubts whether we are producing
more really living elderly men and women than did the ancient world. He
is bitter in his condemnation of the common phrase, “Too old at forty.”
Bernard Shaw[108] thinks mankind is headed straight for the City of
Destruction and can be saved not by eugenics or by a new and better
education, as H. G. Wells opines, but by prolonging human life to
_circa_ three hundred years. If the length of life were reduced to
one-half or one-quarter of what it now is we may assume that our
culture and institutions would decline because children could not
direct them. It is exactly the equivalent of this that has actually
happened, only instead of life being shortened to half or a quarter of
its span the problems of life have doubled or quadrupled in magnitude
and difficulty so that present-day man is not grown up to them. Trained
only to run a motor truck, he is now since the war called on to be an
air pilot, and this requires a long and arduous training with a great
deal of preliminary selection or weeding out. Thus man must now simply
either live a great deal longer or the race will go under.
This can be done and Shaw tells us how. It is simply by wishing and
willing it intensely enough and for generations. Lamarck, the first
creative evolutionist, devoted his life to the “fundamental proposition
that living organisms changed because they wanted to.” They wanted
to see and so evolved eyes; to move about and so grew organs of
locomotion; the forbears of the giraffe wanted to browse on taller
and taller tree-tops and so grew long necks, etc. All this was done
by the same phyletic impulsion as now impels us to talk, swim, skate,
ride a wheel, etc. We strive at it long and persistently and by and
by, presto! the power comes from within because we will it, and it is
never lost. In this same way man can and will acquire the power of
living several times longer than he does now. As he does so he will put
away his present occupations and interests, sports, amusements, party
politics, religious dogmas, ceremonies, and indeed most of the things
that now interest the populace, and come out into a new adulthood with
vastly enhanced powers and a far wider horizon. Those who do this
first will become pilots of mankind, which at present seems doomed
for want of more wisdom and better leaders. Darwin and especially
the Neo-Darwinians who believe in “circumstantial evolution” launched
the world on a career of egoism in morals and mechanism in life that
has brought it to its present pass and made it forget that all true
evolution is from within, vitalistic, and voluntaristic.
Shaw’s drama opens in Eden, where Adam, oppressed by the conviction
that he must live forever, first faces the fact of death in finding the
putrefying body of a fawn. The gorgeously hooded serpent explains to
Eve how she is to renew life by offspring from her body, and because
of this she and Adam are assured that they need live only a thousand
years. In the next scene Cain the Killer justifies his vocation.
In the second part, which opens in our day, two brothers, one a
liberalized clerical and the other a biologist, agree that life is
too short to be taken seriously and that neither of them is within a
hundred and fifty years of the experience and wisdom they have been
sincerely pretending to. To be a good clergyman or biologist requires
several centuries. Man now dies before he knows what life or what
science is. Indeed, life is now so short that it is hardly worth while
to do anything well. Then a past and present prime minister, obviously
caricatures of the two most famous men who have lately filled that
position in England, enter and try--each according to his method and
hobbies--to interest the brothers in one popular cause after another,
but in vain; and are finally plainly told that they have not lived
long enough to outgrow personal and local prejudices or to see things
in their true perspective. The statesmen, failing to find campaign
material serviceable for the next election in this new Gospel of the
Brothers Barnabas, then ask for a prescription that will prolong
their lives and, failing to obtain either, cease to be interested. It
does not seem practical to found a Longevity Party and it might be
dangerous to let everyone live as long as he wanted to. The statesmen
are finally told that as they are incompetent to do God’s work He will
produce some better beings who can.
In Part III, A.D. 2170, The thing Happens. An archbishop, now 283 years
old, is convinced that “mankind can live any length of time it knows
to be absolutely necessary to save civilization from extinction.” Such
lengthening may now happen to anyone and when he is convinced that he
is one of these elect everything changes. A well preserved lady who
appeared in a former part as a parlormaid but who is now 224 years old
enters and discourses sapiently on the traits of the short-livers and
complains that there are so few grown-ups. “What is wrong with us is
that we are a non-adult race.” Her own serious life began at 120.
In Part IV we are transferred to the year A.D. 3000. An Elderly
Gentleman, attired in very pronounced fashions that have not changed
from our day, comes from Bagdad, now the British capital--London being
only a park and cities being for the most part abolished. He is an
amateur student of history and comes to revisit the home of his remote
ancestors but finds it now tenanted only by long-livers who regard
him as a child and chaperone and instruct him as such. At first he
loquaciously vents his own opinions on a great variety of subjects with
the utmost confidence but finally, under the tutelage of a Primary
and a Secondary, and at last from contact with an awful Tertiary (for
thus those in the first, second, and third century of their lives
are known and labeled) he loses confidence, becomes more and more
depressed at finding so many things he cannot understand, and has a
serious attack of the “discouragement” that is generally the doom of
all short-livers who visit these parts. In the end the aged Briton is
so confounded by the wisdom that he cannot comprehend that life loses
all its attractions and he finally dies of exhaustion at the feet of
the Oracle. Napoleon also swaggers and boasts upon the stage, but his
ideals, too, are shown to be only characteristic of the short-livers
and he is completely subjected.
Part V of this Pentateuch is dated A.D. 31,920. Children are now born
from eggs, clamoring to get out when about as mature as our youth
are at seventeen, so that there are no children in our sense. They
are grown-ups, according to our standard, at three or four. Art and
science, after incredible labors, are at last able to produce two
homunculi, a male and a female. They represent the consummation of
circumstantial or mechanical evolution. They appear, talk, will, feel,
apparently not as the reflex mechanisms and automata they are but as
completely human. They have, however, almost incredible powers of
destruction which they turn first against their own fabricator. So
dangerous are they that they have to be destroyed because not truly
human since they lack the creative urge from within.
This amazingly bold projection of Shaw’s imagination into the void is
elaborately wrought out and needs very careful reading to be rightly
appraised. Almost every reader will agree that he goes much too far in
disparaging about all that modern man has done or cared for so far in
the world as childish doll-play. This is its pessimism. Its optimism,
which lies in the hope of vastly increased longevity and wisdom,
will be thought to compensate, or to fail to do so, according to the
temperament of the reader. The new dispensation, which is to come when
man has grown up, for in the last part it is seen that he may live
even 700 or 800 years, will be ushered in by those individuals who are
most perfectly convinced of the desperate state into which man has now
fallen but nevertheless profoundly believe both that he is worth saving
and that he can be saved. George Eliot’s way of prolonging life by
giving to moments the significance of days will not do because great
events often have no power to speed up but must evolve very slowly. The
best type of old age as we know it is still too puerile to expect very
much from.
Shaw’s conceptions of the old are neither attractive nor constructive
but priggish because presuming on their years to demand respect for a
wisdom that is nowhere in evidence. There is almost no suggestion that
they have done anything to improve the material or psychic conditions
of human life. No great inventions are suggested unless telephonic
communication by tuning forks. These Ancients seem to derive their
greatest pleasure from disparagement of their own youth and, what is
far worse, of youth in general. The long-livers are cynical, addicted
to sneering, rebuke, criticise, and do not inspire, construct, achieve,
or even teach; in fact they only make the gestures and show the
affectations of sagehood. They are divided in their counsels whether
to exterminate the short-livers or to leave them to natural selection.
Thus they are a class apart and we have almost no hint as to the
stages by which they evolved. Now we are told that they are “elected”
to longevity or achieve it as “sports,” while in the Preface it is
insisted that it comes by a long series of persistent efforts.
On the whole, happy as was his choice of scene, fascinating as are
these almost actionless conversations, the whole thing is a _jeu
d’esprit_, with no message of practical import to our age or to the
aged unless it be to slightly encourage the hope in the latter that
by willing to do so more and more intensely they may add somewhat to
their length of years. Shaw’s Ancients are simply a board of censors
to carry out his own whims and who have grown arrogant as their powers
increased. Altogether they are so unlovely that the reader would
hesitate whether he would prefer to be a bloodless Ancient or to take
his chance of being exterminated by them as a short-liver. The two
Ancients in the fifth book of the Pentateuch, 700 and 800 years old
respectively, are chilly, loveless, almost clotheless, sleepless,
hairless creatures, happy in enjoying a wisdom of the nature of which
we are given very few hints. They teach that all works of art from
rag dolls to statues, and even to homunculi, are needless, and the
intimation is that they are well on the way to becoming independent
of the body, which they have subjected and which has lost all its
attractions. We are not even told how the gigantic eggs from which the
race is born at adolescence are produced. The final verdict of Lilith,
the androgynous mother of our first parents in Eden, is that in giving
Eve curiosity, which was still impelling the race to conquer matter
and then resolve itself back into bodiless vortexes and energies, she
had made no mistake for the Ancients are ever gaining in wisdom to
comprehend the universe and, despite the slow decay of their bodies,
are likely to attain the goal of achieving real but immaterial truth,
beauty, and goodness all in one, so that she need not exterminate man
and produce in his place a new and higher race of beings. Thus Shaw’s
Ancients are the direct antithetes of Nietzsche’s supermen.
The poets of all times and climes have had something to say of old age,
and vastly more of death. The latter has always been one of the chief
themes of Christian hymnology and both its gruesome horrors and its
consolations have found expression in countless tropes--sleep, harvest,
crossing the river, and many others that are fairly burned into the
consciousness of all who have come into contact with the church.
Hymns have given the Western world ideas of death that the scientific
descriptions of it show to be utterly false to fact, for the dying
almost never face death consciously, so that its terrors are generally
quite unknown to those who meet it; while the cajolements that the
Great Enemy has really been conquered in his stronghold and the supreme
fear of the world banished, which, as I have elsewhere shown,[109] came
to its most ecstatic affirmation at Pentecost, are no less fallacious.
Thus along with its anodyne Christianity has invested death with a new
horror of hell unknown to the pagan world. Moreover, it has always
been taught as something exogenous or as a graft upon a more primitive
stock and it is the latter that the psychologist chiefly seeks to know.
Thus, excluding the more artificial reactions that have come to it from
this source, I have reduced my first numerous selections to a very few
that express the natural spontaneous repercussion of the three chief
attitudes of mind regarding it.
The first is the death thought that always and everywhere tends to find
its first expression in ingenuous youth and this has never been more
fully and normally portrayed than in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,”[110] which
is familiar even to school children and which was written by the author
in his ripe adolescence. This might have been composed in ancient pagan
Hellas or even by a Buddhist as well as by a Christian, so generic and
germane is it to human nature as it evolves. Tennyson’s “Crossing the
Bar,”[111] while it shows vestiges of the same youthful _aperçus_ that
lingered into the author’s maturer years, is far more specific, more
funereal, and really the farewell address of a dying soul to survivors.
The euthanasia motive is far less pronounced in it.
The second attitude is illustrated by Matthew Arnold and by the
lugubrious phase of Walt Whitman, both written after decrepitude
had begun. Poems written in this spirit arouse the question whether
old age is intrinsically pessimistic or perhaps even pathological.
Should senescents express or repress the inexorable and progressive
limitations and weaknesses senescence brings in its train, or strive to
ignore if they cannot be oblivious to them? Are not such abandonments
to pathos, in their deeper psychological motivation, a cry for pity,
to which strong souls feel it unworthy to appeal? Are they perhaps
atavistic vestiges or echoes of a time when the old were more cruelly
treated? Why spend time and energy in mourning for what old age takes
away rather than in finding “joy in what remains behind” and which no
other stage of life can give? Hysterical symptoms are often only an
appeal for sympathy by those who crave, perhaps subconsciously, more
attention and service, which only selfishness would think lacking.
Psychopaths and paranoiacs have often made literary capital of their
aberrations, as have adolescents out of the ferments peculiar to their
age. All this has its place but should, in my opinion, always be
known as what it is, namely, abnormal and aberrant and thus belonging
entirely to science and not to literary art.
The third or reminiscent type expresses the inveterate instinct of the
old to look back upon life, to illumine and interpret its memories by
such philosophy as experience brings, in some measure, to all who can
reflect. It is a happy circumstance that senile amnesia always begins
with the loss of recent recollections, while those of early life are
only later and very rarely effaced. This resource is always open to
the aged, who can relive the most interesting stages of their early
and adult lives, unify them, and draw the moral of them as a whole.
The world owes much and, as it grows old, will owe ever more to the
autobiographic impulse of those who achieve normal senectitude.
The following is Matthew Arnold’s “Growing Old”:
What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
--Yes, but not this alone.
Is it to feel our strength--
Not our bloom only, but our strength--decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more loosely strung?
Yes, this, and more; but not
Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dream’d ’twould be!
’Tis not to have our life
Mellow’d and soften’d as with sunset-glow,
A golden day’s decline.
’Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirr’d;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past.
The years that are no more.
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young;
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.
It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion--none.
It is--last stage of all--
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost,
Which blamed the living man.
From Walt Whitman I quote the following four extracts:[112]
THANKS IN OLD AGE
Thanks in old age--thanks ere I go,
For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air--for life, mere
life,
For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear--you,
father--you, brothers, sisters, friends,)
For all my days--not those of peace alone--the days of war the
same,
For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands,
For shelter, wine and meat--for sweet appreciation.
A CAROL CLOSING SIXTY-NINE
Of me myself--the jocund heart yet beating in my breast,
The body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed--the strange inertia
falling pall-like round me,
The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct,
The undiminish’d faith--the groups of loving friends.
QUERIES TO MY SEVENTIETH YEAR
Approaching, nearing, curious,
Thou dim, uncertain spectre--bringest thou life or death?
Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?
Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?
Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,
Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack’d voice harping, screeching?
AS I SIT WRITING HERE
As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,
Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities,
Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui,
May filter in my daily songs.
Longfellow strikes a less pessimistic note:[113]
MORITURI SALUTAMUS
Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at 80; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Œdipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse
From his compeers
When each had numbered more than four-score years.
And Theophrastus at four-score and ten
Had but begun his characters of men.
Chaucer at Wadstock, with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote The Canterbury Tales.
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past.
These are, indeed, exceptions, but they show
How far the gulf stream of our youth may flow
Into the Arctic regions of our lives
Where little else but life itself survives.
* * * * *
Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
It is the waning, not the crescent, moon,
The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon.
It is not strength but weakness, not desire
But its surcease, not the fierce heat of fire,
The burning and consuming element,
But that of ashes and of embers spent.
In which some living sparks we still discern,
Enough to warm but not enough to burn.
What, then, shall we sit idly down and say
The night hath come; it is no longer day?
The night hath not come; we are not quite
Cut off from labor by the failing light.
Something remains for us to do or dare,
Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.
Not Œdipus Colonus, or Greek Ode,
Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode
Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn.
But other something would we but begin,
For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars invisible by day.
I also append the following quotations:
At sixty-two life is begun,
At seventy-three begins once more;
Fly swifter as thou near’st the sun
And brighter shine at eighty-four.
At ninety-five
Shouldst thou arrive
Still wait on God and work and thrive.
It has been sung by ancient sages
That love of life increases with years
So much that in our later stages,
When bones grow sharp and sickness rages
The greatest love of life appears.
Hard choice for man to die or else to be
That tottering, wretched, wrinkled thing you see,
Age then we all prefer; for age we pray;
And travel on to life’s last lingering day,
Then sinking slowly down from worse to worse,
Find Heaven’s extorted boon our greatest curse.
Many a man passes his youth in preparing misery for his age,
and his age in repairing the misconduct of his youth.
It is easy to die but difficult to die at the right time.
The danger of shipwreck is less in mid-ocean than near to shore.
Time wears out masks; the old show what they are.
The misfortunes of life are that we are born young and become
old.
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made!
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me.
BROWNING: _Rabbi Ben Ezra_.
What is age but youth’s full bloom
And retiring, more transcendent youth?
Old men must die or the world would grow mouldy, would
only breed the past again.--TENNYSON: _Becket_.
Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a
regret.--DISRAELI: _Coningsby_.
See how the world its veterans rewards!
A youth of frolics, an old age of cards.
POPE: _Moral Essays_.
Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that
age appears to be best in four things--old wood best to burn,
old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to
read.--BACON: _Apothegms_.
Dr. Clara Barrus, who for many years has labored in the closest
personal contact with John Burroughs, has kindly sent me, along with
much other information, the notes he made during the last months of his
life for an article that he never lived to complete on Old Age. The
quotations and _aperçus_ that he collected and that most impressed him
were such as the following:
As men grow old they grow more foolish and more wise.
Young saint, old devil; young devil, old saint.
A man at sixteen will prove a child at sixty.
When men grow virtuous in their old age they only make a
sacrifice to God of the devil’s leavings.
Nobody loves life like an old man.
An old young man will make a young old man.
Old age is a tyrant who forbids men, under pain of death, the
pleasures of youth.
Reckless youth makes rueful age.
Young men think old men fools and old men know young men to be
so.
The evening of life brings with it its lamps.
A youthful age is desirable but aged youth is troublesome and
grievous.
To me the worst thing about old age is that one has outlived
all his old friends. The past becomes a cemetery.
It is characteristic of old age to reverse its opinions and its
likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them; it revises
them. If its years have been well spent it has reached a higher
position from which to overlook Life; it commands a wider view.
Old Age may reason well but old age does not remember well.
The power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for
deafness in the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the
ear. Hence we octogenarians so often ask for your question over
again. We do not grasp it the first time. We do not want you
to speak louder. We only need to focus upon you a little more
completely.
I probably make more strenuous demands upon him who aspires to
be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than ever before
that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make poetry
any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive makes
honey. The quality of the man makes all the difference in the
world. A great nature can describe birds and flowers and clouds
and sunsets and spring and autumn greatly.
We in our generation have become so familiar with a universe so
much larger than that known to the Ancients that we naturally
wonder how the wise men of Greece and Rome and of Judea could
have had or seem to have had so little curiosity about the
earth upon which they lived and of which they were so ignorant.
Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation.
It is certainly true that in age we do find our tongues if
we have any. They are unloosened, and when the young or
middle-aged sit silent the octogenarian is a fountain of
conversation. In age one set of pleasures is gone and another
takes its place.
The old man reasons well, the judgment is clear, the mind
active, the conscience alert, the interest in life unabated. It
is the memory that plays the old man tricks.
Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar
all his life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is
as if the belt slipped and the wheel did not go around. Then
the next moment away it goes again. Or shall we call it a kind
of mental anesthetic or paralysis? Thus, the other day I was
reading something about Georgetown, S. A. I repeated the name
over to myself a few times. Have I not known such a place some
time, in my life. Where is it? “Georgetown.” “Georgetown.” The
name seems like a dream. Then I thought of Washington, the
Capitol, and the city above it, but had to ask a friend if its
name was Georgetown. Then suddenly as if some chemical had been
rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came! Of course it
was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it; I had
lived in Washington for ten years.
CHAPTER IV
STATISTICS OF OLD AGE AND ITS CARE
I--Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands where data
are available--Actuarial and other mortality tables--Expectation
of life and death-rate at different ages--Longevity and
fecundity--Death-rate in different occupations--Irving Fisher’s
ideas on longevity--The population problem--Longevity in ancient
Egypt and in the Middle Ages--Diversity of statistical methods
and results.
II--Growing need of care for the indigent old--Causes of
improvidence--Ignorance and misconception of what old age
is and means--Why the old do not know themselves--Old age
pensions in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and her colonies,
France, Belgium, United States--Industrial pensions and
insurance, beginning with railroads--Trades unions--Fraternal
organizations--Retiring pensions in the army and navy--Local
and national insurance--Teachers’ pensions--The Carnegie
Foundation--Criticism of pension systems--Growing magnitude,
urgency, and diversity of views and methods--The Life Extension
Institute--“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs--Should the old
organize?
Before discussing the nature and functions of old age, which chiefly
concern us in this volume, we must in a brief, summary way answer
two preliminary questions: (1) how many old people are there in the
registration areas of the world to-day as compared to earlier times and
to the total population; and (2) what is done for them publicly and
privately. Each of these topics has a copious literature and experts
of its own. On the first or statistical problem there is still great
diversity of methods and results, which I simply present and make no
attempt to harmonize, for this would be premature. As to the second
point, of care, I have also attempted only a bird’s-eye view and
avoided details.
I
The population between the ages of 65 and 74 in various countries
(1900)[114] is as follows: United Kingdom--1,418,000 (including
England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, of which England and Wales have
1,076,000; Scotland, 151,000; Ireland, 191,000); Germany--2,003,000;
Prussia--1,185,000; France--2,246,000; Italy--1,435,000; United
States--2,186,000.
The percentage of the population 65 and upwards in various countries
is: United Kingdom--5 per cent (in England, Wales, and Scotland the
percentage is 5 per cent, and in Ireland 6 per cent); Germany--5 per
cent; France--8 per cent; Italy--6 per cent; United States--4 per cent.
Allyn A. Young[115] gives a table bringing out the following facts,
taking the population of continental United States in 1900 as
75,994,575 as a basis:
+----+--------------------------------------------------+
| | POPULATION |
|Age |--------------+---------------+---------+---------+
| | Native White | Foreign White | Colored | Total |
+----+--------------|---------------+---------+---------+
| 70 | 123,818 | 66,941 | 18,213 | 208,972 |
| 75 | 79,214 | 40,886 | 10,061 | 130,161 |
| 80 | 42,095 | 19,559 | 6,995 | 68,649 |
| 85 | 17,271 | 7,059 | 2,854 | 27,184 |
| 90 | 4,551 | 1,796 | 1,190 | 7,539 |
| 95 | 833 | 430 | 766 | 2,029 |
| 99 | 195 | 168 | 255 | 618 |
+----+--------------+---------------+---------+---------+
Solomon S. Huebner[116] says a mortality table is a picture of a
generation of individuals passing through time. He takes a group of
them and traces their history year by year until all have died. The
American Experience tables, almost exclusively used for computation
by the old insurance companies, contain the following and are based on
100,000 individuals:
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE TABLE OF MORTALITY
+-----+---------------+------------+
| | Number | Number |
| | Living at | Dying |
| Age | Beginning of | during |
| | Designated | Designated |
| | Year | Year |
+-----+---------------+------------+
| 70 | 38,569 | 2,391 |
| 71 | 36,178 | 2,448 |
| 72 | 33,730 | 2,487 |
| 73 | 31,243 | 2,505 |
| 74 | 28,738 | 2,501 |
| 75 | 26,237 | 2,476 |
| 76 | 23,761 | 2,431 |
| 77 | 21,330 | 2,369 |
| 78 | 18,961 | 2,291 |
| 79 | 16,670 | 2,196 |
| 80 | 14,474 | 2,091 |
| 81 | 12,383 | 1,964 |
| 82 | 10,419 | 1,816 |
| 83 | 8,603 | 1,648 |
| 84 | 6,955 | 1,470 |
| 85 | 5,485 | 1,292 |
| 86 | 4,193 | 1,114 |
| 87 | 3,079 | 933 |
| 88 | 2,146 | 744 |
| 89 | 1,402 | 555 |
| 90 | 847 | 385 |
| 91 | 462 | 246 |
| 92 | 216 | 137 |
| 93 | 79 | 58 |
| 94 | 21 | 18 |
| 95 | 3 | 3 |
+-----+---------------+------------+
In a table headed “Actuaries’ or Combined Experience Table of
Mortality”[117] we have the following, taking 100,000 persons of ten
years of age as the basis:
+-----+-------------------+--------------+
| | Probable Number | Expectation |
| Age | of Persons Living | of Life |
+-----+-------------------+--------------+
| 70 | 35,837 | 8.54 |
| 75 | 24,100 | 6.48 |
| 80 | 13,290 | 4.78 |
| 85 | 5,417 | 3.36 |
| 90 | 1,319 | 2.11 |
| 95 | 89 | 1.12 |
| 99 | 1 | .50 |
+-----+-------------------+--------------+
In a very valuable state report[118] collating data from many sources
for convenient use by the legislature it appears that the total
number of persons 65 or over in Massachusetts by the census of April
1, 1915, was 189,047. It is generally supposed that during recent
years the ratio of the aged to the total population has increased, but
the tables show that in Massachusetts this did not hold true for the
forty years ending in 1915. Mortality rates in most localities have
fallen, but improved conditions of life have not affected the ratio of
the aged to the total. Still, the duration of life has continuously
increased, owing to medical and sanitary science and improved standards
of living; and while the younger element of the population has been
chiefly affected, the span of life of the aged has also been somewhat
prolonged. Hence if this tendency continues the need of pensioning
would increase.
A. Newsholme[119] presents a table giving the annual death rate, per
million persons living, from a few prominent diseases, showing that
there is a falling off in the death rate from old age. The author adds:
“If this were a real falling off, it would not be an indisputable
advantage as most people would prefer to die of old age. The decline
under this head, however, is chiefly due to an improved specification
of the causes of which the old die.” He gives copious statistics on the
causes of death. He also gives an interesting table (p. 237) on the
basis of 100,000 of each sex, showing graphically the steady decline
in death liability and that the percentage of death is least at 12 and
the early teens and soon after begins slightly to increase, falling
somewhat more rapidly after 40 and then becoming a little less rapid
after 70; while at 90, only 2,000 of the original 100,000 remain alive.
Director Sam L. Rogers of the Bureau of the Census published tables
of vitality statistics[120] to show expectation of life at all ages
for the population of New England, New York, New Jersey, Indiana,
Michigan, and the District of Columbia (these being the mortality
death registration states) on the basis of the population in 1910
and the mortality for three years. They are like life tables of
insurance companies with the exception that they are based on the whole
population. According to these tables the average expectation of life
for males at birth is 49.9 years; for females, 52.2. Expectation of
white males reaches its maximum at the age of 2 (57.7 years). At the
age of 12, it is 59.2 years; at 25, 39.4; at 40, 28.3; at 50, 21.2;
at 60, 14.6; at 70, 9.1; at 80, 5.2 years. During the first month of
life the death rate of native white boys is nearly 28 per cent higher
than that for girls. The twelfth year seems to be the healthiest for
the native whites and thereafter there is continuous increase in the
death rate. Expectation of life is not the same as saying that a man
has an even chance of living that number of years, because expectation
represents the average remaining length of life at any given age in
a stationary population. A native white male child at birth has one
chance in two of reaching sixty. At the end of his first year he has
more than an even chance of reaching sixty-four. At forty-two he has an
even chance of attaining seventy. At all ages women live longer than
men and expectation in the country at all ages is distinctly greater
than in the city.
R. Henderson’s work[121] sets forth the theoretical relations with
reference to the duration of human life, describing those mortality
tables that have had the greatest influence on the development of the
science of life contingency and its applications in this country. The
author establishes a connection between mortality tables and mortality
statistics and tells how to interpret the latter. The methods of
constructing mortality tables from census and death returns and from
insurance experience are then taken up. The writer deals only with life
contingencies and not at all with monetary applications and gives us a
new table. “The present value of a sum of money payable at death cannot
be properly calculated in assuming it to be payable at the end of a
definite period equal to the expectation of life.” Nor can the present
value of a life annuity be calculated by assuming it to be certainly
payable for that period.
W. S. Rankin[122] tells how he applies vital statistics to sick towns
or cities in a way to first restore consciousness by telling them just
where they stand relatively with regard to death rates and second to
bring about reforms. He has various charts and diagrams. The opinion
of prominent people in every community is, in general, that their
health conditions are good, but when asked what the death rate is they
can give no answer. One community compelled a railroad to build and
maintain an expensive overhead bridge at a cost of $1,500 a year to
prevent one death and the aldermen appropriated only $150 to prevent
fifty deaths. The first thing in treating sick social organisms is to
restore consciousness.
Alexander Graham Bell[123] in the study of a family which is almost
classic found that the average duration of life was 34.6 years; 35.2
per cent of these persons died before they were 20 years of age, and
7.3 per cent lived to be 80 or older. A second danger period was
found in adolescence, ending at 23. Both sexes showed an increase of
deaths during adolescence. More females than males lived to be 95.
But the fathers, on the average, lived longer than the mothers and
the children born between four and eight years after the marriage
of their parents lived longer than those born later. Those who live
to be old come from long-lived parents. The long-lived seem to
inherit disease-resisting qualities and also are more fecund than the
short-lived. He says[124] that in this family mothers who lived to
extreme old age had, on the average, larger families than those who
died earlier in life, for example, those who died before forty had,
on the average, only three to four children apiece. The long-lived
proportion is practically doubled when one parent lives to be old and
quadrupled when both parents do so. The people who lived to be old
represented the disease-resistant strain of their generation and on
account of their superior fecundity this quality is distributed largely
throughout the population. “A very large proportion of each generation
is sprung from a very small proportion of the preceding generation;
namely, from the people who lived to old age. The members of the
short-lived group come from the short-lived parents. The children of
the long-lived parents are on the average stronger, more vigorous, and
longer-lived than the children of others, and there were more of them
per family.”
Scott Nearing[125] says that the years from 45 to 60 or 65 should be
the most valuable ones from the social point of view. He reminds us
that if the average length of life were doubled the population would
in a generation double without any increase in the birth rate. The
average length of life in the leading countries of the world varies
much. In Sweden, for males it is 53.9; France, 45.7; England and Wales,
44.1; Massachusetts, 44.1; India, 23.0. Men born in America of native
white parents live on the average only 31 years; those born of foreign
white parents, 29.1 years. Men in the modern cities die when they are
one score and ten. There is a great difference in occupations: for
shoemakers the death rate per thousand is 8.7; farmers, 11.02; tailors,
13.65; cigar and tobacco makers, 21.67; servants, 21.78; and laborers,
22.3. Such figures suggest the dangerous occupations. As to the length
of the working life, from 15 to 65, out of every one thousand males
living at the age of 15, 440 will survive to the age of 65, while the
rest will have fallen out for some cause. So society has lost more
than half its working force at the end of the working period. In the
16th century the average length of life he estimates at 21.2 years; in
the 17th, 25.7; in the 18th, 33.6; and in the 19th, nearly 40 years.
Finkenberg thinks that in the 16th century it was between 18 and 20
years; at the close of the 18th, over 30; while to-day it is from
38 to 40. We have no data for the United States as a whole that are
of any value. Among males in England the average length of life is
increasing at the rate of 14 years per century; France, 10; Denmark,
25; Massachusetts, 14. Although these figures are only approximations,
Nearing thinks life is probably twice as long as it was a few centuries
ago.
Irving Fisher[126] says in Europe the span of life is double that in
India. The death rate in Dublin is twice that of Amsterdam and three
times that of rural Michigan. Life is probably twice as long as it was
three or four centuries ago and is increasing more rapidly now than
ever. The rate of progress is very variable in different countries,
the maximum being in Prussia. Improvement is most in females and the
rate of increase is accelerated perhaps four years a century on the
whole, although during the last three-quarters of the nineteenth
century Fisher thinks it has increased nine years. At least fourteen
years could be added to human life by eliminating preventable diseases,
which would be the equivalent of reducing the death rate about 23 per
cent. In a table he shows that seven of the ninety causes of death are
responsible for over one-half of the shortening of life. He gives us
a diagram that shows where the saving of life has been and might be
greatest. The area between the curves shows that from 1855 to 1897,
550,000 years were saved for a supposed group of 100,000 persons, or
5.5 years per person. The addition of 12.8 years to the lifetime of
each of 100,000 persons might be divided into three groups, namely,
that of preparation, the working period, and the decline. The chief
cause of prolongation is found in new hygienic ideals.
Metchnikoff thought that the lengthening of human life would at once
decrease the burden on the productive period, which is some 55 per cent
of the total years lived--assuming the working period to be from 17
to 60--and that the latter limit would shift forward. As life becomes
complex and as knowledge increases the period of preparation should
be prolonged. Men should graduate later. Life should be lived on a
larger scale, with more utilization of accumulated experience and less
disastrous immaturity. Now we have to force young men into positions
prematurely because of their vitality. Metchnikoff says “Old age, at
present practically a useless burden on the community, will become a
period of work valuable to it.” Human life will become much longer and
the par value of old people will become much more important than it is
to-day.
Willcox thinks the death rate in the United States is at least eighteen
per thousand. Moreover, we have some three million persons always
on the sick list, more among the old than the young since morbidity
increases in age. But at least one-third are in the working period. The
loss by consumptives alone is figured at sixty million dollars. Now,
it costs no more to raise a man capable of living eighty years than
it does to grow one who has the capacity of living only forty. Health
means increased vitality and makes life, in Mallock’s phrase, better
worth the living, for health is the first wealth. We can do much to
raise American vitality.
Fisher adds[127] that in the United States the general death rate has
steadily fallen for several decades, as is common in all civilized
countries. Many think this means a gain in national vitality. This
may be true for the younger age but the “gain has served to mask a
loss of vitality at the older age periods. This latter phenomenon, a
rising mortality in elderly life, is something almost peculiar to the
United States.” In other lands this fall in death rate has been due
not solely to the reduction of mortality in infancy and adult life,
for most countries have improved their mortality at every age period.
Probably this is due to “some unknown biologic influence or to the
amalgamation of the various races that constitute our population. It
must be ascribed in a broad sense to lack of adaptation to our rapidly
developing civilization.” The American decreases in younger ages are
not as great as in England and Wales and they change into increase
at about the age of forty-five and continue to increase thereafter,
while in England and Wales the decline occurs at all ages. In 1900 or
thereabouts the death rates in the middle ages of life were heavier in
the United States than in Prussia, France, Italy, and Sweden. Since
then death rates in the United States at these ages have grown even
greater.
Better hygienic methods, according to Fisher,[128] started with
Pasteur, who said it was within the power of man to rid himself
of every parasitic disease. Hygienists have followed this clue.
The Roosevelt Conservation Committee in its report on national
vitality and the summary of European life tables show that human life
lengthened during the 17th and 18th centuries at the rate of only
4 years per century, while during the first three-quarters of the
19th it lengthened almost twice as fast and since that four times as
fast, or about 17 years per century. If we could continue to increase
life seventeen years a century, the world would soon be peopled with
Methuselahs. We are witnessing a race between two tendencies, the
reduction of the acute infections, such as typhoid, and an increase
of the chronic or degenerative diseases, such as sclerosis, Bright’s
disease, etc. The degenerative tendency appears more in evidence here
than elsewhere. In Sweden the expectation of life increases at all
ages. Even the nonagenarians have more years to live than did those
of former days in the United States. We are freer from germs than our
ancestors but our vital organs wear out sooner. And this degeneration
of our bodies follows that of our habits. In England, where these
diseases are not increasing, individual exercise out of doors probably
has something to do with it. In Sweden individual hygiene is better
cultivated than anywhere else in the world. It is the only land where
public health includes private habits and touches the life of the
people, especially through the school. The best statistics show that a
large number of our young men and women suffer from diseases of heart,
kidneys, lungs, and circulation, with impairment enough to consult a
physician, that is, over half of our young men and women in active work
and presumably selected for their work as fit, are found, although
unaware of the fact themselves, to be in need of medical attention;
while 37 per cent are on the road to impairment because of the use of
too much alcohol, tobacco, etc. Now, a stitch in time saves nine. Thus
the lesson to all of us is obvious.
I. M. Rubinow[129] says the problem of poverty among the old is
connected with inability to find work because productive power has
waned forever. American experience in tables of mortality shows that of
100 persons at the age of 20, 53 will reach 65; 12, 70; at which time
the average expectation of life will be 8½ years. If we take 100 people
at the age of 30, 53 will live to 65; 48 to 70. But this table was
compiled half a century ago, although it is still used--to the great
profit of insurance companies as expectation has greatly increased.
Ten to fifteen years of life over sixty-five are assured to more than
half all wage workers. In 1880 the percentage of persons 65 or over was
3.5; in 1890, 3.9; in 1900, 4.2; in 1910, 4.3. The number over 65 per
1000/15 increased from 54 to 60 in 1890, and to 63 in 1910. Employed
males over 65 per 1000/15 constituted 50 in 1890; and in 1900, 47. Thus
the production of old men is increased while the proportion of old men
is declining. In 1880, of all old men over 65 years of age, 73.8 per
cent were gainfully employed; in 1900, only 68.4 per cent. The total
number of men over 65 in 1900 was 1,555,000. Thus economic progress
in ten years meant an additional hundred thousand thrown out of
employment. In agriculture, 6.1 per cent of the men employed are over
65; in the professions, 5.5 per cent; but in manufacture and mechanics,
only 3.5 per cent; and in trade and transportation, 3 per cent. Thus
old men are either thrown out or shifted to unskilled occupations.
What does the “iron law” of the increase of old age dependency under a
system of wage labor mean? It is wrong to seek the cause in exceptional
misfortune or in psychological or ethical feeling. The author of
“Old Age Dependencies in the United States” says after sixty men
become dependent by easy stages--property, friends, relatives, and
ambition go and only a few years of life remain, with death final. The
wage-earner is swept from the class of hopeful, independent citizens
into that of the helpless poor.
As to the population problem, Raymond Pearl has studied the ratio
between births and deaths in France, Prussia, Bavaria, and England and
Wales from 1913 to 1920[130] and finds that, in general, the birth
ratios rose during the war--in England to the 100 per cent mark--and
that immediately after the war was over the death-birth ratio began
to drop rapidly in all countries. Vienna suffered perhaps more than
any other city but made the best recovery, showing how promptly the
growth of population tends to regulate itself back toward the normal
after even so great a disturbance. Thus the war, which was the greatest
depopulator since the epidemic of the Middle Ages, caused “only a
momentary hesitation in the steady onward march of population growth.”
If we take any given land area of fixed limits, there must necessarily
be an upper limit to the number of people it can support, but this
limit will be approached asymtotically and the most rapid rise will be
midway between the upper and lower limit, namely, at that point where
half the possible resources of subsistence have been drawn upon and
utilized. The statistician must approach this problem as the astronomer
does in calculating the complete orbit of a comet, that is, he must
construct his curve from a limited number of specific data. If we study
the curve of growth of population in this country, we find that we
have long since passed the most rapid rate of increase. If we compare
this with that of France, which is an old country and much nearer the
upper limit than ours, which started near the lower asymtote only a
century and a half ago; or compare it with that of Serbia, which
is intermediate, all the statistics available conform with singular
accuracy to the theoretic curve.
Professor Pearl concludes that this country has passed the point of
most rapid increase, that this rate began to decline about April 1,
1914, when our population was 98,637,000, and that our upper limit
will be reached about the year 2100, when the population will be
197,274,000 or nearly double what it is now, with about 66 persons
per square mile. Our population will be then far less dense than in
many other countries, but the latter are not self-supporting. He even
estimates how many calories, vegetable and animal, each individual will
require daily and compares this with the agricultural possibilities of
the future. Such considerations lead him to stress the importance of
birth control. This had long been practiced in France before the war,
where the birth- and death-rate nearly balanced, so that industrial
development simply raised the standard of living. Germany, on the other
hand, encouraged the increase of her population by every means and
her scheme was, when the pressure became too great, to facilitate the
overflow of her surplus population elsewhere. “A stationary population
where birth-rate and death-rate are made to balance is necessarily a
population with a relative excess of persons in the higher age groups,
not of much use as fighters, and a relative deficiency of persons in
the lower age groups where the best fighters are. On the contrary,
a people with a high birth-rate has a population with an excess of
persons in the younger age groups.”
In his discussion of life tables Pearl starts with that of Glover based
on the registration area of the United States in 1910. If we assume
an original hundred thousand starting together at birth we note that
at the beginning of the second year of life only 88,538 survive.
In the next year 2446 drop out; the year following, 1062. At forty
about 30,000 have passed away and the line descends with increasing
rapidity until about eighty, when it drops more slowly till soon after
the century mark all the original hundred thousand have passed away.
Expectation of life is the mean or average number of persons surviving
at a stated age. Pearl’s diagrams show that the expectation of life of
those born in Breslau in the seventeenth century was very much lower
than that of an individual born in the United States in 1910, the
difference amounting to 18 years. At the age of ten it has sunk to 12;
at twenty, to 10 years; at fifty, to 4. But the individual of eighty
in Breslau in the seventeenth century could expect to live longer than
the individual of the same age now in the United States. The same
result is found if we compare United States tables now with those of
England in the middle of the eighteenth century, where expectation was
also less before and greater after eighty. Pearson’s study of Egyptian
mummy cases two thousand years old shows that expectation there was far
lower yet through all the early stages of life, although after seventy
those who survived had a greatly increased expectation. Thus either
man to-day is constitutionally fitter to survive or else he has made
himself better conditions up to about the seventh decade. The reason
why expectation increased after that period is because conditions were
so unfavorable that all but the very most rugged succumbed earlier in
life and the proportion of those who reached advanced age was far less
than now. In Rome, during the first three or four centuries of the
Christian era, the expectation was less yet until nearly sixty, after
which it rose, and it is significant that expectation of life was far
less under the conditions then prevailing for women than for men at
all ages of life, which is the reverse of conditions now prevailing.
In the Roman provinces, however, expectation was greater than in the
Eternal City. In the Roman-African population, although there was
greater mortality to about forty, expectation of life was superior
after that age in the early part of the Christian era to what it now is.
In considering life tables that give the number of deaths occurring
at each age, which give an S-shaped curve falling very rapidly before
the end of the second year and reaching its highest subsequent point
at seventy, Karl Pearson finds in this S-shaped curve five components
which he typifies as five Deaths shooting with different weapons and
with differing precision as the procession of human beings crosses
the Bridge of Life. The first Death is a marksman of deadly aim and
unremitting diligence who kills before as well as after birth. The
second, who aims at childhood, has a very concentrated fire. The third,
who shoots at youth, has not a very deadly or accurate weapon but one
rather to be compared with a bow and arrow. The fire of the fourth
marksman is slow, scattered, and not very destructive, as if from an
old-fashioned blunderbus. The last Death plies the rifle, which none
escape. Pearl justly criticises this conception because “no analysis of
the deaths into natural divisions by causes or otherwise has yet been
made such that the totals in the various groups would conform to these
frequency curves.” Thus he holds that Pearson’s concept of the five
deaths does not represent any biological reality but only demonstrates,
as any other equally successful curve would do, that deaths do
not occur chaotically but instead “in a regular manner capable of
representation by mathematical function in respect of age.”
II
Let us glance briefly at the public and private provisions in different
lands for the care of the aged, another large topic with a literature
of its own. Here, too, we find great diversity of method and theory
which it would be premature to attempt to harmonize. Indeed, so limited
is our present knowledge of old age that the available data here also
open rather than close most of the great questions about it, although
we do seem to be at the beginning of a new era regarding this stage
of life. If on the one hand, the length of life is increasing, as we
have seen, on the other the intensity of modern life and industry is
steadily reducing the age of maximal efficiency so that we feel the
handicap of years earlier in life than formerly. The pressure of the
advancing upon the retiring generation is ever-growing and if the
manual laborer lives longer, he feels the impairment of age sooner. In
fact, society is coming to a clearer realization, on the one hand, that
youth must be served and conserved and, on the other, is just beginning
to see that the same is true of old age.
Not only is the average length of human life increasing as civilization
advances but so is the relative and absolute number of old people.
Although under the harder conditions that once prevailed those who
reached advanced years did so by inherent energy of constitution as the
choicest products of natural selection (even though relatively fewer in
numbers), it is fortunate that those who now attain 60, 70, 80, etc.,
are on the average far more comfortable, as well as more numerous than
ever before. Not only is eyesight conserved, loss of teeth made good,
and many of the ailments of the aged mitigated by modern medicine and
hygiene, but by homes, pensions, etc., their lot is made far easier.
Youth tends to live in and for the present and middle life is too
absorbing; while the decrepitude of old age seems so remote and its
attainment so uncertain that the masses of mankind are still far too
improvident of the future. It is somewhat as if our race had developed
in tropical abundance where there was little need of providing food,
clothing, and shelter, and had not adjusted even to a more northern
climate, still less to the complexities of modern civilization and
least of all to the increased chance of attaining old age with its
infirmities. Still, great progress has been made in foresight and
futures play an ever greater rôle in human calculations. The impulse
to accumulate possessions itself always has a protensive factor and we
cannot amass property without thinking of its safety and its use, and
so we lay by, insure and bequeath.
Nevertheless, under the conditions of life in the modern city, and
especially since the Industrial Revolution and the employment of masses
of women and men at wages that always tend to gravitate toward a
minimum, it is impossible for many to save and also to rear families,
while intemperance and vice always furnish their quota to the classes
that outlive their serviceable years in dire poverty and, as old age
advances, become increasingly dependent not only for subsistence but
also for personal care. There are still a few students of the social
and economic questions here involved who urge that all the aged, even
the latter group, should, if possible, be cared for in their own
homes by their children and grandchildren and that to remove them to
institutions, public or private, not only robs them of interest in life
but weakens filial piety and is detrimental to the interests of the
family and to the instincts upon which it rests. They urge that all
children owe to all parents this return for the care that was bestowed
on them during their early, helpless years and that such ministrations
are essential for a true and complete home, etc. But even if we grant
all this, there still remain the childless old and poor who are alone
in the world. There are also the vicious, toward whom their children,
with too much reason, feel that they owe nothing, that their own very
existence was due to the accidents of passion, and that they were not
only unwelcome guests but were made the victims of cruelty, want, etc.
Then there are the sick who cannot be properly cared for at home and
each additional mouth always means less food for all the rest.
The old most of all need personal provision and suffer most from mass
treatment, for they are not a class but are hyperindividualized.
Not only do some become old while they are yet young in years, and
vice versa, but there is the greatest diversity in food, regimen,
and in most bodily and psychic needs. To say nothing of disposition,
diathesis, or temperament, the old often develop what seem to others
senseless idiosyncrasies that are really expressive of essential traits
and require not only kindly consideration but careful study. It is hard
for them, most of all for old women, to be deprived of contact with
the young and to be confined to intercourse with only those of their
own generation. It is also hard on them to be denied the privilege
of privacy at will, of having certain things all their own, with a
secure place accessible to them alone in which to keep them. For myself
I am convinced that the so-called moroseness of old age is largely
due to the inconsiderate treatment it receives. Its real instinct is
to serve no less than to conserve. Even in the best appointed homes
for the aged that I have visited the great need seems to me to be
occupation with things felt to be useful and individual exemptions from
rigid rules mechanically enforced for all. All have their own tastes,
aptitudes, habits, as well as mementos and keepsakes, which should
always be respected, and every possible facility should be given not
only for visits and correspondence but for current reading in order
to maintain a larger surface of contact with the world without. The
old thus constitute, in a sense, a privileged and even a new “leisure
class,” which Veblen omitted to characterize. The very fact that they
have survived means that they have borne the burden and heat of life’s
trying day better than those who have died. In a large over-all sense,
thus, they survived because they were the fittest and even though they
may have wrought solely with an eye to their own personal benefit they
have, nevertheless, helped on the world’s work. Our streets, buildings,
machines, farms, mines, goods, produce, means of transportation--all
these are, in a sense, the bequest of vanished and retiring to future
generations, and even whatever stamina their children have is more or
less due to their virtue, while their very longevity is perhaps the
best of all they have transmitted to their offspring for, as A. G. Bell
has shown, fecundity and long life go together.
Again, as the young and middle-aged most often show the energy that
impels to migrations, it is often inferred that newly settled lands
contain the lowest percentages of old people. This, however, seems to
be true only for a very limited period and indeed the reverse may soon
come to be the case, for the very vigor that impels the emigrant is
a trait of those who will also live long; whence it often comes that
after a few decades new territories have relatively more aged people
than are found in older communities from which the more viable have
emigrated and the less viable been eliminated by death. This is, on the
whole, fortunate, because the wisdom that only years bring acts like a
balance wheel to regulate the impulsions of youth, which always need to
be more or less controlled. Thus, in our Western communities we often
observe, along with the most advanced ultra-modern steps in material
progress and the newest political devices, a certain conservatism in
social mores, creeds, etc., which show not only a stagnation but a
regression of culture that is typical of progressive senescence and its
psychic retardation.
We do little to fit for old age and so come to it unprepared and
uninformed. The senses fail, but usually so gradually that we rarely
realize the full extent of our loss; at any rate, we have time to
become adjusted and perhaps reconciled to it. The muscles very
gradually atrophy, so that all efferent energy declines and we can do
ever less. Indeed, in a new and quite scientific fashion we can speak
of old age as the “great fatigue,” for Hodge, Dolley, and Richardson
and Orr have shown that the changes in brain cells are almost identical
in both. Loss of memory for recent events disorients the old from their
environment. They forget names and their vocabulary contracts as the
brain shrinks. The mental pace slows down. Their feelings and emotions
are less intense, while control over them is often diminished. The
friends of their youth are dead; their authority is gone; they are not
consulted where once they had everything to say. And so they come at
last by slow degrees to realize that they belong to a generation that
is passed and the little world about them of which they were once so
vital a part is neglecting if not actually crowding them aside. If they
come to see that things go on very well without them, both they and
their environment are fortunate; but alas! for both if they gravitate
toward the conviction that as they withdraw all goes wrong.
Nearly every civilized country to-day makes some provision for the aged
poor. While they are often cared for along with the infirm and sick in
hospitals, or with paupers in poor- and workhouses, or allowed to beg
on the street, etc., there are now many charitable funds and pensions,
public and private, provided especially for the aged. Most funds for
all the dependent classes can also be used for their benefit at home or
in institutions; and social and philanthropic work, where it exists,
is always ready to consider helpless age, which has its own appeal to
sympathy and benevolence. The number of such cases is almost everywhere
increasing and so are the provisions for them. As charity has always
been praised as a virtue, it is now becoming also a science, and the
peculiar nature and needs of old age are being better understood,
although there is yet very much to be done in studying this stage of
life which has in the past been so neglected and misunderstood. We are
now far more ignorant of senescence than of adolescence, childhood, or
middle age, but it is quite as unique, on the whole, and more apart
than any of these other periods. There is a sense, too, in which those
in each stage of life know least of it. The child knows little of
childhood, which had to be discovered in this “century of the child.”
The second childhood of old age often knows itself only little better.
The child cannot, the old will not, realize their age for what it is
and what it means.
Our conspectus is as follows:
The first German Old Age and Invalidity Insurance Law dates from 1889
and has been modified since by various supplementary acts so that it is
now very comprehensive. These acts were due to the social democratic
agitation that prompted Bismarck to set a backfire and thus allay
the discontent of the working classes. Old-age insurance has been
obligatory since 1889 upon practically all laborers and officials paid
under $500 a year and the right to insure voluntarily is extended to
others. The employer is held responsible for the insurance of everyone
and deducts the workman’s share of the premium from his wages. In 1910
some 14,000,000 out of a population of 60,000,000 were thus insured.
The obligation to insure begins with the 17th year and a percentage
of the wages must be paid for 1200 weeks. The Empire and the employer
also contribute--the former a fixed annual sum of $11.90. There are
five wage classes and a special postal service with insurance stamps.
It is, however, impossible to obtain from German reports much data for
old age alone, which is almost always classed with invalidity and often
with accident, sickness, etc. As in every country, there was at first
much discussion whether such social insurance should be compulsory or
voluntary, contributory or non-contributory, universal or partial,
etc., and different countries and agencies have decided these questions
differently.
Austria since 1906 had a limited system of old age insurance for
certain salaried employees of the middle class. But a sweeping change
in the bill in 1908 was intended to include nearly 10,000,000 of the
population. Old-age pensions could be paid at 65 to those insured for a
period of thirty years. The scheme was worked out in very great detail
but, as in other German lands, was a distinctly political measure
provoked in Austria by the Socialists, who, as elsewhere, at first
hesitated to adopt a measure that gave the Government, to which they
had been opposed, the prestige of having realized so many of their
own ideas by these measures. The movement soon won many supporters,
however, from their ranks. As a political _coup_ it was a great success
and most Socialists could find no alternative but to accept it, at
least in principle, although criticism of the small and inadequate
funds received by the pensioners is common.
H. J. Hoare[131] best describes the British Old Age Pension Acts
1908–1911, the scheme of which is as follows: Both sexes, married
or single, over 70, of British nationality, who for 12 years out of
the last 20 were residents, and whose yearly income does not exceed
31 pounds and 10 shillings, are eligible for pensions. They make no
contributions, the money coming from the state. The scheme is worked
jointly by the Civil Service and local authorities; and only inmates
of workhouses, asylums, inebriates’ homes, prisons, and those who
have habitually failed to work are disqualified. The pension cannot
be charged or assigned and if the pensioner is bankrupt, the pension
cannot pass to a trustee or creditor. The receipt of such a pension
deprives of no franchise or privilege and subjects to no disability, as
is the case with those who accept the poor rates. In 1913, 363,811 men
and 604,110 women were pensioners, 62.5 per cent of all being women.
Where the yearly means of the pensioner does not exceed 21 pounds, he
or she receives 5 shillings a week; if between 21 and 23 pounds 12s.
6d., 4 shillings a week; and so on through 6 classes, those whose
income is between 28 pounds 7s. 6d. and 31 pounds 11s. receiving one
shilling a week. As a matter of fact, however, 94 per cent of the
pensions are at the full rate. The expense of administering this system
is less than half of one per cent of the total amount of pensions.
In 1920, 920,198 old men and women received pensions.[132] The chief
grievances the old find against this system are: (1) that it does not
begin at 65; and especially (2) that it is so little, for, of course,
no one can begin to exist to-day on 5s. a week. Both these limitations
cause very acute complaint among the beneficiaries themselves.
Practically every other European country has adopted some form of old
age relief.[133] Denmark in 1891 put in operation a scheme of outdoor
relief for the deserving aged poor. This, too, was done as a political
move to reconcile radicals and liberals. Its pensionable age of 60
years is, I believe, the lowest anywhere found. The amount of the
dotation is not fixed; local authorities decide it in each individual
case. It must be, however, “sufficient for support.” Communes and the
state bear the expense equally.
Belgium’s Old Age Pension Act of 1900 is a comprehensive scheme of
assisted insurance and non-contributory pensions. It aims, first, to
encourage workers to save; and, second, to help the aged by special
grants. It has its own superannuation fund bank. Annuities rarely
exceed $72 and are payable at 65. The pensions are graded according
to the age of the insured, and at last accounts nearly a million, or
one-eighth of the population, benefited.
France has a voluntary, contributory old-age insurance system
administered through a national bank with a state guarantee, which goes
back to 1850 but has been much perfected by subsequent legislation.
It differs only in detail from the Belgian scheme. The amount of the
insurance is not less than $12 or more than $48 a year and may be given
in money, hospital service, or provisions. The permissible pension age
in France is now 65.
Since 1898 Italy has had a system of voluntary, contributory insurance,
subsidized by the state, which provides annuities after the age of 60
if the recipient has paid his dues for 25 years.
The chief British colonies have adopted very wise and comprehensive
systems of old age pensions. New Zealand provides a maximum pension of
$130 a year in monthly installments to those of 65 who are “of good
moral character and have led a sober, reputable life.” Each pension is
only granted for a year but is renewable upon request.
The Australian colonies, one after another, enacted old-age pension
laws near the close of the first decade of the present century. These
grants are made “as a right and not as a charity,” and the commissioner
determines the amount of the pension within limits according to what he
deems the needs of each case. A special investigation is made for each
applicant.
The Canadian system (1908) differs widely from that of Australia.
Its preamble states that it is to promote thrift and to encourage
individual provisions for old age. The Minister of the Interior may
contract with any Canadian for the sale of an annuity, between the
limits of $50 and $600, although none can be payable under the age of
55. If the purchaser of an annuity dies before it becomes payable,
all of it with compound interest is returned to his heirs. As this
system is voluntary, very vigorous efforts were made by organizers and
lecturers to bring it to the attention of, and make it attractive to,
the people, and these thrift campaigns have been highly educative.
Francis A. Carman[134] tells us that the Canadian scheme, like most
others, was to alleviate the universal dread of the poorhouse. It was
adopted to circumvent the growing demand for the support of old age by
the Government. Its unique features are: no forfeiture in case payments
are interrupted or ceased, and the annuities cannot be mortgaged,
seized for debt, or anticipated. Admirable as is the scheme, there
have been less than two thousand to enjoy its full benefits. It has
not reached the day laborer but, for the most part, only clerks and
teachers.
The United States is the only nation that has no retiring system or
provision for old age, even for its employees, save for soldiers and
for judges of the Supreme Court, who may retire after ten years of
service or on having attained the age of 75 on full salaries. Military
pensions go back nearly to the Revolutionary War. There has been much
legislation since. In 1908 there were no less than 951,687 pensioners
who received more than $153,000,000, the survivors of the Civil War
constituting 65 per cent of all. There are also retirement pensions for
officers and enlisted men in the regular Army. Officers at the age of
64 must be retired, with no option, on three-fourths pay.
No American state has established any system of old age pensions,
although many Southern states provide for Confederate veterans; but
many states or cities have provided for firemen, policemen, teachers,
and certain other public employees.
Mabel L. Nassau[135] personally studied the history of one hundred poor
old people in the very heart of New York city and observed them as a
neighborhood study, dividing her cases into those wholly or partly
self-supporting, and wholly or partly dependent upon their families
or upon charity. She stresses the fact so abundantly illustrated that
it was impossible for most of these destitute individuals to put by
money for their old age. The lives of most of them had been spent in
the direst poverty, with low wages, almost no industrial training,
long intervals of non-employment, illness often due to malnutrition,
not to mention the really not very common effects of drink and vice.
They often have little experience in buying and have all their lives
been cheated and imposed on. Very many have the finest sensibilities,
although this is often not suspected because they lack education to
express their feelings. In this stratum of society, although the young
are often underfed and the middle aged overworked, the old have the
hardest time. The burden of the aged falls hardest upon the children,
who must get a work certificate as soon as possible to help feed
their grandparents. The old generally have a horror of going to an
institution; and many of these are so managed as to justify this dread,
separating married couples, imposing senseless rules, providing poor
food and perhaps no recreation, and greatly restricting liberties, so
that life is hopelessly monotonous, with no incentive for personal
effort. The inmates generally have no private place, even a locked
drawer, to keep personal effects, so that they can really own nothing.
Mills’ hotels seem nearer the ideal. Many systems to help the old
involve conditions that amount to dominating their lives. Old age is
really a risk to which all are liable and self-respect and thrift
require us to give more attention to it. It should be no more of a
disgrace to accept a pension for old age than for service in war. State
aid assumes that the old have added to the health and power of the
state by their work, and recognizes this.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad established the first pension
system in this industry in 1884 and in the last two decades many
corporations, mercantile houses, banks, etc., have established such
systems. The above Massachusetts Report supplies many details of
fifty of these systems. In the modern business world the problem of
dealing with aged employees is increasingly difficult. The use of
machinery, specialization, and the modern efficiency ideals have made
it increasingly hard for the old to keep the pace and the universal
demand now is for younger men, so that many firms actually refuse new
men over thirty-five. Men wear out fast. To carry the incapacitated
on their payroll is not only not economic but discouraging to the
working force and it is not humane to turn them adrift. The general
scheme adopted in view of these facts is either voluntary or compulsory
retirement at a certain age, with weekly or monthly allowances, the
amount of which depends upon the length of service and the wage, the
expense of the system being borne by the employer with help from the
employee. The economic motives, of course, have been more potent than
the humanitarian. It has been good business policy, for it not only
prevents the waste of using worn-out men but it stimulates loyalty on
the part of the working force. Voluntary retirement is generally at
60 and compulsory at 70, but this varies greatly, as does the time
of service upon which aid is conditioned, which is usually from 10
to 30 years. Often the allowance is one per cent of the average wage
during the last 10 years; for example, an employee who has worked 40
years at an average wage of $50 a month would receive $20. The system
is generally administered by a board composed of both employers and
employees. Some firms expressly repudiate all contractual rights.
Inquiry was made in Massachusetts of over a thousand employers but only
three hundred and sixty-two replies were received; and of these only
four had regular systems of retirement pensions, although often special
grants were made. This was a very delicate inquiry and the excuses for
the absence of any pension system usually were that the business was
itself too insecure or that the working force was too unstable and
transitory.
Many fraternal organizations have old-age benefits. But the early
history of this movement is strewn with financial wrecks, because the
rates were too low and philanthropic impulses outweighed scientific
methods. Very few of these organizations had anything that can be
called old-age pensions or benefits, although some of them are now
coming to do so.
A few trade unions have superannuation features, particularly the
International Typographical Union and the Amalgamated Societies of
Engineers, also carpenters and joiners. But here, again, benefits are
small.
Industrial insurance is really life insurance for small amounts and is
designed for wage earners, with premiums payable weekly, collected from
homes by agents, and the premiums graded in multiples of five cents.
This method really began in London in 1854 and despite initial errors
the movement has grown rapidly, so that there are now many millions of
industrial policies in force in that country. But only very recently
have they attempted specific insurance against old age. Here the
premiums usually cease at 65 and the annuity is rarely over $100.
The Krupp Company at Essen had, before the war, one of the most
elaborate systems of age insurance, conducted solely for the benefit of
the employees and to which the Company contributed largely. The scheme
is complex and was often interpellated in the _Reichstag_, especially
on the point of forfeiture of payments of members who leave the firm.
Each workman pays 2½ per cent, which is deducted from his wages. The
system is chiefly for those who do not earn over 2000 marks a year.
Retirement is permissible after 20 years of service or on reaching
the age of 65. After 20 years the workman receives 40 per cent of his
earnings, increasing yearly by 1½ per cent up to a maximum, after 44
years, of 75 per cent. If he dies, his widow receives half his pension,
and each child 10 per cent. If the mother dies, each child receives
15 per cent. The total membership varies from 30,000 to 40,000, and
the average pension is 683 marks. A number of other large German
industrial concerns have adopted certain features of this scheme.
Most of the Friendly Societies of Great Britain make provision for
old age insurance but only to a limited extent, insuring at the same
time against sickness, unemployment, providing death benefits, etc.
The germ of all such work is found in the medieval trade guilds, and
the necessity of it was immensely enhanced by the development of the
factory system and what is called the Industrial Revolution.
After 20 years of discussion, the Sterling-Lehlbach Act, passed by
Congress and which went into effect in August, 1920, provides federal
civil-service pensions for all classes of employees upon retirement.
It is contributory and compulsory, requiring each to contribute 2½ per
cent of their salaries. The minimum age of retirement is 65; all must
retire at 70; and 15 years of service are required for eligibility to
an allowance, the annuity running from a minimum of $180 after 15 years
of service to a maximum of $720 after 30 years. The scheme takes no
account of the amount of salary at the time of retirement and certainly
$720 is no inducement to a man receiving $2000 to resign.
In recent years there has been a growing conviction not only that the
salaries of teachers must be increased, “but some kind of retiring
allowance provided for all public school teachers, if teaching is to
become a profession.”[136] These are provided by nearly every country
of Western Europe; and in 1916, 32 states in this country had made some
provision for the retirement of teachers, most of them contributory
systems where teachers insured themselves against disability.
Our country, however, is still far behind others in this respect.[137]
The first city-school system to provide retirement funds was in Chicago
in 1893, followed two years later by a New Jersey mutual-benefit
plan, and there are now eight or nine types of state, county, and
city pension systems in the country. The peculiar difficulty here is
found in the fact that one-fourth of our 720,000 school teachers leave
teaching every year, making the average term of service four years and
causing 185,000 new inexperienced teachers to begin each year. Thus few
expect to benefit from such a system and so long as it is voluntary
it is utterly inadequate. “While pensions and tenure help to secure
and hold good teachers, they also make it possible to free schools
with social justice and dignity from superannuated and incapacitated
teachers. This is almost as great a benefit as the others to the
schools, the children, and society.”
There are two volumes[138] which, as Professor H. S. Pritchett well
says in an able article on pension literature (_Fifteenth Annual Report
of the Carnegie Foundation_, 1920) “mark the close of one period in
the history of pensions and the beginning of a new scientific one.”
The most difficult question is the method of calculating the amount of
superannuation benefits. If the basis is the flat rate, this is simple;
but if it is the average of the salary given during the last five or
ten years, or during the whole period of service, the difficulty in
determining the amount of actual contributions to yield the prospective
benefit becomes very great. Teachers’ salaries are, especially now,
very unstable. A pension system based on anticipated pay leaves too
much in suspense. It is difficult to provide pensions on a subsistence
basis, which also bears some relation to final salary. If the pension
is too high, there is temptation to retire too early; if it is too low,
to retire too late. Ultimately, too, teachers must be able to migrate
without loss or change of status and this would involve reciprocity
between different cities and even states. In New York, before the new
system went into effect in 1921, there were 2,000 different rates;
and in Pennsylvania, 86. The new system of New York, which developed
because the old one had settled into bankruptcy, although optional
for teachers appointed before 1921 is compulsory for those appointed
after and the pension is to consist of half the average salary during
the last five years; the payment is not to exceed $800 and this will
be paid after 25 years of service. The old view which held that the
very word “pension” suggested a cripple and real manhood would compel
everyone to lay by for old age, and which flattered those who entered
their profession in youth with the hope that in old age they “might be
permitted to sun themselves on the veranda of a state poorhouse,” has
entirely passed away. But pensions are no longer considered as a form
of charity or a form of paternalism, or even as a reward for service.
They only demand of the teacher the same thrift as do savings and their
proper function is to secure efficiency of service and they should be
regarded “as a condition of service just the same as a salary.” Most of
even the best recent systems, like that of the District of Columbia and
the Y. M. C. A. officers’ pension plan, which is just about to go into
operation, are a compromise between the old and the new ideas. The same
is true of civil-service pensions in New York state and city.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1920 had a
total fund of $24,628,000 and its retirement allowances for that year
were $875,514.04, with allowances then in force to 555 individuals, or
an average to each of $1,568.77. The fund was originally administered
solely in the form of gifts but the unexpected number of applicants
made it necessary to gradually change to a contractual plan involving
very moderate contributions from the institutions benefited, which now
include those of Canada as well as of this country. It is one of the
most wise and beneficent gifts of the great philanthropist who founded
it and its influence in giving permanence in the sense of security to
active professors still efficient, and relieving institutions of those
past their usefulness to make way for younger men, is unquestionably
for good.
The President of the Foundation has grappled with the whole subject of
industrial pensions. It was at first planned that the same principles
should be applied here as those in the more stabilized professions
but this is impossible because of the labor turnover each year,
which amounts to 100 to 200 per cent of their employees in some
industrial establishments. It is one of the functions of the pension
system to reduce the turnover and to secure continuity of service and
avoid migrations. Many systems do not provide for the return of the
employee’s contributions in the cases of withdrawal or dismissal, or
for the use of such contributions for other purposes, so that the
fund accumulated would soon, in some cases, run into millions. It
does not follow, however, that the opposite tendencies now manifest
to seek a solution of the problem in a non-contributory scheme are
sound, for this would still encounter the opposition of labor unions,
who see in all such schemes a return to feudalism or an attempt to
make labor stick to its job by the use of vague promises, to the
fulfillment of which the employee himself contributes in the long
run in the form of depressed wages. The Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company, however, seems to have found a way out and has proposed to
“write annuity contracts maturing at the age of 65 under which the
pension is purchased each year in small units representing either flat
rate or a percentage of salary. The employer, the employee, or both,
make a contribution each year toward the pension to fall due on the
retirement of the employee,” who receives a bond each year that assures
him a pension when he retires, each bond being complete in itself. This
scheme costs little to administer and it meets the objection against
a non-contributory system, that although pensions defer pay only the
employee who survives in the same service until retirement receives the
benefit promised, by the provision that this bond is given each year
and becomes his property, to be realized at a fixed age in later years.
Frederick L. Hoffmann[139] gives us one of the sanest and most
compendious summaries of the negative views on this whole subject.
Present systems have not eliminated poorhouses or the pauper’s grave.
Of the 1,981,208 individuals in the United States over 70, according
to the census of 1898, a great majority would welcome a pension; and
of all legislation this is most irreversible. On the contrary, old
beneficiaries constantly agitate for more. State pension systems,
too, do not materially reduce the cost of charitable relief, whether
indoor or outdoor. Only in a last resort should the state attempt to
do what can be done by private institutions or by private individual
foresight and nothing should discourage voluntary thrift of any kind.
Where pensions have caused the removal of beneficiaries from asylums
or almshouses, the results have generally been unfavorable. Pensions
are chiefly of benefit to those not within the scope of poor law
administration or private charitable aid. It is just this class which
pensions would help that is now most efficient in helping themselves.
If the family is at all kept up to its ideal, the young will help the
old as they have been helped by them. This is not charity but mutual
aid based upon mutual obligation for service rendered and there can
be no substitute for this. It is this class that forms the backbone
of a nation and which, by even moderate foresight, could provide for
a modest support in their old age. The billions of dollars that they
have invested in savings banks and in insurance institutions of various
kinds show that they are not unmindful of the future. Legislation is
needed to stamp out fraudulent enterprises designed to attract small
savings on the plea of large returns; therefore, security should be the
first consideration in such investments. The prevailing wages should
make it possible for the masses of wage earners to provide the support
necessary for their old age, at their own cost and in their own way,
if they are given sufficient intelligence and motive and could feel
sufficient security. To take an example, 5 per cent of a wage of $900
per annum, or $45, commencing with the age of 30 and continuing to
65, would produce an annuity of $450. Of course, the earlier in life
the periodical payment begins, the smaller would be the annual amount
required to be paid. The fact is that parents who have done well by
their children seldom come to grief in their old age, except by special
misfortune. Nothing must be done to weaken the virtues here involved.
The view that old-age pensions should be given as a right and not as an
act of charity is one-sided, because wage workers have not spent their
lives in behalf of the state but have sought to aid themselves in their
own way and sold their services to the highest bidder.[140]
L. W. Squier[141] tells us that of the 18,000,000 wage earners in
the United States, about 1,250,000 reach the age of 65 in want and
are not sufficiently supported by public or private charities which,
in round numbers, cost the country $250,000,000. Of the 2,000,000
non-fatal accidents Hoffmann estimates per year, the old, to be sure,
have somewhat less than their share. The United States Bureau of Labor
lately estimated that $220,000,000 per annum is the average the laborer
has to pay for medicines alone, not including doctors’ bills, and about
79 per cent of those in almshouses are either physically or mentally
defective. Our total pension outlay for the War of the Revolution,
that of 1812, the Indian wars, Mexican, Civil, and Spanish, in regular
establishments and unclassified, he estimates at $4,230,381,730.
Despite the world unrest there are probably ever increasing numbers who
look forward to a quiet old age, and we must depend more and more upon
inculcating thrift wherever possible and encourage all to earn more
than a living wage.
Present-day man, at his best, is certainly far below the standard,
for nowhere among wild animals do we find so many with defective
teeth, vision, tonsils, bowels, flat foot, etc., and the rejection of
nearly one-third of the drafted men for physical unfitness was a most
significant fact. The trouble is men will not take pains to prolong
life and still shrink from medical examinations at all ages. Some tell
us that old people do so most of all, fearing to know the truth about
their condition.
This very cursory sketch must suffice to show the increasing interest
in and the growing magnitude of the economic problem of old age. But
before closing this chapter let us glance at the efforts of the new
Life Extension Institute to prolong life and increase efficiency.
It is said to be “five per cent philanthropy,” and all those whose
lives are insured are to make a definite effort to avoid sickness
and defer death. Members are inspected gratis and all others can be
for a moderate fee. A regular system of examination for repairs is
provided for, just as all manufacturers do for their machines, with
a written report to the person’s family physician. At the start the
Postal Life Insurance Company turned over to the new organization
its well established system of examinations for policy-holders and
the Metropolitan Life made an agreement for periodic examinations.
The company’s conservation policy leads an impaired man to consult a
physician before it is too late, and this, we are told, has reduced
the death rate among those examined. They plan to extend this over the
whole country. Two-thirds of the profits beyond 5 per cent are to go
toward increasing the further usefulness of the Institution. Judge W.
H. Taft is chairman of the Board of Directors while Irving Fisher is
chairman of the Committee of One Hundred on Hygiene.[142]
In the _Nation_ of January 8, 1914, commenting on the hygienic
reference board of the Life Extension Institute the writer tells
us that they will even tackle such problems as ventilation, how to
clothe and feed the body, etc. Some have advocated compulsory annual
examinations for all. This the _Nation_ condemns. There is the danger
of false diagnosis as to degree or kind of defect. An ailing man might
be injured by knowing the seriousness of his trouble. It might detract
from the joy of life and to compel it would be an undue invasion of
liberty, for it is not like vaccination and similar measures necessary
for all.
What the old need is an occasional examination of sight and hearing, of
respiratory, circulatory, digestive, and perhaps sexual system, each by
an expert, with hygienic and therapeutic suggestions based upon these
results. This the Life Extension Institute does not attempt to furnish
and it is perhaps too much to expect yet.
A few other voluntary organizations for the benefit of the old should
be mentioned here.
The “Borrowed Time Club” of Oak Park, Illinois, dates from the year
1900 but was reorganized in 1911, and in 1920 had 294 names on its
roster. It admits only those of seventy years of age or more and has
clubrooms of its own in which it holds weekly meetings. One of its
most impressive customs is an annual meeting devoted to the memory of
the brethren who have died during the year, with a service at which
a floral tribute is laid upon each vacant chair placed in a line on
the platform by younger members of the families of the deceased.
Political and religious questions are barred. There are no fees but
a voluntary offering once a month, and any citizen of whatever creed
or race, whether rich or poor, is eligible. Fraternal sympathy and
companionship are fostered. There is music and a prayer at most of the
meetings, illness of members is reported on, current events discussed,
and a program usually provided. “The main purpose of the organization
is to bring happiness to others.” There are perhaps a hundred and
fifty associate members. This club has several branches, and others of
similar name and character have been established in other cities.
To the writer, the name of the club seems unfortunate in assuming the
Biblical limitation of life at three-score-and-ten, as if we were
incurring indebtedness and living on by the special indulgence of
Father Time if we surpass that age. Why are we debtors after more than
before this age, when the fact is we are living on capital accumulated
or inherited and in no sense on credit? The religious features that
seem to characterize every program are well and no one could have
anything but commendation for the interest displayed in sick members
or in the annual tributes to the dead. But the thanatic outlook from
the “west window” should not predominate and the discussion of current
events and interest in vital problems should be kept most lively to
offset the attitude of patheticism to which the old are only too prone.
The Sunset Club, at present largely composed of women over sixty, has
little organization although it has many branches in various parts of
the country. Its purpose is not only to have old people help and be
helped by others to useful occupations but to supply reading matter,
chaperones, etc. Anyone can start a club anywhere, intellectuals can
get together, the rich can help those in need, those with unoccupied
time can help those who need sympathy and companionship, those with
happy homes may occasionally open them to the homeless, or they can
simply form good cheer circles. There are no dues but volunteer funds
have sufficed for this “silver-haired sisterhood,” which has often
provided friends for the friendless and employment for the unoccupied.
Many women of the more or less leisured class have thus found spheres
of usefulness which they preferred to bridge, gossip, “kettledrum or
kaffee-klatsch.” Some branches of the club have an exchange where
members can send things that they make for sale. Young couples,
especially brides, are often aided in starting homes.
In Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland, is a beautiful public park with an
avenue of old trees under which the old men of the district who were
come to the resting time of life used to foregather “for a crack and
a smoke.” Then a kind man, remembering the frequent rainy days there
were, presented them with an old railway carriage as a shelter where
this group could meet in shower or shine. Later the park was extended
and a public-spirited man erected a pretty little dwelling for the
club, red tiled, with a veranda all around. Here are games and books
and here the club meets at will. Provision has also been made for a
yearly summer holiday for the members.
Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, boasts an octogenarian society, the last
annual meeting of which on September 29, 1921, witnessed a gathering of
twenty-one members.
A sagacious and venerable correspondent has suggested to the writer
that the time is ripe for some kind of a senescent league of national
dimensions which should, of course, establish relations with all
existing associations of the old but should slowly develop a somewhat
elaborate organization of its own, with committees on finance, on the
literature of senescence, including its psychology, physiology and
hygiene, etc. If such an organization under any name were founded, it
should certainly have an organ or journal of its own that should be
the medium of correspondence, keeping its members informed to date
upon all matters of interest or profit to them, perhaps keeping tab on
instances of extreme longevity or unusual conservation of energy, with
possibly a junior department eventually for youngsters of fifty. It
should concern itself with the phenomena connected with the turning of
the tide of life, which so often occurs even in the fourth decade. It
would be interesting to know how such an organization would appeal to
intelligent old men and women. That it might do great good is hardly to
be doubted.
CHAPTER V
MEDICAL VIEWS AND TREATMENT OF OLD AGE
The self-knowledge that doctors give--Insidious approach of
many diseases--Medical views of the old age of body and
mind (senile dementia)--Charcot--G. M. Humphry--Sir James
Crichton-Browne--H. M. Friedman--H. Gilford--H. Oertel--A. S.
Warthin--W. Spielmeyer--I. L. Nascher--Sir Dyce Duckworth--Robert
Saundby--Arnold Lorand--T. D. Crothers--C. G. Stockton--W.
G. Thompson--M. L. Price--G. S. Keith--J. M. Taylor--C. W.
Saleeby--C. A. Ewald--Raymond Pearl--Protest against the
prepotence of heredity in determining longevity.
By an instinct that is very deep and strong most old people shrink
from realizing just what their stage of life is and means, although
most are ready enough to discuss such symptoms as are forced upon
their consciousness. Disguise it as we will, old age is now only too
commonly a hateful and even ghastly thing. Even those most garrulous
and pessimistic about their infirmities are often prone to an almost
fetishistic focalization upon certain symptom-groups of their own to
the neglect of others by the same mechanism by which general anxiety
may come to a head on a single phobia, which is thus exaggerated,
because all the affectivity of their more general state finds an
outcrop in some special fear. This mechanism is the same, too, as that
by which love may find a vent for itself in some amatory fetish. Few,
indeed, are the old men, and perhaps fewer still the old women, who do
not seek to seem to others younger than their real physiological age,
and all even to their innermost selves are prone to dwell more on what
the great deprivator leaves behind than on what he has taken away.
Childhood and youth long forward, old age longs backward.
Wishing to really know myself as old, I subjected myself upon my
retirement to the examination and tests of some half dozen medical
experts for eyes, ears, heart, lungs, digestive tract, kidneys, and
even sex, but was surprised to find how hard it was to do so. A strong
minority of my impulses preferred the ignorance that is often bliss.
There are no mental tests of generally recognized validity above the
teens, so that we have no criteria for determining psychological age
for even the elderly, while psychoanalysts refuse on the express
authority of Freud to take on patients over forty. When it was well
over I was glad, for most organs and functions were found to be in
fair condition, although one was in need of some special care. I
realized anew, however, that there are no gerontologists, as there
are experts for women, children, etc., and that barring acute attacks
I must henceforth, for the most part, be my own physician and that I
must give far more attention than ever before to keeping well and in
condition. Body-keeping for the old is a very personal and pressing
problem requiring much time and attention, and the methods that are
successful differ so widely that the diet and regimen good for one
might be dangerous, if not fatal, for another. But my chief interest
for months centered in rather voracious medical and psychiatric
literature upon senility and its disorders till my friends thought me
in danger of growing morbid and predicted and feared hypochondria.
Gruesome and depressing as it all was, it had nevertheless a certain
grim fascination to know what a cohort of disorders encamp about and
prey upon the aged, any group of which is liable to assail and perhaps
take the citadel of life by storm. Evasion of these enemies gives a new
sense of heroism.
Rheumatism, lumbago, varicose veins, calcified arteries, compensated
for by enlargement of the heart, its valvular leaks and weakness, high
abnormal blood pressure, adiposity or progressive emaciation, shaking
palsy, cramps, bronchitis, asthma, shortness of breath, gout, stone,
Bright’s disease, diabetes, constipation, piles, hernia, prostate
troubles, tuberculosis, cancer, dyspepsias, flatulence, nausea,
vertigo, flaccid and atrophied pudenda, feeble voice, defective sleep,
failing eyesight and hearing, weakness of muscles, gaps in dentition,
rather more hygienic than the complete edentate state; and beyond
all these and many more the certain prospect of death just ahead or
around the corner, liable to come from many of these causes or from
any one of them already so well advanced that to know is no longer to
prevent it--these are the things the old face if they have the courage
not to flee from real facts. One or more of these maladies is sure to
strangle, starve, bleed, poison, or paralyze us suddenly or slowly,
and that ere long. Some of us will die from the top down with dementia
more or less developed, while for others some vegetative organ will
collapse and drag down with it all the rest of our powers, which might
otherwise go on for a decade or two. These are the things that often
make the old pessimistic. They are the secrets of age that must be kept
from the young lest they interfere with their joy of life and which
religion and philosophy have done their best from the beginning of
history to mitigate. Thus the soul of the old, when it confronts the
sternest of all facts at close quarters, grows more and more prone to
seek diversion than consolation, for the former in fact is the chief
resource of senescence although, as I shall indicate later, modern
science is slowly evolving a third and better one.
Meanwhile, since medicine is far from having yet developed any
systematic or coherent gerontology, although it has marshaled many
facts and given us many hints toward such a science, it has seemed to
me that in the present state of knowledge I can serve the reader better
by epitomizing, without any attempt at systematization that would be
certainly premature, the _aperçus_ and the standpoints of those who
seem to me in recent years to have written more wisely than others upon
this theme, as follows.
The only attempt at a history of what medicine has done for old age
that I can find is in an old book by Charcot[143] in which he attempts
to list and characterize the far too few studies of any importance made
upon the subject up to that date. He urges that medical science should
give far more attention to it.
Dr. G. M. Humphry[144] gives us a memorable study of five hundred
old people of over eighty years of age, including an equal number of
males and females. He stresses the fact that the descending changes of
development are just as orderly as its earlier ascending phases and
that civilization enables us to see far more of the natural processes
of senescence than was possible when the conditions of life were ruder,
for we can now promote the powers of self-maintenance to a degree
impossible before. “The chief requisite for longevity must clearly be
the inherent or inborn quality of endurance, of steady, persistent,
nutritive force, which includes recuperative power and resistance to
disturbing agencies and a good degree of balance between the several
organs.” That is, each must be sound in itself and have due relation to
the strength of other organs. “If the heart and digestive system are
disproportionately strong, they will overload and oppress the other
organs, one of which will give way.”
His findings indicate that both men and women of average size and
stature live longer than those much larger or smaller. He thinks, too,
that there must be some trait associated with the development of the
tubercle bacillus, “which is not only not incompatible with longevity
but is not infrequently associated with it”; and this condition he
found in eighty-two of the cases he studied. Most of them belonged to
long-lived families, had enjoyed good health, appetite, and digestion,
had taken little medicine, eaten little meat, been only very slightly
addicted to alcohol, had been good sleepers, and rarely suffered from
long or exhausting diseases. Most had been much out-of-doors. The
average number of teeth in all these subjects was six for men and three
for women, and only fifty-seven were entirely without them. The upper
or alveolar part of the jaw tended to be absorbed and only the later,
firmer growth of the lower part of it to be retained. In primitive
man probably loss of teeth would materially shorten life. The skull,
which generally becomes lighter, may also sometimes become heavier and
increase inwardly as the brain shrinks. The rate of the heart varies
very little as age advances. From eighty to ninety years he found it
averaged 73–74 beats per minute in men and 78–79 in women. Respiration
was 19–20 times per minute and, like the heart, was very slightly
accelerated, although the respiratory change might be due to the
prevalence of bronchitis in old people.
He found little tendency to senile dementia and many of even the very
aged had their mental faculties intact and took a keen interest in
passing events, possessed clear judgment, and were full of thought for
the present and future welfare of others. “It is no less satisfactory
to find that the active, even severe and long-continued intellectual
activity of the matured brain seems in no way to impair its enduring
qualities, and that good, earnest, useful employment of the body and
mind are not only compatible with but even conducive to longevity.”
Of 157 of the males who replied, only six had ever had diseases of
the prostate or bladder, so that in general he thinks that “the aged
body does not seem to be, on the whole, prone to disease.” Few of his
returns indicate the presence of any special malady. “We know that
even cancers, when they attack old people, often make slow progress in
them and sometimes fail to make way at all, remaining stationary or
even withering, and the susceptibility to contagious disease appears
to decrease from infancy to old age. Quite as remarkable is the fact
that recovery from wounds, fractures, or operations, seems to be quite
as rapid, and sometimes more so than in middle age. Indeed, wounds in
the old heal very quickly provided they do not slough, indicating two
opposite tendencies.” He also finds evidence of greater vital energy
in parts nearest to those diseased provided they are able to live at
all, as if nature had recuperative processes of stimulating parts
adjacent to lesions. He chronicled few more surprising results than the
infrequency of sclerosis.
* * * * *
Sir James Crichton-Browne’s long article[145] is a classic and is
based on very comprehensive statistical and other studies. He tells
physicians that it should be their great aim to grow old themselves
and to be the cause of old age in others. The marked increase in the
duration of life in recent decades has been almost entirely confined
to its early stages. After 45 the decline in the death rate has been
insignificant; and after 65, as we have elsewhere seen, it has actually
increased. Thus the proportion of men ripened by experience has in fact
declined. What carries off the old? Not fever, smallpox, or phthisis
chiefly, as was once the case, but the following in order of frequency:
cancer, heart diseases, nervous troubles, and kidney complaints, and
these are all degenerative diseases due not so much to intemperance as
to the new strains of modern life, which are less felt in the country
and less by women.
Society needs to have life lengthened instead of abbreviated at its
extreme end but men and women to-day are growing old before their
time. We often have deaths reported to be from old age between 45
and 55. Indeed, atrophy and debility often come prematurely. The
long-sightedness of old age seems to begin earlier than it used to do
and the increased number of those who wear glasses cannot be entirely
explained by better diagnosis. It is quite clear that those who live
in hot climates show these optical symptoms of old age earlier than
Europeans. The teeth, too, are certainly degenerating earlier than
formerly, and early baldness is probably increasing still more. Senile
insanity or atrophy of the brain is certainly more common and appears
earlier. It abounds in our metropolitan asylums where human wreckage
accumulates. Very many enter the outer circles of melancholia without
proceeding to dementia and still fewer proceed to suicide, the rate
of which is also rapidly increasing after 45. Touches of this kind of
depression are very often felt at the turning point of life or soon
after, perhaps at the first discovery of gray hairs, and many are
tormented in private and perhaps in the silent watches of the night
by the realization that youth is leaving them. Such, however, is the
law of nature, for even the stars and planets grow old, as we know by
their spectra. The voice is not normally shrill or quavering but may be
very strong unless the crop of wild oats, which always ripens in later
years, is too rank. Conscience may awaken near the turn, especially if
too many dregs have accumulated in the cup of life or the machinery
has been overstrained. The fact is, the infirmities often attached
to age may, each of them, in single cases be absent, so that typical
old age is rare, and any one of them is far less prevalent than is
generally supposed.
Our life is made up of a series of evolutions of a group of different
functions that develop serially, beginning at different age epochs,
reaching their maximum vigor, and then declining. The hyaline cartilage
dies of old age when bone is formed of it, as the milk teeth do. The
thymus gland has completed its growth at the third year and slowly
atrophies with every sign of age. The nervous system has the most
sustained evolution. The infant, child, youth, are learning higher
coördinations, and the psycho-motor system is not completely evolved
till the end of the teens. The hand and arm centers continue their
development and do not attain their perfection before thirty. The
writer studied workmen in various factories and found that in many
cases proficiency in manipulation grew for a decade and then became
stationary at thirty, beyond which it could never be increased, and
later declined. This decline took place sooner in highly specialized
than it did in more general movements. In some artists, however, manual
skill may increase to a great age.
In the brain centers that preside over language there is continuous
development, so that it has been carefully estimated that our
powers of expression culminate between 45 and 55. Demosthenes’ _De
Corona_, his masterpiece, was delivered at the age of 52; Burke’s
impeachment of Hastings, when he was 58; and many authors have
thought their vocabulary and command of language at its best during
this decade. After this, faint symptoms of aphasia and amnesia begin
to show themselves. But it is in the frontal lobes, in which it is
now believed that the powers of attention, reason and judgment are
located, that the acme of development comes still later, perhaps in
the decade ending at the age of 65. Indeed, Moebius and others have
shown that the cortical layers believed to be most closely associated
with mentation are still developing as late as the age of sixty-three.
Bacon produced the first two books of the _Novum Organum_ at 59; Kant’s
_Critique of Pure Reason_ was produced when he was 57; Harvey’s great
work on the circulation, when he was 72, etc. It is certain that long
after memory of names and physical vigor have begun to abate, the power
of comparison, inference, and above all a moral sense, which is perhaps
the finest and latest of all our powers, comes to full maturity.
The ideal of a greater old age is not an idle dream and Browne insists
that physicians should strive themselves to live to be 100 and to
make their patients do so. The best antiseptic against senile decay
is, he thinks, active interest in human affairs. This, at any rate,
should be our working hypothesis. A man of 80 should realize that he
has one-fifth of his life before him. He tells us of a man of 84 who
attempted suicide because he could no longer support his parents,
and of another of 102 who had undergone a successful operation for
cancer of the lip without anæsthetics. Of course, senile involution,
when cell growth is more than counterbalanced by cell decay, is the
natural pathway to death, and a man ultimately dies of it when there
is no question of disease. But the brain, like the lens of the eye,
may become flatter and more longsighted, focusing better on objects
far than those that are near. There is no short cut to longevity.
Its achievement must be the work of a lifetime. Sympathy, which goes
far deeper than courteous manners, is fundamental for the successful
treatment of old age.
H. M. Friedman[146] begins his comprehensive treatise with biological
and embryological considerations, and here perhaps he makes his
most original suggestions. The higher the plane of the animal, the
more marked is cell differentiation or specialization and this
affects most cells. Once a degree of differentiation is observed, no
backward step to a previous state of generalization, regeneration, or
rejuvenation is possible. The higher the ascent of the cell in the
plane of differentiation, the lower is its power of rejuvenation.
Connective tissue, muscle fiber, and cylindrical cells are the least
differentiated and therefore have the greatest power of regeneration.
Nerve cells have the least because their work is of a high order and
they are most specialized. Nerve fibers are mere conductors and they
and epithelial cells have probably the greatest power of regeneration.
Again, the more differentiated the cell, the more rapid is its
development, early decline, and death. Precocity even of the separate
cell purports early maturity. “So senescence is an increased
differentiation of the protoplasm, while rejuvenation is an increase of
the nuclear elements at the expense of the protoplasm.” The increase
of nuclear material allows fission and the formation of new cells.
Thus the degree of differentiation is greatest as fission or mytosis
is least. The power of regeneration is in direct proportion to the
power of cell fission. Thus “the greater the cell differentiation, the
smaller the mytotic index.” With maturity the decrease of the mytotic
index, or the number of tissues into the composition of which the cell
can enter, becomes restricted. The cells in the original germinal layer
have before them the possibility of entering into the structure of any
tissue, but as cells differentiate the germinal layers take on a more
structural character and leave the field to the entrance of cells into
different tissue formations more restricted, since during development
the number of tissues yet unformed or undifferentiated becomes less
and less and once a cell has assumed a personality it must continue to
follow it up and cannot diverge from it. This is the law of genetic
restriction. The younger the cells, the greater their multiplying
power and the greater the tissue possibilities they can choose. Hence
morbid tumors are formed from young cells of higher mytotic index
whose genetic restriction has not progressed far enough to inhibit
range and rapidity of growth. Before genetic restriction young cells
may become one tissue or another. Injuries causing cell degeneration
of the young cells are often, therefore, the seats of morbid growths.
The young or undifferentiated cells forming malignant amorphous tumors
and growing in tissues alien to them develop rapidly, probably because
they are deprived of the “social” restriction to overgrowth that they
would have in their own cell society. Thus the presence of young cells
in out-of-the-way places or where older and more differentiated cells
would be expected should excite suspicion. “Young cells, like young
children, are safest among their own.”
Generally a cell in an organism lives long enough to reproduce its
kind; else the species would die and death does occur in many lower
organisms immediately after ovulation. The young thus grow rapidly,
while old age is the period of slowest growth; and indeed the rate
of growth depends upon the degree of senescence. The tendency to
senescence is at its maximum in the very young and the rate of
senescence diminishes with age.
As to the cause of senility, physiologically it is desiccation. At
birth there is most fluid and gaseous material, but organization
demands solidarity. Lactic acid may retard the growth of intestinal
flora and the up-keep of the intestinal toilet by larvage. Intoxication
of some kind is a factor in many of the changes accompanying senility.
Lorand thought age was chiefly due to atrophy and degenerative tissue
by failure of the function of the ductless glands, especially the
thyroid. The myxedematous look and are old. Thus the limit of life
is a matter of excretion. The special organs of elimination cannot
act to their full capacity or to that of vital necessity because
of the replacement in senility of parenchyma by fibrous or fatty
tissue. The retained waste products increase the sclerotic changes and
produce a vicious circle--irritation, intoxication, and atheroma. The
degeneration of the first stage produces insufficiency of the organs of
elimination and the degeneration of all organs.
As to physical manifestations, there is atrophy of the higher and more
specialized cells and they are replaced by hypertrophied connective
tissue. The heart is enlarged but this is compensatory for the
stiffening and narrowing of the lumen of the great vessels near it and
so the blood pressure is increased. The changes in bone, ligament,
and tendons are extreme, with increased enervation throughout the
body and perhaps senile marasmus, which may bring extreme emaciation
or osteomalacia and even bone deformity. This may affect nervous and
mental elements, like senile asystole and changes in the blood. The
temperature, however, is not affected.
As to mental manifestations, this author says they are extremely
variable, insidious, and have a very wide latitude. The vitality
of the mind should be far greater than that of the body. Old age
dulls conscience, may bring vanity and new ambitions, petulance,
irritability, misanthropy, and slows down activity. But the best
average barometer of mental failure is memory, the loss of which comes
as an advance guard of many symptoms. The old have no faith in the
young, for example, Virchow and Agassiz would not accept evolution.
There is a universal tendency to overeat, although we should “descend
out of life as we ascended into it, even as to the child’s diet.” The
first sign that food must be reduced is increased blood pressure.
If only lower ideals were exercised in early life, the reversion is
ominous. Age is never chronological except in the legal sense. It is
often called a vascular problem. The old have immunity from certain
diseases such as eruptive fevers, typhoid, phthisis, and old tissues do
not seem to be good media for these disease agencies, but age is very
prone to pneumonic infections and erysipelas.
As to premature senility, in general its symptoms are identical with
those of mature senility. The old are particularly prone to flush
under very slight emotional strain and cannot throw off care or
control patience. As to the causes of premature senility, abuse rather
than use is the key. There is an unhealthy tendency to force decline
by overtaxing the body and the nerves. It is those who do this who
take the pace that kills, taxing themselves beyond their capacities.
Alcohol and syphilis are specific forerunners of arteriosclerosis but
overeating is worse than alcohol, especially of meat. “Most people eat
about twice as much as they need, and the high cost of living is the
high cost of overeating.” The dietitian’s table of food values should
always be consulted but there has to be wide latitude for individual
adjustments. Modern efficiency ideals bring high pressure. Change
is the greatest regulator. We now relegate older men to innocuous
desuetude to give the younger a chance to forge ahead.
As to the proper sphere of the aged, there have been opposite views.
Perhaps there are no more than five hundred really great men in history
who were clearly above mediocrity. Galton thinks 70 per cent of their
work was completed before 45, and 80 per cent before 50. Dorland
analyzed four hundred celebrities and concluded the average age of the
commencement of their activities was 24 years--in musicians perhaps as
early as 17 and scientists at 32. Science is hard and requires a large
fund of experience and knowledge. The greatest average for activity in
all endeavors together is about 40. To enjoy life after 40 one must
have attained some degree of success, for the saddest thing is to
reflect on many years of effort and no accomplishment.
As to medico-legal aspects, eccentricities may prevent the aged
testator from being allowed the right of testament, but in general the
mental symptoms of advanced senility differ from senile dementia only
in degree.
As to the future of old age, those who are not senile have a distinct
place as counsellors. They should excel in strength of reason, cool
judgment, and breadth of view. One may be past the age of discretion
before one is old in years. The conservative tendencies of this
period are valuable as checks to the exuberant impulses of youth. The
dependent aged are a burden and their support is often a handicap. With
modern progress the number who fail to keep pace increases with the
speed of advance and this has to be complemented by the fact that the
old are increasing in numbers. With few exceptions man lives longest of
any animal. Everything does grow old except vanity and the more perfect
the organization the earlier the aging and the sooner the end, for it
is the perfect more surely than the good that die young. Every stage
of life is marked by a limit, but this limit varies greatly. “Every
man past forty is a fool, physician, or a divine, and most people
practically throw away their lives.” The lower the scale of education,
the greater the hazard of life. Longevity among pure muscle workers is
rare. We know little of the influence of race, but we know that women,
lean people, the married, the religious, on the whole, live longest.
Haeckel believed in “medical selection” and pointed to the fact that
some have greater power to resist disease. Is this desirable for the
integrity of the race? “Death is a process, not an event.” Man does
begin to die early in life. The bicycle rider has to keep going to keep
erect, and so the old must keep working. The first vacation is often
fatal.
Hastings Gilford[147] regards the development of the human body as
a whole, or of any portion of the body, as describing a curve that
ascends from the time of the union of the two genetic elements to a
maximum at which there is the greatest development of specialization
in function and the least in the general characters, such as those
of multiplication. The curve then begins to descend, with a gradual
and progressive loss of differentiation in form and function and an
increasing tendency of certain cells to multiply. Decay of certain
cells during advancing age leads to their becoming bodies foreign
to their host, and this, in turn, calls forth the phagocytes which,
walling off the foreign body, become themselves transformed into
fibrotic tissue. The three characters of old age are decay, fibrosis,
and proliferation of non-specialized cells. As the more specialized
cells retrogress, with the loss of specialization they take on an
increased tendency to multiplication. “Reversion ... is the keynote of
the proliferation in old age wherever it occurs.”
Granting the foregoing statements regarding the anatomy and biology of
old age to be true, Gilford even believes that we can explain cancer
in terms of senility. He says: “Thus the typical cancer is made up of
a collection of cells native to the part, but of more embryonic type,
and these cells are surrounded by collections of round indifferent
cells derived from fibrous tissue and from other low class structures,
such as endothelium and leucocytes.” The fibrous tissue, moreover, is
often increased, as it is in the senile organ. These changes may be
interpreted as follows. Certain somatic cells become aged while the
tissues around them are still in a state of comparative youth. They
express their senility by returning to a more embryonic form, and as
they do so they increase in number, the faculty of multiplication being
one of the manifestations of regression. But as this qualitative change
takes place they become alien to their surroundings and, as foreigners
or rebels, stimulate into action the mechanism of phagocytosis. Not
only is there an incursion of lymphocytes into the parts but the
connective tissue and endothelial cells in their vicinity revert to
their embryonic state and begin the work of phagocytosis. But as a
fact they have to deal with neither the effete products of molecular
degeneration nor with an inert foreign body, for though virtually
strangers cancer cells are by no means inactive. Hence the attack is
abortive, except in so far as the phagocytes, by forming new fibrous
tissue, tend mechanically to limit the proliferation of the cancer
cells. For in the meantime the fixed connective tissue cells are
themselves rapidly proliferating, with the result that when they cease
their activity and return to their resting stage, groups of cancer
cells are cut off by intersecting bundles of fibrous tissue, while
the whole mass is surrounded by an incomplete capsule of the same
structure. This tends to limit the encroachment of the growing cancer,
and were it not for the lymph spaces or capillaries, which are the gaps
through which the growing cells escape, no doubt the limitation and
strangulation of cancers would occur far more often than they do.
It will be noticed that the more nearly the cells of a cancer approach
the embryonic state the more rapid will be the growth, and the less
opportunity for fibrosis the more malignant the cancer. Gilford
maintains for this unique theory that it is satisfactory, based as it
is, upon facts reasonably interpreted, and that it covers all of the
ground.
Horst Oertel[148] holds that the origin of cancer in the liver is a
transformation of multiple groups of its cells and that there was a
direct change of atrophic, degenerative, existing liver cells into
cancer cells while they were still in perfect continuity with each
other. In this degeneration of normal to cancer cells the former lose
their typical protoplasm, the nucleus grows small and its chromatin
structure faint, till little of it remains, with only a faint rim
of surrounding protoplasm. At this point some of these cells show a
very striking change in rapid, irregular production of rich chromatin
arranged in a less structural definition and leading to marked
enlargement of them. There is a first destructive stage with extensive
loss and granular degeneration of protoplasm. In the second, incipient
regeneration shows and the nucleus is markedly enlarged, with irregular
production of small chromatin granules; while in the third stage,
the carcinomatous, we have a new type of cell following new laws and
breaking with the former physiological arrangement and structure. The
new functional type involves rapid independent growth with a distinct
disregard of original source and surroundings and with progressive loss
of continuity and power to secrete bile.
Thus he, too, holds that cancer seems an embryonic reversal and
involves no specific changes but is a phenomenon of senescence, a
degeneration of cells with an unequal decline in cell functions. Thus
races of cells develop that lack the differentiation of undegenerated
cells but are still endowed with vegetative and reproductive
properties. His idea that the degeneration and injury to cells could
be responsible for growth, was severely criticised. It was said that
any change that meant injury could never be progressive but would
lead to diminution of functions. But the author still holds that
injury may produce growth of all kinds of tumors, for example, in the
pancreas, growth and cell division is dependent upon the release of
certain inhibitory influences that exist in the normal well-balanced
cells. This upset may be caused by certain liquid solvents but the
idea of formative stimuli on the whole seems to hold; namely, cancer
cells arise out of degenerative and atrophic changes, so that injury,
degeneration, and growth do not exclude each other but stand in genetic
relation.
That organs that have reached full maturity and differentiation are
stable and fixed in cell type and organization is false. Our organs are
constantly in active regression, degeneration, and progression, and
it is difficult to separate pathological from physiological changes.
The pancreas is particularly in constant regression and progression.
Thus it is peculiarly unstable and the limit of normality in its
variations cannot be determined. Senescence is accompanied by multiple
degenerative changes in many other organs and tissues, and associated
with these are various benign and malignant tumors that seem to result
from degenerative changes. Thus Oertel’s idea of endless proliferation
as a result of differentiation is not an idle speculation but rests
upon an anatomical and experimental basis.
A. S. Warthin[149] says that syphilitic cases are generally regarded as
cured if the Wassermann reaction is negative but there are very many
cases that this escapes. It is commoner than is supposed, the usual
estimates being that from 5 per cent to 15 per cent of deaths are due
to it, but this writer for America and Osler for Great Britain, place
it at 30 per cent. “Syphilis is the leading infection and the chief
cause of death, particularly in males between 40 and 60, and in the
great majority of cases its symptoms are myocardial, vascular, renal,
or hepatic, and this is often not recognized as a remote result.” The
author has never seen a marked case of syphilis cured. Most die as a
result of mild inflammatory processes of the viscera and blood vessels
rather than from paresis or tabes. It is progressive and marks the
individual as damaged goods. Even immunity is bought at a price. All
the organs must be examined before it is pronounced certainly absent.
It is a spirochete-carrier. It tends to become mild but at any time
the partnership between the spirochete and the body may be disturbed
and the tissues susceptible to the violence of the spirochete may be
increased so that the disease again appears above the clinical horizon.
Chronic myocarditis is the most common form of death.
W. Spielmeyer[150] says that in the last decade the clinicians and
pathological anatomists have discussed old age more than in preceding
decades. We know that organs are used up and that their substance is
not fully replaced. The functionally exciting parenchyma is injured
by its own function and in this metabolism the quality and sometimes
the volume of the organ is reduced. Thus old age is a function of the
work of the organism and it seems to be an intrinsic quality of cells
to use themselves up. Many do not regard age as a normal physiological
process but with Metchnikoff think it is due to injurious substances,
that is, endogenous toxins that are more important than the exogenous
factors, so that blood vessels, glands, and muscle and ganglia cells
degenerate. But the cortical cells, as the most sensitive of the
organism, are more often injured. Metchnikoff thinks that the higher
elements of the tissues are in conflict with the lower and are overcome
by them, the phagocytes being left masters of the field.
Few, however, hold this view. Ribbert, Naunyn, Hansemann, and
Nothnagel think that outer and inner injuries should have precedence
in accounting for old age. But without these coöperative factors there
is a physiological determinant of the organism and its parts to be
used up and they become senile and lapse by physiological processes,
while Naunyn thinks that it is perhaps a general law that every organ
fulfills its functional task only by impairment of its complete
organic integrity. This using up of an organism by its own work occurs
first in the brain and the central nervous system. There is a general
decline in weight, even in the fourth or third decennium, which is
accelerated in the seventies and may reach one hundred grams (Naunyn)
and, in pathological states, still more. It is, therefore, of great
interest for the relation of function and the use-up of organs that
brain atrophy is not usually uniform or diffuse but that there is often
a difference between the right and left hemispheres in the diminution
of their volume. The left hemisphere is more used and usually more
atrophied than the right. The left convolutions, therefore, suffer most
reduction.
Among the earliest and most uniform changes due to age is the
regressive transformation of the blood vessels as in sclerosis. As the
central tissues suffer from a using up of their nervous substance, the
central vessels are soon involved. Till lately we have assumed that
these disease processes in senium were a result and expression of the
primary affections of the blood vessels in these organs. But it now
appears that as in other organs, for example, the kidneys, grave age
changes can occur while blood vessels are intact. So in the central
organ grave independent age changes can occur without being caused by
the blood vessels. To be sure, they often concur for the simple reason
that the nervous system, like that of the vessels, is found affected
oftenest and earliest in old age. But the assumption of a dependence
of central nervous degeneration was an erroneous conclusion from the
observation that by these frequent degenerative processes in the walls
of the vessels there were, at the same time, phenomena of using up
of nerve substance. “The changes of both organs can, despite their
frequent combination, be the independent expression of age and quite
independent one from the other.”
Every study of the psychosis of regression and age must start from
this fact and we must seek to distinguish the forms of weakness of old
age due to central tissues from those that have their cause in the
primary weakness of the blood vessels. For sclerotic senile dementia
anatomy has already more or less basis. For the various forms of brain
sclerosis it is now possible to propose an anatomical diagnosis,
although it is impossible to have a very definite clinical picture of
what takes place.
Outside these two chief groups of organically conditioned psychosis
and degeneration there are many processes not yet certainly determined
anatomically. These belong neither to sclerotic brain disease nor to
proper senile dementia. They differ also in their general aspects
from the average case of the imbecility of old age, and if they
are classified with it, this rests only on superficial grounds and
it is the problem of pathological anatomy to help clear up this
clinical-psychological question. It is a little here as with innate
and childish mental weakness, which we anatomically distinguish as
idiocy and imbecility with partial success, just as we are trying to
distinguish the psychosis of old age to make it conform to anatomical
principles.
With the great recent progress of anatomy we are just at the beginning
here, the chief result so far being the possibility of distinguishing
senile involution and its morbid traits with a view to eventually being
able to make an anatomical differential diagnosis, such as we must do
to really get at the root of the problem of senile dementia. From this
point of view other processes can readily be derived, and some of them
histologically, like regression. The anatomical investigation stands
in temporal relations with the idea of senile dementia and it must be
defined or widened enough to do this. Perhaps we shall be able to have
a good anatomical picture of senile dementia beginning with the fifth
and sixth decennium and even to explain atypical forms and show their
relation with the central system.
Here, then, the author, starting from an anatomical basis, begins with
a study of forms that are atypical in localization, intensity, or
temporal onset. Then he can discuss the mental diseases that are based
on sclerosis. So he first discusses briefly those psychoses that rest
upon clearly recognizable but not yet very distinctly determined brain
troubles that deviate from the ordinary senile processes and those,
which so far as we can now see, are really sclerotic. Then the long
series of psychoses, the anatomical substratum of which we do not yet
know, and the functional processes of this age can be discussed. In
doing this, more than in the case of many organic processes, we shall
find a great difficulty in proving for such diseases their specific
senile or climacteric character. We shall constantly face the objection
that we have here to do only with mental diseases that usually come
in other ages and only have peculiar traits on account of the age
of the patient, as is the case with many depressive and paranoiac
symptom-complexes of regression that resemble those of age.
Thus the distinction of regressive psychoses from senile changes,
this author thinks, cannot be carried through by grouping them in the
decennia in which they arise. It would be better to distinguish them as
progressive and incurable, or otherwise, but this could be done only
with further distinction of our anatomical and clinical data and we
shall perhaps still lack that for a long time.
When, therefore, in these regressions we start from anatomy and the
psychoses connected with it at this age of life, we may seem to
overestimate the achievements of histology. We at any rate do not
underestimate our ignorance here. But with the great confusion of
opinions based on clinical observations we believe we are justified
in this point of departure. Ultimately anatomy will very likely be
our guide in all clinical work as well as in the field of psychiatry,
physiology, and psychology. We shall doubtless also learn very much
more about the localization in which the degenerative processes of age
begin.
_Senile Dementia._--Textbooks and articles on old age generally state
that the changes in psychic personality that occur are identical with
normal ones, only in intensified degree. The traits most commonly
specified are: limitation of the circle of ideas, qualitative and
quantitative loss of elasticity, pauperization of interests, dwelling
on _gemütlicher_ activity, lapses in attention, Ziehen’s “egocentric
narrowing of the life of feeling,” perhaps hypochondriacal symptoms,
mistrust, inflexibility, lowered power of activity, and resistance
against everything that is new. Works in general pathology, like
Hübner, Ranschenburg, Balint, and Lieske deal with these in more detail.
In general, there is a sinking of psychic activity and change of
character which suggest physiological involution, and these occur--in
some, earlier, and in some later. If we compare these psychic traits it
would seem that there is only a quantitative difference between normal
old age and senile dementia, the latter having only gone farther or
faster. The decision of this question is for pathological anatomy and
here Spielmeyer’s studies coincide with those of Simchowicz. The older
an individual is, the less sharply either clinically or anatomically
can it be decided whether it is normal or senile dementia. There are
the same changes in the nerve cells, neuroglia, the myelin sheaths,
and the mesoderm tissues; also in the blood vessels the changes are
identical, the difference being only in degree. Fatty degenerations of
the ganglion cells also occur in both. Sclerotic changes of elements
are general. The neuroglia cells with normal seniles have lipoidal
material in abundance, and the gliafibers, especially in their upper
surfaces in the cortex, are increased. The walls of the blood vessels
have undergone the same regressive changes and acquired the same
fatty material by infiltration, and even the so-called senile plaques
are found. Thus in general there is the same using up of the central
organs. We are, thus, not yet in a position to determine from the
brain alone, if we know nothing of the individual, whether he was a
senile dement or a very old man. The older a man is, the more we find
the Redlich-Fischer plaques. Thus the senile dement shows neither
anatomically nor clinically any essential differences from those found
in the normal senium.
I. L. Nascher[151] thinks that too little study has been given to
the physical changes in involution and still less to the mental.
Occasionally the approach of senile dementia gives rise to forensic
questions. There is a general neglect of the subject of geriatrics.
This author thinks the brain reaches its limit of physical development
at about 30, but Bunsen and Mommsen both did much of their best work
after their brain had grown quite atrophied, so that quality comes in.
The integrity of these cells depends upon nutrition. We have few blood
examinations of the aged and these do not show any marked clinical
or microscopic differences between maturity and senility, while the
process of senile involution rests apparently on defective nutrition of
cell tissues. Those who do good work in age generally focus into one
channel and their degeneration is shown in other fields. We usually do
not think of our somatic state until some discomfort compels us to do
so. One may have lessened interest in former hobbies or events of the
day; but if impairment of reason keeps pace with that of memory, he
will not know that his powers are failing. He then begins to think of
his body and its preservation as more important than wealth or fame,
wants to live, and gives more attention to prolonging life.
There is often a change of temperament into egoism, perverseness,
peevishness, loss of ambition, religiosity, inability to bear slight
discomforts and depression. The child thinks little of the future,
while in maturity hope tends to paint a future haloed by happiness and
in senility the future is death, notwithstanding what all philosophers,
poets, and preachers say. Our mental attitude is simply a resignation
to the inevitable. One patient had a daughter devoted to him whose
absence for a moment he could not bear, and once this so angered him
that his total attitude toward her changed to one of dislike and
suspicion. In another case a woman of seventy-six underwent a complete
change of character. Arrogance gave way to humility; in contrast to her
former independence, she now craved sympathy. Then later she changed
again and made extraordinary demands upon her children, wanted the
latest styles in everything, etc. In another case memory, reason, and
will grew weak in an old manufacturer. He lost his way on the street,
a child could divert him from his purpose, and he clung to a notebook
by day and night till complete dementia came. Another man who was
noted for carrying through everything he planned, even breaking up
partnerships, when old became not only susceptible to advice but could
be easily turned from his purpose.
Thus senile mentality shows temperamental changes. There is
introspection, with natural fears and unnatural phobias, hope for
strength and vitality or even for beauty, and often overweaning
biophilism. Action is slow; fatigue, quick. The mind may be often
trivial on all other matters but yet sound in the center of interest.
Personal attainments and achievements are often magnified, and
complaints are exaggerated as calls for sympathy. Moral deterioration
may be first. Lapses are condoned that were once condemned. The old
man may slowly come to take interest in what is low and vulgar. This
moral decadence is entirely apart from the pathological condition in
which the _cœundi potentia_ is lost while the desire remains, and the
recrudescence of desire may occur in the senile climacteric but is a
forerunner of senile dementia.
The æsthetic sense causes the old often to neglect cleanliness in
person and clothes, to be untidy in their room, expectorate, scratch in
public, make disagreeable sounds, and disregard proprieties generally.
Women show these traits, but in less degree, and depression is less
pronounced. There is no sudden realizing of aging and fear of death is
more often overcome by religion. Sometimes the intellectual faculties
deteriorate more rapidly, but moral and æsthetic impulses change less.
Sometimes old women take greater care of their appearance and seem to
be vain and to fight old age. Men occasionally at a great age take
a new interest in their appearance, dyeing their hair and becoming
dandified, which may show recrudescence of sex.
After the climacteric depression may pass to apathy. Death is less
fearful as the mind weakens; there is less concern for the future
and life is more in the present. Even early recollections grow dim,
although such cases may be roused momentarily. There may be marked
preference for association with children. There may also be childish
acts and garrulity. The family history given the physician by an
elderly patient is often unreliable. Insignificant symptoms are
magnified; so are former attainments. Old patients often claim they
possessed wonderful constitutions, perhaps that they were never ill,
despite indubitable marks of disease.
In homes for the aged there is much suggestion. If one scratches,
the rest do, without pruritus, so that to isolate the author of this
contagion cures it. The same is true of groaning and grunts and even
tremor may be acquired by association. In one case, cutting off food
stimulated to overcome tremor. Pain, cough, and stiffness are magnified
for sympathy. The fear of pain of an operation may cause the denial or
hiding of symptoms, although weakened mentality makes sense impression
less acute, either from peripheral or central causes, so that it is
hard to tell whether this is due to local anæsthesia or weakened
mentality. Tests used for malingerers may be necessary to determine
sensitiveness and other symptoms or even harshness and threats may
bring out the truth. Though cruel, these are sometimes necessary for
correct diagnosis.
Friends often observe changes sooner than the immediate family but the
latter must corroborate the statements. The physician should determine
if an oikiomania exists and so must be alone with the patient, as he
will not encourage such an attitude in the presence of the object of
his hatred. If the physician tries to reason him out of his delusion,
he thinks he is in league with the hated person and therefore hates him
more. If the physician has incurred the patient’s dislike, he should
leave him for a few days so that he may forget. Sometimes the dislike
of seeing the doctor grows from day to day. One had a suspicion that
the doctor was in league with a daughter, and so put him out. A few
days later the doctor was called for, and only when the wife told
the patient why he would not come did he remember his suspicions and
thereafter refuse to see him. In one case, having incurred an old
woman’s displeasure by excusing her son, whom she feared, the doctor
left and was soon called again, all being forgotten. The person hated
should stay away and the dislike may pass, especially in the case of a
physician who has been necessary to the patient.
The great factor is the senile’s sense of dependence on others. The
old man does not realize that one more mouth means less food for the
children or that his carelessness makes work or his peculiarities
alienate sympathy and affection. Perhaps he feels he is a burden and
his death would be a relief to those for whom he provided in earlier
years. So delusions of persecution may arise.
What can we do? Symptoms are often bettered at an asylum. Phobias
vanish and so do fears for the immediate future. All energies may be
guided to one channel and the person may be made useful and his fear of
being useless thus cured. The old are thus often anxious to do little
services to show they are not worthless and little tasks can occupy
them without strain. A patient pensioned after sixty-five years of work
could get no other employment, felt useless, instead of being cheery
became depressed, and was cured by being re-employed. The influence
of young people keeps up interest in life--especially marriage with a
young person, the development of a hobby, collecting anything, such
as stamps, coins, books; witnessing new sights, but not fairs, where
numbers confuse.
Drugs give temporary relief. Small doses of morphine give exhilaration
and arouse the imagination, but its effects soon wear off. “Phosphorus
in solution is the most effective drug for prolonged use.” It is a
mental and nervous stimulant and aphrodisiac, increasing mental power
and producing a sense of well-being. One-fiftieth-grain doses several
times a day, stopping just as soon as the intellect begins to brighten,
are often beneficent. This can be kept up for years. Perhaps amorphous
phosphorus may be used.
* * * * *
Sir Dyce Duckworth[152] asks: Why are some remarkably young for their
age and others old? It cannot all be explained by anything in the
individual life or habits. Perhaps it is in part because the ancestors
lived a hard life. We want the degree of inherent vitality proper to
each individual patient. This would be as important for prognosis
in pneumonia as are the hæmic leucocytes. Arterial hardening may be
local only, for example, radial. There are two kinds of arterial
degeneration, namely, the brittle and the tough, the former more liable
to cause hemorrhages and fatty degeneration.
Very important is the discovery that the rigidity of calcified arteries
is greatly increased immediately after death. The lime is present
before, as disclosed by the X-rays, but it is like wet or unset mortar
and only sets after death under the influence of carbon dioxide and
the rapidly diminishing alkalinity of the blood. The so-called air in
the arteries after death is chiefly carbon dioxide and this explains
why such arteries do not rupture so frequently as we might expect.
Premature death of parts of the body is constantly occurring, for
example, baldness, teeth. One may be vulnerable to one and another to
another type of injury or bacilli. Syphilis is mainly a conjoined trait
or infection and greatly predisposes to tubercle. Indeed, a syphilitic
patient may be regarded as a prematurely aged one in spite of a good
constitution, because there is always the possibility of sequels or
parasyphilis, general paralysis, etc.
Among the early mental signs of interstitial nephritis is an explosive
temper. Fits of hilarity and weeping may alternate (first pointed out
by Clifford Allbutt). The costal cartilages ossify generally before
the sixth decade and this is often premature. A hobby may no longer
avail to preserve mental activity, and “the golf ball to-day is not
seldom one of the beneficent agencies for this purpose.” Cirrhosis
of the liver is longer averted in the patrician than in the plebeian
because the laborer becomes senile sooner than others owing to his
life of strain in all weathers. In arthritis, the nodosity of joints,
especially in the fingers, in the form of _Heberden’s_ nodes, is
thought by some an indication of longevity. They are often found in
those who have few classical symptoms of gout and few reach eighty or
ninety without these trophic changes. Dupuytren’s contractures and
the camptodactylia of Landouzy, or incurved little finger, are among
indications of a gouty habit and are not truly rheumatic lesions.
Indolence of the bladder does not imply prostatic symptoms. Very
common are widespread catarrhal disturbances, as for example, tussis
senilis, with much flux of mucus, often rich in sodium chloride. Fits
of sneezing, also of hiccough and even gaping, are frequent.
The main treatment for early senility is physiological righteousness
(Sir A. Clark). We must especially know the degree of vigor, of
vitality, and specific habit of body. We must pay attention to the
degree of blood pressure and early indications of renal inadequacy,
orthostatic albuminuria, the tendency to epistaxis, and maintain as our
keynote moderation in all things. The best idea is that of universal
service which would bring all the world together on a high plane. The
author refers with a good deal of skepticism to Metchnikoff’s Bulgarian
bacillus but mentions Saundby’s book with great praise.
Robert Saundby, M.D.,[153] has given us what is, to date, the
best handbook, both for practitioners and for old people who are
intelligently interested in conserving their life and strength, on the
common infirmities and care of the aged, exclusive, for the most part,
of nervous and psychic symptoms. He first describes normal old age,
then its diseases in successive chapters--diathetic infections, and
those of the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and genito-urinal
systems. Perhaps most practical are the dietaries he gives for
different stages of old age and different diatheses. He commands a wide
knowledge of Continental literature on the subjects he treats. He has
a just sense of the dangers of stressing specifics from, for example,
Pythagoras, who thought there was a special virtue for longevity
in honey; Bacon, in sweating; Harvey, in avoiding acids; down to
Blanchard, in sal volatile; blood drinking cures, olive oil, licorice,
etc. He believes that Metchnikoff’s panacea and the undue stress laid
by Lorand on thyroid therapy have not escaped the dangers of undue
focalization. He allows a very wide latitude not only in regimen and
exercise but food, condiments, and even stimulants, for the aged.
No one can read his account of the changes that take place in each
part and organ of the body as they are successively described and the
very different treatments that each needs as it goes wrong, without a
sense of the fatality with which these vast cohorts of life-quelling
symptoms advance and, in view of the many strategies the lethal
processes make use of to undermine the fortress of life, without
experiencing a profound sense of the hopelessness of watching out in so
many directions and realizing that, as differentiation proceeds in the
different organs, any regimen helpful to one would almost certainly be
harmful to others.
Arnold Lorand, an Australian physician,[154] bases his work on the
principle that man does not die but kills himself. He does not
philosophize but tells us that while it is impossible to create a young
man out of an old one, it is quite within the bounds of possibility to
prolong our youthfulness by ten or twenty years. In other words, we
need no longer grow old at forty or fifty. We may live on to the age
of 90 or 100 years instead of dying at 60 or 70. Old age is just as
amenable to treatment as chronic diseases. He has great faith in the
present possibilities and still larger hopes for the future of serum
therapy, for to him life is most of all connected with the glands. He
discourses upon the hygiene of throat, lungs, heart, kidney, liver,
stomach, bowels, reproductive organs, and the rest with a bewildering
volume of details but good perspective, and the reader is again
disheartened to find that the treatment prescribed for one organ is
deleterious to another. Indeed, Lorand’s somewhat encyclopedic and
undigested data, despite the common sense and practical spirit in which
they are presented, bear, on the whole, less upon old age itself than
upon general hygiene at all stages of life, so that his title is to
that extent a misnomer.
He sums up his practical conclusions in the form of twelve
commandments, which are, briefly, to keep in the open and take plenty
of exercise; eat according to rule; bathe and move the bowels daily;
wear porous underclothes; early to bed and rise; sleep where it is dark
and quiet; rest one day each week; avoid emotional strain; get married;
be temperate in the use of alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee; and avoid
over-eating and -heating.
* * * * *
T. D. Crothers, M.D.,[155] thinks we have not sufficiently considered
the abilities of old age from a medico-legal standpoint. He also
thinks that if we do not live to be 100 something is wrong with us
or our ancestors. We all carry a large reserve that many die without
drawing upon, and this reserve is especially available in old age (he
develops this point psychologically). Many old people with melancholia,
hallucinations, and the characteristic physical defects of old age
have, nevertheless, a higher kind of sanity to which their juniors
do an injustice by the tests they propose. They are quite capable of
making wills and otherwise deciding the large questions that come
before them and often do so from a broader point of view than younger
men. It is possible, then, to rise to a higher level, to a kind of
graduate school of life, to use the unused, etc. Again, the varied
experiences of long life give mobility of mood up and down what Adler
calls the life line, so that the old have a larger assortment of
viewpoints and even moods, to say nothing of greater ups and downs in
horizon and standpoint generally.
* * * * *
C. G. Stockton, M.D.,[156] suggests family records and pride to avoid
mixing good stock with that which decays early. He recognizes the great
contributions of the dentist and oculist, deplores the neglect of old
age, and insists that the aged do respond to treatment very readily. He
also deplores the attitude of many physicians who discourage resolute
methods of curing defects and warding off evils because the patient
is old. He stresses the value of emunctory procedures both within and
without.
* * * * *
Dr. W. G. Thompson[157] deplores the fact that physicians have given
so little attention to old age and that the medical literature upon
the subject is so meager. The very old have survived all corroborative
evidence as to their age, their failing memories confuse tradition and
fact, and they come very often to take pride in their age and so add to
it. The author’s study is based on the census statistics of 1910, which
record, from 90–94 years, 6,175 deaths; from 95–99, 1,427; 100 years
and over, 372. The respiratory diseases as a group took first rank
as the cause of death; organic heart disease, apoplexy, and Bright’s
disease occurring in frequency in the order mentioned. Among diseases
of the digestive system enteritis outranked all others.
As age advances and its activities and diversions become less and less,
locomotion is reduced, along with acuteness of sight and hearing,
and the pleasures of the table remain the only gratification of a
monotonous existence. Very many accustom themselves to the habitual
use of laxatives to counteract the effects of overeating, and often we
have obstructions, especially of the rectum or colon, that may become
fatal. This, however, is more often seen in those who eat too little
and become perhaps atrophic and marasmic. These people become careless
of matters of the toilet and obstructions often cause death. Apoplexy
is relatively rare among centenarians and carcinoma also declines as
a cause of death after the ninetieth year. Indeed, the disease that
does not develop until after the ninetieth year can scarcely be due to
hereditary factors and the infrequency of cancer in the later stages of
life emphasizes the constitutional resistance to extraneous influences
that the majority of centenarians possess in a high degree. Acute and
very quick or fatal pneumonia is not infrequent.
One very peculiar difficulty in treating old patients is their
prejudice and obstinacy in matters of diet and hygiene; because they
have lived so long they naturally think they know better than anyone
else what is good for them and, with a certain irritability, resist
interference. As a rule, they are relatively very susceptible to the
action of drugs and two-thirds of the ordinary dosage for adults
generally suffices. Very often the very aged suffer from the neglect
of personal cleanliness. There are many diseases common from the sixth
to the ninth decades of life that are very rare later, for example,
tuberculosis. Suicide is very rare, the census of 1910 recording only
one of a centenarian and nine among nonagenarians. The latter generally
have a long-lived ancestry and many families are remarkable for this
trait. But this is by no means essential. The aged often exhibit
no predominant symptom of any one disease to which their death is
attributable, and hence “senility” is so often given as the cause of
death. Tranquillity, moderation, and regularity seem to be the chief
factors in securing a long life and a peaceful death.
* * * * *
M. L. Price, M.D.,[158] attacks Metchnikoff’s theory of old age by
assuming that in addition to all toxins and inflammations there is
always an old-age exhaustion of a vital principle that he calls
bioplasmine, that may, to be sure, be mainly caused by Metchnikoff’s
agencies but is equally affected by effort, exposure, growth, and
reproduction. He sagely predicts that the solution of the problem of
old age, which he thinks is the central theme of all medicine in the
sense in which he conceives it, because every disease brings senile
phenomena to some part of the organism or to the whole of it, will
be solved by biochemistry, although he admits that it may take many
generations of investigation to achieve this final solution.
* * * * *
George S. Keith, M.D.,[159] after a long life of practice, has grown
suspicious of current methods. “I purge, I puke, I sweat ’em; and if
they die I let ’em.” As to foods, he believes that the old should only
eat when they are far hungrier than they usually are and leave off
eating when they now habitually begin a meal. Appetite, which seems
to give momentum to all the assimilative processes, is never utilized
to its full extent. Sick animals often go off alone and succeed in
recovering and he believes humans have the same instinct. He is,
therefore, bitterly opposed to forced feeding, even for the insane,
save under very exceptional conditions. The sick should generally be
allowed to eat whatever they wish, perhaps in moderation, or to go
entirely without food. Probably primitive man and all animals had to
undergo occasional long fasts and this serves to tone up not only the
nerves but the entire digestive system. Instinct is a far truer guide
than doctors who interfere with it think. Once the fevered patient who
reveled in dreams of cold was kept warm; now we know better.
This author has, thus, an almost implicit trust in the cravings and
dislikes of the sick and would indulge them almost to the limit, as
the German hygienist, Sternberg, would do to a perhaps even greater
degree. He is also a great believer in rubbing and massage. Hot water
plays an important rôle, too, while he attaches very special value
to licorice. Doctors are often too anxious to save patients from all
pain, perhaps by the use of means that entail worse consequences.
Pain has its place in nature and the doctor should also try to have
the patient apply the cure of patience. Pain is nature’s cry for
help, to which she often responds as she does not to other stimuli;
and benign as is the rôle of anæsthesia, it should not blind us to
the tonic effects pain often exercises. So sleeplessness may not be
an unmixed evil in certain cases and sleep artificially induced is
usually of poorer and less restorative quality. He has found fixating,
spontaneous retinal phosphenes a good soporific method. He believes
that very many diseases would cure themselves if the patient could be
induced to simply rest and starve. Although he is not a homeopathist,
he nevertheless believes that dosages of medicine are far too large.
He insists that old and experienced physicians ought to, and that the
best do, learn a great deal from experience in keeping themselves well,
and that every physician should accumulate thus a store of knowledge
based on self-observation, and may well, with profit, always be mildly
experimenting upon himself. As age advances he would regulate diet and
treatment largely to the avoidance of accumulation of uric acid in the
system. He found great reinforcement for himself in making a breakfast
of coffee only, etc.
* * * * *
J. Madison Taylor[160] notes the paucity of literature on this subject
that he found in trying to read up on it and thinks it warrants far
more attention. The foundations for longevity are laid in the first
few months of life and bottle-fed babies are shorter-lived and much
less likely to reach old age. Those who spend their infancy and
childhood, too, in large centers are less long-lived than those brought
up in the country. A serene mental view and capacity for deliberate
enjoyment of whatever betides he places first of all and advises
self-education in serenity. The less we eat and the less variety, the
longer we live, and on this the author lays great stress. We must put
aside, as we advance, some articles of diet of which we are fond.
He believes dentists have greatly interfered with longevity because
man was meant to be more or less toothless and thus to be reduced in
old age to childish diet and fluids, while the dentists enable us to
eat anything we ever did, which is against Nature. He speaks of fads
and their dangers, for example, one old lady thought she prolonged her
life by eating a great deal of salt. The indolence and indifference
of age is a great difficulty. If one persists in trying to keep up
indefinitely, the results are often amazing. Medical aid should be
sought more constantly for lesser ills. Man is like an old horse--if he
once gets thoroughly out of condition it is hard to bring him back. G.
M. Gould has believed that unfit glasses have shortened the lives of
many eminent men. But open air is a _sine qua non_ always.
Tessier gives a clinical picture of approaching death--(1) heart and
blood vessels, (2) lungs, (3) kidneys, (4) digestive organs, (5) the
brain. Most agree that the heart plays the chief rôle in ending life
and many used to think that nearly all old-age diseases were from
arterial hardening. But this was doubtless much exaggerated. Old age is
a progressive diminution of all functional activities. All clinicians
recognize diatheses or a tendency toward disease and we can detect
them in their incipiency now far more than formerly. Age diathesis
means a lessened coefficient of resistance, quick exhaustion, and weak
repair. The author devotes great attention to obesity, which shortens
life, and he advocates various exercises of the extensor muscles, deep
breathing, and thinks much can be done to tone up and increase the
activity of the heart.
He thinks the effects of the menopause have been rather overestimated.
Exhaustion, especially induced by emotions, fatigue, anger, grief,
and fear, weaken the protective powers of the mysterious agents of
immunity. The mind is very liable to become fixed upon some ailment
and hyper-conscious, particularly near the menopause, and this is due
to failure of the organism to offer the same degree of resistance to
toxins and to a general lessening of functional activity.
He thinks we can postpone old age by the following agencies. We should
develop, not discourage, bodily exercise for without it there is a slow
retrogressive change. The more nearly the diet is reduced to bread,
milk and fruit, the longer the person will live and enjoy good health.
Some can go for long intervals without feeding though more thrive on
small quantities taken frequently. He condemns all purgatives and
would regulate by salads, nuts, fruit, and thinks the best drink is
buttermilk, which has salutary effects on both bowels and kidneys. Next
comes koumyss. Fluids are best taken in abundance, but if the heart is
weak they should be avoided before exercise, for this increases the
cardiac strain. If the skin is dry, he advocates dry rubs rather than
cold baths and olive oil occasionally, of which he says it is amazing
how much the skin will absorb. He speaks emphatically of the dangers
of chills and of the trend of all tissues to harden, stiffen, or lose
their elasticity. Tissues about the neck are particularly prone to lose
vigor. Regulated movements of the neck and upper truncal muscles often
improve hearing, vision, cerebration, and sleep, and the same is true
of friction. Most digestive disturbances, even those of early middle
life, are due to relaxation of the supporting tissues of the great
organs in the abdomen. This dilation is found in at least 60 per cent
of adults, and it produces a long train of alterations. The kidneys
are supported mainly by their blood vessels, so that if they sag their
circulation is impaired, and this kind of ptosis is very common. Hence
faulty attitudes are very important for all visceral ptoses, while
he finds much to commend in the use of abdominal corsets, even for
fleshy men. Elasticity of the ribs should receive attention and the
author prides himself on exercises that increase the elasticity of the
basal tissues which sclerosis is prone to assail. The capacities of
individuals for exercise in the open air can generally lessen the need
of medical supervision. With old people, the extensors should receive
more, and the flexors, less attention and there should be sufficient
stretching, torsion, etc.
As to the senile heart, it is generally assumed that the old should do
no more than they are inclined to do and perhaps even lead a vegetable
existence. But he believes that disinclination to movement means and
makes under-oxidization and causes decay and he is severe on what
he calls senile laziness. The healthier and happier old people are,
the more active they become. The life of a hothouse plant is bad.
Humphry found in most old people he examined little or no change in
the arterial system. Allbutt says there are many old people in whom
there is no arteriosclerosis. One common phenomenon of old age is the
loss of vascular tone and defective lymph circulation. The bones lose
weight and size and the walls of the shaft grow thin from within,
especially toward the end of the bones and most near the head of the
femur. Trunecek of Prague emitted the thesis that certain salts can be
introduced into the blood current that aid in dissolving the calcium
phosphate found in the structure of sclerosed arteries. So he injected
hypodermically a strong solution of sodium phosphate and magnesium
phosphate, which are normally found in the blood serum but only in
minute quantities. Others have introduced this by both bowel and mouth.
Anything that aids oxidation of tissues helps.
In another article[161] Taylor says almost nothing that is new
although there is much that would be practical to aging people. The
machinery has become a little worn and weaker in spots but the bare
surfaces have been abraded to meet each other so that there is less
friction and racking of the joints. The body cells are less irritable.
Degenerative diseases are very insidious. They increase in the
following order--liver, digestion, apoplexy, nerves, heart, kidneys.
One’s enjoyment of food is greater perhaps than discriminative. Many
reminders of age are overcome by warming up. Skin emanations may be
offensive. Traits of a mature mind are poise, deliberation, economy and
the largest output of judgment, like the Roman senators or seniors.
Irritability is common. Youth wants to know; age wants to be.
* * * * *
C. A. Ewald,[162] one of the most eminent of German professors of
biology, gives us one of the most condensed statements on the subject
of old age. He begins by contrasting the intense life of Berlin, where
the lecture was given, with the fact that all paths lead to the door
of death, which is nearest in war. The antique conception of death was
youth with a reversed torch; the medieval, a skeletal mower taking
pleasure in his work. The martyr’s love of death and even the passion
for Nirvana are probably more or less pathological. If we assume
15,000 million people on the earth and a death rate of 30 million per
year, we should have 81,192 deaths daily; 3,425, hourly; and 57 every
minute. The baobab tree of Cape Verde shows a life of 5,000 years. Some
have ascribed 500 to the swan. But nearly all data of great age are
discredited. Even that of Parr (152), who married with potence at 120,
and all the rest, are doubted. But the length of life is increasing.
In Sweden, of every 100 children of five at the beginning of the last
century, 27 reached 70; at the end of the century, 48 did so. In
Bavaria the number increased from 25 to 40; in Germany, in the last
twenty years, it increased from 30 to 39, so that we all have a better
chance of living long than we would have had if we had been born a
hundred years earlier. The average length of life in 1870 in Germany
was 37 years and has now increased to 42½. In France and England it
is 46 and in Norway and Sweden, 52. Cures of tuberculosis in the last
twenty years have reduced the percentage of its victims from 31 to 17
per 10,000, and vaccination has reduced the death per million from
smallpox to 5; while in Russia, where it is not compulsory, it is 520.
_A priori_, death does not seem necessary and yet for even protozoa
division often involves something like a very rudimentary corpse so
that investigators like Götte, Hertwig, and Verworn accept the tenet of
Weismann, with some slight reservation, if the corpse is to be taken as
the criterion of death.
Bees and the stork and other birds of passage kill or neglect their
old, while in ancient German myth old men often slew themselves for the
good of the community. Certain species eat their young rather than die
themselves and even this is for the interest of the species. A certain
wasp lays its eggs in the female plant and its young, when covered
with its pollen, fly to a male plant to fertilize it, although this
means their death. Thus death is a normative factor of development and
to this extent Weismann is correct. Life has three periods. In the
first there is an excess of energy and growth; then comes middle age
with an equilibrium, while in old age the relation of these energies
is reversed, so that the first and third stages contradict each
other. But everywhere life is dependent on nutrition and all death,
in whatever form, is due to its lack. So we have a kind of biological
circulation and a kilogram of body substance evolves a different sum of
total energy in each of these periods of life. The author gives us an
interesting cut of the contraction of the vertebrae and their padding,
which often in the old means ankylosis in the lower part of the spinal
column.
He dissents from the Conklin theory of the abatement of metabolism
as a cause of old age because he thinks this activity has a wide
range of play at all stages of life, monthly and even daily. Nor does
he accept without modification the _Schilddrüse_ (thyroid) theory,
although admitting that the endocrine glands play a very important
function. Nor does he accept Von Hansemann’s view of altruistic
nutritive disturbance, namely, that single cell groups are more or less
reciprocally dependent upon others for their activity so that they in
a sense work for each other. The physiological (that is, without outer
stimulation) collapse of groups of cells is especially connected with
the generative cells and their departure reacts upon the nutrition of
the whole body and in a sense weakens it (the atrophy of age). The loss
of the generative cells is physiological because they, in departing
from the body, represent the growth of a new organism. Hansemann gives
countless examples but they affect only the fact and not the kind or
method of growing old, which is a progressive process, and we still
are unable to answer the question why the generative cells in the
ordinary process of life are so soon destroyed or why so few of them
are devoted to this purpose.
The author sees much truth in Minot’s differentiation or cytomorphosis
of cells, according to which differentiation, which causes growth, is
also the cause of death. Minot himself says that the biologist can no
more grasp the essence of death than he can that of life. Science does
not know the difference between these two despite the impulsions of our
causal instinct. Horsley thinks the condition for a green old age is
the conservation of a sound thyroid. With its activity is, of course,
connected that of other glands.
He says it might be assumed in a period during which a whole generation
dies that the whole mass of putrefaction would cause infection. But
in a half-dozen German cities very carefully investigated along this
line it was found that those who lived in or near cemeteries were
as long-lived as others and even those who drink water that is fed
by drainage from well appointed graveyards are not infected; on the
contrary, in several places this water is purer than elsewhere. There
is only one exhumation in Germany for criminal purposes out of 600,000
corpses, but poison that might be detected by exhumation cannot, of
course, be traced after cremation.
Instead of the remorse, anxiety for friends, dread and pain, the
author, who says he has seen “many, many hundreds of deaths,” never
saw one that was not unconscious. There are often, perhaps even for
days, physical signs of great suffering but this is never felt; and the
author advocates special death rooms in hospitals because it is so hard
for onlookers that it is inhuman to allow patients to die in a ward
with only a screen in front of the bed. The review of life by drowning
people is a myth. It is the duty of the doctor to mitigate closing
pains by morphia and other means, provided these do not shorten but
rather tend, as they should, to somewhat prolong life. Even in death by
fire and torture the last stages are painless.
The Kamerlengo strikes the Pope on the forehead three times with a
silver hammer and calls his name and, if he does not answer, says,
“The Pope is really dead.” This is because hearing is supposed to be
the last sense to die. But often after death the muscles contract
spontaneously, even enough to move the body and this has made survivors
believe their friends were alive. The muscles respond to electrical
stimuli for hours. The pupil of beheaded people contracts to light. In
Charlotte Corday’s head the eyes opened. Dr. Rousseau saw a case in
which the heart occasionally beat twenty-nine hours after decapitation.
Generally death proceeds from the heart and its last beat marks the
entrance of death. Respiration, too, or the last breath is often the
mark of death because the carbon dioxide is not removed; hence we say
life is in the blood. Everyone at times wonders not only when he will
die but how. And it is hard to live so as to avoid pathological death.
A French nobleman, François de Civille, in the time of Karl IX,
appended to his monument the inscription: “Thrice dead, thrice buried,
and by the grace of God, thrice revived.” The riddle meant that he woke
first from his mother’s body at birth and twice in war was thought dead
and placed among the dead. But the absence of personal consciousness
is very unreliable because after long periods of lethargy many have
rather suddenly revived. There never was a doctor present at an
exhumation of a living man. Being buried alive is really a ghost that
has no justification in civilized lands. This has nothing to do, of
course, with simulation. Karl V simulated death in order to enjoy the
spectacle of his funeral, as Juliet allowed herself to be buried. By
contraction of the muscles of the neck and deep respiration the heart
can be checked and the physiologist, Weber, nearly lost his life thus.
Dr. Gosch tells of a Colonel Townsend who in the presence of Prof.
Cheyne stopped his heart and breathing, the latter tested by a mirror,
for half an hour until they were all convinced he was dead. But then he
gradually came to, though he died eight hours later.
Herter and Rovighi tested lactic acid and its effects on fermentation
of the large intestine and found negative results, so that we do not
have an arcanum against death or old age in this sense, although
insufficient excretion of toxins has much to do with it.
In his illuminating articles Professor Raymond Pearl, after showing
the novelty of natural death and how even somatic cells now seem
possibly immortal if separated from the metazoan body and that heredity
is a prime determinant of the length of the span of life, says we
must know more of the vagaries of germ plasm before society should
assume to control it, although such control sooner or later will be
necessary. The death rates for the four diseases that public health
and sanitary activities have been most successful in treating, namely,
(1) tuberculosis of the lungs, (2) typhoid fever, (3) diphtheria and
croup, (4) dysentery, have been materially reduced in the last nineteen
years. But if we compare four other causes of death, (1) bronchitis,
(2) paralysis, (3) purulent infection and septicemia, (4) softening of
the brain, on which health and sanitation have had little effect, it
is found that the rate of mortality from these troubles has declined
just as much, and probably a little more, in the same period of time,
although the numbers in the latter group are far less. “Hence the
declining death rate in and of itself does not mark the successful
result of human effort.”
Recognizing the fact that the essential cells in our body are
inherently capable under proper conditions of living indefinitely, the
problem that confronts us is whether environment or heredity has most
to do in determining the actual length of life. Pearl[163] concludes
that the death rate of the earliest period of life is selective,
eliminating the weak and leaving the strong, and that inheritance is
“one of the strongest elements, if not indeed the dominating factor, in
determining the duration of life of human beings.”
The duration of life in animals also depends on the total amount
of metabolic activity or work and it has been proven that rats, at
least, live longer under conditions so controlled that their activity
is lessened, so that the greater the total work done or total energy
output, the shorter is the duration of life and _vice versa_, work
accelerating the aging process somewhat as rise of temperature
does. Pearl says: “The manner in which the environmental forces (of
sublethal intensity of course) chiefly act in determining the duration
of life appears to be chiefly by changing the rate of metabolism in
the individual. Furthermore, one would suggest, on this view, that
what heredity does in relation to duration of life is chiefly to
determine within fairly narrow limits the total energy output which
the individual exhibits in its lifetime.” The duration of life of
an animal stands in inverse relation to the total amount of its
metabolic activity or, put in other words, to the work in the sense
of theoretical mechanics that it as a machine does during its life.
Or, to put it in another way, if the total activity of a unit of time
is increased by some means other than increased temperature, the same
result appears as if the increased activity is caused by increased
temperature. Pearl thinks that Steinach’s experiments on the sexual
glands, whatever their results for rejuvenation, do not prove “any
really significant lengthening of the life span.” Nor does he think
that Robertson’s experiments with tethelin from the pituitary gland,
whatever its effects upon growth, show that it materially increases the
length of life to a degree that has much significance statistically, so
that inheritance remains a prime determinant of longevity.
We are all born in one way but die in many. By international agreement
a mortality code has been developed with fourteen general classes
comprising 180 distinct units. Pearl would supplement this very
unsatisfactory classification by the following: (1) circulatory
system and blood-forming organs, (2) respiratory system, (3) primary
and secondary sex organs, (4) kidney and related excretory organs,
(5) skeletal and muscular system, (6) alimentary tract and associate
organs concerned with metabolism, (7) nervous system and sense organs,
(8) skin, (9) endocrinal system, (10) all other causes. This would
show organological breakdown rather than pathological causation. The
breakdown of the respiratory system is the chief cause of death, and
next comes that of the alimentary tract; these together constitute half
the deaths biologically classifiable. Next come troubles with the blood
and circulation. We may conceive these as three successive defense
lines, and it is against the first two of these that better health and
hygiene have been chiefly directed, having been most successful with
the respiratory system. Child-welfare, both pre- and post-natal, is
by all odds the most hopeful direction of public-health activities.
Pearl’s very important studies here confirm the conclusions others have
reached, that early pubertal years show the lowest mortality rate, and
he traces in detail for each age of life the mortality curves for each
of the chief groups of disease.
Very interesting are his conclusions touching the embryological basis
of mortality in which he attempts to trace the causes of death back
to the three primitive tissue elements, concluding that about 57 per
cent of biologically classifiable deaths result from the breakdown or
failure to function of organs arising from the endoderm, 8 to 13 per
cent from those that spring from the ectoderm, while the remaining 30
to 35 per cent are of mesodermic origin. The ectoderm has been most
widely differentiated from its primitive condition, as best illustrated
by the central nervous system, the endoderm least differentiated,
while the mesoderm is intermediate in this respect. Now, degrees of
differentiation imply adaptation to the environment and the endoderm,
which is least differentiated, is least able to meet vicissitudes.
“Evolutionally speaking, it is a very old-fashioned and out-of-date
ancestral relic which causes man an infinity of troubles. Practically
all public-health activities have been directed toward overcoming the
difficulties which arise because man carries about this antediluvian
sort of endoderm.” Prior to the age of sixty the breakdown of organs
of endodermic origin causes most deaths; next come breakdowns with
organs of mesodermic origin, and lastly those of ectodermic origin.
The rate for all these germ layers is relatively high in infancy,
dropping to a low point in early youth. In infancy the chief mortality
is due to endodermic defect; from about the age of 12 on, to faults
of ectodermic, and after about 22 to those of mesodermic origin. The
death-rate curve rises at a practically constant rate to extreme
old age. From about 60 to the end of life deaths from the breakdown
of organs of mesodermic origin lead. The heart generally outwears
the lungs and the brain outwears both because evolution is a purely
mechanical process instead of being an intelligent one. “It is
conceivable that an omnipotent person could have made a much better
machine as a whole than the human body which evolution has produced.
He would presumably have made an endoderm with as good resisting and
wearing qualities as a mesoderm or ectoderm. Evolution by the haphazard
process of trial and error which we call natural selection makes each
part only just good enough to get by.” All this, the author believes,
only strengthens the evidence that the most important part in longevity
is played by innate constitutional biological factors.
This view so commonly held, that heredity is the chief factor in
longevity is doubtless correct in general. But it is fatalistic and
directly tends to lessen the confidence of hygienists and physicians
in the efficacy of all their methods of prolonging life in the aged.
There is, we think, good reason to believe that there is a great
and now rapidly growing number of exceptions to this so-called law,
cases in which by conformity to right rules of living, age has been
increased many years beyond that which our forbears attained. Indeed,
the very fact of the gradual prolongation of life shows that the
hereditary predisposition to die at a certain age can be, to a great
extent, overcome. The psychological effect of this dogma of the
prepotence of heredity in determining the length of life is itself
not only depressing but may readily become, as psychologists can best
understand, a dangerous lethal agent with the old and cause those who
have reached the span of years at which their forbears died to succumb
to their troubles with less resistance. Indeed, it is one of the chief
purposes of this volume to show that the old-age problem is not merely
economic, philanthropic, social, or even medical, but also, when all
is said and done, perhaps chiefly psychological and that the future
welfare of the race depends upon the development of an old age due
not chiefly to heredity but to better knowledge and control of the
conditions of this state of life.
Senescence is, in no small degree, a state of mind as well as a
state of body, and the study of it as such has been so far strangely
neglected but is now in order. Even doctors who have told us most about
it have made few intensive investigations of its nature and there are
very few gerontologists; while the alienists who have described the
senile psyche have done so only in general terms that add but little to
what is obvious to common experience and observation. None have sought
to ascertain empirically from intelligent old people capable of telling
how they think and feel about their stage in life, or to determine how
far their attitude toward it was indigenous and how far it was really
due to the acceptance of current traditions that have come down to us
from a remote past and that no longer fit present conditions. How this
old tradition still influences even physicians may best be shown by a
few instances that have come under my own observation. A friend of 73
fell sick of pneumonia which soon involved both lungs. The excellent
family doctor had him removed to a hospital where expert care could be
added to his own. Soon all hope of his recovery was abandoned and for
a week friends who called or telephoned were told that nothing more
could be done and the end was certain and might be expected any time.
“He is 73, you know,” the doctor said. To-day he is well and daily
active in the very large concern he created. The father of an intimate
friend at the age of 69 fell ill from a complication of disorders the
family doctor diagnosed as old age and telegraphed his son to hasten
home from a distant city if he would see him alive. Upon his arrival,
on the morning of the 70th birthday, he found him half comatose and
convinced that this day would be his last; but he was cheered up,
diverted, partook of a stimulated eggnog, his first food for two days;
and when he awoke just past midnight and realized that he had entered
upon another decade, revived, made a slow but surprising recovery,
and enjoyed not only a comfortable but a very active life for nine
years. He could not, however, quite bring his mind to enter the ninth
decennium. Strangely enough, my friend’s mother, whom I had also known
all my life, two years later passed through almost the same experience.
He was called to her deathbed, reaching her three days after all hope
had been abandoned. But she recovered and was nearly as well as before,
and lived seven years. A friend of mine retired from a college chair at
74 and was told that he was worn out, had several grave symptoms, and
must drop work and go South. “You should be satisfied,” his physician
told him, “with four years beyond the allotted three score and ten.”
But he had unfinished tasks, believed them to be life-preservers, and
now at 82 is still engaged upon them. A vigorous old lady of 87 has
thrice been given up by her physician within the decade. Are doctors a
little falsetto in their treatment of the aged?
Seventy is, on the whole, the most dangerous milestone and the morning
of that birthday is probably the saddest of all that those who attain
it have known or will ever know. It brings a new consciousness that
now indeed we are old; and if we still carry on as before, we are at
least under the suspicion of affecting a vigor that we really lack and
are liable to lapse to an apologetic state of mind because we do not
step aside and give our place to our juniors who often feel that they
have a right to it, even though they try not to show or even confess
it to themselves. If we make partial withdrawal we find insistencies,
conscious and unconscious, in those who supersede us that we might as
well make it complete and the sense of being superfluous and no longer
needed is bitter. Complete retirement from all our life work, whatever
it is, may make us feel that we are already dead so far as our further
usefulness is concerned. Yet at no stage of life do we want more to be
of service than when we are deprived of our most wonted opportunities
to be so. We do not take with entire kindness and resignation to being
set off as a class apart.
CHAPTER VI
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF BIOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY
Weismann’s immortality of the germ plasm and his denial of the
inheritance of acquired qualities--The truth and limitations
of his views--The theories of Hering and Simon--Metchnikoff’s
conception of the disharmonies in man, of the rôle of intestinal
flora and their products, of euthanasia, and of the means
and effects of prolonging life--C. S. Minot’s conception of
the progressive arrest of life from birth on as measured by
declining rate of growth and his neglect to consider the
dynamic elements--C. M. Child’s studies of rejuvenation in
lower and higher forms of life in the light of the problems
of senescence--J. Loeb’s studies of the effects of lower
temperatures, of toxins, and ferments--The preservation of
cells of somatic tissues potentially immortal under artificial
conditions--Account of the studies of Carrel, Pozzi, and
others--Investigations upon the effects on sex qualities and
age of the extracts and transplantations of glands, from Claude
Bernard--Investigations of Eugene Steinach on the interchange of
sex qualities and rejuvenation by glandular operations in animals
and man--G. F. Lydston’s work--Serge Voronoff’s experiments
and his exposition of the achievements and hopes of glandular
therapy--Some general considerations in view of work in this
field.
Next to Darwin, though by a wide interval, August Weismann (d. 1914,
_a.e._ 80) has most influenced general biological thought. His
failing eyesight at middle age caused him to abandon the microscope
for biological thinking, a field where there was a great need of
synthesis and expert theory and in which he developed great power and
influence. His hierarchy of metamicroscopic vital units, his dogma
of the non-inheritance of acquired qualities in confutation of the
prevailing Lamarckianism, and his demonstration of the continuity of
the germ plasm have been theses of great interest and centers of very
active discussion, even outside the special field of zoölogy, although
in the latter doctrine, which chiefly concerns this discussion, he
was in a sense anticipated by Owen, Jäger, Nussbaum, and especially
by Sir Francis Galton, as he later found.[164] He first set forth the
now generally accepted view that most of the primitive unicellular
organisms do not die and also sought to explain how death first entered
the world.[165] He says:
We cannot speak of natural death among unicellular animals,
for their growth has no termination which is comparable with
death. The origin of new individuals is not connected with
the death of the old; but increase by division takes place in
such a way that the two parts into which an organism separates
are exactly equivalent, one to the other, and neither of them
is older nor younger than the other. In this way countless
numbers of individuals arise, each of which is as old as the
species itself, while each possesses the capability of living
on indefinitely by means of division.
Each of these one-celled individuals thus lives on and grows, till
its surface, through which all nutritive substance is absorbed and
which increases at a less rapid rate than its cubic content, becomes
relatively too small, so that the creature can no longer be nourished
through it and the mature cell faces the alternative either to die
or divide into two halves; and, accepting the latter, becomes, by
division, two smaller daughter cells that, as the food-absorbing
surface becomes now relatively greater, are rejuvenated, although
their combined substance is exactly the same as that of the mother
cell of which they are simply bifurcations. As, thus, the substance
of the parent cells all goes over into the offspring resulting from
the fission, nothing is lost in the process, not even an envelope or
membrane, as Götte, Weismann’s chief earlier critic, thought was the
case in encystment. Thus there is no vestige or rudiment of a corpse.
Nothing is sloughed off. It is in this sense that such creatures are
immortal. They have gone on growing and dividing thus ever since
life began and will continue to do so until it ceases. Thus there is
a direct continuity from first to last that is unbroken by anything
that can be called death. If once and so long as these single-celled
creatures were the only or highest forms of life, death or anything
like it was unknown. In all this process, of course, nothing like
conjugation, mating, or fertilization occurs.
That this is not mere theory the experiments and observations of many
subsequent investigators, especially Woodruff and his pupils, have
shown. In thirteen and a half years he found paramecia had divided some
8,500 times, and the process is still going on as actively as at first.
Of these results Raymond Pearl[166] says, “If in 8,500 generations--a
duration of healthy reproductive existence which, if the generations
were of the same length as in man, would represent roughly a quarter of
a million years in absolute time--natural death has not occurred, we
may, with reasonable assurance, conclude that the animal is immortal.”
Thus it is that larger, older cells are constantly being regenerated
by spontaneous division and natural death does not occur among most
protozoa.
They simply grow and divide in an ever alternating rhythm and this was
the fundamental cadence in the song of life. If the large or mature
stage is, in any sense, a prelude of old age, division in the same way
represents rejuvenation. The latter is thus almost, although perhaps
not quite, as primordial as the phase of growth itself, and among the
most ancient and persistent of all the heritages that higher forms of
life received from the lower is this power to grow young. Thus the
systole and diastole of the heart of the _Zoölogos_ began. The monad
becomes a duad; the individual, a dividual, almost as inevitably as
the former grows; and the processional through this tiny life cycle
contains in it the promise and potency of countless other processes
that developed from it later. Thus even a colony of the far more
complex coral polyps may develop perhaps for thousands of years from a
single individual.
Now, while protozoa may occasionally conjugate and thus prelude a
higher form of reproduction and while the simpler metazoa may propagate
by fission or budding, reminiscent of the older way, the general mode
of propagation among many-celled organisms follows what seems at first
a very different law. In these forms a sperm cell or spermatozoön must
penetrate a germ cell or an ovum and then the zygote, or fertilized
egg, immediately begins to reorganize itself from within and to divide
into two, four, eight cells, etc.; and these divisions produce cells
not all exactly like the mother cell but differentiation begins.
In some species, as early as the first few divisions certain cells
are set apart as germ cells, devoted exclusively to the purpose of
reproduction. From these ova and spermatozoa arise. While others, far
more in number and aggregate bulk and increasingly so as we ascend the
scale of life, become more and more specialized for the production of
different organs, structures, and tissues. These gradually lose the
power to produce entire individuals. It is these that produce, and
their descendants that constitute, all the rest of the body, or soma,
and so are called the somatic cells. It is these and their progeny only
that die while the germ cells, a very minute portion of the entire
body in the higher forms of life, still continue, like the protozoa,
to divide and grow _in sæcula sæculorum_, and it is they that, in a
mundane sense, are immortal. Of course very few of the _circa_ four
hundred ova produced during the sex life of an average human female and
vastly less of the three hundred and forty billions of spermatozoa,
according to Lote’s estimate, produced by the average male[167] become
mature individuals. Most of them perish by the way and all those in the
body at its death perish, of course, with it. But sex cells, or rather
the germ plasm, even in the highest animals, including man, which
attain their goal and produce mature individuals of a new generation,
continuing to follow the old formula of eternal growth and division
though vastly slower, remain still deathless.
Thus life is a really unbroken continuum from its beginning to its end
and we are all connected, as it were, by direct physical participation
with the life of our progenitors. Each individual produces a few germ
cells that reach the goal of maturity and many somatic cells doomed
to death; and in the next generation each repeats the same process.
Some flagellate spores, for example, when they divide, lose only the
flagellum, which each new individual has to reproduce for itself and
this is the rudiment of the corpse that in the higher forms of life
becomes indefinitely more bulky and complex; while underneath all this
increasing punctuation by death, as it developed, the old plasmal
immortality still persists. On the other hand, all forms of fission and
agamic budding, so common a method of reproduction in plants and often
found in simpler forms of multicellular animal life, such as sponges
and coelenterates, are reminiscent of the protozoan fashion.
Thus we see that death came into the world not by reason of sin,
as theology teaches, but because of differentiation. As cells
acquired the power to produce more and more specialized organs and
functions they lost the power to reproduce the entire body and they
lost it progressively--almost in exact proportion as their power
of multiplication became specific. Thus, as we should expect, we
find in the early stages of this differentiation cells that can be
influenced toward the old general or the new and more specific powers
of reproduction. Yet back of all the fact remains that life itself is
essentially perdurable and that we can explain death better than we can
explain life. Death is thus not necessary or universal but is derived
and is, in a sense, a product of slow development; and we can conceive
a stage of evolution in which natural death did not occur at all but
was always due to external accidents. Indeed, Weismann goes so far as
to say that the difference between the germ and the soma is so great
that the latter, with all its fortunes, has little or no influence upon
the former; and by his doctrine that acquired traits and qualities
are not inheritable he seems to draw a hard and fast line separating
the mortal from the immortal parts or organisms. He also devoted the
greatest ingenuity in evolving an intricate scheme of biophores,
ids, idants, determinants, etc., inherent in germ cells, in order to
explain the phenomena of heredity. His studies have had great influence
in directing the attention of investigators to the most elementary
structures and functions of germ plasm and the remarkable changes
within cells that occur in the very earliest stages of embryonic
development; while, as we shall see, many of the most recent researches
have been directed, since his work was done, to the conditions under
which somatic cells in different tissues of the animal body can be made
to proliferate and grow, under carefully controlled conditions, more
than it was possible for them to do under conditions afforded them
while they remained parts of the body in which they were developed.
Here I deem it in point to observe that the adoption in its extreme
form of the theory of preformation versus epigenesis, or the
assumption that no qualities due to the experiences of the soma can
have any influence upon germ plasm or affect heredity, would be to
revert to views very like those of the old creationists. From Weismann
we may well lay to heart that this influence is very slow and slight in
any one or even a large number of generations, suggesting a very long
prehistory for the germ plasm of higher organisms. But to hold that
nothing in the recent past or the near future of the environment within
or without the individual can ever in the least affect innate qualities
is to throw ourselves into the arms of a fatalism that more or less
blights all the motives of reform and amelioration of conditions or of
educational influences in their widest scope. On the contrary, we hold
that the ultimate goal of all the improvements of life or mores is to
better heredity, that most precious and ancient of all the many forms
of values and worths, and that the degree in which they do this is the
final criterion of all really worthy endeavor in the world. If the good
life of a long series of generations of our ancestors does not in the
least tend to make their offspring a little better born and give them
some slightly better chance for a worthy, long, and happy life, quite
apart from all postnatal, parental, and other influences, the taproot
of all motivations for reforming human conditions is cut, and all
efforts in this direction become a little falsetto and every generation
must start again at the beginning.
Just now we are told that the whole domain of consciousness since
civilization began has had little influence upon the deeper and
older unconscious elements of human nature but no one among these
psychoanalysts has for a moment insisted that it had none. The moral in
both cases is simply that we must now make far larger drafts upon the
inexhaustible bank of Time and realize that in the one case, body, and
in the other, mind, is immeasurably older than we had deemed them to
be, that is, that both germ plasm and the unconscious have been very
long in the making and come to us charged with potencies innate in the
individual but very slowly acquired--in the one case by the ascending
orders of animal life from the first and, in the other, by man and
his ancestors. We certainly have not yet heard the last word from
zoölogy which, while stressing the hereditary factors, for example, and
individual longevity, must admit that old age in general is a more or
less acquired character. Before we do so, an important correlation, to
which I shall advert later, between these investigations and those in
the new field of the endocrine glands and the hormones that have such
new and marvelous power of speedy and profound influences upon so many
parts of and processes that go on in the body, must be made.[168]
One of the chief traits of old age is the loss of germ plasm with
its power of perennially regenerating life and this loss leaves the
soma to slow degeneration. As germ substance decreases individuality
generally increases, sometimes in the form of gross selfishness. As the
body becomes cadaverous or corpse-like and the springs of love begin
to dry up at their source, secondary sex qualities fade and the sexes
again become more alike, as in childhood, and the extremely senile
are but the husk or shadow of their former selves. Tenaciously as
life is clung to, it is at the same time felt to be less worth saving
either here or hereafter, for whoever heard of senile decrepitude
wanting to be continued beyond the grave. All ideals of a future
life assume a restoration of maturity if not of youth. Doddering,
desiccating senility has always been abhorrent to gods and men and
I know of no either imaginative or scientific writer who has even
attempted to describe the senium as it would be if prolonged to its
extremest conceivable term, when each organ and function slowly
ceased “altogether and nothing first”--ever shorter in stature, more
shriveled and emaciated in form, hairless, the voice shrunk to a
whisper, tottering, tremors, and then inability to work, move, or even
eat; abatement of all natural functions, the senses slowly becoming
extinct, teeth and the power of mastication gone, everything in a
stage of progressive involution, increasing paralysis of all receptive
or effector processes, offensive perhaps to the very senses of those
about, seemingly forgotten for the time by death itself, which the
poor victim perhaps longs for but is unable to command the means of
attaining, feeling himself useless and a grievous burden, a just living
mummy, torpid, neither really sleeping nor waking; and in the end with
every natural function sinking synchronously but so gradually that
observers could not be sure whether each slow breath or heart beat was
really the last or just when the Great Divide had really been crossed
where Sleep embraces its brother, Death. Something like this would be
the fate of the soma, after it had been abandoned by the germ plasm,
if a really natural death occurred, that is, if, by some of the many
disharmonies that pervade the body, some organ or part did not break
down before the others were worn out and drag them to its own doom,
which is what always really occurs in fact.
If we look at the matter from the more psychological and Lamarckian
viewpoint, suggested, for example, by the thesis of Hering, that memory
is the most fundamental trait of organized matter, a view elaborated by
Simon’s theory of mnemes and engrams, all experience is more or less
permanently registered on the most vital of living substances, which is
“wax to receive and granite to retain,” nerve and brain being the next
best organs of registration only acting more specifically; while the
most generic resultants of experience attain their ultimate goal of
being recorded in the structure or functions of the germ plasm and thus
becoming permanent acquisitions of the species or race. On this view
the apex of life is reached at that stage of it when the influence of
the soma upon the germ plasm is greatest. This, of course, ceases when
the latter takes its departure with loss of the power to propagate.
Thus of all the stages of life, old age and its fortunes alone can
never affect heredity. Individuals who live on do so only by the
momentum given by germinal energies transmitted from their parents, and
only the old are completely isolated from the main currents of the life
of the race. They have already died racially or to the phylum and only
await a second or individual death. Thus if any large number of such
individuals lived on for many decades, they would be an encumbrance;
and so Nature, always intent on the interests of the species and so
indifferent to the individual, has to leave them to their fate. They
may still alleviate individual conditions but can contribute nothing to
racial memories in the above sense. The species has “forgotten them and
they are of it forgot.”
* * * * *
Elie Metchnikoff (d. 1916, _a.e._ 71), a bacteriologist and the
successor of Pasteur, who approached the problem of old age from a very
different angle and collected many interesting data, was led by his
experiments and observations to a unique theory.[169] He first sets
forth the disharmonies in the life of animals and especially of man
in a way that seems pessimistic; but both his volumes are subtitled
“optimistic studies” because he finds hope at the bottom of the Pandora
casket.
Old age, he thinks, is not due to loss of the power of somatic cells
to divide or reproduce themselves but is “an infectious chronic
disease, whether manifested by degeneration or an enfeebling of the
nobler elements and by the excessive activity of macrophags,” the
latter being large wandering cells represented by the white blood
corpuscles and which he holds to be true phagocytes or scavengers,
which, instead of protecting as they were meant to do, are very liable
to turn on and destroy the higher elements of the body. They are thus
like an army raised and sent out to destroy menacing savages that
may turn and attack its own city. Old age and death, then, according
to Metchnikoff, are not due, as Blütschli thought, to the exhaustion
of some kind of vital ferment that protozoa and germ plasm have
pre-eminent power to make; nor to the mere accumulation of waste, which
the more always tend to dump upon the less vital elements of the body;
nor, as Delboeuf conjectured, to the precipitation of the substance of
organs, which always tend to revert to their inorganic bases; nor to
Roux’s hypothesis that organs are always competing with each other for
the available nutritive material, and that as and when there is not
enough to satisfy all, those that have to starve drag down the rest;
nor to the failure of the initial momentum given at impregnation; nor
to the fact that at the senium the body has passed beyond the reach of
the influences of sex and its products; but it is due to a very rank
and variegated flora or fauna of noxious microbes, and especially to
the toxic products they make, which tend to accumulate in the large
intestine, making it thus a very cesspool or latrine of the most
manifold infections.
Darwinists have stressed the advantages of the large intestine for
convenience and the avoidance of the necessity of leaving frequent
spoors by which animals might be tracked by their enemies. But many
species are without it or have it only in rudimentary form and in man
its removal by surgery results in no very serious impairment. We may
add, too, that more recently psychoanalysts have described the anus and
rectum and their functions as centers of various erotic activities,
especially but by no means exclusively in children. Here the waste
products of the digestive processes are dumped, awaiting removal, and
it has long been known that their undue accumulation caused not only
local troubles but general malaise, anxieties, and nervous and mental
tensions. Metchnikoff and his pupils showed that very soon after birth
noxious bacteria find their way to the large intestine and flourish
thereafter in great profusion, especially in constipation, and that no
cathartics can be relied on for permanent relief, salutary as medicine
has always and everywhere found them for mitigation of many diverse
ailments. It is the microbes that find their chief nidus here that
are the principal cause of old age and if an antidote to their lethal
action could be found Metchnikoff believes life could be very greatly
prolonged. He attempts to show that among not only mammals but also
birds, the species that have developed the large intestine are less
long-lived than those in which it is rudimentary, so that in animals
generally its relative size and individual longevity are inversely
as each other. Most of the digestive processes are completed before
food reaches this terminal part of the long alimentary canal and very
little save water can be absorbed through its walls, so that rectal
feeding contributes very little, indeed, to the total nutritive needs
of the body. But it is here that death finds its chief armamentaria
and establishes a receptacle, factory, or laboratory of poisons. Not
only are there many microbes that here feed on food residues and
occasionally pierce the intestinal walls themselves, but they produce
putrefactive products that are still more lethal. The chief of these
are phenol and indol, both very complex and due to the breaking down of
albuminoids, the chief element in meat, peas, eggs, etc. Young people
may for a long time show no trace of the deleterious effects due to the
absorption of these toxins, but the slight wear and tear of the tissues
they cause is cumulative. They produce in animals old-age effects in
kidneys, arteries, liver, lungs, muscles, testes, ovaries, and even
in the brain, for senility is due to the action of these bacterial
invaders and not to time or to wearing out.
So vital and rapidly growing are these bacteria that they would soon,
under favorable conditions, outbulk the entire body. But while their
numbers are kept down by lack of nutriment and other conditions,
nature provides no adequate antidote to their activity. This was found
by Woolman and was called glycobacterium, or the sugar-maker. It was
found first in the dog, and it can be cultivated in the laboratory
and introduced into the body. It transforms starch into sugar without
affecting the albuminoids and it is not, like sugar, absorbed before
it reaches the large intestine. Thus it is not sugar that is the
antidote but the lactic acid of its product and this is found in
nature in the bacillus of sour milk, a common article of diet among
Bulgarians, who seem to be the longest-lived people in Europe. The
results of experiments with this product, first upon rats and other
animals, Metchnikoff thought remarkably rejuvenating; and as all know,
many substances containing lactic acid were for a long time in great
favor, although expectations of its effectiveness have by no means
been fulfilled. The death of Metchnikoff himself, too, at the age of
seventy-one, who had long and diligently used his own panacea, did not
help the confidence of his disciples, for we can never forget the old
slogan, “Physician, heal thyself.”
In Sanger’s returns to his questionnaire,[170] as well as to my own,
one often finds people who use some form of this preparation and with
what they deem good results and Metchnikoff’s volumes show such a
unique combination of humanistic and scientific interests that they
have had wide popularity.
The problems, however, with which he deals are so extremely complicated
that his work may really be said to have propounded more problems than
he solved. He believed he had found and even named specific phagocytes
attacking most, but not all, of the main tissues and organs of the
body. Cohorts of them encamp about cells, very slowly absorbing their
substance and depleting their energies--some attacking muscles; others,
heart and arteries, etc.; others consuming the pigment cells of the
hair which, however, as Pohl showed, continues to grow as rapidly in
old age as in youth, as do the finger nails; others making the bones
porous and brittle by removing the lime from them and transferring some
of it to the walls of the arteries; some even specializing to attack
brain and nerve cells. We must fight fire with fire, and to do this we
must not only introduce the sugar-making bacteria but provide them with
food _in situ_ in order that they may do their great work of purifying
the cradle or breeding ground of noxious bacilli. Some of his disciples
are still enthusiastic enough to believe that just as we purified the
Panama Zone; as vaccination has almost annihilated smallpox, which
once caused about one-tenth of all deaths; as Behring’s antitoxin
has greatly abated the scourge of diphtheria; as Wright’s vaccine
has lessened death from typhoid; as Ehrlich’s salvarsan treatment
has done so much for syphilis, and as he and Wassermann hope may be
done for cancer--so we may yet find and learn how to use a specific
that, although it will not realize the dreams of those who once
sought an elixir of life, will nevertheless contribute to its perhaps
indefinitely great prolongation. This Metchnikoff does not hesitate
to call “the most important problem of humanity.” His ideal is what he
calls orthobiosis, which is “the development of human life so that it
passes through a long period of old age in active and vigorous health
leading to the final period in which there shall be present a sense of
satiety of life and a wish for death.” Mere prolongation of life in the
sense of Herbert Spencer is not in itself desirable. When the wish for
death comes, he thinks that under certain circumstances suicide would
be quite justifiable. Old age, he believes, will not only be greatly
prolonged but will become optimistic. Pessimism he finds commonest
among young men, while many avowed pessimists have become optimistic in
their old age. Young men will not so precipitately attempt to displace
the old, as he finds to be too much the case now, but the latter will
attain greater power and influence.
The constitution man has inherited from his anthropoid ancestors is far
from fitting his present environment. The greatest disharmony of all
is the morbid nature and brevity of the period of old age. Man does
not round out his prescribed cycle and develop in its final stage an
instinct for and love of death, as he should. He is expelled from the
school of life at all stages of its curriculum but always before the
final or senior year, until the fact that there was such a final grade
has been almost forgotten. It was because man felt himself prematurely
cut off that he developed all dreams of resurrection and of another
life. Had he completed his life here he would never have wanted or
dreamed of another. Had the involution that begins usually in the fifth
decade or earlier gone on normally, it would have made each stage of
the recessional no whit less delightful than those of the processional
of youth till, having withdrawn more and more from life and being in
the end quite satiated with it, the individual would have rejoiced
to see the limitations that separate him from ultimate reality fall
away until he merges, body and soul, into the cosmos from which he
came. Only the simplest organisms are immortal and as we ascend the
scale and develop a more complex soma, the more impossible does any
kind of immortality become. Metchnikoff seeks nothing of this sort but
would simply increase the number of years and enrich them in the last
phase of our existence so that, instead of being the pitiful remnant
it now is and instead of having to console itself so pathetically by
the puerile and unsubstantial figments that religions and philosophies
have given us, man would enter upon the full heritage that nature
intended for him. Thus the highest goal of all endeavor is to overcome
the present degeneration of senescence, to cultivate physiological old
age; and when this ideal is realized, more and more of the complex and
intricate affairs of social, industrial, political, and other forms of
life will be left to the old men, for these things require not only
technical training but, perhaps even more, the wide view, insight, and
common sense for which experience with life is the best school.
Metchnikoff was able to discover only two ideal cases of old people
in whom his “instinct for death” was well developed. But he believes
that as gerontology advances this instinct will not be the exception
but the rule and that the very nature of old age as we know it will be
radically transformed. At present we know little more of it than the
prepubescent child knows of sex or the embryo of its mother’s milk.
When the instinct for death is well developed, we shall long for it as
we do for sleep when we are fatigued, for old age is The Great Fatigue.
Many instincts of the young are reversed and pass over into their
ambivalent opposite at a later stage of life; and so the love of life
will, in the end, be transformed into the love of death. Both animal
and human parents devote their lives to the service of their offspring
during the period in which this is necessary; but when the latter are
mature, we often find a reversal of this instinct. Perhaps the intense
sensitiveness of ova and spermotozoa displayed in the phenomena of
chemotaxis and in the marvelous power of regeneration of lost parts
among many lower forms of metazoa, and the many phenomena that led
Haeckel to call the soul of cells immortal, are lost later as higher,
conscious psychic powers develop; and if so, this shows the marvelous
transformability of the primitive impulses that dominate simpler forms
of life.
Thus Metchnikoff is a humanist as well as a scientist. He sets down
faithfully what he saw through the microscope, but not content with
that ventures to indulge his speculative instincts and tell the world
what he thinks his discoveries mean for the practical conduct of life
and of mind--and that, too, in more or less untechnical terms that make
his ideas accessible to intelligent laymen. For him, as for Plato,
“philosophy is the art of preparing for death.” He even urged that
“the instinct for death seems to lie in some potential form deep in
the constitution of man,” and it was this he sought to develop. The
only basis for all modern forms of belief in immortality roots in a
platonic reminiscence of the processes of the deathless germ plasm,
and from this the old soma and the, no whit less, old psyche have
departed as far as possible. Psychic life, too, has its proximate
beginnings in the intense vitality of germ plasm and cells and from
these rudiments the adult human consciousness has so far developed
that our conscious psyche knows no more of it than it does of the
migrations or depredations of the phagocytes within the body. Man is
the most pathetic of beings because of the two tides whose ebb and flow
constitute his life--evolution and de- or in-volution, anabasis and
catabasis. He has failed, on account of the action of the intestinal
fauna within him, to achieve any adequate sense of appreciation, still
less enjoyment of the refluent currents. Man is thus deprived of the
nascent period in which this wooing of death is due to arise and does
not reach his true end or final goal. Dreamy illusions about it have
always haunted his soul as unsubstantial surrogates. When man now
in the making is finished, what we at present call old age will be
a sort of superhumanity, a new and higher story, and its completion
will spontaneously bring with it new and deeper insights; and he will
approach and finally enter Nirvana with the same zest and buoyancy with
which he now takes possession of life.
Crude and amateurish as often is Metchnikoff’s philosophy, his courage,
candor, and the strength of his convictions are commendable, and the
faith he adds to his knowledge is full of hope. From his ideal thinker,
Schopenhauer, he caught the flavor of the Vedanta and Upanishads but
he did not see how these very ideals also underlay the mystic hermetic
philosophy of the medieval alchemists and their royal art, as modern
symbolists like Hitchcock and Silberer interpret them; and to this I
shall revert later. If he overestimated the value of his panacea and
ventured into fields of other experts in which he was ignorant and
where he was often mistaken, he has at least made a very valuable
addition to the yet all too meager literature on senectitude, which all
thoughtful and intelligent aging people can read not only with profit
but with pleasure, if only they have escaped from the narrow limits
of orthodox Philistia. To have really edified this now ever growing
section of all civilized countries is a real culture service. His work
is uniquely inspired by a spirit psychologically very akin to that
which impelled Buddha when he set out on his mission of finding The
Way, stimulated to do so by the sight of an aging man and a putrefying
corpse.[171]
Charles Sedgwick Minot, an embryologist, (d. 1914, _a.e._ 62) devoted
most of his maturer years to a study of the phenomena of growth,
keeping and daily weighing many young animals, especially guinea pigs,
and he has left us a good compendium of his life work.[172] Stated in
the most general terms, he held that old age and death were progressive
phenomena that began in the individual with life itself, that the best
method of measuring vitality was the rate of growth, and that this
constantly diminishes and finally ceases. As soon as, for example,
guinea pigs recover from the disturbances caused by their birth, which
are great and last two or three days because they are born at a very
advanced stage of development, they add from 5 per cent to 6 per cent
to their weight during a single day. But this percentage diminishes, so
that by the end of the first month they add only 2 per cent; at ninety
days, only 1 per cent; and the diminution continues, rapidly at first
and then more slowly. Calculating the time to make successive additions
of 10 per cent, there are twenty-five of these additions; and not
until we reach the seventeenth addition do we find nine days or more
necessary. The twenty-second addition takes four days, the later ones
being somewhat irregular. The first ten per cent increment often comes
in two days.
Chicks, too, are born highly developed, and so lose during the first
day. Then the daily percentage of increase is greater than in the
guinea pig. From the sixth to the tenth day inclusive the average is
nearly but not quite 9 per cent; at the end of the third month, only
2 per cent. Rabbits are born very immature and, being less developed,
grow more rapidly. The average for males of the first five days of
growth is over 17 per cent. The rabbit thirty days old has about the
same daily percentage of increase as the new-born guinea pig. The human
child takes 180 days to double its weight; a horse, 60; a cow, 47;
goat, 19; pig, 18; sheep, 10; cat, 9½; dog, 8; rabbit, 6–7, these rates
depending, in part, on the quality of the mother’s milk.
In embryos the rate of growth is still more rapid. The increase in the
guinea pig in the first five days is 3,520 per cent, or an average
of 704 per cent daily. From the fifteenth to the twentieth day it is
1,058 per cent, or an average of 212 per cent per day. Thus the rate
of growth during the foetal period is far more rapid and it is more so
in the earlier than in the later stages of embryonic development. The
farther back we go, the more rapid is this rate. Thus his curves show a
very steep decline in the rate of growth, even in its earlier stages,
and this decline continues, although at an ever decreasing rate, to the
end. Thus from this point of view the younger creatures are, the more
rapidly they are dying. The weight of a fertilized germ he estimates at
0.6 milligram (and he tells us that 50,000 of these could go by mail
for a two-cent stamp). Thus the human embryo at birth has increased
5,000,000 per cent of its initial weight. Old age is merely the later
result of changes that have gone on at a diminishing rate ever since
the ovum from which we originated was fertilized.
Life is growth; the retardation of growth is old age; and its cessation
is death. “Senescence is at its maximum in the very young stages, and
the rate of senescence diminishes with age” (p. 250). The embryo in
its earliest stages rushes toward old age at an almost inconceivable
velocity, the new-born infant runs, the child walks rapidly, youth
saunters, the adult mopes, and old age only crawls on toward death. In
other words, the momentum of life given by impregnation at the age of
zero is retarded--most at first and with a diminishing rate at every
stage.
Something like this same paradoxical law holds, Minot believed, for
the human brain and mind. In one of his Harvey lectures he tells us
that the brain of a child at birth is but little differentiated. During
the first year it learns all the great adaptations in the physical and
human world: time, space, ego, etc. “It learns more during the first
year than in all the subsequent years of life” and from birth on the
power of learning is rapidly diminished. It declines very fast during
infancy, more slowly in childhood, etc.
Accepting Metchnikoff’s dictum that senility is atrophy and that
toxins of intestinal origin poison and debilitate tissues so that they
succumb to, if they do not actually attract, the predaceous phagocytes
(though not proposing his substitute of sour milk for religion and
philosophy), Minot points out that we are always throwing off dead
cells. Blood corpuscles collapse and are utilized by the liver; the
skin is incessantly shedding dead cells, as is the whole intestinal
tract and each organ; stature declines some 13 cm.; the brain loses
some 19 gms. in weight; the rate and depth of respiration sink; the
heart, although growing larger and from the age of prime to senility
beating some eight times per minute faster, is nevertheless obstructed
in its action by rigidifying arteries; the bones grow spongy and their
hard outer part becomes a thin shell; the muscle fibers decline both
in size and number, exercise being able to increase only the former
and not the latter; both structure and function go on to rigidity and
inflexibility after sufficient firmness and size have been attained,
till the part becomes too hard and inflexible to function and then is
shed as the ripened leaf falls in autumn. But none of these processes
are abnormal and hence death is in no sense a disease. Indeed, the
power of repair and even recuperation persists far more in the old than
has been generally recognized.
The more specific cause of what is generally called old age he
finds in the increase of the quantity and the hyperdifferentiation
of the structure of the protoplasmic envelope of the nucleus. This
protoplasm constitutes the body of the cell. In the earliest stages of
cytomorphosis, which follow impregnation, the total amount of nuclear
material increases fastest, while later and especially in the senescent
cells it is the protoplasm that does so. In the early stages of their
embryonic development, too, the cells differ relatively little; but
those that constitute the adult body differ so greatly that any skilled
observer can tell from which organ they came, whether from the brain,
muscle, skin, stomach, liver, etc.; that is, they differentiate more
and more as these organs mature. This differentiation is, however,
all on the way to death and is never reversible; that is, old body
cells never grow young. Nuclei change but it is the protoplasm that
changes the most and acquires a new structure, while the composition
of the nucleus not only changes less but always retains certain
fundamental traits. “The increase of the protoplasm, together with
its differentiation, is to be regarded as the explanation (or should
we say cause?) of senescence” (p. 134). This is necrobiosis. All old
cells, from whatever organ, are thus as recognizable as old faces.
“Growth and differentiation of protoplasm are the cause of the loss of
the power of growth” (p. 161). He even holds that the first stages of
the segmentation of the ovum must be called rejuvenation. On page 167
he says:
The life of the cell has two phases--an early brief one
during which the young material is produced and the later
and prolonged one in which the process of differentiation
goes on; and that which was young, through a prolonged
senescence becomes old. I believe these are the alternating
phases of life, and that as we define senescence as an
increase and differentiation of the protoplasm, so we must
define rejuvenation as an increase of the nuclear material.
The alternation of phases is due to the alternation in the
proportions of nucleus and protoplasm.
In adults, and even in the old, there are always young cells in
reserve, often grouped in certain foci, for example, the marrow of the
bones, which can in emergencies come forward, take up the function
of growth, regenerate lost tissues or, in lower animals, even lost
organs. At and even after the death of the aged there are always cells
and even parts that are relatively young and growing. There are also,
of course, the cells and their matrix, which are very early set apart
for the purpose of reproduction, and these, of course, are least of
all differentiated. Most cells of the body, however, follow the law of
genetic restriction. This means that as differentiation proceeds, the
possible directions in which cells can develop become more and more
limited till finally they cannot divide at all and lose even the power
of nourishing themselves, and so die. The cell and all of it represents
life, and Minot has no use for any of the smaller metamicroscopic vital
units, gemules, plastidules, plasomes, ideosomes, granules, etc., but
thinks that if we wish to accept any kind of ultimate elements of this
sort, Weismann’s scheme of them is perhaps, on the whole, the best.
As to the practical questions, how we can help rejuvenation and delay
senescence, he states that he has nothing to suggest, although he
believes it possible that some time in the future a means may be found
of increasing the activities and volume of the nucleus and restricting
the growth and differentiation of the protoplasm, which would mean a
prolongation of youth.
Minot concludes his volume with a glance at paidology in order to
stress the great relative importance for both the bodily and mental
development of the early stages of life. The baby develops faster than
the child; the child, than the youth, etc., and the rate of psychic
unfoldment declines very rapidly from the first, as does that of the
body. Week by week, from birth, there is a remarkable expansion of
life. Each one of the senses learns how to function effectively and
most of them learn to attract the attention, the power of correlating
movements and making voluntary ones, and the rudiments of memory
and association are laid down, as are the bases of disposition. The
infant from the earliest months of its life knows much of the persons
and objects in its environment and perhaps has even discovered its
own ego. It touches, handles, tastes everything; is an inveterate
investigator in an ever widening field of research; has at least a
sense of intercourse and companionship; is already at home with time,
space, cause, and relation; its feelings, will, and even intellect are
developed, and in this order; and the foundations for knowledge and
achievement are laid. Thus the child of school age is already senile
so far as its infancy is concerned and the boy’s psychic processes are
retarded, hard, and unspontaneous. Learning begins to be difficult.
Nature no longer shoots the mind up the phyletic ladder but it must
climb and grow henceforth by work as well as playwise. Thus man’s
mental powers show the same law of progressive retardation as does his
physical growth. Instead of drawing the dead line at forty, as Osler
did, Minot draws it at twenty-five. Had he been versed in paidology or
even known the Freudian conceptions of infancy, he might have greatly
amplified his treatment of this stage of the psychic life with which
his volume closes. But as it is, there are certain definite criticisms
of his conclusions concerning gerontology.
First, as I have said, he only attempts to show the cause and has
nothing to say as to the cure of senescence. But he was not in quest of
a panacea and was too true to the limitations of his science to pretend
to have found one. This will be a disappointment only to those laymen
who read him in furtherance of this pragmatic quest.
More serious is the objection that, according to his criterion and
curves of declining growth rate, we are really old when we stop
growing, for the mature young man and the very old one both are living
but a very little above the deadline. On this view, the extinct
saurians that grew all their lives were far more vital than creatures
that attain a relatively fixed and constant size early and then stop
growing. Growth is one measure of vitality, but surely function is
another. The dynamic curve of energy and the power of work rises
rapidly as that of growth declines and the curve of brain work reaches
its apex somewhat later. Determining the increment of pounds or even of
foot pounds of energy is not the sole measure of vitality.
Again, if all differentiation is progress toward death, evolution
itself, instead of being progressive, is really retrogressive and
the ascending orders of life are only a funeral march to the grave.
Minot admits this in principle but says that although the advance it
brings is bought at the price of death, it is worth all it costs.
So it is, but it will not be if the organization and its increase in
heterogeneity of structure are only morphological. It pays because
of the quest for the good, the beautiful, and the true; because of
science, law, love, the control of nature, the organization of society;
because of the supreme joy of just being alive and the exhilarating
sense of progress. The more evolved all creatures are, including man,
the more the pleasure field overlaps the field of pain.
As the hypercivilized mind often longs back, like Rousseau, to an
idyllic state of nature; or the world-weary pietist longs back to
God; and, we may now add, as the psychoanalyst finds what he deems
a psychodynamic equivalent for this trend, in a perhaps yet more
exaggerated form, in the flight from reality, seen in dementia præcox
and in longing for the mother’s lap and, as Ferenczi says, even for
her womb; so Minot’s view of life might almost justify a kind of
homesickness for the state of the ovum or the immortal germ plasm, for
in this state of incipiency a single-celled organism performs all the
functions of life, not only nutritive and reproductive but sensient
and motor. It is at this stage, when all cells do all things, that the
spirit of life celebrates its highest triumph. The sigh for lost youth
is here deepest. Life itself as we know it from this viewpoint seems a
little falsetto and pathetic, for it is throughout, in a sense, a fall.
The analyst is also tempted to venture a little farther and to raise
the question whether the life of the author of this view itself did
not subconsciously contribute a little to reinforce his theory. With
a none too rich and full childhood and youth, waiting for years for
adequate recognition, passionately if not precociously devoted to the
study of embryology, in which field he became one of the ablest and
most accomplished of all leaders,[173] it would not be surprising if
he found certain compensations in devoting his life to a study of that
stage in which its manifestations are most active, and ably developed
in this field apperception centers he somewhat overworked, while his
self-affirmation and the instinctive impulse we all have for due
recognition give a subtle self-satisfaction in reiterating the paradox
that death is most active near the beginning rather than the end of the
life cycle. Whether this suggestion has any validity or not, no one has
ever more challengingly presented the problem of why the rate of growth
declines from first to last, and whether it be due to an inevitable
loss of the initial momentum or biological _élan vital_ or to checks,
arrests, and inhibitions of it, some of which may be removed. The very
intensity of its early manifestations, if it gives us a haunting sense
of loss also reinforces the hope that the high potential with which
we all started somehow, sometime, may be better conserved, so that
perhaps here, again, as with Metchnikoff’s views, the morale of Minot’s
conclusions is, on the whole, optimistic.
* * * * *
Charles Manning Child, professor of biology in the University of
Chicago, has given the most comprehensive statement of his problem to
date from the standpoint of his science, although, as we shall see,
much has been done since.[174] His most interesting and important
contribution for our purpose is his refutation of the older view that
life is always a progressive process and that true rejuvenescence
does not occur. Of course, in higher animals the progressive features
are predominant and development ends in death. But the above
generalization does not take due account of what occurs in lower
organisms, while even in man and other mammals the different tissues
do not undergo senescence either alike or synchronously. Some, for
example, cells of the epidermis remain relatively young till and after
the death of the individual. In other tissues such replacement of old,
differentiated, or dead cells by younger ones occurs more or less
extensively and tissue regeneration following injury occurs more or
less in all tissues save only the nervous system. Such regeneration
retards the aging of the tissue or organ as a whole. Minot thought
that in such cases regeneration arises from cells or parts of cells
that have never undergone differentiation, so that even in such cases
development is progressive and not regressive. Even if he is right in
maintaining that fibrillar substance cannot regenerate, it must be
noted that new fibrillar substance does arise in continuity with the
old, while isolated cells apparently do not produce it. Child maintains
that there is differentiation in such cases and that these regenerating
cells have returned to a kind of activity characteristic of the early
stages of embryonic development; that is, that cells _can_ assume an
activity characteristic of an earlier stage. “Even in the outgrowth
of new nerve fibers from the central stump of a cut nerve there is
return to a process of growth and development which is normally
characteristic of an earlier stage of development.” Thus regression and
differentiation do occur in most tissues of man and higher animals,
although cells of one tissue can never produce those of another.
Again, after hibernation regeneration is often extensive. The large
proportion of young cells in the body in such cases renders the
animal as a whole appreciably younger than at the beginning of
hibernation, so that the periodic cycle of activity and hibernation
is much like an age cycle. This rejuvenescence may begin during the
hibernation, when the animal is living on its own substance. Again,
we see periodic changes that resemble the age cycle in glands. In
the pancreas cell, for example, the loading of the cell is both
morphologically and physiologically similar to senescence, and the
discharge, to rejuvenescence. In this case the change occurs in
individual cells without cell reproduction. Even the cells of the
nervous system throughout mature life possess no appreciable capacity
for differentiation and regeneration beyond the power to regenerate
fibers arising from them. Child believes that the effect of a change in
mental occupation or of a vacation may afford “some slight degree of
rejuvenescence of the nerve cells.” Verworn, he tells us, distinguishes
between fatigue due to accumulations that check metabolism and
exhaustion due to lack of oxygen, both of which may cause senility
in nerve cells. “Thus exhaustion resembles senility as death from
asphyxiation resembles death from old age.” Recovery from exhaustion
is not the same sort of change as rejuvenescence except as it involves
increase in the rate of oxidization. But fatigue and recovery
constitute a cycle resembling closely the age cycle.
Studies of starvation suggest the same thing. Various experiments have
shown that in the later but premortal stage of starvation there is
a certain activation of vital processes, including heat production,
and it is possible that this has some significance for regeneration.
Higher animals are apparently unable to use their own tissues as a
source of nutrition to any such extent as the lower forms can do, and
this is probably connected with a higher physiological stability of
the tissue components. The body weight often does, however, increase
and become greater after starvation than it was before, so that a
fasting period is followed by an increase in vigor and body weight and
hence the wide belief in its therapeutic value. On the other hand, the
injurious effects of over-nutrition in man are supposed to be due to
the accumulation of food or to intoxication, but it is possible that
overnutrition actually increases the rate of senescence by augmenting
in the cellular substratum not only the decomposition of food but other
substances that decrease the rate of metabolism. There are certainly
many instances of longevity in man on a low diet. Again, after certain
bacterial diseases, for example, typhoid, the body weight often becomes
greater and vigor increases. While low diet often does good, it may, on
the other hand, aggravate many diseases. Frogs and salamanders may live
a long time without food and undergo great reduction, and starvation
sometimes has a directly rejuvenating effect. The animals grow much
more rapidly afterward and use a larger percentage of nutrition in
growth and attain a larger size than those continuously fed.
Death of cells apparently from old age occurs at every stage of
development and many cells do not die when the individual does,
for he does so only because some tissue or organ that is essential
reaches the point of death. Some have thought glands are primarily
responsible for it; but others, whose view Child adopts, hold that it
is the nervous system, especially its cephalic part, that dies first
in man. In various insects and, for example, the salamander, death
occurs almost at once after the exclusion of the sexual products, but
this is exhaustion. In most, the length of life of the individual is
determined by that of the shortest-lived essential organ or of the
tissue that is least capable of regression and rejuvenation and the
development of which, therefore, remains most continuously progressive.
In cold-blooded animals where the rate of metabolism is dependent
on external temperature, senescence can be reduced by cold, and in
certain lower invertebrates by the simple method of underfeeding. When
cells lose the capacity to divide, they differentiate, grow old, and
sooner or later die, although death everywhere is the result of final
progressive development if this process goes far enough and is not
interrupted by regression caused by the need of repair, reproduction,
or lack of food. Death is due, thus, to increased physiological
stability of the substratum of the organism or to an increasing degree
of differentiation that this general stability makes possible. And as
individuation increases, death becomes more and more inevitable. Rubner
calculated the total energy requirements in calories for doubling the
body weight after birth and the requirements per kilogram in body
weight for the whole period of life, for a number of domestic animals.
His totals for all, except man, showed close agreement, and hence he
concludes that the amounts of energy required are the same in all
species except for man, who has a far greater amount of energy, that
is, a smaller percentage of the energy of food is consumed in growth
and maintenance of body weight and more in activity than in other
animals. Very likely domestic animals expend less energy than their
wild congeners but it is certainly difficult to correlate these results
with Minot’s criteria of age as measured by the decrease of growth.
Child concludes that senescence is more continuous in man than in the
lower forms. His long evolution has given a physiological stability to
the protoplasmic substratum and a high degree of individuation results
from this. But the central nervous system, being least capable of
progressive change, always dies first, so that the length of man’s life
is that of his nervous system and physiological death and senescence
inhere in its fortunes. In the lower forms the death point may never be
attained under normal conditions because of the low stability of the
substratum and the consequent decrease of individuation that permits
the frequent occurrence of a high degree of rejuvenation. But in the
higher forms of life the capacity for the latter is limited by greater
stability; and this, again, has been acquired through a process of
evolution lasting through so many millennia that we must certainly
“admit that this task [man’s rejuvenation] may prove to be one of
considerable difficulty.”
Thus, according to Child, whose views are the most philosophical
and insightful in the field of biology up to date for our purposes,
senescence and rejuvenescence are both going on all the time in
all cells and organs and are not special processes. In most cells
and in most lower organisms dedifferentiation and despecialization
of structure and function, which we may term in general regressive
tendencies, are always less pronounced than progressive impulsions,
while the latter predominate still more in the higher forms of life.
It is “quite impossible to account for the course of evolution and
particularly for many so-called adaptations in organisms without the
inheritance of such acquired characters, but since thousands or ten
thousands of generations may be necessary in many cases for inheritance
of this kind to become appreciable, it is not strange that experimental
evidence upon this point is still conflicting” (p. 463). Germ plasm is
not something apart from or uninfluenced by all that goes on in its
immediate environment within the body. Regression and dedifferentiation
involve reconstitution and always approximate reproduction. To state
the matter roughly, all processes involved both in growing old and
in growing young might conceivably be arranged on a kind of Porphery
ladder with agamic forms of indefinite reproduction, as illustrated in
unicellular organisms or in germ plasm at the lower or _summum gens_
end, and the most differentiated cells that have progressively lost the
power of reproducing the whole organism, regenerating lost parts, power
to grow, divide, and nourish themselves, at the top of the ladder,
representing the _infima_ species. On such a ladder, development,
differentiation, and individuation is progress up, and all rejuvenating
activities are descent toward the most generalized function of
perpetual self-reproduction. This conception is in very suggestive
harmony with the analogous psychoanalytic law of restitution to mental
health by reversion to a more primitive state of psychic development,
for all these methods might be called rejuvenation cures.
Physiological integration, with its increasing stability of the
structural substratum, makes senescence cumulative as we go up the
scale of evolution, so that it is ever less balanced or offset by
rejuvenation, reproduction, or other regressive changes, as is the
case with simple organisms whose life cycle consists merely of
brief alternating phases of progression and regression, for the
large protozoan cell about to divide is old compared with the two
smaller daughter cells formed from it. Senescence is retardation
and rejuvenescence is the acceleration that works by transforming,
readapting, and even sloughing off old and useless structures. It will
take long to modify the course of evolutionary processes that are the
result of millions of years of alternating progressive and regressive
changes, but not only the phenomena of rejuvenescence but “sports”
and saltatory mutation, to say nothing of the findings of recent
experiments showing how life and even activities of somatic cells
separated from the body and given a more favorable environment may be
indefinitely prolonged, point toward a vast reservoir of vitality. Thus
we come to a new appreciation of the incalculable energy behind all
the phenomena of animate existence and the hope is irrepressible that
somehow, although we have as yet no idea how or when, we may abate or
inhibit the forces that check or repress it and man may emerge into a
fuller and even a longer life.
* * * * *
Jacques Loeb, of the Rockefeller Institute, has devoted himself for
many years, with a rare combination of great learning and originality,
to problems directly or indirectly bearing upon old age and death.[175]
As his studies of tropism show, he is prone to mechanical and chemical
interpretations; and since science has more or less eliminated
smallpox, typhoid, yellow fever, malaria, rabies, diphtheria,
meningitis, etc., the citizens of scientific nations will sometime,
he thinks, be guaranteed a pretty fair probability of a much longer
duration of life than they now enjoy. If we define life as the sum of
all those forces that resist death, which means disintegration, the
latter is comparable to digestion, which transforms meat into soluble
products by two ferments, pepsin in the stomach and trypsin in the
intestine. These ferments break up the mass into molecules small enough
to be absorbed by the blood, and both of them exist not merely in
digestive organs but probably in all living cells. They do not destroy
our body, perhaps because the coöperation of both is required to do
so and this is possible only at a certain degree of acidity, which
cannot be reached in the living body because respiration is constantly
removing acid. Death thus really comes when respiration ceases.
Of course there is another cause of disintegration, namely,
microörganisms from the air and in the intestines. During life the
cells are protected by a normal membrane that is destroyed in death
and then the action of the microörganisms can superpose itself upon
that of digestion. Thus in man death is stopping the breath and this
may be done by poison, disease, etc. The problem is whether there is
any natural death, for if not we ought to be able to prolong life
indefinitely. But we cannot experiment on man because neither the
intestines nor respiratory tract can be kept free from microbes.
A Russian, Bogdanow, solved this problem for the fly, putting its
fresh eggs into bichlorid of mercury, which a few survived, with no
microörganisms on the outside. These eggs were then developed on
sterilized meat in sterile flasks and Guyemot raised 80 generations
of fruit flies thus. Loeb himself and Northrop raised 87 generations.
Their dead bodies were transferred to culture media such as are used
for the growth of bacteria and more were produced thus for years. Hence
fruit flies freed from infection and well fed would not entirely escape
death and probably higher organisms would thus die from internal causes
were external ones excluded. Eggs, for example, those of starfish,
ripen and disintegrate very rapidly if not fertilized by the process
of autolysis, which acts only after the egg is ripe. The fertilized
egg, however, does not degenerate in the presence of oxygen but dies
in its absence, so that we might say that the fertilized egg is a
strict aërobe and the unfertilized, an anaërobe. The entrance of the
spermatozoön saves the life of the egg.
Is natural death due to the gradual production in the body of harmful
toxins or to the gradual destruction of substances required to keep
up youthful vigor? If the latter, the natural duration of life would
be the time necessary to complete a series of chemical reactions that
would produce enough of the toxins to kill. Now, the period necessary
to complete a chemical reaction diminishes rapidly when the temperature
is raised, and increases when it is lowered. This time is doubled
or trebled when the temperature is lowered by 10° C. The influence
of temperature on the rate of these processes seems typical. If the
duration of life, then, is the time required for the completion of
certain chemical reactions in the body, we should expect it to be
doubled or trebled when we lower the temperature. We can test this
only where, as in our flies, infection is avoided. Northrop put their
fresh eggs on sterilized yeast at a temperature of 0.2° C., and the
higher temperatures selected were 5°, 10°, and 25°. All the flies died
at nearly the same time when kept in the same temperature. The total
average duration of life was 2½ days at 30° C., when nearly all of them
died. At 10° C. it was 177 days. Thus heat accelerates all chemical
action, and here we have the duration of life increased from 200 to 300
per cent. In man the body temperature is constant, for example, 35.5°
C. whether in the tropics or the Arctic regions. If we could reduce our
temperature, we might live as long as Methuselah. If we could keep the
body temperature at 7.5° C. and follow the above ratio, we should live
about 27 times 70 or about 1,900 years. Thus the duration of life seems
to be the time required for the completion of a chemical reaction or a
series of them. The latter may be the gradual accumulation of harmful
products or the destruction of substances required for sustaining
youth. Not only are unicellular organisms immortal and the life of all
their successive generations a continuum, but a bit of cancer tumor
can be transplanted to other individuals and there grow larger, and
a bit from this second individual transferred to a third, and so on
indefinitely; so that the same cancer cell continues to live on in
successive transplantations throughout many individual lives. It has
thus outlived many times the natural life of the mouse. Indeed, it
seems to be able to live on indefinitely and Carrel has shown that this
is true of other normal cells. Thus death may not be at all inherent in
the individual cell but only be the fate of more complicated organisms
in which the different types of structure depend on each other. Certain
cells are able to produce substances that slowly become harmful to some
vital organ or center and its collapse brings death to the whole.
In man there is no sharp limit between youth and maturity unless it
be marked by puberty, but in lower forms of life it is demarcated
by a metamorphosis. The tadpole, for example, becomes a frog in the
third or fourth month of its life and this process can be accelerated
by feeding the creature with thyroid, no matter from what animal.
Gudernatsch was able to make frogs no larger than a fly. Allen showed
that the tadpole with the thyroid removed can never become a frog,
although it may live long and continue to grow larger than the usual
tadpole; but if such aged tadpoles are fed with thyroid they promptly
become frogs. Salamanders metamorphose by merely throwing off the gills
and changing the skin and tail, and the Mexican axoloti maintains the
tadpole form through life; but even it, when fed with thyroid, promptly
metamorphoses. Schwingle induced metamorphosis in tadpoles by feeding
them with a trace of inorganic iodine. Thus the duration of the tadpole
stage seems to be the time required to secure a certain compound
containing iodine. Insects hatched as maggots will become chrysalides
and then flies, but if thyroid is fed to the maggot it accelerates
the metamorphosis, although we do not know whether it is due to the
accumulation or formation of definite compounds.
Loeb sought to determine whether the duration of the maggot in the
larval stage could be due to temperature and he found that this had
effects similar to those described above. The larval period lasted 5.8
days at 25° C. and 17.8 days at 15°. The total duration of life was
38.5 days at 25° and 123.96 at 15°, both ratios being 1 to 3. Thus the
influence of temperature upon the larval period was like that which it
exerted on adult life. The same effect he found in salamanders, all of
which suggested to him the conclusion that the duration of life and
of the larval period is really the time required for the completion
of certain chemical reactions. The cessation of respiration, which
means death, and alterations in circulation, which mean metamorphosis
or the death of youth, are critical periods and perhaps both points
are reached when a certain toxin is formed in sufficient quantity or
when a necessary substance is destroyed or reduced. Thus a shortened
youth can, in amphibians, be prolonged by modifying the temperature
or offering the specific substance that causes metamorphosis, namely,
iodine or thyroid. There is no end to the substances capable of
hastening death; shall we ever find one that can prolong life?[176]
Pearl’s experiments on the fruit fly[177] show that where long- and
short-lived strains are mixed, the first generation they produce is
longer-lived than either parent and that for subsequent generations
Mendelian laws hold even for longevity, so that there is increased
vigor in the hybrid generation due to the mingling of germ plasms that
are different. As to bacterial invasion, the stability and resistance
of the organism is also a factor, but by rearing insects kept free from
all such invasion it appears that “bacteria play but an essentially
accidental rôle in determining the length of the span of life in
comparison with the influence of heredity.” Pearl criticizes the
conclusion of statisticians like Hersch that poverty shortens human
life, despite the fact that this is perhaps the most potent single
environmental factor affecting civilized man to-day. But we have no
real evidence that if the conditions between the rich and poor were
reversed the death rate would also be reversed. The influence of high
temperature, which is known to accelerate all the metabolic processes,
does not interfere with the predominant influence of heredity because
it only accelerates life processes exactly in the same way that it
accelerates chemical activities and the same is more or less true of
the influence of the secretions of the endocrine glands.
Pearl concludes[178] that it has already been demonstrated that cells
from nearly every part of the metazoan soma are potentially immortal,
even in the case of tumors by transplantation, though of course not yet
for such exceedingly specialized structures as hair and nails. Under
artificial conditions cells from nearly all organs can be made to long
outlive the body from which they are taken, just as grafts from apple
trees may be passed on indefinitely to successive generations. Thus
death is not a necessary inherent consequent of life in even somatic
cells but “potential longevity inheres in most of the different kinds
of cells for the metazoan body except those which are extremely
differentiated for peculiar functions.” The special conditions under
which this occurs are often very complex and differ greatly for
different tissues and animals, and we shall probably know far more
later of the chemico-physical conditions necessary to insure continuous
life, for these studies are new, having begun barely twenty years ago.
The reason that all these essential tissues are not actually immortal
in multicellular animals is that the individual parts do not find in
the body the conditions necessary for their continued existence, each
part being dependent upon other parts. This view differs from Minot’s
that there is a specific inherent lethal process going on within the
cells themselves that causes senescence. Pearl concludes “that these
visible cytological changes are expressive of effects, not causes, and
that they are the effects of the organization of the body as a whole
as a system of mutually dependent parts and not a specific inherent
and inevitable cellular process. Cells in culture _in vitro_ do not
grow old. We see none of the characteristic senescent changes in them.”
Thus it may be inferred that when cells show characteristic senescent
changes it is because they are “reflecting in their morphology and
physiology a consequence of their mutually dependent association in
the body as a whole and not any necessary progressive process inherent
in themselves. Thus senescence is an attribute of the multicellular
body as a whole consequent upon its scheme of morphologic and dynamic
organization.” The lethal process, thus, does not originate in the
cells themselves. “In short, senescence is not a primary attribute of
the physiological economy of cells as such.”
It has long been known, as we have seen, that unicellular organisms
could go on dividing indefinitely and that germ plasm had a potential
mundane immortality; but no one had suspected that highly organized and
differentiated somatic cells, which had lost the power of producing
the whole individual and could only produce cells of their own special
tissue, had this power. Recent experiments, however, indicate that
under certain highly elaborated conditions they, too, can be made to
live and even grow indefinitely and that this growth can not only be
observed but measured under the microscope. Many attempts had been
made by many individuals to grow tissues artificially to see their
development, their functions, and decay, in both health and disease.
This can now be done by taking pieces of living tissue from the body,
for science has never produced a single living cell, and placing it
in artificial media made out of blood plasma especially prepared, for
nutrition for such a bit of tissue deprived of access to the normal
circulation of the blood is the prime condition for such growth.[179]
Indeed, until Carrel, who had long been interested in the regenerative
processes of scars, succeeded in actually causing cells of the
connective tissue to grow after being deprived of the circulation of
the blood, this was supposed to be impossible. Leo Loeb had already
produced artificial growth within and without the body as early as
1907, and in such processes that utilized the body fluid it was found
that the same course was followed as in nature, so that the processes
in such culture media approximated those that followed grafting. In
1907 Harrison gave details of such a process that seemed convincing,
although he worked only on cold-blooded animals, cultivating nerve
fibers from the central system of the frog. Carrel extended this method
to warm-blooded creatures and mammals, studying especially the laws of
regeneration of tissues after surgical wounds.
The method of these remarkable achievements, now often repeated, is to
put tiny bits of living tissue in a plasma of blood serum that will
coagulate. The blood must be deprived of its cells by the centrifugal
process and must generally be taken from the animal for which the
tissue is to be cultivated or, at any rate, generally from the same
species, although this is not without exceptions, for chicken tissue
has been grown in the blood of human beings, dogs, and rabbits; morbid
tissue, perhaps, like cancer, being most indifferent. The tissue is
taken from an etherized subject, with every possible precaution against
bacteria, chilling, or drying, and so liable is it to be killed by
exposure to air that it is best dissected in serum. Both plasma and
tissue are kept in cold storage and the time during which it can be
thus kept varies very greatly with different animals. The bit of tissue
must be very small because only the outer edge can get the nourishment
when deprived of the normal blood circulation, for when the piece of
tissue is large, all but the periphery dies. To see these changes of
form, small bits of tissue are grown on the inside of a coverglass
of a microscope slide that has been overlain with a prepared plasma,
sealed with paraffin and put into an electric incubator provided with a
microscope. The period before growth begins varies but when it occurs,
the microscope shows the direct division of the nuclei and the growth
taking the form either of layers or of radiating chains, depending
on whether epithelial or connective tissue is being developed. Each
tissue, whether normal or morbid, develops very precisely tissue of
its own kind, and sometimes as, for example, with cancerous tissue,
the growth is so rapid that it can be observed with the naked eye.
This, of course, opens an immense field of observation and experiment,
for example, immunity, protection against antibodies, redintegration,
regulation of growth of the whole or parts, and perhaps especially
rejuvenation and senility, to say nothing of the character and the
influence of the secretions from all the glands. The trouble at first
was that the artificial growth was so short-lived; but by changing the
medium often and by frequent washing away of the waste products in a
salt solution, it was found that the life and growth of these isolated
bits of tissue could be very greatly prolonged. It seemed that the
process of decay was due to the inability of tissues to eliminate waste
products. So in 1912 Carrel’s problem was whether these effects could
be overcome.
To solve this problem bits of the heart and blood vessels of a chick
embryo were grown. These growths were immersed in salt solution for a
few minutes and then placed in the new plasma and it was soon found
that thus the tissue could be made to live on indefinitely. Growth is
more rapid the earlier the stage of it and it soon declines; hence
the advantage of using tissue from embryos. But by subjecting these
artificial growths to washings it was found that they were many times
greater at the end than at the commencement of the month, showing that
they do not grow old at all. Thus C. Pozzi says:
The pulsations of a bit of heart which had diminished in number
and intensity or ceased could be revived to a normal state by
washing and passage through a new solution. In a secondary
culture two fragments of heart, separated by a free space, beat
strongly and regularly, the larger fragment 92, the smaller
120 times a minute. For three days the number and intensity
of pulsations of the two parts varied slightly. On the fourth
they diminished considerably in intensity, the large fragment
beating 40, the smaller 90 times. When the culture was washed
and placed in a new medium, the pulsations again became strong,
the larger one 20, the smaller one 60 times a minute. At the
same time, the fragments grew rapidly, and in eight hours they
were united and formed a mass of which all the parts beat
synchronously.
Pozzi again says:
On January 17 the fragment of a chicken heart embryo was placed
in plasma. It grew readily on a thick crown of conjunctive
cells. In three days the pulsations, which were regular and
strong at the beginning, grew feeble and ceased completely,
and this state continued for more than a month. On the 29th of
February, the culture, which had been subjected to fourteen
passages, was dissected and the central film placed in a new
medium. After the fifteenth passage it contracted rhythmically,
with pulsations as strong and frequent as on January 17,
_viz._, from 120 to 130 per minute. During March and April this
fragment of a heart continued to beat from 60 to 120 times per
minute. As the growth of the conjunctive tissue became more
active, it was necessary, before each passage, to extirpate
the new connective tissue formed around the muscle. On April
17 the fragment beat 92 times, agitating all the mass of the
tissue and the neighboring parts of the middle of the culture.
On May 1 the pulsations were feeble and they were given their
thirty-fifth passage. In the manipulation the muscular tissue
was stretched and torn so that the contractions ceased.
Thus experiment seems to establish the fact that even connective
tissue, composed of not the most highly developed but of vigorous
though low-level cells, is immortal. Senility and death result because
in normal conditions the blood does not succeed in removing waste
products. Could science only wash them away in a living organism, life
might be indefinitely prolonged. It is these connective tissues that
give support to the textures that compose the body and that chiefly
make up bone, cartilage, ligaments, and the lymph network, the cells
of which are endowed with special properties of growth and play a
great rôle in rejuvenating injured tissue. All this work, in a sense,
started from Claude Bernard’s principle that the life of an organism is
dependent on the interaction of its cells and the medium in which they
grow. Thus, to understand the process by which the body develops and
why it must yield to decay and death, we must inquire into the cause of
the loss of character of these interactions; and this was impossible
until tissue could be grown outside the body so that the processes
might thus be brought within the range of the microscope and all its
conditions under control. Carrel’s first effort, thus, was directed
toward the way in which the medium affected the life of the cell and in
constituting this medium of plasma from the blood of dogs and chickens
he found that the older the animal from which the blood was taken,
the less rapidly and extensively the tissues grew in it. In the blood
of a relatively old animal the increase became so slight as to be
practically _nil_. These comparative experiments were made, Grandcourt
tells us, with the blood of animals from five months to five years of
age, and there was enormously greater activity on the part of the blood
of growing animals. Thus it would seem that when an animal attains its
size and stops growing, its blood undergoes progressive changes till
it lacks, more and more, the dynamic power of youth. So the problem
was whether the plasma could be given the force of youth so far as
its action on growing cells was concerned and this was accomplished
by mixing it with juices extracted from the embryo. Experiments, too,
were made with a strain of connective tissue cells that had been kept
in artificial life for more than sixteen months. It was divided into
two parts, one of which was grown on adult plasma and the other in a
mixture of two parts, one of plasma and the other of embryonic juice.
In two days the ring of tissue around the second part was three times
as great as that around the first. Some of these tissues, passed
through a salt solution 130 times, doubled their area in forty-eight
hours. Another, washed 57 times, increased in volume fifteen times in
ten days, etc. These rapid growths, however, could not be duplicated in
normal plasma which was then further modified. Thus the different media
have a pretty constant effect upon the rate of growth. Carrel says:
“The special rapidity of the growth of the tissue depends so much on
the composition of the medium that it may become possible to use as a
reagent of the dynamic value of the humors of the organism a strain of
cells adjusted to life _in utero_.” If human connective tissue could
be preserved in the condition of permanent life as the connective
tissue cells of a chicken are preserved, the value of the plasma of an
individual might be approximated by the cultivation in it of a group of
these cells and by the observation of the rate of their multiplication.
Such observations do suggest some indication of certain values of the
blood of an organism and may give us some clue to old age.
Thus in the course of development the activity of the tissue is apt to
vary in the body as a whole and in its parts. It therefore became a
question whether each particular condition was permanent or whether the
dynamics of the cell changes through the action of the medium upon it.
To determine this, several bits of tissue, each having its own dynamic
power, were cultivated in media exactly alike and differences in the
character of the growth were noted. Then the influence of the medium
began to tell. Measurements of the changes undergone on the part, in
turn of a fast- and slow-growing tissue, showed that the former had
lowered its activity one-half in forty-eight hours, while the latter
had multiplied its activity by six. This process continued until the
level of uniformity was reached, when the conditions of growth remained
equal in all cases. Thus it appears that though, in the beginning,
certain substances that the tissues had accumulated had the effect of
accelerating or retarding its activity in the medium, yet in time the
latter overcame these conditions and growth was brought under the laws
of its own special mechanism. Thus the sum of the investigations on the
influence of the medium on cells is that it may not only change the
dynamic possibilities of the tissue but the character of the change
may be regulated by a carefully considered modification of the medium
(Grandcourt).
All this work involves the theory that the cells make such demands upon
the nutrition supplied by the medium that they deplete it and then
become indirect means of introducing into the life process a chemically
destructive activity (catabolism). The result is a gradual slowing down
of cell growth, which is progressive aging and death. A very analogous
course was that followed in the earlier artificial cultivations. The
tissues lived a short span of days and then died. But the process of
degeneration could be obviated by salt solutions and other processes so
that tissues now grow _in vitro_ for a year and a half and may continue
to multiply faster than those of the embryo. Thus for such tissues
senility does not exist and the question naturally arises whether we
can ever hope to accomplish anything of this sort inside the body.
Carrel in 1914 reported a strain of connective tissue that had
undergone 358 passages and had then reached the twenty-eighth month
of its life _in vitro_. It was detached from the heart of a chick
embryo seven days of age, which pulsated for 104 days and gave rise to
a large number of connective tissue cells. These multiplied actively
for the first two years, a great many cultures having been derived
from this strain every week. The fragment of the tissue usually
doubled in forty-eight hours, though rapidity of growth was subject
to fluctuations. One striking result is seen by comparing the amount
of tissue produced by a given culture in forty-eight hours this year
with that produced in the same tissue by the same strain of cells a
year before. This shows that the activity of the strain had increased,
although this might, of course, be due to improvement of technic
or possibly to a progressive adaptation to life _in vitro_. Carrel
says: “Thus it is conclusively shown that the proliferating power
of the strain has in no wise diminished. During the third year of
independent life, the connective tissue shows greater activity than at
the beginning of the period and is no longer subject to the influence
of time. If we exclude accident, the connective tissue cells, like
infusoria, may proliferate indefinitely.” In the latest report at hand
one of these cultures had been kept alive and growing thus for seven
and a half years.
* * * * *
The original and indefatigable American-Frenchman, C. E. Brown-Séquard
(1817–1894) who in 1878 succeeded Claude Bernard in the chair of
experimental medicine in the _Collège de France_, was one of the
first experimental physiologists to study the functions of glands and
to realize the importance of their secretions. After investigating
the suprarenals in animals as early as 1869 and finding that their
removal always caused death, he returned to this subject twenty
years later to investigate the testicular fluids which, discharged
into the blood, “exalted the power of the nervous system and kept up
the vital energies.” He even injected the fluids extracted from the
testes of animals into his own system hypodermically, with results
that he thought distinctly beneficial to himself and says that he “at
the age of seventy recovered the force and energy of youth, with
manifestations unknown for a number of years.” He thus believed that
he had discovered a new therapeutic agent of great rejuvenating power.
Berthelot says, “The subject required delicate manipulation, not only
because of the extraordinary precautions required for this kind of
investigation but of charlatanism, always ready to possess itself of
new curative procedures. He did not protest against the abuses by which
his name was used to cover industrial enterprises.” He persisted in
his idea, and he, more than anyone else, should be called the founder
of opotherapy or treatment by extracts from organs. His name will
always have a prominent place in the history of endocrinology or the
science that deals with the glands that secrete inwardly, a subject
that already has a vast and rapidly growing literature, with an
essentially new body of facts and insights and, at its present stage
of development, yet far more precious hopes and expectations of great
discoveries just ahead.
Some of the many commercial products of testicular juices, so
very difficult to prepare in a form that can be preserved, were
for many years widely used and the best known of these, Pohl’s
spermine preparations, are still more or less in demand. But despite
Brown-Séquard’s enthusiastic belief in his age-deferring cure, it
lapsed from general attention, partly because the initial expectations
were too high, until a very few years ago when the problems it had
suggested were approached in a new way by a few investigators whose
results have not only a high value in themselves but give promise
of yet more important and definite subsequent discoveries--and that
despite the conservatism and criticism that all efforts to deal
scientifically and fundamentally with human sex problems always
encounter.
Professor Eugene Steinach, who founded a laboratory of comparative
physiology at Prague and was later made director of the biological
institute at Vienna, continued to work there until his institute, for
which Roux and others have solicited contributions from men of science,
to have it opened again, was closed by the war. He began to publish his
epoch-making results in 1910. In spring frogs brought to his laboratory
he found 8 per cent impotent and also that testicular injection from
normal frogs seemed to restore or intensify the embracement impulse and
the strength of the forelegs.[180] The effect lasted, however, only a
few days. Nevertheless he suggests that in borderline cases it might
permanently restore fertility. The same process in castrated frogs
showed the same effect, only in much less degree, and the injection of
substance from the cerebro-spinal centers of these activities seemed to
have a certain but very slight effect upon the sex nature.
When ovaries and testes were transferred in guinea pigs a few days
old, he found, in general, that through the influences of the
hormones from these glands the character of each sex underwent “slow
but radical transformation over toward the other.”[181] In the one
case the male organ atrophied and the breasts were developed, with a
disposition to nurse, the hair became finer, the method of growth was
transformed into that of the other sex; and the converse occurred when
the transplantation was in the reverse direction. The change was thus
both morphological and functional and Steinach believes that there is
a distinct antagonism of the sex hormones due to transplantation of a
heterological gland and that this is not due to biochemical differences
of blood but to a distinct antagonism between male and female
hormones, which have a sex specificity that is the main factor in
directing growth. He distinguishes between the specific sex influence
and the antagonism that brings about heterological sex signs, which
favor the development of other pubertal glands and control growth, even
to the dimensions of the skeleton, both stimulating and inhibiting it.
The transplantation can be so effected that the glands of both sexes,
in a sense, inhibit each other, so that something like experimental
hermaphroditism can be caused. These changes last sometimes through
life and occasionally there may be periodic milk secretions in males.
Each element checks and may throw the other out of function.
In a later article[182] Steinach published results of experiments upon
the exchange of sex glands in other animals between the different
sexes and found that the female masculated by being given the testes
of her brother followed more or less his development rather than her
own, almost equaling him in growth, weight, and robustness. This
Steinach calls hyper-masculinization and a degree of this follows
the development of the glands after transplantation, which the
microscope showed was attended by real intussusception. He also showed
hyper-feminization, so that we have a change of the ovaries into
hypertrophic but analogous pubertal glands, with corresponding change
of traits, dependent upon the degree of success or completeness of the
operation. Thus he thinks, too, we can explain somatic and psychic
precocity by the hypertrophy of these glands. In another article[183]
the author emphasizes the great variability in the development of sex,
both as to size of organs and their functions in different individuals
and believes that besides environment, heredity, race, etc., climate
has a great deal to do with it. He finds that in warm countries the
advent of sex maturity is somewhat earlier in all its aspects, although
there is some suggestion that these accelerations may be connected
with the development of other secondary traits. Experiments made with
animals in artificial climates point to the same result and changes
in this direction are observed in animals accustomed to cold that are
transported to warm climates.
Interesting as these experiments on the interchange of primary
and secondary sexual qualities are, they were, for Steinach, only
preliminary to what chiefly concerns us here, namely, his studies of
rejuvenation[184] and his problem was to see whether by his operations
he could shed light upon the problem of whether age is a condition
we are defenseless against, like an incurable disease, or senescence
can, at least within certain modest limits, be influenced. He says his
experiments have decided in favor of the latter alternative. He had
first to determine whether orthoplastic, homoplastic, or a combination
of both methods was the best. The former was chosen because it was
quickest and easiest and independent of earlier implantation material,
especially with men. And so, with his colleague, Lichtenstern, various
operations were performed, of which three type cases are as follows:
Case 1. Man of 44, lean, weak, wrinkled, incapable of
physical work by reason of easy fatigue. Libido failing for
years and almost extinct, testicular pains, and double-sided
hydrocele. With local anesthesia the typical Winkelmann
operation was performed. On both sides there was ligature of
the vas deferens between the testicle and the epididymis. The
cure took a week and the patient was soon discharged. A few
weeks witnessed a striking change. He increased in weight,
the wrinkles almost vanished, and in five months he had won
back muscular power and become a hard worker, carrying heavy
burdens. “Libido and potence returned with great intensity.”
The upper part of the thigh grew hairy and both hair and beard
increased so that he had to shave more often. Improvement
continued during the year and a half in which he was under
observation and he seemed in every way a vigorous and young man.
Case 2. Man of 71, of large business, who came to the hospital
with an abscess in the left testicle with septic signs--chills,
high temperature, etc.--so that it was necessary to remove the
source of maturation _in toto_. At the same time the right,
sound testicle was subjected to ligature of the passage from
the epididymis to the vas deferens. In twenty-four hours the
patient lost his fever and in three weeks left the hospital.
Quite apart from the acute symptoms, this patient had for
years suffered marked signs of age, especially calcification
phenomena--dizziness, shortness of breath, weakness of
heart, great fatigue, tremors, etc., with libido extinct for
eight years. Within a few months a marked change occurred. A
feeling of masculinity returned and in nine months the patient
described his own condition in a letter in which he says in
substance that, to his great surprise, certain nocturnal
phenomena had recurred, his appetite was so great that for a
long time it was difficult for him to satisfy it, instead of
previous depression he found himself again full of the joy of
life and considered himself very elastic for his age, while his
friends often remarked the great change that had taken place
and could not believe he was seventy-one. He suffers little
from fatigue, calcification and dizziness have ceased, he can
think clearly, had to go to the barber more often, and all his
functions have greatly improved.
Case 3. This was a wholesale merchant of 66 who for some
five years had shown senile symptoms, such as difficulty of
respiration and in thinking, weak memory and also muscles, and
libido almost gone. In this case there was rapid prostatism
and catheterization, also emaciation, and occasionally more
pronounced psychic disturbances. The first operation on this
case was prostatomy but this did not arrest loss of weight or
increasing weakness. Then there was ligature of the vas near
its entrance into the epididymis on both sides, which was
followed by a very rapid recovery, with improvement of nearly
all symptoms.
Thus the author thinks that in fighting old age orthoplasty is by far
the best method, and to the objection that these cases are not true
psychic senescence but only symptoms of intercurrent disease he replies
that this only gave occasion for the operation and that the disease
itself was the result of age. Thus, in general, he concludes that for
advanced senescence the ligature of the vas, as above, gives the most
remarkable results, and that for those before the senium also it may
often work very favorably. The same is true of premature old age, the
advent of which has immense individual variations.
As to checking the advance of old age in women, Steinach is not yet
ready to make any positive report, but in view of what has already
been done with animals he thinks a good prognosis can be made and that
the best method is by implantation of young ovarian material. The
difficulty of this orthoplastic process is found only in the dependence
upon the material of implantation, which is very difficult to secure.
The effort is directed in all such cases to the influence of the aging
ovaries, whether operative by orthoplastic transplantation or by the
use of Roentgen rays. The former, on account of the earlier involution
of ovaries, is confined within certain limits to women. The phenomena
of fatigue, etc., have been removed by this method, which has been so
successful that improvement has been noticed by friends.
In Steinach’s experiments with rats, which pass through the life
stages so rapidly, he used the method of transplantation of testicular
glands furnished by three-months-old individuals and this grafting
need not necessarily be _in situ_ but in various parts of the body.
If intussusception took place, as it generally did if the operation
was well performed, the change here was generally marked within two
weeks, as his photographs show. More or less of Steinach’s work has
been confirmed, Ebstein tells us, by other observers who have shown
that not only in rats but in guinea pigs the transfer of ovaries and
testes between the sexes makes the male, to some extent, become female,
and _vice versa_. Sex differences, Steinach thinks, do not result
from anatomical differences in the organs transferred but are due to
functions residing in certain cells, especially those of Leydig or
Lutein. It is their secretions that determine sex characteristics.
Indeed, they are really glands and vitality and vigor depend upon
their state. Youth is the freshening up of these glands. No one has
recognized more clearly than Steinach that there is a false old age
that has been, in a sense, imposed by civilization upon elderly people
and given them a rôle they have more or less passively accepted, just
as in the same way there are spurious forms of other diseases. Some of
Steinach’s critics have suggested that all he has done is to throw off
these artificial inhibitions and give old age the true character nature
intended it to have. But even if this criticism has any weight against
his conclusions respecting old age in man, it certainly cannot apply
to his studies of senescent animals, for in them the traits of old age
were unmistakable, as not only photographs but, far more, activities
showed. They certainly do seem to be really rejuvenated and not merely
to be laying aside a sham old age.
Of the half-dozen or more expert opinions upon Steinach’s work nearly
all have been by his own countrymen and by far the most exhaustive and,
on the whole, highly favorable is that of Paul Kammerer.[185] For a
very condensed account of it in English see A. Granet’s résumé[186] in
which he says (1) that Steinach’s work is based on a new conception
of the puberty gland as the internal secretory portion of the gonads.
This consists of the interstitial cells in the male and of the lutein
cells in the female. (2) Steinach began by studying animals with a
protracted rutting period in alternating stages of development of
the interstitial gland and the generative gland proper. He found a
periodical hyperdevelopment in the evolution of every individual,
the interstitial gland predominating in infancy and attaining its
maximum development at puberty and adolescence, when growth and vital
energy are also at their maximum. At this time the generative gland
increases and both the interstitial and generative portions continue
to be about equally active till the climacteric, after which there is
rapid recession of the interstitial gland, and this causes senility,
which is not due to the ultimate using up of all elements but to the
lack of potential stimulus due to degeneration of the interstitial
gland. (3) Steinach used this alternating balance of nature in the
mixed gland by artificially inhibiting the generative portion and
thereby causing compensatory regulation and revival of the interstitial
portion with all its rejuvenating effects and the recession of the
traits of senility. This he accomplished by three methods (_a_) simple
ligation, under local anæsthesia, of the vas deferens. This causes
regression of the generative gland and a compensatory regeneration
of the interstitial portions. A one-sided operation is sufficient in
all cases and has the advantage of preserving in addition the power
of procreation. Of course ligation of the Fallopian tube in the
female does not produce this result. (_b_) Repeated mild exposure of
the gonads to the X-ray is a slower but apparently just as effective
a means of obtaining the same result for both ovaries and testes.
And lastly, (_c_) the effects of rejuvenation may be experimentally
produced by transplantation in the old of the respective gonads of
the young animal of the same species. For years Steinach bred and
reared healthy generations of laboratory animals and studied their
dispositions, habits, physical and psychic traits, until he has become
unprecedentedly expert in diagnosing age, to say nothing of sex. The
increased resistance to disease and the actual prolongation of life of
the operated animals he estimates at about 25 per cent but after a time
senescence sets in again.
For women in the climacteric the X-ray method is, by general consent,
best. But Steinach contends that increased well-being and capacity
thus caused are really due to regeneration of the interstitial ovarian
structures. General debility and climacteric metrorrhagias are
distinctly helped by this method because the interstitial portion of
the ovary is not affected by the X-ray whereas the colloidal-albuminoid
precipitation occurs in the cells of the Graafian follicles, which
are radio-sensitive, the same as the metaplastic cells. The affected
cells disappear by autolysis. Menopause sets in and the interstitial
portion alone whose hormones produce the rejuvenating effect remains
functioning. The effects of transplantation, too, are the same and the
shrinking of the transplanted gland seems due to atrophy and should not
prevent rejuvenating effects.
E. Payr[187] calls attention to the fact that Steinach’s puberty
glands, which correspond to the Leydig cells, are those that secrete
internally and that it is these that act so powerfully upon secondary
sex qualities and bring what often appears to be a renewal of youth.
His operation is especially indicated in the case of subjects with
healthy internal organs who are growing prematurely old and who give
evidence of loss of function of secondary sexual characteristics.
G. F. Lydston[188] describes nine cases of men with atrophied testes,
injured, or removed, which were replaced _in situ_ surgically by those
from the bodies of boys recently dead. The glands from the boys were
removed within a few hours after death and generally subjected to cold
storage for some hours and then ingrafted upon the older patient. The
boys from whom they were taken were healthy boys who had suffered
sudden or violent death and there might be an interval of many hours
not only between the death and the removal but between the latter
and the implantation. In all these cases Lydston reports more or
less improvement by the operation, which in a few cases was marked.
The transplanted glands atrophy and disappear more rapidly when the
recipient has more or less well developed testes of his own. Apparently
permanent local results were best obtained in those cases in which the
patient had very little gland tissue. Lydston thinks that there may
be a sort of parasitic action of the patient’s own glands upon the
transplanted ones. His own organs probably contribute the nutritive
pabulum otherwise available for the implanted ones but the therapeutic
results are obtained and sustained even when the implanted gland
eventually disappears. He thinks that the notable result obtained by
Dr. I. L. Stanley, where the glands from a Negro hanged for murder were
implanted in the scrotum of a white moron, apparently with remarkable
results, suggests that atrophy may take place more slowly when the
donor is of the same race as the recipient. The author doubts whether
there is much advantage in anastomosis as to either betterment of
nutrition or preservation of the spermogenetic function. He thinks “we
run more risk of failure of the implant from the greater traumatization
of the tissue necessary for anastomosis.” He thinks, too, that the
spermogenetic epithelium of the testes degenerates in all cases rather
promptly.[189]
In his book, _Impotence, Sterility and Sex Gland Implantation_ (1917),
which seems somewhat ill-digested, Lydston claims priority on eight
points and formulates twenty-one conclusions. It seems to me that
he has not sufficiently assimilated the best European work in this
field or profited as much as he might have done by the far greater
refinements of technique of Steinach; while such results as he claims
are, as he himself admits, always wide open to criticism.
* * * * *
Serge Voronoff, like Metchnikoff, combines research with humanism
and gives free rein to his idealism. He is professor in the medical
school of the _Collège de France_ and deals with old age and death
from the standpoint of endocrinology or the study of the glands of
internal secretion. Accepting Weismann’s doctrine of the continuity
of germ plasm, he says that the nameless and ever unassuaged horror
that everybody really feels for death is “because an intimate memory
of our immortality” survives or because we recollect creation’s first
intention as expressed in plasmal immortality. Man has inherited
this longing from the deathless unicellular creatures from which he
descended not only in the form of quests for elixirs of life here but
in all his manifold beliefs of a life beyond the grave, at the same
time for this life accepting the gospel of renunciation to death as
something inevitable. The ghastly thought of death not only clouds all
our life but predisposes even most scientists to think that research in
this field cannot be successful.
The background view of the work in Voronoff’s field, roughly stated,
is as follows. Somatic cells, having lost the power to propagate the
whole body, as they develop and multiply become more and more special,
not only in form but in function, until they finally lose the power
of multiplication or of regeneration. These are higher and perform
the most particularized functions. Besides these most individualized
cells, so characteristic of every organ that a cytologist can at once
distinguish cells that form the epithelium, intestines, brain, muscle,
glands, etc., there always remain other far less differentiated or
more primitive cells, chiefly leucocytes or white blood corpuscles
and the connective tissue cells. The former float in the blood and
can pass out through the thin walls of the capillaries into other
tissues. The latter constitute all the firmer supportive framework
of every organ. They are very robust, fecund proletarians and are
largely made up of the former. From birth they wage unceasing war
upon the nobler, more professional and expert, but less independent
cells which have sacrificed most of their cruder, pristine powers for
service to the body corporate. These higher cells represent the extreme
division of labor within our bodies. They are no longer sufficient
unto themselves but each class of them depends upon the work of
others. The low, banal, barbaric but vigorous cells of the conjunctive
tissue, on the other hand, always strive to destroy and to themselves
take the place of the higher cells and it is this process slowly
going on everywhere that constitutes old age and all its processes of
hardening, atrophy, disintegration, etc., for these lower cells cannot
discharge the functions of the higher ones they have supplanted and
hence comes anarchy within the organ or body. We die because nature
tends so strongly to develop the cruder type of cell that makes up the
connective tissue.
Now, secretions of the thyroid gland check this aggression of the
lower upon the higher cells, as is shown in the studies of cretinism,
which is in so many respects nothing but premature old age brought
on because the thyroid fluid, the special function of which was to
retard this process, was not supplied; and when it fails, old age
comes on precipitately and even children often look and act much like
prematurely old men and women. On the other hand, the Metchnikoff
ferments of the large intestine weaken the higher cells and leave them
with less power of resistance, so that they become more easily the
prey of the lower cells of the connective tissue. The enemy, however,
for the endocrinologist is not primarily a microbe entering from
without but a more formidable and subtle foe that springs up within.
The difficulty in meeting the situation is immensely enhanced by the
fact that the cells of the conjunctive tissue are not only useful
but indispensable for the work and the development of every organ at
first and continue to be so as long as they do not transcend this
their original function and trespass outside it. The white corpuscles,
although the source of the connective tissue cells, are themselves our
chief defenders. It is they who attack and devour invading microbes but
they consume not only these but also higher cells that have, by the
action of microbes or otherwise, become debilitated. They are, however,
on the whole, so serviceable that we cannot intervene against them but
only against our more dangerous and insidious enemy, the conjunctive
tissue cells.
Not only the thyroid but yet more the tiny parathyroid glands secrete a
fluid, the absence of which brings convulsions and death. A knowledge
of the function of these glands, no larger than a pinhead, as well
as that of the adrenals or of the far more complex pituitary body
(hypophysis), each lobe of which plays its own particular rôle, has
been nothing less than revolutionary. The effects due either to excess
or deficit of the secretion of these glands, which have been studied
experimentally in animals and observed in man, show that they have
great power even to arrest or accelerate growth itself. It is they
that do much to keep us young or make us old. In a sense they furnish
the power that makes about all the organs do their work efficiently,
as an electric current from a battery may start, or its absence stop,
the most diverse kinds of electric machinery. Thus glands have come to
play a great rôle in physiology, medicine, and even psychology, and
their activities have come to be recognized in very many phenomena both
of health and disease, which till recent years no one had suspected.
Some of these glands contain a relatively small number of cells but
do a vast amount of work and manufacture fluids that no chemist can
duplicate and that seem almost magic in their effects. We owe to them
growth, health, and vitality.
Most important of all, and the chief source of human energy in man, are
the sex glands, which distribute energy to all the sixty trillion cells
of the body, making each carry out the function assigned it. Voronoff
made personal studies of eunuchs in the East and among the many traits
so often mentioned he finds them not only arrested along various lines
of bodily and psychic growth but short-lived and perhaps old before
they are forty. They are often selfish and crafty. Sex glands stimulate
not merely amorousness but all kinds of cerebral and muscular energy,
pouring into the blood a species of vital fluid, and give a sense of
vigor and well-being and plenitude of life, which later vanish when
their source begins to run dry in age. Can this wonderful source of
human energy be placed, in any sense, in man’s control? It has already
been proven that trituration of the sex glands does not produce its
entire product and particularly lacks the active element. Moreover, all
preparations of this liquid change very rapidly and may even become
toxic. This method has passed beyond the stage of ingestion in the
stomach or subcutaneous ingestions.
Voronoff undertook to graft young sex glands themselves into
bodies older than those from which they came and if they lived and
throve in the body of the host, the product they secreted would
be complete and also vital. He says of the testes: “To graft this
gland is to participate at first hand in the work of creation, to
imitate nature in the procedures which she has elaborated in order
to secure the harmonious functioning of our body”[190] (p. 65). He
published his first results in 1912. He then showed a lamb born
of an ewe whose ovaries he had removed, replacing them with the
ovaries of her younger sister. His most important paper was read in
October, 1919, on “Testicular Grafts.” He had been experimenting on
flocks of sheep and goats, grafting the whole gland in twenty-five,
large fragments in fifty-eight, and small ones in thirty-seven
individuals. Transplantation was effected subcutaneously sixty-five
times, in the scrotum itself thirty-two times, and twenty-three
times in the peritoneum. Anastomosis did not follow; nor was it
necessary. Testicular tissue, he thinks, has remarkable aptitude for
transplantation and a microscopist, M. Retterer, shows us with abundant
illustrations just what takes place. The nutrition of the small
fragments was more easily assured than that of the large fragments or
the whole. Sometimes where sex power is restored in old animals so
that they bear young, the parental instinct seems weakened, but the
rejuvenation effects of this process, as his many photographs show, are
marked. The old and debilitated animals become well, lively, vigorous,
and belligerent.
Voronoff is very candid in admitting that his interest and enthusiasm
may cause him unconsciously to overestimate the rejuvenating effects of
his grafts, and he also admits that he does not yet know how long the
beneficial effects will last. That they have done so for two or even
three years is beyond question. He is conscious of the incredulity of
biological experts but reminds them that a society of physicists, when
first shown the phonograph, insisted that it was ventriloquism. He
calls attention to the great difficulties in his field, due not only to
prejudice but to laws that forbid the taking of organs of healthy men
killed by accident. He does not expect surgery will ever remove glands
or even portions of them from the living young to revitalize the old,
in human subjects, although he thinks that perhaps “the restoration of
the vital energy and the productive power of Pasteur may well be worth
the slight pain inflicted on the robust porter.” Most men, however,
would prefer to lose an eye rather than one of these glands, as the
price proposed by a few who offered themselves for this purpose shows.
Voronoff sees a great future possible for glandular transplantation and
grafting between men and animals but shows that this can never be very
effective for man save with apes, to whom he is so much more closely
related, even in the makeup and properties of his blood, than to any
other species. Thus the organ of an ape transplanted to man will find
there nutritive and other conditions very like those it was used to.
Surgery has done much and wonderful grafting in the war, even of bones,
and now man, “the talented ape,” as Huxley called him, is recognizing
his simian ancestry in a new way. A fibula congenitally missing in
a child was successfully transplanted from an ape, and the radiogram
showed complete intussusception, no absorption, and it functioned well.
Voronoff transplanted the thyroid gland of an ape into the neck of a
boy of fourteen, who was lapsing to cretinism, with remarkable results
which he describes in detail and with photographs, although the ape
from which the thyroid was taken died. The transplanted gland was not
merely tolerated and then expelled as a foreign body or resorbed but
the graft seemed to really take and its effects to be permanent and
not temporary, like those due to the ingestion of thyroid tablets. The
boy changed in his habits, his school work improved remarkably, and
the last heard from him was that he was a soldier at the front. Here
the beneficial effects were marked and traced for six years and seemed
to promise permanence. Other grafts from apes for cretinism have been
made, but because chimpanzees, which are best for this purpose, are
very hard to procure in sufficient numbers, this process must always
be limited. Voronoff has, however, made no grafts, even of thyroids,
from parent to child save in one case; and here, although the young
imbecile was nearly twenty when the operation was performed, marked
improvement took place. The ape is, in a sense, however, superior to
man, as represented by the quality of these organs, owing perhaps to a
more robust physical constitution; or it may be due to the fact that
with the first boy the graft was from a young ape and the latter from
his mature mother.
For woman, for whom old age has perhaps even greater terrors than for
man, such restoration has not yet been made. Indeed, ovariotomy has
less effects upon young women than does castration upon man, so that
here we face a new problem that cannot yet be solved. The problem now
is whether we can generalize yet from these special studies, including
bone grafting and the surgery of transplantation of other organs.
Kidney grafting has been successful as yet only on cats and dogs but
opotherapy or the administration of glandular extracts of animals when
our own fail is in its infancy, although it does seem to give promise
of deferring death and increasing the vigor of human life. Indeed, he
thinks that the renewal of worn-out glandular mechanisms by grafting
may even become a commonplace. The vital fluid supplied by these organs
“restores energy in all cells and spreads happiness and a feeling
of well-being and the plenitude of life throughout our organism.”
The idea of controlling this marvelous force and placing it at our
service when the natural sources of our energy begin to dry up with the
advance of age has long haunted the minds of investigators, and Paul
Bert and Ollier decades ago dreamed of a day when old organs might be
set aside like worn-out clothes and replaced by new ones. “Several of
these animals operated upon have exceeded the age limit which animals
of their species generally attain and, instead of showing signs of
decrepitude and senility, they give promise of astonishing vigor.”
Louis Berman, M.D.,[191] tells us that infancy is the epoch of the
thymus, childhood of the pineal, adolescence of whatever gland is
left in control as the result of the life struggle, and senility is
the epoch of gradual endocrine insufficiency. The discovery of the
effects of endocrine secretions he compares with that of radium and
thinks that by control of this function we may be able to modify the
rigidity of Weismann’s dogma and affect heredity itself. He draws a
very long bow and even attempts to characterize important personages
and races according to the predominance of thyroid, pituitary, or
adrenal secretions and sees here the fundamental determinants of human
character and conduct. Well informed and expert as he is in this field,
his views, though bold and interesting, are, it must be admitted, more
or less speculative in the present state of our knowledge, and he
devotes little consideration to old age or to the methods of deferring
it.
If we conceive life as the sum total of all the forces that resist
death and death in its essence as the queller of life, it is to
biology, not to theology or philosophy, that we must look for our most
authoritative and normative ideas of both life and death. We must
examine not only the now very copious data that this science already
supplies but also the instrument that defines, delivers, and interprets
them, namely, the mind, so that psychology must henceforth have a place
here second only to biology in formulating conclusions. Now, psychology
teaches not only that there are certain determining tendencies that
always, in part at least below the threshold of consciousness, direct
the course of thought, slowly build up centers of apperception and
interest, and that must always be reckoned with sooner or later not
only in the treatment of any subject in which their action is involved
but also when almost any scientific laws of nature are formulated, but
also that, quite apart from their primary significance for the field in
which they arose, they have a secondary anagogic value in other fields,
in which they become symbols, often of great efficacy. Only the lower
alchemists sought to evolve gold from baser metals and this quest we
now know was always and everywhere really subordinate to the effort to
evolve the _summum bonum_ in human life. So the modern sciences that
deal with life and death, health and disease, are really directed far
more than they know, even in those researches upon the lower forms
of life and most abnormal processes, by the deeper, determining
motivation to know better and to influence more the conditions of human
life. Thus a truer and larger self-knowledge for man is, in this sense,
their ultimate goal.
In view of this, what psychologist can for a moment doubt that the
old problem which F. W. H. Myers called the most insistent that ever
haunted the mind of man has contributed very much to stimulate interest
in Weismann’s doctrine of the immortality of the germ plasm and for a
wide lay public has given a zest and interest in phenomena that can
hardly be observed at all save through a microscope and by an expert.
If we had an analysis of Weismann’s own consciousness from his first
conception of this idea to its full development we should doubtless
find the same factor. True, we search his writings in vain for any
intimation that he recognized any such influence, but I think there can
be no doubt that had he been a psychologist interested in the sources
of his own motivations and had he left us an autobiography as intimate
as that of Spencer, Wundt, or even Darwin, we should have seen that
he realized that he was only giving a new answer to the oldest of all
culture problems. Of course, no psychoanalyst or geneticist would
claim that Weismann was seeking an _elixir vitæ_ or a new fountain
of youth for himself or for others, but it would be equally extreme,
on the other hand, to deny that in the very use of the concept and
term immortal, as he applied them to germ plasm and protozoa, he was
propounding a new if partial surrogate answer to the problem of a
larger life for man. Indeed, we might go further and suggest that
in his extreme pronouncements against the inheritance of acquired
qualities he gave way to the same basal disposition or diathesis
that made theologians so exiguous in formulating conceptions of the
inviolability of divine decrees.
Another underlying psychic determinant is found in the intense
popular interest in investigations like those of Voronoff, Steinach,
and Carrel, of which the latter is perhaps least conscious while
the former is almost as tinglingly so throughout as Haeckel was of
these older concepts. That highly differentiated and complex somatic
tissues removed from the body and given a more fit medium, and kept
from all products of decomposition, etc., can keep on functioning and
growing for years, better than they had done in the body in which they
originated, neither has nor is ever likely to have any real practical
utility for prolonging or intensifying human life. The fact may have
a certain moral for cleanliness and even for nutrition but we can
never wash out the tissues of the body or keep each of its cells in
an optimum environment. Yet even here the mind finds a faint if, all
things considered, somewhat pathetic element of hope that old age and
death may sometime be deferred.
Nor can we ever hope to ward death off by keeping the tissues of the
body young and growing to the end of life and breaking the law, to
which nearly all species are subject, of attaining their maximum size
long before age and decline set in. It has long been realized that one
of the first signs of the advent of the chronic hereditary diseases in
children is the arrest of growth but man can never, of course, hope to
approximate immortality by attaining gigantic size. Nor can we hope to
advance toward the old idea of macrobiotism by permanently lowering
the temperature within the body, as experimenters show can be done
with great increase of life for certain of its lower forms, especially
those called cold-blooded which take the temperature of the medium in
which they live. And yet here man has a very old instinct, reinforced
by modern hygiene, to avoid excessive heat, an instinct that perhaps
originally impelled him to leave tropic regions and haunt the edge
of retreating glaciers. Nor can we ever expect to rejuvenate man by
bringing about a dedifferentiation of organs or functions because just
this is the price we pay for progress, evolution, and individuation.
But this concept, too, has many prelusive forms in the early
developmental history of human consciousness and it has its own obvious
anagogic meaning. If we follow these trends they lead us, of course,
straight to Pantheism and give us a painful sense of the limitations
inherent in personality itself. As to the conclusion of Loeb, that
life departs with breath because the absence of a fresh supply of
oxygen lets loose dissolutive chemical changes its presence prevented,
the pragmatic layman can only point to the recognition that in a few
generations has become world-wide, of the value of ventilation, deep
breathing, and the adequate oxidation of tissues. This shows that man
felt that life was closely bound up with oxygen long before he could
prove it. So the biological evidence that it is the brain or nervous
system that dies first and determines the death of all the other parts
and functions, if it has any culture correlate, finds it probably
in the hazy quarter truths of the doctrines of the mental healers,
that far more human ills and far more deaths and preventions and
postponements of death than we know are amenable to mind cure because
they are mind-made.
The only practical hope of easement from the hardships of senescence
and for the postponement of death now tenable is that now arising
faintly and tentatively that, some day, some mitigation of the terrors
of old age and death may be found by glandular implantation or perhaps
even by the injection of the secretions of certain glands. We know
that the germinal glands, and especially their products, have a unique
vitality of their own and also that they exert a remarkable and
all-pervasive influence upon all the organs and functions of the body;
and that thyroid extract retards and its absence precipitates all the
processes of aging. The new studies in this field suggest that glands
may be the sovereign masters of life. These studies are yet, however,
in their infancy and it will be, at the best, a long time before we can
know whether they are able to fulfill their promise to the human heart
and to the will to live.
I deem it, however, very significant that contemporaneously with the
discovery and exploitation of endocrine functions, and especially those
of the sex glands, from another field and quite independently have come
the discovery and exploitation of the unconscious and the recognition
that its chief content is sexual. The analogies between these two lines
of advance and their real relation with each other have not yet been
fully recognized, much less wrought out. But already there is promise
of a new and more stimulating rapport between biology and analytic and
genetic psychology. If researches in the former field ever have the
therapeutic value already so abundantly illustrated in the latter, we
shall indeed be fortunate. Just now this seems not probable for a long
time. But the physiological dominance of sex glands and their products,
and the immense rôle played by sex life, especially in man, suggest
that it is in this field that the cure of his most grievous ills must
be sought, just as the oldest and most persistent myths and legends
have so long taught that it was in this field that the so-called fall
of man took place.
CHAPTER VII
REPORT ON QUESTIONNAIRE RETURNS
Their value suggestive but only for a class--(1) Effects of the
first realization of the approach of old age--(2) To what do
you ascribe your long life?--(3) How do you keep well?--(4) Are
you troubled by regrets?--(5) What temptations do you feel--old
or new?--(6) What duties do you feel you still owe to others or
to self?--(7) Is interest in public affairs for the far future
and past, as compared with what is closer at hand, greater or
less?--(8) In what do you take your greatest pleasures?--(9) Do
you enjoy the society of children, youth, adults, those of your
own age, more or less than formerly?--(10) Would you live your
life over again?--(11) Did you experience an “Indian summer” of
renewed vigor before the winter of age began?--(12) Do you rely
more or less upon doctors than formerly?--(13) Do you get more or
less from the clergy and the church than formerly?--(14) Do you
think more or less of dying and the Hereafter?--A few individual
returns from eminent people.
Perhaps no one but a genetic psychologist can realize how very widely
the successive stages of life in man differ from each other. Underneath
the tenuous memory continuum that is the chief basis of all feeling
of identity between our present and former selves, deeper even than
every unity of life plan and persistence of disposition, are the great
changes the years bring. These are, indeed, so great that although
they very commonly modulate, each into the next stage of the series
by almost imperceptible gradations, we all really live not one but a
succession of lives. Further than this, just as in dementia præcox the
normal development of the psyche is permanently arrested in a juvenile
stage, so, but far more commonly, the normal progress from maturity to
senectitude is arrested; and in the decades of involution, which is
just as progressive and interesting as evolution, the old cling to or
leave with great reluctance their mature stage and so never achieve
true senectitude. Just as the precocious dement balks in adolescence at
the growing complexity and arduousness of the problems of adulthood and
so fails to mature because he lacks the energy or hereditary momentum
to do so, so the old very often find themselves inadequate to the new
tasks involved in beating the great retreat. They cannot break from the
things that are behind and reach forward to those that are before and
they cling with a tenacity that is purely arrestive to a stage of life
that has passed. They refuse to accept old age and to make the most and
best of it, to face its tasks and to improve all its opportunities.
If they do not paint, dye, pad, or affect the fashions and manners of
the young (for old age may show traits of narcissism), when the call
comes to move on to a new phase of life, their mentality defaults. This
type of mental defect has never so far been adequately characterized
but it is probably far more common than what is usually called senile
dementia, of which it is almost the diametrical opposite, although
because of its prevalence it has a better claim to this designation.
Believing profoundly that involution is just as interesting a phase of
life as evolution and not being satisfied with the poems, essays, and
meditations of literary men and women who have addressed the public
on the theme of senescence, which are, as we saw in a former chapter,
often more or less hortatory, consolatory, or else were composed as
exercises to hearten themselves against the great enemy, it seemed
worth while to try to seek a new contact with the fresh spontaneous
thoughts and feelings of normal old people concerning their estate.
Years ago I had visited homes for the aged, held converse with many
inmates and officials, had given each inmate a tiny blue book and
asked them to answer a few questions and add anything that occurred
to them that they thought characteristic of their stage of life. The
records thus secured, although voluminous enough, had very little
value. Most who answered were uneducated and the data they supplied
were usually trivial, tediously and irrelevantly reminiscent, or else
descriptive of surroundings in earlier life, complaints, wishes, fears,
etc., so that I realized that true old age as I had conceived it was
not to be sought in such institutions. There was pathos and pessimism
galore, while disciplined tranquillity and serenity were very rare.
There is doubtless material enough in even the most inarticulate and
insignificant life to repay the longest and most painstaking study.
Perhaps, too, a psychotherapy may sometime be evolved that will launch
such stranded and arrested lives out again into the current and give
them full fruition of all the fruitage of life. But the world is as yet
far from any such beneficent ministry.
Accordingly, I turned to another source and selected a few score
of names of mostly eminent and some very distinguished old people,
both acquaintances and strangers, and addressed to each a simple
questionnaire, also inviting spontaneous impartations in addition to
responses to the points suggested. Some of those who did me the honor
of replying, and often with much detail, are people of national and
international reputation and I wish I had not promised to withhold
their names for this would have given greatly added interest to the
following report. All are cultivated Americans and thus they represent
a single class. Most are Anglo-Saxons and I have not been able to
gather much material from Oriental or non-Christian sources, desirable
and important as this would be. My data are, however, sufficiently
copious to illustrate the chief types of attitudes within their
class. To the returns from this source I have added data from less
than a score of others of the same class with whom I have personal
acquaintance and I have drawn but very little from the rich field of
autobiography for my inductions. Such data can, of course, only yield
results that are far more suggestive than conclusive, and so I forbear
from all statistics because the number of my respondents is too small.
But although what follows does not represent the great majority of old
people it does have a psychological value that I deem as unique as it
is pertinent to my theme. It is also perhaps significant that of those
who wrote expressing interest and an intention to respond, not one has
done so after an interval of several months. It should perhaps also be
mentioned here that the suggestion of attempting this book came from
nearly two-score letters from old people, which were addressed to me
through the editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_ and were evoked by an
anonymous article I published on “Old Age” in the January, 1921, number
of that magazine. I have endeavored to keep the following report of
these somewhat heterogeneous data as objective as possible, although it
would be absurd to claim that by such a method on such a theme I have
entirely escaped subjective bias.
_How and at what age did you first realize the approach of old age?_
This realization not infrequently begins in the forties and increases
thereafter, often intensively with the beginning of each new decade.
The first sign of baldness, the first touch of fatigue at stated tasks,
lapse of memory for names, waning potency in men; and the first gray
hairs, wrinkles, fading of complexion, and change of figure, etc., in
women are often specified in our returns. Such and many other signs
usually gave the first sad recognition that the meridian of life was
being crossed and that gradual declination was just ahead. In many
a man and woman this is, as has been recognized, a dangerous age and
it often comes in the middle and later thirties in women. The latter,
realizing that their summer is ending, sometimes break away from old
restraints and give themselves more liberties, not only social but
moral. The first glimpse of the specter of senility ahead puts them
in a now-or-never mood. Men ask themselves if they will be content to
go on as they are so far heading, so that there will be nothing new
to be written in the story of their life save only the date of their
death. They wonder if the future is to be as the past and perhaps make
an inventory of their unrealized ideals, hopes, and wishes, and cross
many of them off their ledger as bad debts they owe themselves but can
never collect. This crossing the line is for some so serious a matter
that it may cause an abrupt turn in their life line, which starts off
in a new direction, as is illustrated in a few conspicuous examples in
Chapter I. This touch of autumn in August, however, rarely brings frost
or blight but leaves only a trace of a new seriousness and perhaps
sadness, while otherwise all goes on as before.
In a few cases the first realization that one is getting old springs
upon the soul, as if from ambush, on some trivial occasion and
clings like an obsession that remits only to recur again and again.
The majority, however, promptly and ruthlessly suppress all such
intimations beneath the threshold of consciousness, telling not only
others but themselves that they are just as young and capable as ever,
thus refusing to recognize that age is upon them till perhaps the
sixth or seventh decade. Thus the old are often the last to recognize
in themselves infirmities that have long been patent to others. This
is one of the benignities of nature, for to no disease, not even
consumption, does she give a more effective opiate. A man of ninety
still retains his post as head of a great concern he created in his
youth, to its serious detriment, convinced that he is better than ever
and that the scores of younger men under him lack the efficiency of
those of his own generation. “He was on the verge of resigning twenty
years ago,” said one of his subordinates to me, “but now he does not
know enough to do so.”
On the other hand, some seem to take a new lease of life in this youth
of old age. It is not so much that they have a new sense of the value
of time but because they have taken in sail in other directions and,
realizing the limitations of life, have focused more sharply upon the
things they deem most essential.
_To what do you ascribe your long life?_
Good heredity is much more often specified than anything else. There is
a tendency in the old to inventory the virtues of parents and ancestors
and a deep-seated belief, even in these democratic days, that blood
will tell. Four correspondents believed their constitution was weak and
that the early realization of this called their attention to personal
hygiene, so that these individuals ascribe their long life more to
their own effort than to inheritance. Next in rating is the environment
of early life. In our land many have been born in the country and led
a laborious life in youth and later changed to urban surroundings and
to more sedentary habits, which always involves a considerable strain
of readjustment. Where this change has been successfully weathered
there is a strong disposition to place a very high emphasis upon the
beneficence of strenuous physical activity in the formative period.
Next in appreciation comes the preservative influence of good and
temperate habits, reinforced by observations of acquaintances of early
life who, by reason of less moderation, have preceded them to the
cemetery. When our own associates die we tend to draw the lessons of
their physical and moral life. One ascribes her longevity to the very
early implantation of the idea that everything must be determined by
its bearing upon her power to bring healthy children into the world.
Most mention, and many stress, the absence of worry and overwork,
although one insists that he had been chronically anxious from the
first, suffering by day for years from apprehensions of evil and lying
awake nights trying to plan the reconstruction of the universe. Several
ascribe their length of years to the fact that as they advanced in
age they learned betimes to give up former duties and lay off burdens
they could no longer carry with impunity. It is evident that this
realization of the effect of years differs very widely in different
individuals and seems almost lacking in some. Several take pride in the
fact that although they inherited a short life from both parents and
grandparents they have succeeded in greatly prolonging it, and by diet
and regimen in overcoming hereditary handicaps. One determined early in
life to make the mind rule the body. One old lady ascribes her vigor to
progressive self-forgetfulness and devotion to the service of others.
An interesting case, which I deem typical of many in these Christian
Science days, declares that he early learned that all living animals,
especially man, have “a constructive, preserving, and renewing
principle or energy within them fully competent to care for the body
in every particular, demonstrated by the evidence of a vast number of
recorded cures of so-called incurable diseases without any external
remedial agency.” This element can become amenable to conscious
control. “We are composed of a thousand billion cells, far greater
in number than that of the entire population of the globe since
man arrived and each of them infinitely complex and charged with
potencies.” With such a force man should place no limitations upon
himself, for he has inexhaustible recuperative energy, etc. If such a
faith has little justification for science, it may, nevertheless, give
a mental attitude that is conducive to a poise and confidence that in
itself has marked hygienic and therapeutic value. It is interesting
to note that cultivated men and women seem far less prone than the
ignorant to the medical fetichism that ascribes exceptional value to
some nostrum or single item of diet or regimen and this suggests how
fast the age-long quest for a universal panacea is vanishing from
modern consciousness. As men grow old and have a long experience and
youthful friends have passed away, it is inevitable that they should
seek the cause of their longevity and this urge would naturally
increase with years. Therefore, while the individual answers to this
question have little scientific value, they are of both psychological
and practical interest. Underneath them all there is a tendency to
identify hygiene with morals and most men who achieve great age thus
tend to look with complacency upon their life as a whole as a triumph
of virtue, even though in fact it may have been quite irregular.
_How do you keep well, that is, what do you find especially good or bad
in diet, regimen, interests, and personal hygiene generally?_
In the answers to this question, as was perhaps to be expected, we find
the utmost diversity. Only two report that they eat and do anything
that appeals to them, with no special attention to regimen. Some eschew
drugs, while one would wager that he had taken nearly every kind of
medicament and said he had used laxatives daily for thirty-eight years.
One had found great reinforcement of life from moderate wine drinking
and thus found prohibition somewhat reductive of his vitality. Some
entirely eschew tea, coffee, and tobacco, while most indulge in both
of the former and several in the latter in moderation. Several found
marked reinforcement when they began to rest or perhaps take a nap in
the middle of the day. All praise early retiring and insist that a
generous portion of the twenty-four hours must be spent in bed, even if
they do not sleep. Most ascribe much virtue to daily, and particularly
to cold baths, shower, spray, etc., while a very few prefer a sponge-
or only a rub-down. Most stress the importance of exercise, varied and
out-of-doors, particularly walking, while some emphasize the value
of a little all-round indoor gymnastics that call all the muscles
into moderate action. Some note the avoidance of starchy foods, while
others speak of the effectiveness of bran or other agencies against
constipation, which is, rightly or wrongly, felt to be one of the
morbific tendencies of the old, although others believe that some
degree of it is normal at this stage of life. Only one felt rejuvenated
by vegetarianism, while many found it advantageous to eat less and more
frequently. Most had given considerable attention to diet and had drawn
up a list of things good or bad for them. Some found it necessary to
regulate their lives with reference to some special morbid tendency of
kidneys, intestines, heart, lungs, etc. Some laid special emphasis upon
confining their occupation to things that were agreeable or congenial,
while things distasteful brought fatigue early. A few were so in love
with their life-work, or it had such variety, that they never felt the
need of a vacation, while others were very dependent upon a more or
less stated remission of work or change of scene and activity, not only
yearly but at every week’s end.
The problem of finding a golden mean between excess and defective
diet, exercise, work, and excitement, was almost always present. The
fads that individuals stressed were horseback and bicycle riding,
hunting, tramping, sleeping out-of-doors on an open porch, developing
a programme that kept both mind and body busy all day with objective
things, indulging in one or even several avocations often far removed
from the main line of interest, etc. Some stressed more or less exact
routine, while others found virtue in having none but always following
their inner inclination and took pleasure in breaking up old habits.
One old man loved skating; another, when he was seventy-three, took
up automobiling with great zest. A man of ninety has a rub-down by
a nurse every night and morning, with some massage. Another is so
dependent upon the food to which he is accustomed that he always takes
his cook with him in his private car and even if he goes out to dinner
must be served with viands prepared by this particular servitor.
Then, after exactly half an hour, he leaves the table, even when he
is visiting, for a brief siesta. DeSaverin tells us that old people
are liable to develop Epicurean appetites and, as they advance in age,
can distinguish liquid and solid viands with far greater acuteness
than when they were younger. Our data do not, however, confirm
this but suggest that gustatory inclinations grow more amenable to
reason. Appetite, we are told, is the safest guide, pointing true as
the needle to the pole, to the nutritive needs of the body. It is,
nevertheless, very modifiable, and the old often easily come to like
the food they have learned is good for them, although they very rarely
adopt dietaries suggested for their benefit by nutrition laboratories.
It does seem, however, that there should be institutions where old
people can go periodically for personal surveys of all their habits
and receive suggestions that, based upon their idiosyncrasies, would
doubtless be marked by very wide individual variations. It is certain
that the diet and regimen most advantageous for the person of one
diathesis would be very deleterious to another.
_Are you troubled with regrets for things done or not done by or for
you?_
In these returns there is no vestige of tragic remorse of either the
old classic or theological kind, although only one disclaimed every
trace of regret for anything in the past. This is not because he had
not made mistakes but because he believed, as nearly all did, that
regrets were vain. Most admitted serious errors both of omission
and commission, while many specified waste of time and energy,
misdirection, bad advice, lack of method, continuity, and system. One
bitterly regretted her choice of calling, which had made her daily work
a “crucifixion.” Several regretted that they had not been more generous
and deplored the too absorbing efforts they had made for acquisition.
Others deplored their training as children, the effects of which it
had taken years to overcome; while still others regretted the way in
which they had brought up their own children. Some thought they had
done too little for or given too little attention to their families.
Some had made special efforts to cultivate forgetfulness of faults and
especially rankling injustices they had suffered from others. One felt
that he had come into the world not by his own will but as an accident
of sexual passion and therefore felt himself under no obligations to
his parents and not responsible for his life or its conduct. Some had
even learned to rejoice in their mistakes because of the wisdom that
had thus been taught them. Not a few took occasion to reflect upon
their satisfactions, which offset the dissatisfaction with what life
had brought. Many reproached themselves that they had not done more,
worked harder, had more to show, etc. Other old people have a dull
and sometimes corroding sense of sexual errors in their past that may
have impaired the quality of all their family relations and even the
constitution of their children. Some are prone to turn to thoughts of
specific instances of outrageous injustice, so that their most poignant
regret is that they have never been able to wreak vengeance upon those
who had wronged them.
Many specified the long hardships to which they had been subjected by
too strict religious and moral regimen and blamed their parents for not
giving them instruction betimes during the stage of pubertal ferment.
A few had been through the crisis of business failure, made mistaken
alliances, or been mismated, or regretted that they had not married.
Not infrequent is the regret of having been a spendthrift, wasted a
patrimony; and still more frequent are the mentions of injuries to
health by unhygienic habits. A few chiefly deplored the fact of not
being able to believe what they felt they should. Other few deplored
the dullness and languor of their emotional zests and that they take
less interest in things than formerly. Most who make decided breaks in
middle life do not seem to regret them, although more regret a series
of circumnutations among various occupations before they found the
right one.
It would seem that the very fact that man has succeeded in living and
conserving tolerable health till advanced years gives a feeling that he
has, on the whole, succeeded despite errors and lapses, and there seems
to be at least a tacit agreement on the part of all that it is idle to
regret what it is too late to help. Old age does not, therefore, seem
to be a time of repentance for youthful follies and if this exists at
all, it is more than compensated for by a complacency that things have
not been worse than they were, and even the possibilities of the latter
bring no disquietude.
_What temptations do you feel, old or new?_
More of my respondents failed to answer this question than any other
and most answers were brief. It is very interesting and significant
to note that resistances to anything like confessionalism increase
with age. If the old have long walked in ways that society condemns,
their secrecy about it has been too long and habitual to be readily
broken. This is one reason why psychoanalysis totally fails with the
old, so that most analysts refuse to take patients over forty. The
German jurist, Friedrich, said that everyone was a potential murderer,
because at some moment in his life he had been angry enough to kill and
probably would have done so if every circumstance had favored. So the
candid and conscientious man who looks back upon a long life realizes
that he has done or nearly done, at least in heart, about every crime
and yielded and felt promptings to about every vice. Probably everyone,
too, had actually done things that if known would expose him to
obloquy. Thus the old almost never go to the confessional. Moreover,
there is a benign but deep instinct in us to forget things we have
done that would disgrace us and perhaps especially those things at
which our own moral sense and self-respect most revolt, where qualms of
conscience would be so painful that we refuse to face them. And this is
connected with the fact that in those churches that stress a radical
change of heart, with deep conviction of sin, conversions of the old
are very rare. Martial[192] says of the fortunate old Antonius viewing
the years behind:
Back on their flight he looks and feels no dread
To think that Lethe’s waters flow so near.
There is no day of all the train that gives
A pang; no moment that he would forget.
A good man’s span is doubled; twice he lives
Who, viewing his past life, enjoys it yet.
All, of course, want to do just this, so that “the good men do” may
live “after them,” while “the bad is interred with their bones.”
Edgar Lee Masters, in a little volume of clever poetic skits,[193]
describes the dead in a country churchyard as sitting up, one after
another, in their graves and belying their epitaphs. One says in
substance, “They called me good and pure but I was a villain”; another,
“They called me philanthropic and generous but I ground the faces of
the poor and all my charities were to camouflage my selfishness and
extortion”; and so on through a long list of rectifications, showing
that while men generally follow the precept of saying nothing but
good of the dead there may be, after all, at the bottom of the soul a
certain impulse to have all the worst in us known. But this is not true
of modern life, if it ever was so in the past.
Some of our respondents specified temptations to overeat, to
under-exercise, to take life too easy or to be too tardy in throwing
off responsibilities, to read or think too much, to be censorious
and intolerant, irritable, to resent the cocky infallibility of the
young, the excessive urge to speed up, the danger of getting cranky, of
brooding; and a few speak vaguely of temptations of the flesh. Nearly
all say that they are less prone to yield to temptations than in middle
life.
It is perhaps from this standpoint that we see most clearly the
danger to which the old are subjected in the progressive loss of
self-knowledge. It is very hard for any but the strongest mentalities
to realize the changes that age brings, to adjust to, feel at home in,
and come to terms consciously with it, so that most would probably be
surprised if they knew how clearly those closest to them understood
their weaknesses, tolerated their idiosyncrasies, and made allowances
for their failures. Self-control, poise, a calm, judicial state of mind
even with regard to things that concern us most deeply, are among
the chief, if also among the rarest, virtues of senescence. Everyone
carries with him to the grave many a secret that it is well for him and
for the world is buried with him; and the impulse to be known even by
God Himself exactly as we are, although it has so many expressions in
prayers and religious formulæ, lacks in our day, we must conclude, any
real depth of sincerity.
_What duties do you feel that you still owe either to those about you
or to the world?_
Some place first the duty of providing wisely and well for their
families and friends after their death. A few are oppressed by the
thought that they still owe the world far more than they can pay,
although one who has lived a life of very large usefulness thinks
the world owes him now far more than he owes it. Some have a dread
amounting almost to horror of being useless and wish, above all things,
to be not a burden but serviceable. A few feel the same old duties,
with no change. Others feel called to give to the world, or at least
to those about them, advice and admonition based upon the rich lessons
of experience. Some who have been lifelong slaves to duty resolve that
they will now emancipate themselves and live henceforth according to
their own pleasure. Some feel that their time and strength for doing
good have so abated that it is vain to try to accomplish anything more
and that they must devote themselves to being, instead of doing, good,
and would thus cultivate every grace of character and let their light
so shine as to be examples to others, so that self-development must
henceforth be their chief effort.
In such answers as are before me two things stand out with special
prominence. The first is that the men of science, who constitute about
one-third of all, have unfinished studies, which they feel it is their
supreme duty to complete before their powers abate. It is less often
new themes to which they would consecrate their energies than old ones
on which already very much work has been done and that they rightly
feel no one else could properly finish and that would thus be lost to
the world unless they themselves were able to complete it. These men
are less intent upon public reforms or special civic duties than upon
adding at least a tiny stone to the great temple of science, although
only a few in their own specialty will ever appreciate or be benefited
by their work. The world has certainly lost much, although probably
less than those concerned think, by the death or the incapacitating
senility of savants who left an unfinished window in their Aladdin
tower. We all think of great novels, which the authors did not live
to complete; of promising, intricate researches, which were perhaps
bungled by the imperfect reports of the half-competent who undertook
to present them to the world; of papers left by the old to be edited
by their children or their advanced students, some of which had better
have remained untouched; of belabored manuscripts, which survivors can
make nothing of and which are perhaps piously preserved for years and
eventually consigned to the flames. It is such fates for the children
of their brain that some of our respondents seem to dread chiefly and
it is this that prompts them to dreams, which are generally fatuous, of
literary executors or post-mortem publications.
The most general conclusion from these data is that the old are very
prone to develop, if they have not had it before, a kind of educational
instinct in the larger sense of this word; they wish to admonish or
exhort, if not the world at least some section of it, to better and
wiser living, to the acquisition of the knowledge that is of most
worth, to the cultivation of peace and amity, or to a simple and
perhaps more strenuous and efficient life and to the development of
good habits. The lessons they would teach often impress the young as
being trite and commonplace, but if they are so, they are charged with
a depth of conviction and enriched by a wealth of experience that give
them a greater significance than the young can appreciate.
_Is your interest in public, community, or in far future or past
things, as compared with interest in persons and things right about
you, greater or less than formerly?_
Here we have two very distinctly opposite tendencies. On the one
hand, more frequently in women than men and much more common in the
uneducated classes, the horizon of interest tends to narrow to the
immediate environment and to the here and now of each day and if health
is impaired, the chief concern may be personal well- or ill-being,
in which case we see the egoism and selfishness of old age in its
extreme form. On the other hand, and as we would fain believe more
normally, we have an increase of breadth of view and of interest not
only in local affairs of the community but of the state, country,
world, and humanity, which may be intensified as decline necessitates
withdrawal from more active participation in affairs nearest in time
and place. Two great events have had an incalculable influence in
this direction that often appears in our data. The one is the World
War, the new era of history it has opened, and the whole problem of
the future fate of civilization. This has made a tremendous appeal to
those of contemplative habits and has stimulated them to follow the
course of world events, to study the past and peer into the future as
never before, as well as to want to live on to see the next act in the
great drama. Suffrage and the new enfranchisement of woman have marked
a great increase in public life and opened new spheres of influence
for her sex in political, civic, and moral fields that are proving so
absorbing that the former tendency which advanced years brought--to
focus on persons at closer range and on narrower human relations--is
superseded by a new and larger humanism. Not only have these tendencies
greatly enriched old age but there is no reason to think they will ever
be transcended or reversed. In this sense there has been no age in the
world in which it was so good to be old and the last decade or two have
contributed far more than any other to give old people a stronger hold
on life and to bring it more of just the kind of culture needed for its
legitimate development, as well as to very greatly strengthen the will
to live.
_In what do you now take your greatest pleasure?_
While a few find it only in the same sources as before old age
supervened, most have discovered new sources of satisfaction or at
least find joy in more abandonment to inclinations that had to be
more or less sidetracked or almost tabooed before. Reading is most
often specified. A few who used to read novels voraciously have
lost all interest in love stories and turned to biographies, which
they now pursue with almost the same zest as they formerly felt for
romance. A few turn to history in general or perhaps trace the earlier
stages of the development of their own field of work. Several find
a great resource in meditation or even reverie, giving more time to
day-dreaming than before. A very few feel a new urge to give some
message to the world before they die, and perhaps try, with or without
success, to write for publication, while some do so merely for their
own edification. Two old professors who have taught successfully all
their lives, on ceasing to do so were impelled to address a larger
public by print and were dismayed to find their efforts unsuccessful.
Others confess to a loss of ambition to do anything to better the
world but would confine their efforts to making those about them wiser
or happier. Many find a new charm in nature, for example, walks in
the open, gardening, birds, stars, celestial phenomena, or perhaps
reading the works of naturalists and out-of-door observers of animals,
flowers, plants, trees; while others, like Socrates, prefer human
relations and indulge more freely than before in companionships,
correspondence, or perhaps things that absorb them in their immediate
environment, or in a wider rapport with current events, and give more
time to newspapers, etc. It is not uncommon for cultivated old people
to reread the classic standard literature they perused in their youth
and sometimes to abandon themselves to the study of the best things
in ancient literature, which they had only known before by name and
always felt inclined but never had time to indulge in, feeling perhaps
that they are thus tardily making up for lost time. Only a few specify
greater keenness of æsthetic enjoyment for works of art, music, drama,
etc. Men very rarely, and women somewhat more frequently, confess to
taking greater pleasure in dress, so that while we only seldom find
dandified old men who affect the fashions and dress of youth, women
not infrequently feel that as their personal charms decline they
must compensate by richness of attire, jewels, and perhaps lavish
ornamentation, coiffure, etc. One old lady in the eighties regretted
bitterly that lavender was the only color in which she could now dress
without criticism. Perhaps excess in this direction is, on the whole,
more pleasing than the growing neglect of these things with years,
which is so much more common.
Of the three muses, solitude, society, and nature, while all have a
new if not stronger attraction it is the first that, from our returns,
would seem to increase most with age. Deafness, or perhaps impatience
with the overactivities of the young, may weaken the social bonds
and physical infirmity may limit contact with nature but nearly all
our respondents seek and find solace in themselves more than before.
We find few old people who, like many younger ones, have a horror of
being alone. Several have daily periods of retreat or retirement when
they are “at home” only to themselves, perhaps to digest what they
have lately read or to adjust with more equanimity to changes within
or without. Thus the old generally find resources within themselves
that more or less compensate for their growing isolation, although
some reproach themselves or others that they find these resources too
meager. One old philosopher says in substance that, realizing that he
must sometime meet death absolutely alone and reach a point where he
must take final leave of all and everything about him, he feels that
he must strengthen his soul by practising for the most solitary of all
experiences. Thus there is a certain hermit or recluse motive, which of
old sent so many aging persons into the desert, wilderness, mountains,
etc., a motif that may possibly have received some psychogenetic
reinforcement from the dangers of ill-treatment by their fellows to
which in cruder stages of life the old were exposed. It is entirely
impossible for youth to fully sympathize with age because this would
mean nothing less than to anticipate it, and so the aged often feel,
deep in their souls, that there is a slight falsetto or conventional
note, even in the greatest consideration shown to them. This condition,
in morbid cases, may amount to suspicions of insincerity or a sense
that kindness masks the opposite feeling. Happily, however, most of the
aged do not seem to suffer acutely from this feeling but accept what is
done for them at its full face value.
Nature, on the other hand, is probably at no stage of life felt to
be so motherly, so sympathetic, or so full of moral meanings. Quite
apart from the nature that science teaches us, the old seem to feel a
recrudescence of the old anthropomorphic feeling that once made the
nature-myths and has inspired so many of the parables, similes, tropes,
and what are now called anagogic interpretations, by which man has
read into nature’s phenomena the experiences of his own life. The old
man feels in a new way that not only all bibles but humanity itself
came straight out of the heart of nature, so that contemplation of her
various aspects may become for him again a kind of navel-gazing. He
sometimes becomes an annotator of weather and temperature, to which he
has a new susceptibility, and feels a new kinship not only with the
sun, storm, forest, mountain, shore and sea, but even with celestial
phenomena. He welcomes the advent of spring with a trace of the old
jubilance once expressed in many vernal festivals; feels and is perhaps
depressed by the analogy between his period of life and winter; often
indulges the hope that he may die in his favorite season and not be
buried when the world is ice-bound; and is in the closest rapport with
climate and often makes much sacrifice to live in one he has found most
favorable. In general, he is responsive, probably far more deeply even
than he realizes, to all the moods and tenses in which nature expresses
herself. Perhaps his very wakefulness gives him a new rapport with the
night through all its watches.
The old who have access to the country often select favorite and
generally retired nooks where they can sit for hours and be alone
with nature and thus entertain their souls. One old man who did
this habitually every summer in a spot in what he called his coign
of vantage told me that at each successive year, on revisiting this
spot, he was conscious of some deep change, of a certain new sense of
closeness to nature’s heart, which, although he could not define it,
seemed to mark a new step in his development and which he thought
somehow normative for his whole life during the year, for he often
went to sleep thinking of the charm of this place, etc. The psychology
of solitude, both chosen and enforced, shows that it often brings an
almost rapturous delight in the contemplation of some simple object
of nature--a flower, shrub, insect or tiny animal, which causes for
a moment a kind of temporary focalization that gives it something of
a fetishistic power. All this, however, does not lessen but perhaps
rather augments, by the law of change and alternation, the growing
charm that humanity in the large sense always has for old people who
conserve their faculties. The sphinx riddle, what is man and what is
the worth and meaning of all his strivings, never fails to come over
the matured mind, despite the fact that it is the most baffling and
insoluble of all problems, for “age brings a philosophic mind” and with
it comes a new realization that the greatest study of mankind is man.
_Do you enjoy the society of children, of young people, adults, or
those near your own age more or less than formerly?_
Responses here differed very widely but certain common traits appear.
Those who grow deaf are often condemned to a progressive solitude
and this affliction has a pathos of its own. The friends we knew in
youth and college are scattered and most of them, and perhaps most
members of our own family, are dead, so that associates of our own
age are generally very few. But besides this the old often develop
idiosyncrasies highly distasteful to others and we find complaints
of the stupidity or querulousness of other old people. Despite the
fact that we have occasional instances of intimate friendships in the
latest decades of life, the herd instinct that prompts each to flock
with those of near his or her own years is less insistent, while with
happily married pairs even love seems to take on the character of
friendship. There is, indeed, no doubt that the gregarious instinct
tends to wane, and as men advance in years they tend to withdraw from
clubs and associations, not only because of infirmities but because
increased individuation is itself isolative. On the other hand, I think
we detect, not only in these returns but in life, a tendency to prefer
associates of the next generation, that is, those of such an age that
they might have been our own children. Some old men especially state
that they prefer the society of men of middle life and it has often
been thought that young teachers are best for young and older teachers
for older children and that the young have a certain attraction for
those near the age limits of their parents. A few of the very old
like children, but often with reservations or best at a distance, and
are prone to be annoyed by their noise or too great familiarity. It
is pretty clear that age does incline to youth and perhaps becomes
dependent on it for a kind of vicarious rejuvenation. Old professors
often feel in a peculiarly close rapport with those of student years
but this is partly due to habit. The old sometimes take, with peculiar
interest, to pets and not infrequently have strong likes and dislikes,
which they can only explain on the basis of congeniality or antipathy.
There can be no question that old people to-day are just as fond
of acting as mentors for the young as they were in ancient Greece,
although now it takes the very different form of a propensity to give
advice and warnings. But our civilization has not yet found effective
ways of making even god-fathers and -mothers really sponsors or
assistant parents, although the teaching instinct is closely allied to
the parental and is more or less developed in all. It is the testimony
of those familiar with old people’s homes that their inmates do not
tend to fraternize and although crony friendships are not infrequent,
there is no analogy to “mashes” or “crushes.” Indeed, pessimists have
often intimated that no one could really love very old people and so
far as this is true we could hardly expect them to love even each other
in return.
The above applies more to men than women and the case seems quite
different with the latter, who are much more prone to be interested in
the young, even in the very young, than are old men. The grandmother
may lavish too much, while the grandfather gives too little, attention
to the grandchildren. On the other hand, both are often very critical
of the larger liberties allowed to and taken by children and find it
hard to adjust to new notions and social customs and especially to the
now rapidly increasing license given to both their conversation and
conduct, which can hardly be said, in its turn, to involve greater
respect for age than formerly.
_Would you live your life over again?_
All answered this question, but three could not decide. One had found
it all so enjoyable that he would gladly start over again and repeat
all identically. One recoiled “with horror” at the thought and rejoiced
every week that it was ended forever. Even the pleasant experiences had
such an alloy or aftermath of pain that one subject could not bear the
thought of repeating a moment of it.
“What is the use?” said another. “I would probably do the same thing
over again.” Some would live parts of their lives again or begin at
a certain stage. Most would repeat it if they could start with some
of their present knowledge or experience and thus improve upon what
they had been or done. Most, too, had such a sense of progress that it
would seem painful to them to go back to more primitive conditions.
Two felt so assured of progress beyond the grave that the future
drew them more than the past. One did not see how his life could be
materially improved for he had fallen victim to no temptations, made
very few mistakes, etc.; while many specified often radical changes
they would make, errors or mistakes they would avoid, etc. There were
no expressions of remorse; no bitter imprecations of fate, heredity,
or nature; no vain longings for rejuvenation; and these data suggest
that the vivid pleasures of childhood, the joys of youth, and the
intoxication with life that characterizes its immature stages had
vanished and left no trace in the memory of these respondents, or
perhaps that life had palled and brought a certain satiety. One said:
I have lived three more or less independent lives, as
naturalist and explorer for the love of it, as science teacher
for the love of it, and as administrator because I knew men
and the value of money; and finally, as a matter of duty, as a
minor prophet of democracy. If I had the chance I would take
them all again. There is pleasure in it and the world badly
needs men willing to be counted in the minority.
In the attitude of these old people to this problem the psychologist
can glimpse a little of the _tedium vitæ_ that perhaps first produced
and then discarded the Oriental doctrine of eternal recurrence of
life and death, a psychic trend that gave birth to and vitalized
metempsychosis and that impelled the Buddha to break away and find a
goal beyond it. It needs little psychology to see that such attitudes
of mind imply a deep dissatisfaction with any form of future existence
that would be in essence a repetition of life here, even with moderate
improvements on our present state of existence. A postmortem form of
survival or revival that is, in any large sense, a reduplication of
this could never bring a deep satisfaction. All ancient creeds and all
modern philosophies of recurrence, for example, that of Nietzsche, have
always been strongholds of pessimism and are really anti-evolutionary,
although they are sometimes said to presage modern theories of
development.
To the genetic philosopher it would seem, from such data, that
senescents tend to lose the sense that infancy and childhood are more
generic than adulthood, that the latter brings the “shades of the
prisonhouse,” and that every stage of individual development brings
added limitations, so that our matured consciousness is only a very
partial expression of the vaster life of the race, most of which is
more and more repressed and incapable of coming to consciousness as
life proceeds. If each of us might have lived very different lives
from what we have done, and if many and varied lives are required to
express all the possibilities with which we all start, it would seem as
if each individual would have chosen, when he had played one part, to
assume another in the _comédie humaine_ and then another, and so on;
that the slave would want to complement his defects of opportunity by
becoming king--if not, indeed, _vice versa_. When the psychic life of
the race was young and rank, great minds did dream even of living out
every phase and stage of life: of being animals, of experiencing every
lot and station of humanity. But now that the world is older and the
hyperindividuation that comes with age has supervened, this passion to
taste everything possible to our estate is lost. Instead of sampling
every dish we make a full meal of one and other viands are refused for
we are sated. Biology teaches, as we have seen, that specialization
is death and a hypertrophied personal consciousness is psychic
specialization.
For myself, I confess I even retain in old age some vestige of my
strong childish desire to be a horse, lion, ape, dog, fish, and even
insect; or, in a word, to know how the world looks from under the
skull of our older brothers, the beasts. Still stronger is the wish to
have lived as a troglodyte, Indian, to have been a fire-worshiper,
totemist, a woman, millionaire, tramp, or even a moron or a genius--if
not, in some moods, to have experienced various insanities and even
diseases. But strangest of all is the wish that I could be set back
to happy childhood, even if it had to be with the smallest modicum
of the experience I have acquired, and try the game of life again.
It has been, on the whole, so fortunate that I would even repeat it
identically, if I had to, rather than to face the future I do. But the
chief charm would be not so much to improve it and avoid errors but to
vary it and give my more generic self a less one-sided expression so as
to bring out latencies that are suppressed or slumber and to invest the
same old self with a new set of attributes. I have only seen one very
small aspect of life and know but a single corner of my own soul and
my knowledge of the world is too limited to my own narrow specialty.
The future not only of my department but of all lines of human activity
is so full of possibilities yet unrealized but which have aroused such
eagerness of interest, that I would accept another life here under
almost any terms in order to see the swelling drama unfold; while I
revolt unspeakably at the realization that I must be cut off when so
many things in which I have the keenest zest are in the most critical
or interesting phase of their development.
Of course I am answering my question in a different sense than that
understood by most of my correspondents. In fact, in a way it was
an idle and perhaps foolish question, because to exactly relive a
present life is so impossible that it is hardly conceivable. But let
us oldsters realize that if we are sated, it is because our appetite
has flagged and not because viands are scantier or less toothsome.
Perhaps we all wish we had been born later so that we should be now
in our prime. Most of us would probably have sacrificed a few of
the earlier, if by so doing we could add a few more to the later,
years of our life. Perhaps the very restlessness of old people, their
retirement from activity, their propensity to a change of scene or
mode of life, or their not infrequent _Wanderlust_, is the result of a
blind instinct to exploit unused and submerged faculties and thus to
complement or vicariate for the loss of certain possibilities always
involved in realizing other careers. Certain it is that even those who
do not make a clean break with their past develop views, interests,
habits, modes of life, personal associations, or perhaps take pleasure
in becoming novices, apprentices, or amateurs, in new fields and find
thus a certain rejuvenation, the strong instinct for which has found
so many unworthy forms of expression that the term “second childhood”
as applied to age is commonly one of reproach and the affectations of
youth by the old are ridiculous. We all tend to live our lives over
again in our children and grandchildren and this impulse is another
expression of the deep instinct for renewal and living other lives
again. How shall we explain, too, the so common inclination of the old
to plant trees they will never see mature or build houses they can
hope to live in only a short time; or to get into and keep in such
sympathetic rapport with the young; to engage in works of charity;
or to grow tolerant of errors, of persons, and of opinions they once
bitterly opposed. What can all these phenomena mean save that the
barriers of egoism are falling down and that we tend to live more and
more not only for but in others by a kind of sympathetic identification
with them. Three of my correspondents had a period of reorienting
themselves to new interests as if to find themselves again, which is
suggestive of the period in youth when one vocation after another is
taken up and abandoned before a fit life purpose has been found.
Whether these tentatives in the old were a recrudescence of a series of
earlier circummutations, like those of a climbing vine seeking a fit
support, our data do not show.
_Did you experience an “Indian summer” of revived energy before the
winter of age began to set in?_
Only five responses were affirmative to this question. One of the
most eminent men of science with a world-wide reputation reported,
at seventy-two, that he had never worked so effectively and was now
engaged on a program that would require from ten to twenty years of
strenuous activity for its completion, besides answering several
scores of letters daily. Another scarcely less eminent, at the age of
seventy-three, had lately undertaken an arduous line of investigation
that would “require many years to complete” but was confident that he
could finish it, for “a task is a life-preserver.” My returns suggest
that men engaged in scientific research have more power to “carry on”
than any other class and that those engaged in the professions are
perhaps least likely to do so when they cease active practice. Several
specify greater mental clarity in seeing through delusions, shams,
and vanities. Others feel a certain exaltation at times, dependent
perhaps upon digestion or the weather. Others specify new and deeper
self-knowledge. Others find much satisfaction in the settling of a
few fixed and cardinal ideas or convictions. A few feel new ambitions
to begin new enterprises. Several found in the war and its results
a mental stimulus that they felt to be rejuvenating and longed and
believed that they must live on to see the settlement of some of the
great questions now so wide open. Four had observed such awakenings
in others. Most, however, felt themselves going on about as before,
with no change save gradual abatement of energy. Some felt as strong
physically and mentally as ever until they set themselves to some
serious task and then realized that this feeling was illusory. Others
were sure they would have felt a revival of springtide but for some
infirmity or disaster. It is, however, hard for others to judge on this
matter and harder perhaps for the individual to answer the question for
himself.
The remission of responsibilities and the dropping of burdens would of
itself give a certain sense of exaltation, because all such changes
involve a new balance between ambitions and accomplishments. Retired
clergymen often feel a great relief from being no longer accountable
to others for their opinions and some often find a joyful sense of
emancipation from old doctrines surprising, not only to others but most
of all to themselves. One writes, “I found, on sober second thought,
I no longer really believed certain dogmas I had preached all my life
and that in my inmost heart I really believed certain things I had
often condemned as heresies.” He found an intense mental stimulus in
thus reconstructing his own creed. A clergyman of seventy-nine once
told me he had ceased to preach, even as a supply, because since his
resignation his new views gave offense. Old physicians, too, sometimes,
though far more rarely and to a less extent, drop as illusions certain
fundamental principles by which the practice of a lifetime had been
regulated.
Again, the new lines of interest to which the old, set free from the
tasks of their lives, sometimes turn show that there is a half-delusive
and half-real sense of psychic rejuvenation associated with the pursuit
of a new topic. On the whole, however, it would seem that withdrawal
from exacting duties, the freedom from the necessity of self-support
and the leisure thus resulting, the abatement of the _vita sexualis_
and the storm and stress this is now known to cause, the fact that
one is now no longer anxious lest he do or say anything that would
interfere with his own future career, and the sense that he can both
live and think as he lists, would altogether constitute a loud call
to revise his views, to get down to fundamentals, be more sincere and
independent, to get better acquainted with his inmost self, review his
past life, and draw from it its lessons. Morale, as I have elsewhere
tried to show,[194] consists in keeping ourselves, body and mind,
always at the tiptop of condition and this is ever harder to do as age
advances. But I think we may conclude that just in proportion as this
is done there is a perhaps prolonged and delightful “Indian summer”
that is caused by the kind of mental housecleaning that dispenses with
all non-essentials and consists in warming up the deeper emotions,
quickening the intellect and reinforcing the will, and that this period
combines uniquely the charm of summer and fall without excessive heat
and without dangerous chill. All invites to synthesis, for the age of
excessive and diverting specialization that is forced upon the young
and immature in our day is past and the season for harvest has come.
And it is just this that our distracted world now most lacks and
needs. Sane and ripe old age has a new sense of values, relations,
perspectives; and no form of culture man has ever produced is ripe
until the fruitage it contributes to morals and life has been garnered.
To show how all our achievements affect human conduct is the thing the
world most needs to-day and needs far more than at any other period
in history. This is what our age calls so loudly upon the old to
supply. Just in proportion as civilization advances and life becomes
more and more complex and distracting, the need of older and wiser men
increases, for only from their outlook tower can things be seen in
their true perspective. Wells’s new conspectus of history represents
the old man’s view and one of my correspondents writes that in a long
literary life he has never come upon anything quite so stimulating and
absorbing. It is this sort of work that should have been done by an old
man and such tasks can only be accomplished by those younger men who
have the rare power of genius to anticipate the choicest gifts of age.
Plato saw that the proper business of old men was to philosophize; and
what is religion, to which so many senescents turn, but a condensed
philosophy put in the form of symbol, myth, and rite.
Old women, perhaps even more than old men, seem to enjoy an “Indian
summer” of life. The best of them grow serene, tolerant, liberal,
often devote themselves with great assiduity to charity, to causes, to
helpful and intelligent ministrations to others, perhaps with utter
self-abnegation; while others carry on affairs, conduct enterprises
of moment, and really guide all about them without their knowledge
and without realizing themselves that they are doing so; still others
read with an abandon that they have never experienced before and
are often wise in counsel, even subordinating their own daughters,
husbands, and perhaps sons in a way that suggests the possibility of
a new matriarchate. They sometimes develop a therapeutic skill that
is a modern analogue of the old grandmother’s medicinal herb-lore
and is as unexplained as the old countryman’s weather wisdom. They
are almost always more religious than old men but rarely dogmatic or
theological and often grow indifferent or almost oblivious of the
creeds they affected in their earlier years. Thus they illustrate at
every stage of life what is true of all its stages, that woman lives
nearer to the life of the race, is a better representative of it, and
so a more generic being than man, and is thus less prone to dwarfing
specialization.
_Do you rely more or less on doctors or find that you must study
yourself and be your own doctor?_
In the answers to this question there was a general consensus to the
effect that doctors were resorted to only in emergencies of illness,
accident, or perhaps surgery, and several mentioned the old saw to the
effect that in the fourth or fifth decade a man is either a fool, an
invalid, or a physician to himself. Only a few followed the practice
of having a look-over at intervals as a prophylactic. Two had special
friendships for a particular doctor, except for whom they would
have no use for the profession. Several expressed their gratitude
to physicians who were responsible for a vacation, a tour, or other
change. Several had turned away from the regulars to homeopathy,
osteopathy, or Christian Science. Some allowed doctors to examine and
prescribe and then used their own judgment as to how much of their
medicines should be taken or prescriptions followed. Some relied much
upon physicians who had known them personally for a long period or
practiced in their family but had little faith in new physicians.
One doctor professed loss of confidence in his profession and had
“returned to nature.” A few had found fasting of from twenty-four
to forty-eight hours beneficial for most of their ailments. None
doubted, and several expressed very special gratitude to specialists,
particularly ophthalmologists and even surgeons. There is a very
general aversion to drugs, although a few dosed themselves for years,
tried many patent medicines, and one thought he had exhausted almost
all the pharmacopœia. Aging people often regret the replacement of the
old family physician by experts who in prescribing for one defective
function ignore and perhaps injure others. Occasionally old people of
both sexes retain or revert to old family traditions of the virtue
of herbs, which played such a great rôle in the ancient days of the
herbalists. We find, too, outcrops of the fear that surgeons are too
ready to operate. One old man told me that in a recent illness it
took him a month to get over the disease and three months to recover
from the effects of the medicines the doctor had prescribed. Another
followed the precept of young doctors for special and acute, and old
doctors for general, troubles and for prescriptions of regimen. It
is often deplored that while women’s diseases, troubles of sight,
throat, lungs, abdomen, and children’s disorders, have each their own
specialists, there are almost none who have specialized on old age and
that when the old are seriously ill, there is a general tendency in the
profession to give up hope too soon, to pay less attention to those
who because of age and its feebleness will die soon anyway. We have
frequent illustrations of remarkable recoveries of old people who had
been given up by physicians.
It must not be forgotten, however, that medicine has made great strides
in the last few decades and that the older generation now passing
has not yet come to a full realization of the new resources that the
advances of modern pathology and the other sciences that underlie
the healing art have brought to it. Perhaps we might commend to the
aged, when they first fully realize that they are old, the course of
one of our respondents, who made a round of the specialists for the
different organs to reinforce his own hygienic self-knowledge, although
he found the prophylactic prescriptions of the different experts
so contradictory as to be often practically impossible. Unhappily,
however, we have no agencies to examine the whole ensemble of parts
and functions and suggest modes of life fit for each individual, as
for example, the Life Extension Institute should do. Nothing is more
certain than that every senescent should, with increasing frequency,
have himself looked over that he may anticipate, at as early a stage
as possible, the onset of the many physiological failures that impend.
_Do you get more or less from the clergy and the church than formerly?_
All answered this question, with surprising unanimity and but slight
reservations, negatively. A few still loved church services, had
clerical friends whom they loved and respected, went to church for
the music, enjoyed university preachers, reread portions of the Bible
with edification, etc. Many thought the clergy insincere or ignorant,
too absorbed in money-raising, preposterously antagonistic to science,
or found the same uplift in reading other great literature as in the
Scriptures. Over and over we find statements to the effect that the
writer has become his own high-priest, minister, oracle, captain of
his soul, no longer in need of ecclesiastical mediation with the
divine, etc. “Why is the church still so apologetic when science does
not apologize for Copernicus?” “Why has the church waged such bitter
warfare against Darwinism, when evolution is only another and better
name for the revelation of the divine and should have brought such
enlargement and reinforcement to religious thought and feelings?” One
eminent artist finds all the religion he needs in art; students of
science find it in nature; students of the humanities, in the study
of the deeper nature of man. The beautiful is just as religious, if
not more so, than the good or the true. “There is only one great word
in the world and that is _love_.” “I preached all the doctrines and
found some truth in many of them but have rejected most, and perhaps
the form of all, as pulp and rind.” “Each of us must work out our
own salvation.” “My religion is the Red Cross.” Several who had been
brought up pietists and had attached themselves to various churches in
turn had, in later years, withdrawn from all and come to depend on
their own reading and meditation. “The clergy are blind leaders of the
blind.” In one case church was discontinued because the assumptions of
pulpiteers aroused “all my porcupine quills.” Some had ceased to attend
divine services because they seemed irreligious compared to the deeper
religion they find within. The higher criticism has brought insights to
some that the church knows not of and “my real conversion was from, not
to, the church. It knows and can teach us nothing about the hereafter.”
Thus, in general it would seem, if our meager returns are at all
typical, that the clergyman makes less appeal to the old and knows less
about ministering to their nature and needs than do physicians. It must
not be forgotten, however, that, as one of our respondents says in
substance, the views of those this questionnaire appealed to, people of
intelligence and culture, are exceptional, and probably the majority
of the uneducated have at least a falsetto belief in some institutions
and teachings of the church. Our returns indicate, however, the same
growth of skepticism with years as that found by the far more extensive
conspectus of J. H. Leuba,[195] from which he gathered that the
percentage of those who believed in God and immortality decreased both
with age and with education.
_Do you think or worry about dying or the hereafter more or less than
formerly?_
Here, as was to be expected in our age of transition and
_éclaircissement_, there is the utmost diversity. All my respondents
answered but only four of them (three women) found anything like
the orthodox religious consolations afforded by the hope of a
personal immortality. Most were agnostic. “I know as much about
it as anyone who ever lived, which is absolutely nothing.” Four
were distinctly pantheistic and found pleasure in the belief of
extinction, annihilation, or absorption into the cosmos like a drop
of water returning to the sea. About one-half had lost confidence in
sacerdotalism and had no connection with any church and a few were
bitter against ecclesiastical assumptions. Most had ceased to worry
about death, a few professed never to think of it, two dreaded the
pain they associated with the act of dying, and one prayed that the
end might be instantaneous. Men of science wished and hoped that they
might go on “thinking God’s thoughts after Him” with renewed facilities
and incentives for getting nearer to the soul of the great _Autos_.
One’s life-long religion seems to have been based on the analogy of
the chick in the egg who regarded hatching as its death, when it was
really coming into a vaster life. Most disclaimed all terror, although
two in their youth had felt that this might recur in second childhood.
The attitude of most might be described by the phrases: “one world at
a time and this one now;” “consider the duty of the present moment
and leave the rest;” “never be anxious concerning anything beyond our
control,” etc. One wished to die like a pious Buddhist in thinking on
his good deeds. One expressed a strong contempt for a god who would
tolerate an orthodox hell and several felt that they would sooner or
later become wearied to the point of ennui with a heaven according to
any conception of it. Most had reckoned with the chance of death in the
plans of their business, making their wills, etc., but believed that
all thought concerning the hereafter was a waste of energy. Several
found consolation only in influential immortality and wanted to live
on in the memory of their friends and in the service they had rendered
to others, although this idea was generally connected with thoughts of
plasmal immortality or living on in their offspring. One good old lady
I knew who had spent a life doing good works and had always attended
church said, in answer to this question, that she had been so occupied
in active services that she had never found time to think much about
theology but in her heart doubted all doctrines, was not at all sure
that she believed in either God or immortality, and was convinced
only that whatever happened would be all right. Old clergymen seem
particularly prone to suffer from doubts, sometimes of the most radical
nature, and even wonder if after a life of zealous propaganda they may,
after all, have been wrong. Several professed themselves more deeply
religious, as they understand religion, than the church itself, and
even insisted upon a larger, deeper faith than orthodoxy dreams of.
It would seem, from these and other data, that the fears of death are
by far most intense in youth, and that in moments when the tide of
life ebbs and there are great griefs or disappointments--not only in
love, where it is most marked, but along other life lines--a terrible
and sudden envisagement of death often arises, although this mood is
generally flitting and soon passes. When in age the forces of life
abate, death has already begun its work and if belief in personal
immortality remains it is sustained and fed chiefly by poetic metaphors
or similes that have little justification before the bar of reason and
are essentially tenuous and sentimental. Certain it is that inhibitions
of the life tide do not so readily prompt thoughts of suicide; though
if they do so, as statistics show, the thought of it is more likely to
prompt the act of self-destruction in the later decades than it is in
youth, when nearly all coquette with these thoughts. The curve has two
crests, one in adolescence and the other in senescence.
The chief psychological inference seems to be that the old generally
refuse to face squarely and come to terms with the death-thought
consciously because it is more fatal to them than to the young, but
fly to every kind of relief from it by diversion to other things and
themes. In age there is often a narrowing of the intellectual horizon
to the immediate environment and this itself is opiative. Thus nature
alleviates in the old the fear of death, which impends and which they
know to be near. They sometimes wonder just how it will come but rarely
dwell upon such details as their own obsequies or leaving last messages
and think more often, if their thoughts stray to such subjects, of the
effects their demise will entail upon the course of life of others. The
fact is, the race has always found death too terrible to be faced in
all its horrors and has camouflaged and disguised its grim details by
tombs and avoided the direct envisagement of it by focusing attention
upon the soul that survives in ways we shall see more clearly hereafter.
Some individuals’ returns transcended my rubrics and have a value
in themselves that merit, and I hope will find, publication in full
elsewhere. One man known and loved wherever the English language is
spoken, who died in 1921 in his 84th year, had the supreme good fortune
for nearly thirty years to have the almost daily association and
assistance of a sagacious lady physician who entered sympathetically
into all his interests and became his literary executor and biographer.
This venerable man, so buoyant in his writings, grew depressed as
age advanced, especially toward nightfall, although this is nowhere
expressed in his books but abounds in his diaries. He developed an
interest that seems abnormal in everything pertaining to diet, tried
scores of new foods and drinks, only to discard them one after another,
and became so averse to tea, coffee, and smoking that it was hard for
him to tolerate those addicted to them. But it was on the problems
connected with constipation and evacuation that his interest seems
to have become most exaggerated. In his converse even with the young
but especially with those near his own age he constantly reverted to
this subject and his favorite theme of conversation seems to have
been on topics of personal and especially dietary hygiene. He studied
the chemistry of nutrition and corresponded with experts upon the
subject and attempted to carry out upon himself all their findings as
he understood them. Eggs he thought more or less poisonous and for a
time he seemed almost to think that the hens that laid them could not
be suitable food. His idiosyncrasies in this field would constitute
a unique theme for study that would have lessons all its own. He was
always checking his appetite and experimenting upon and observing
himself. There were, in this case, somewhat unique signs of an Indian
summer. He wrote twelve books from the age of 30 to 64, and fifteen
from 64 to near 84. At 64 he felt that he had written himself out but
soon struck other veins, so that his later books cannot be called
inferior to his earlier ones. In editing poems of Nature at this time
he found so many aspects of it that poets had overlooked that he
undertook to supply the gap and had a period of rhyming that lasted
about a year.
This suggests another octogenarian I knew, a great leader in
mathematics and a man of international fame, who in his latest years
believed that he had poetic gifts and wooed the muses, even the goddess
of love, with canticles that amazed his friends, who wondered whether
he was just making his acquaintance with poetry for the first time
or had known it more discriminatingly earlier in life and lost his
standards. Another eminent man I knew whose name is known throughout
the literary world, and who was also a physician, believed in and
practiced frequent naps, in which I have seen him indulge between the
courses of a long public dinner, in the intervals of which he would
converse with all his old sprightliness and vigor and at the close
make the best speech of the occasion. There was no record of even
midday sleeps with the naturalist above described. He usually did his
best work in the forenoon but occasionally, even in the last years of
his life, worked till late at night and resumed early in the morning,
doing this for some days as with a kind of afflatus. He also kept up
an active interest in public affairs until his increasing illness
compelled him to narrow down his interests more and more, so that
toward the end they seemed to center entirely in himself.
A man of eighty ceased manual work at fifty and had a marked
intellectual renaissance and became an author. He has come to realize
the limitations of doctors and, although he employs them, is his
own ultimate judge in all matters pertaining to his health. He has
withdrawn from the influence of the clergy. “My science and reason
say that there is no hereafter while my faith says that there is but
I do not give myself any trouble about their quarrel for it will all
be decided soon enough.” “I am more disposed to take the far view of
things and try to estimate wider relations than formerly.” “I feel
that my duty is to the race and to humanity rather than to any section
of it.” He reads science and occasionally a good story, although the
latter “must have some interest besides that of love.” “I formerly was
fond of hunting and fishing but the killing instinct has faded with
age, as it does with most people; but the forest and field, the sea and
land, are beautiful beyond compare and their infinitely varied forms
are more bewitching than ever.” Everyone, he thinks, should have some
Bohemia into which he should retreat when overtaken by age and has
leisure, and his has been genealogy, mainly getting acquainted with his
own ancestors and trying to visualize them as men and women, feeling
that he owes to them all his qualities, mental, moral, and physical.
A liberal clergyman approaching the eighties after a life of unique
eminence and service writes: “As for a future life for the soul of
man, I believe it is a moral necessity to explain and justify his
ethical conduct in the present sphere of existence. If, nevertheless,
after death there should be no continued existence, individually and
consciously, I am ready to accept this solution as also wise and right
because ordained by Him who is all-wise and good--‘I cannot drift
beyond His loving care.’” He believes that his devotion to great
causes that he has seen advance, while “conserving divine ideals
below, which ever find us young and ever keep us so,” has contributed
to his exceptional vigor and his message to the young is to prepare
for old age physically, economically, intellectually, morally, and
religiously. He grows more charitable and appreciative, feels deep
personal gratitude to physicians, who have more than once saved his
life; blesses his long-lived parents for the rare constitution that
has not only carried him through but given him a recuperative power at
which he has often marveled, dreads the excess of sentiment he often
notes in others of his age, who too readily become lachrymose; deplores
the excessive freedom and growing self-affirmation, lack of restraint
and modesty, courtesy, and thoughtfulness for others in the rising
generation; thinks, with Goethe, that if as he grows older he has less
keenness of sympathy for suffering, he thrills more deeply in the
contemplation of every noble and disinterested act; finds satisfaction
in knowing that his ashes (for he has long been an advocate of
cremation) will lie near other dear ones on a beautiful hillside in
sight of the Pacific; and takes satisfaction in reviewing his life from
a large ethical standpoint.
A naturalist of seventy-two of international reputation, who has done
perhaps more creative work for the benefit of the human race in his
field than any other living man, first realized that he was old at
sixty-five, when digestion and elimination were very slightly reduced.
Feeling the need of companionship he married at sixty-seven and found
increased happiness and rejuvenation. Frail when young, he learned
early to take better care of himself, restricting the amount of starchy
foods and stressing the importance of the daily use of one ounce
of agar-agar, one ounce of wheat bran, and half an ounce of liquid
paraffin, which has become an absolute necessity. He writes three hours
and works his head and body outdoors eight hours per day, covering
rarely less than twelve miles. He is not only his own doctor but has
often helped others by his experience. “I never worry about dying or
think of the hereafter,” he says. “I have done good work for my fellow
men, have never injured, over-reached, or cheated a human being in
all my life and hope to live in the hearts of others so that my works
and words may be of value to those who follow.” “I have no earthly or
heavenly use for the clergy or church; am my own minister to my soul.”
“I have no regrets whatever for anything I have ever done through life
but have been ‘done for’ several times by others.” “Since about fifty I
have taken more interest in public and community affairs and the future
life of those who are to come after.” His great temptation is physical
and mental overwork, which it requires constant care to curb. “I am now
in the ‘Indian summer’ of mental clarity, finding myself able to do
very much heavier and better work than at any other time in life, and
only wish I could continue to carry on these experiments throughout the
ages but am limiting myself to experiments that will not last more than
ten or twenty years.” He receives several score letters a day and is
editing a comprehensive work of eight volumes describing perhaps the
most complicated creative work that has fallen to the hands of man to
do.
One of America’s most eminent educators and leaders in science, and
the creator of a great university, who has made his mark on the world
as an advocate of peace, believing, however, that when we were once in
the war we should push it with the utmost vigor, regrets only that he
has, on one or two occasions, been misunderstood. He has traveled and
lectured very extensively and is widely known by his books outside his
own specialty. He ascribes his vigor to his early life on a farm and
his outdoor life as a student of nature. Although he became a doctor of
medicine in 1875 he has had occasion to feel the deepest appreciation
of the services a few other members of that profession have rendered
him. He says: “I have good friends among the clergy and often preach to
them. They have no special pull on my future. I shall probably have to
go out alone; I came in that way.” He writes:
When man shall come to Manhood’s destiny
When our slow-creeping race shall be full-grown
Deep in each human heart a chamber lone
Of holies, holiest shall builded be;
And each man for himself shall hold the key,
Each one shall kindle his own altar fires,
Each burn an offering of his own desires,
And each at last his own high-priest must be.
A Quaker lady of seventy-four has reread Emerson, Browning, Tennyson,
Shakespeare, and other masters, and found them more intelligible and
charged with meaning than ever before. Hence she is convinced that
she has a new mental clarity, not only in regard to these but to the
fundamental questions of life. She shrinks from companionship with
the very old and infirm but loves society more than ever, especially
of those somewhat younger than herself. She feels no temptation except
to indulge too much in day-dreaming, has less love for young children
individually but found more enthusiasm than in anything else in a cause
that saved the lives of many and improved the condition of yet more.
She is deeply religious, reading the Bible daily and hoping to see her
departed friends in another life, although “I have my doubts.”
One venerable respondent wrote in substance that no words could
describe the rest and peace that slowly supervened after he had ridded
his mind of every vestige of the old belief in which he was trained of
a future personal life and realized that he would live on only in the
contribution he had made to the sum of human knowledge and welfare,
in the grateful memory of his friends, in his posterity, and that
his individuality, with all its limitations, would be resolved into
or rendered back to the cosmos with his mouldering corpse. When he
realized that death would end all forever for him and was once free
from all the harassing hopes and fears about a postmortem state, the
new serenity and poise made him believe that he had penetrated to a
deeper psychic level than that explored and bequeathed to the Christian
world by the marvelously gifted but epileptic apostle, Paul, and that
he had struck the bedrock of humanity and attained a fuller and larger
completeness of life as it was meant to be and will be if man ever
comes to full maturity. He compares the attainment of this new attitude
toward death to the change that took place in Bunyan’s Christian
when he turned his back upon the city of Vanity Fair and faced the
Delectable Mountain.
An able respondent who has given much attention to these subjects
concludes that deep in his soul every candid mind feels that all
arguments for immortality are more or less falsetto and do not ring
true, are factitious, and are neither born of nor have the power to
bring inner conviction. Their propounders, if they are honest to the
core and also if they have the power to analyze their own mental
processes in constructing such so-called proofs, feel, though they
may not know it, that they are really reasoning against their own
profounder convictions or seeking to convince themselves against their
own intuitions. They vilipend skepticism because they hope thus to
drown its still small voice in themselves. In no other field of thought
does it begin to be so hard to be sincere with ourselves and in no
other domain of belief do men accept such specious and inconclusive
evidence. Most demonstrators of immortality within the Christian pale
fall back sooner or later, some more and some less, upon the myth of
revelation and the postulated faculty called faith which, when we study
its psychology, turns out to be only a hope-wish born of the unspent
momentum of the will-to-live and this deploys in the individual in
which it is thus falsely interpreted, as egoism wants it to be. Rich
and rank as have been its products for the imagination, they are fancy
bred and, in fact, superstitions, extra-beliefs or _Aberglauben_ of
the psyche and their acceptance as authentic or final is always and
everywhere a craven flight from reality, for the sentence of execution
is already passed upon all of us and is only suspended for a season.
One thoughtful respondent who is facing his sunset years says that he
has heard some sixty-five hundred sermons and has reversed certain of
his opinions so that he has felt compelled to resign as a trustee of
his church since he has a new and clear idea of the kind of church he
wants. He cannot longer believe in the kind of deity who likes to be
flattered, thanked, entreated, and listen to Te Deums. “We inherit
such ideas from vain Oriental kings.” “Symbolisms a thousand years old
are not suited to us or to our times.” “I cannot subscribe to that
stock idea--‘the religion I got from my mother’s knee is good enough
for me’--for by the same token we should now be idolaters or Druids.”
“Now that the church has become a man it ought to ‘put away childish
things’ and should no longer use ‘bottles’ and ceremonies two or
three thousand years old.” “If we judge the church by its results in
suppressing selfishness or even vice, it is a failure and any other
agency in any other field or business not being able to show any better
and faster results, that is, in reducing crime, unrest, selfishness,
and hate between classes, races, and nations, especially as evidenced
by the experiences of the decade 1911–1921, would have to resign.” “If
Christianity had not been, almost from the very start, handicapped by
the church in creating irrelevant and quarrelsome issues and diverting
emphasis to a future life, instead of improving the conditions of the
present one, it is fair to say that our present social, moral, and
spiritual condition would have been very different from and better than
it is.” The church atmosphere, hymns, prayers, sermons, ceremonies,
“are all age-musty and dominated by and saturated with miracles and
sanguinary and puzzling atonement and trinity theology, things with
which I am no longer in sympathy and the emphasis of which is offensive
to me.” “I think all these things are man-made incrustations. I
sometimes think the wonder is not why so many men stay away from church
but why so many attend it. Religion must be rescued. I do not know how
but it has got to be done.”
CHAPTER VIII
SOME CONCLUSIONS
The early decades of age--The deadline of seventy--The patheticism
of the old--The attitude of physicians toward them--Fluctuations
of youth--Erotic decline--Alternations in the domain of sleep,
food, mood, irritability, rational self-control, and sex--The
dawn of old age in women--Dangers of the disparity when
December weds May--Sexual hygiene for the old--Mental effects
of the dulling of sensations--Lack of mental pabulum--The
_tedium vitae_--Changes in the emotional life--Age not
second childhood--Women in the dangerous age--Need of a new
and higher type of old age--Aristotle’s golden mean and the
magnanimous man--The age of disillusion--Increased power of
synthesis--Nature’s balance between old and young--The eternal
war between them--Superior powers of the old in perspective
and larger views--New love of nature and the country--Their
preëminence in religion, politics, philosophy, morals, and as
judges--Looking within and without--Merging with the cosmos--The
three ways of escaping the decay of civilization.
To learn that we are really old is a long, complex, and painful
experience. Each decade the circle of the Great Fatigue narrows around
us, restricting the intensity and endurance of our activities. In the
thirties the athletic power passes its prime, for muscular energy
begins to abate. There is also some loss of deftness, subtlety, and
power of making fine, complex movements of the accessory motor system,
and a loss of facility for acquiring new skills. In the forties
grayness and, in men, baldness may begin and eyesight is a little less
acute so that we hold our book or paper farther off. We are less fond
of “roughing” it or of severe forms of exercise. We may become so
discontented with our achievements or our environment that we change
our whole plan of life. In the fifties we feel that half a century
is a long time to have lived and compare our vitality with that of
our forbears and contemporaries of the same age. Memory for names
may occasionally slip a cog. We go to the physician for a “once over”
to be sure that all our organs are functioning properly. We realize
that if we are ever to accomplish anything more in the world we must
be up and at it and give up many old hopes and ambitions as vain.
Perhaps we indulge ourselves in certain pleasures hitherto denied
before it is forever too late. At sixty we realize that there is but
one more threshold to cross before we find ourselves in the great hall
of discard where most lay their burdens down and that what remains
yet to do must be done quickly. Hence this is a decade peculiarly
prone to overwork. We refuse to compromise with failing powers but
drive ourselves all the more because we are on the home stretch. We
anticipate leaving but must leave things right and feel we can rest up
afterwards. So we are prone to overdraw our account of energy and brave
the danger of collapse if our overdraft is not honored. Thus some cross
the conventional deadline of seventy in a state of exhaustion that
nature can never entirely make good. Added to all this is the struggle,
never so intense for men as in the sixties, to seem younger, to be and
remain necessary, and perhaps to circumvent the looming possibilities
of displacement by younger men. Thus it is that men often shorten their
lives and, what is far more important, impair the quality of their old
age, so that we yet see and know but little of what it could, should,
or would be if we could order life according to its true nature and
intent. Only greater easement between fifty and seventy can bring
ripe, healthful, vigorous senectitude, the services of which to the
race constitute, as I have elsewhere tried to show, probably the very
greatest need of our civilization to-day.
In the seventies we often begin to muse on how our environment will
look and what our friends will do when we are gone; and now the
suspicion, hitherto nebulous, that there are quarters in which our
demise would be welcome may arise to consciousness and perhaps take
definite form. There are those who, also perhaps unconsciously, are
waiting for our place or positions and so we grow hypersensitive to
every manifestation of respect or esteem and not only resist being
set aside or being superseded but seek to find new kinds of service
that will be recognized as useful. The seventieth is the saddest of
all birthdays and if we “linger superfluous on the stage,” we feel
that society regards us as, to some extent, a class apart; and so we
instinctively make more effort to compensate our clumsiness by spryness
and gently resist the kindly offices and tokens of respect to which
the young incline or, perhaps more often, are taught to render the
old. We are a trifle more prone to lose or mislay things, perhaps
almost resent the family’s solicitude for our glasses, slippers, cane,
overcoat, diet, and quiet. We have to give ever-increasing time and
attention to health and to nursing ourselves and in many exceptional
experiences feel that we are seeing persons and may be doing things
for the last time. All our plans and efforts and prospects directed
toward the future have a new element of uncertainty and tentativeness.
We can easily be spoiled by kindness or soured by neglect and our own
personality requires so much attention in making the new adjustments
that are necessary that we are in new danger of becoming selfish; while
our nerves are liable to grow irritable and there is a new trend to
depressive states as our activities abate.
It is not strange that one of our grievous dangers is patheticism.
One who begins to suspect waning love on the part of those in his
sphere may come to accept and even crave pity in its place and farther
on in the infirmities of age a husband or wife may do the same and
magnify to their partner ailments and symptoms to this end. A little
farther yet in this direction lies what may be called the hysteria of
senescents. We may come to love to be waited on more than is needful
and thus grow into a fictive helplessness and dependence on the
ministrations of others. We love to pour our troubles into sympathetic
ears and may be spoiled by the too great devotion of our married
partner, sons, or daughters, whom we sometimes permit to become slaves
not only to our infirmities but to our very whims and notions. Who
has not known old people otherwise excellent who almost seem to have
lived by the precept of never doing for themselves anything they can
get others to do for them. There are fathers who, with no thought that
they are selfish, monopolize the love and services of their daughters,
and mothers who do the same of grown sons, and these of the younger
generation may lavish upon their parents the devotion that was meant
for a mate or a family of their own. We know that marriage, when it
comes to such people, is likely to be unhappy unless the wife is in
the image of the fondled mother or the husband in that of the too much
loved father. We are prone to forget that for the old, as truly as for
the young, it is more blessed to give than to receive and that we must
not insist on our rights and forget that each has its corresponding
duties. The old are rarely oppressed by a sense of gratitude and may
come to feel that because they have reared their children they have
laid them under obligations of a return service that can never be fully
discharged, forgetting that beyond certain limits they pay us best by
rendering the same service not to us but to their own children. Most
of us are or are destined to become a real burden and this we should
strive to delay and lighten and not to accelerate or increase, and we
should not come to make a luxury of our sense of dependence. Thus if
the old have savings, however small, they should never expropriate
but retain and use them wherever and when their help will be most
serviceable. The fact that we have withdrawn from larger outside
activities naturally inclines us to strive to be of compensatingly
more account in the smaller circle left us but this must not make us
arbitrary in this narrowed field for self-assertion and we should not
feel that as we become less important to the world we must become more
so within the family circle. We have, in fact, a new place and must
exert ourselves to learn and keep it, without interference with those
who are taking ours or making their own careers.
In his dealings with such cases the physician needs a special sagacity.
He must realize the great satisfaction it gives his aged patients to
have him listen patiently and sympathetically to all their ills and
should encourage them to trust him fully and with no reservations.
This not only shields others but by humoring the wise doctor can not
only gain full confidence but may be able to bring such patients to
see their own selfishness and thus effect a real cure even in their
physical condition. I have known cases where such ministrations were
a benediction to the family. Where old patients have thus built up
a system of half-fancied ailments, placeboes may work wonders, the
therapy being in fact chiefly mental. Such insidious dangers to which
the aged are exposed cannot be reached by medicaments but rather
by pithiatism in the sense of Babinski or persuasion in the sense
of Dubois, Merchenowsky, Rosenbach, or Herbert Hall, who heal by
prescribing activities, physical and mental, found possible after
painstaking analysis. The old often feel a falsetto invalidism that may
be cured by a vigorous appeal to their moral sense or, again by changes
in their daily program or regimen or by exposing them to fresh streams
of rich outer impressions that correct the mental stagnation to which
they are prone or keep their attention from themselves by giving their
minds a larger field and a far-off focus, as against their inveterate
tendency to mental short-sightedness.
In youth erotic fetishes and pet, instinctive aversions are now
known to play an important if half-unconscious rôle in love between
the sexes. Eyes, hair, lips, cheek, neck, or any of her little ways
of movement or speech may become a focus of special charm to the
young amorist. Conversely, other or even the same features, traits,
automatisms, or habits may mediate no less unconscious dislike.[196]
Some of the same rapports or repulsions exist between the old and
the young. The former may even have their favorite children or
grandchildren and dislike others in ways they themselves could only
inadequately justify. This partiality is most pronounced between
fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. It is the chief factor not
only in what is called love at first sight but of first impressions of
strangers, which are proverbially so hard to efface. Thus what we deem
trifles may loom large.
The old are particularly prone to develop peculiarities which, if
they do not unconsciously alienate those nearest and perhaps dearest
to them, are real handicaps to their devotion. Of this the old are
rarely aware, and if attention is called to them they minimize their
importance. These might be listed and weighed like their analogues in
the erotic field. The roster of them on the negative side would be
long. There are faults in table manners, modes of eating and drinking,
using table utensils from the napkin on, etc. Mastication may be noisy
or otherwise subtly disagreeable, or there is slobbering, clumsiness,
or neglect of common conventionalities once observed. The toilet may
be neglected, the attire soiled or spotted or imperfectly put on, and
so a look-over needed before we go out. We do things or make noises
in the presence of others that once we only permitted ourselves when
alone and there is a new indifference to personal appearance. The
voice is impaired in volume, richness of inflection, and articulation;
our face or form are no longer æsthetic objects; we mislay things
and invoke those about us to help find them; and are tediously slow
in mind and body. If, in addition to all this, we become pryingly
overcurious, fault-finding, exact, and forgetful, we give our friends
more to put up with than we realize, and the best of them would be
shocked if they became conscious of how much they repress in their
psychic attitude toward, if not in their treatment of us. On all such
matters we should make frequent self-surveys. On the other hand, if
we cultivate not only order and control but, above all, the poise and
repose of those seeking the Great Peace, striving always to do, be, and
say only our best things, we may make ourselves not only respected but
loved in a new way, so that we shall be turned to not only for advice
but for companionship and help in emergencies and make some of even
the most obtrusive signs of physical decay attractive by association
with the higher qualities of soul, as the ugliness of Socrates came
to be almost loved by his disciples. Art understands this and many
of its masterpieces depict old age in its glory. The same is true of
literature and even of the drama, despite the fact that actors who
specialize in old women’s and particularly old men’s parts so often
make age repulsive and ridiculous, for it has always been a most
attractive field for caricature.
The old are subject to certain fluctuations, new in kind, degree, or
both. Sleep is less regular. They have good and bad nights, one or
more of each alternating, which make the next day clear or cloudy with
dregs. If fatigue comes more quickly, so does recuperation by rest.
They are often refreshed by a very brief nap or by recumbency, or even
by a period of solitude during the day. Thus on the periodicity of day
and night is superposed one of less amplitude or briefer duration,
perhaps after one or each meal. Thus the distinction between the
sleeping and waking state comes to be less sharp, slumber is not so
deep or long, and the dreamy states of reverie invade mentation by day.
The great restorer does not quite make losses good and the accumulation
of these deficits explains very many of the phenomena of old age,
which might be characterized as sleepiness for death, the rest that
is complete and knows no waking. Capitulation to the siesta habit is
marked in some by a distinct improvement of condition. They speak of
a new balance between activity and repose and sleep all the better
nights, while others resist such tamperings with nature’s rhythm and if
they acquire the midday habit find themselves nervous or less refreshed
the morning after. Some retire and rise with the sun and find a certain
elation of spirits in this reversion to nature and praise the morning
hour or even sunrise, of which the urbanized world about them knows
little and ever less; while others find a virtue in lying abed late.
While we know too little of the hygiene of the aged to prescribe, it
is certain that they tend to break with the old regulations and really
need some of the indulgences they are often too inclined to permit
themselves.
The appetites fluctuate and may readily become capricious. Some would
eat more and less often than before and love to experiment with new
viands. Some think some items of diet once beneficial become harmful
and so eliminate them, while some like and can digest things impossible
before. Sometimes they indulge for days or even weeks in a favorite
dish that at intervals they cannot touch with impunity, as if there
were spells of immunity broken by intervals during which the same
article produces deleterious results. One says that what is at one
time a food becomes for him at another time a poison. This seems
particularly true of certain fruits, while the acid balance seems very
liable to upsets. Most tend to overeat and are always struggling with
their appetite. Yet they often have periods when foods lose their
attraction, as if Nature decreed a fast. Here she is often right and a
day or more of relative or even entire abstinence may prove helpful. So
the former diet periods do not need to be observed; nor need the old be
coaxed at such times with tempting food.
Springtime is hard on the assimilative processes of all but
especially on those of the old. This is partly because the tides of
life everywhere set toward genesis rather than toward individuation
but still more because the calorific elements of food need to be
essentially reduced and also because winter’s supplies grow a little
stale before summer ripens her produce. So, too, with the abated
activity that years bring the need of food is reduced and hence the old
can often thrive on a small percentage of what they formerly needed.
Most, too, not only learn to avoid hearty meals at night but find it
best to lay in most of their rations earlier in the day. Very many find
in diet their chief center of interest and solicitude and the most
active theme for theorization, so that in many cases more and more
mentation seems to center about alimentary functions. There are very
active inductions from experience and constant modifications of views
hard to change in other fields. There does seem to be often a change
toward either increased sensitiveness or torpidity of the alimentary
tract. A few grow especially susceptible to seasoning, condiments,
flavors, and even confectionery. They may become even connoisseurs in
wine, tea, coffee, tobacco, while others grow indifferent and insist
that they like and can eat almost anything. Nutritive ups and downs
are thus more marked than before. Tendencies to decrease in weight are
distinctly more favorable for prolonged life than the opposite tendency
to obesity. Indeed, the former seems normal.
There are alternations of mood. Depression may be acute to-day and
vanish to-morrow, depending not only upon sleep and nutrition but
the weather and incidents, perhaps trivialities, in the environment.
Irritability may alternate with apathy and the old may lose
self-control and anon exercise a high degree of it. Some days they feel
comfortable and even vigorous and on others are miserable. Now weak
organs or functions, heart, stomach, bowels, rheumatism, or whatever
be the besetting troubles, are much in evidence and symptoms may grow
dangerous until the old have a new sense of the fragile hold they
have upon life, which may end suddenly in some of these weak moments.
Then these symptoms intermit and they feel well and take heart again
till the next “spell.” A few never allow themselves to be caught
without some one or more trusted drugs kept handy for immediate use in
emergencies and much, too, might be written of “warnings” and their
sometimes epochal effects upon both the inner and outer life. Thus
the old may sometimes give way to their feelings and become stormy,
lachrymose, perhaps even violent, and they may react from this to
a state of almost philosophic poise, which passes upon even their
own outbreaks with objective detachment and psychological interest,
phenomena that we may call the “apologetics” of old age. Thus emotivity
and reason may succeed each other.
The old are very dependent upon weather, climate, and seasons. Winter
is hardest on them. Not only does it mean more indoor life and less
activity but cold is one of the chief enemies of the old and winter is
also supercharged with subtle and profound symbolisms of their own
stage of life which deploy more beneath than above the threshold of
their consciousness. What old person does not shudder at the thought
of being buried in snow and ice. Even the autumn is for them full
of somber analogies of the stage of the sere and falling leaves, of
the ripening and garnering of the fruits of the earth, of the first
blighting frosts. All the old long for the rejuvenation of springtime
and perhaps daydream of it when nature is snowbound. Some keep diaries
of wind, temperature, and storm and become weather-wise, while those
who can, seek warmer climes, especially when winter begins to break,
a season statistics show is most fatal for the old. The poet who sang
that he could endure anything but a series of bad days must have had
the psychic barometry of old age. Thus we draw nearer to nature, our
source and our home.
Even sex often does not decline and die without terminal oscillations
in its course and in extreme cases apathy and aversion may alternate
with abnormal erotic outbreaks dangerous alike to the health of the
individual, to domestic happiness, and even to public morals. Those
who have led lustful lives may resort to unnatural and illegal forms
of vice and thus illustrate the various perversions of this function.
While only a few indulge in orgies, very few fail to note occasional
spontaneous but transient calentures here suggestive of potency long
after it was deemed “closed season.” Such recrudescences, though they
seem to be nearly always only partial, are very prone to deceive and
may lead to follies. Instead of being indulged, cultivated, or even
welcomed, as by an inveterate fallacy too prevalent with the young
they too often are, the old should rigorously ignore and suppress
all such manifestations in this field. While the full realization of
impotence brings a psychalgia all its own, it also has physiological
and psychological if not conscious compensations, while belated and,
especially, stimulated activity of reproductive functions not only can
never result in offspring of value to the world but saps vitality and
accelerates the decay of every secondary sex quality of mind and body,
so that complete chastity, psychic and somatic, should be the ideal of
the old. They should be not only embodiments of purity but the wisest
of all counselors in this field. Only to those in whom asceticism and
sublimation have done their perfect work will there come an Indian
summer of calentures for the higher ideals of life and mind, while
those who fail here can never know the true and consummate joy of old
age.
For myself, I frankly confess that the longer I live the more I want to
keep on doing so. Hence in the last two years of retired leisure I have
given far more time and attention to personal hygiene, regimen, and
diet than ever before and have mildly experimented with myself in many
ways. I have tried eating two and four meals daily, going early and
late to bed, forcing myself to lie there a fixed number of hours and at
certain times again retiring and rising with no regularity as I felt
like doing. I have tried systematic rub-downs, self-massage; cold and
warm, frequent and infrequent baths, have equipped a modest gymnasium
and taken mild but systematic exercises with various apparatus and then
abandoned all this or done nothing of it without an inner prompting. I
have followed prescribed diets and tried many special foods, interested
myself in vitamines, beginning with Eddy’s manual and trying out
vegex preparations, although no one has as yet studied the effects of
any of the three species of vitamines upon old age, as has been done
for other stages of life. I even used olive oil, which so many of my
correspondents praise both for internal and external application,
stopped smoking for a week, which seemed greatly to prolong each
day after thirty years of mild addition to nicotine, corrected for a
time and then yielded to the senescent’s tendency to constipation,
experimented with alcohol in several forms, even with Pohl’s spermine
tablets and minimal doses of phosphorus, etc. But out of all these
moderate hygienic adventures I have so far found no topping specific.
It would be interesting to try out the gland-grafting experiments which
seem to have regenerated the famous Vienna surgeon, Lorenz, and others,
and I think I would gladly offer myself as a _corpus vile_ for the
Steinach operation to study its psychological effects at first hand.
Although I have found in the above experiences a few things that I so
far believe helpful to me, I have derived from them all no advice to
offer others except, if time and inclination favor, to try out all
things for themselves. Plenty of moderate exercise out of doors, active
intellectual interests, both just to the point of healthy fatigue
but no more, are fundamental. One must have insight and considerable
power of self-observation to profit therefrom. But the main thing is
to develop and maintain at its highest possible morale a rigorous and
unremitting hygienic conscience that will never let down but always
enforce the doing of what we know to be best. Otherwise we may eat,
sleep, work, and generally do or not do what seems best as we list. I
am even skeptical about the almost universal counsel for tranquillity
and against worrying, for more or less anxiety is not only the normal
lot of man but it gives a tonic sense of responsibility which we all
need.
Special forms of pleasure that have to be prepared for attract us less
but we find soul-filling satisfaction in just living, contemplating
nature wherever we happen to be, eating, sleeping, and in common
converse. All these things acquire a charm unknown before, while
“occasions,” events, and sights that are rare and afar lose their
charm. Thus we come to love each hour of each day and the most wonted
and commonplace experiences, while our work (for no one can be happy
without some task) even though it seemed drudgery before becomes
attractive because we can do it when and as we will and as much or
little of it as our strength permits or inclination impels. Meanwhile
friends grow nearer and dearer, enmities fade, and we enjoy converse
with those toward whom we were formerly indifferent or even averse.
Thus old age may become the most satisfying and deeply enjoyable stage
of life. Hitherto the rest cures we prescribed have been more or less
reversionary to youthful or even primitive scenes and activities.
It may be that this is wrong and that for all such cases we should
prescribe for the young or middle-aged the occupations, attitudes and
regimen of the old and that this would be more therapeutic.
Sensations and movements are the basis of mind and when these are
reduced, as in old age, we often have the phenomena of mental
starvation because the supplies of mental pabulum are lowered. If
the old have little society and do not read, their psychic powers of
digesting their experience run down, not from any inherent weakness
but because they are on short rations for data. The mills could often
grind as fine and as much as ever, and possibly more so, but the grist
is lacking. Thus there are two opposite trends in the old. On the one
hand, their physical state demands attention to themselves so that they
tend to have “too much ego” in their cosmos, grow subjective, and may
become hypochondriacal or preoccupied with their own personal problems.
The simple decree of nature is that we must give more care to our
health and morale and it is excess, defect, or perversion of this deep
instinct that causes so many of our pains and our ill repute. Here lies
our chief need of personal study, psychoanalysis, and reëducation. The
other trend is in the opposite direction, toward depersonalization.
We need to look out, not in; to forget self and to be absorbed in
objectives. We are impelled to escape our environment and interest
ourselves in things that are remote in space and time, in nature, the
stars, great causes and events, personalities, masterpieces, to escape
from our miserable selves by their contemplation. We cannot see the
countenance of things for their soul. It is this fugue from self that
perhaps impels us to so many of our petty pastimes and diversions:
solitaire, idle reveries, our predilection for amusements, fussiness
about our things; as well as, on the negative side, to neglect our
person, really of dwindling value in the great world and soon to be
effaced. All these phenomena are outcrops of the tendency by which
“the individual withers and the world is more and more,” for our
fate is depersonalization and resumption into nature. These symptoms
are anticipations of euthanasia or, to use a phrase now current in
psychology, they are extrovertive and not introvertive, just as the old
were meant to be.
Thus the old need a higher kind and degree of self-knowledge than they
have yet attained. They need to be individually studied and analyzed
to avoid the new, peculiar, and not yet understood dementia præcox now
so liable to supervene upon the youth of age. This is all the more
needful now that the intensity of modern life with its industrial and
managerial strain compels earlier withdrawal from its strenuosities.
We live longer and also begin to retire earlier, so that senescence is
lengthening at both ends. Hence, again, the need of midwives to bring
us into the new world of higher sanity now possible to ever more of us.
Both we and our civilization now so checked, disoriented, and misled by
immaturities are in such crying need of a higher leadership that is not
forthcoming! We are suffering chiefly from unripeness. The human stock
is not maturing as it should. Life is so complicated that the years of
apprenticeship are ever longer and harder, so that we are exhausted ere
we become master workmen in our craft and the rapid age turnover this
involves robs us of too many of the choicest fruits of experience.
Our retirement, even if gradual and not dated, calls attention to our
age, and to our little world we grow old a decade the day it learns
that we have stepped aside while to ourselves we may and ought to
feel that we grow young that day by yet more. The springtide of a new
stage of life stirs our pulses and we feel something of the care-free
happiness of another childhood. Our intimates often remark signs of a
new vitality, physical and mental. If we are normal and not too spent,
we feel new hopes, ambitions, make plans to surpass our old selves and
to at last be, do, say, enjoy something really worth while. As we pass
our life in review, stage by stage, up to the present, it seems so
incomplete, fragmentary, tentative, and altogether unsatisfying that
we almost wonder whether it was we ourselves who really lived it or
someone else whose career we are following with an objective detachment
never felt before toward our own ego. Certain it is that a new veil
falls between us and our past, gauzy and transparent though it be.
Our psychic nature did not intend us for the rôle of reminiscence so
persistently assigned to and so commonly accepted by us. Our juvenile
memories are but the ragbag vestiges of a vaster experience that had to
be forgotten to be completely incorporated in our personality and to
ascribe too much significance to them is the fetishism of senility. If
we write up our lives, we can make them interesting and valuable only
by using our better information about and more sympathetic rapport with
ourselves with the same impartiality that a close and discerning friend
would do if he had all our data. It is for the things of the present
and for the problems of the future that our mental vision becomes
clearer than ever before. Our wish and will to achieve and make our
insights known and prevail acquire new force.
How different we find old age from what we had expected or observed it
to be; how little there is in common between what we feel toward it
and the way we find it regarded by our juniors; and how hard it is to
conform to their expectations of us! They think we have glided into a
peaceful harbor and have only to cast anchor and be at rest. We feel
that we have made landfall on a new continent where we must not only
disembark but explore and make new departures and institutions and give
a better interpretation to human life. Instead of descending toward
a deep, dark valley we stand, in fact, before a delectable mountain,
from the summit of which, if we can only reach it, we can view the
world in a clearer light and in truer perspective than the race has yet
attained. It is all only a question of strength and endurance. That is
the great and only but, when we squarely face it, a staggering proviso.
In all essentials we are better and more fit than ever before save
only for the curse of fatigability, for age and death are nothing but
fatigue advancing and finally conquering life. One single example of
a hale old man dowered by nature and nurture, as immune from tire as
youth is, would give the world a new idea of senectitude.
We were told that the days and years pass more quickly as we advance
in age. What could be more false! Not only do the nights, of which
sound sleep once made us unconscious, often drag slowly through their
watches but each day is so long that we often find time hanging heavily
on our hands; and when we have done all the work we can, we turn to
our friends to amuse us and seek and perhaps invent pastimes or fresh
occupations to kill it. Sermons, lectures, meetings of all kinds, even
the drama, seem long. The winter lingers until we almost fear that
spring will never come or out-of-doors attract us again. When we have
to wait for things, the time stretches as if there were no limit to
its elasticity, and when we turn to reveries of the past, it is a last
resort from the _tedium vitae._ We really have time for anything and to
spare. It is the demon fatigue that makes us so in love with diversion,
for rest is more and more frequently sought and found in change.
They say our emotional life is damped. True, we are more immune
from certain great passions and our affectivity is very differently
distributed. But what lessons of repression we have to learn! If
the fires of youth are banked and smouldering they are in no wise
extinguished and perhaps burn only the more fiercely inwardly because
they cannot vent themselves, as even the Lange-James theory admits for
repressed feelings, inhibition of which really only makes them more
intense. We get scant credit for the self-control that restrains us
from so much we feel impelled to say and do and if we break out, it
is ascribed not to its true cause in outer circumstance but to the
irritability thought characteristic of our years. Age has the same
right to emotional perturbations as youth and is no whit less exposed
and disposed to them. Here, as everywhere, we are misunderstood and
are in such a feeble minority that we have to incessantly renounce
our impulsions. Marie Bashkirtseff has betrayed the secret of how the
pubescent girl, and Karin Michaëlis, of how the woman of forty feels,
but no one has ever attempted to explain the sentimental nature of
aging men or women. Even Solomon and Omar Khayyam presented only the
negations and not the reaffirmations of the will-to-live.
Thus it is no wonder if the old often best illustrate what Henri
Bordeaux describes as “the fear of living.” René Doumic thinks that
there is a new disease in our old civilization and that many in
their prime only make a pretense of living. “We value our peace above
everything and wish to keep it at all hazards, however dearly we
must pay for it. We shun responsibilities, avoid risks and chances
of struggle, flee from adventure and danger, seek to escape from
everything that makes for the charm and value of life. We no longer
have any faith in the future because we no longer have faith in
ourselves.” How well this applies to those brought face to face
with the last stage of life! The fact is, we must find and make new
pleasures as well as new modes of escaping and mitigating the pains of
body and mind and must learn anew how to love, hate, fear, be angry,
pity, and sympathize aright. The serenity ascribed to us would pall
and bring stagnation. It is a profound psychological truth that “out
of the heart are the issues of life” and our heart is not dead; on the
contrary, emotivity probably increases with years and most expressions
of it, unless they become more sublimated, strongly tend to grow more
crass and stormy. We were never more interested in things, persons,
events, causes, in life itself. Slights rankle, neglect chills,
attentions warm, affronts incense, and praise thrills us, and if we
grow censorious, it is because our ideals of conduct and motive have
become higher and purer and we are in a greater hurry to see them
realized. We cannot help these gropings toward a new dispensation and
their very persistence is the best reason for believing that they will
sometime find their goal in a better stage of things and an improved
race of men not in another world but here. Perhaps some of even what
we now call the whimsies of the old will be seen to be the labor pains
of humanity, which is striving thus to surpass itself, to improve the
stock, and to really bring in a new and higher type of man.
Old age is called second childhood. This is all wrong for there is
nothing rejuvenative about it. Childhood is the most active, healthful,
buoyant, and intuitive stage of life; age, the least so. What is there
really common to the morning and evening of life? We even lose much
of the power we once had to understand children and if we love them,
we want them at a distance, while they in turn understand and like us
little by nature. They inherit far less of the results of experience
with grandparents than with parents, for less of us have survived to
see them and the latter often resent or even criticise our relations to
them. We are nearly as immune to their prevailing faults as to their
diseases. They listen to our stories but do not crave our cuddling,
are jealous if we usurp the offices of their parents to them and are
usually a little less free in our presence. Nature has established
an old and close rapport between one generation and the next. Even
young teachers get on best with young, old with maturer pupils. M. L.
Reymert[197] says that his general study shows him that teachers below
twenty and over forty are of less influence than teachers between
these ages. The most efficient man teacher is generally from 25 to
35. The best woman teacher has a little wider range--say, 20 to 40.
But of course mental and physiological age are different. Helen M.
Downey “Old and Young Teachers,” _Ped. Sem._, June, 1918, concludes,
on the basis of questionnaire data, that the younger teacher has other
interests that keep her bright and cheerful; the older teacher excels
in mental and the younger in dispositional traits; the old are careless
of appearance and this does not appeal to children; the older rule by
discipline, not by love and kindness; the young teacher more often
overtaxes her strength; the old are more set in methods, fixed in
opinions, resent suggestions for improvement. Many suggest there should
be an age limit of 60. Health and temper suffer. There are often
negative psychic idiosyncrasies. Older teachers lose contact. Social
traits are a very great factor in consideration of the period of rapid
growth. Dispositional qualities are more impressive than any other. The
favorite teacher is enthusiastic, energetic, young. Pupils’ estimates
do not involve age when they speak of old and young. I know an old and
successful professor, interested in his work to the end, who, when he
retired with powers little abated and much work yet to be completed,
found that in his speech and writing he imagined himself as no longer
addressing minds in the student, even graduate, stage, but wished to be
at home teaching and learning from those not under forty, for at that
age real wisdom begins, the effects of special training having then
faded. A refocalization took place in his mind that involved not only
new methods but, yet more, new topics and subject matter. What student,
however mature, would care for and what curriculum in any university
in the world would include, for example, the theme of this volume. And
who but a _Greis_ would ever have found its preparation a fascinating
task! No, the old are not childish but, if they are normal, have simply
reached a stage of postmaturity that involves much of what Nietzsche
called the transvaluation of all values.
But if we can no longer see over the crest of the divide that separates
age from youth, if the acclivity is shut off, we do see more nearly
and clearly each step of the declivity and find the catabasis of life
no less zestful than its anabasis was in its time, while we have the
great advantage that comes from the power of being able to compare the
two and this itself opens rich mines of thought. The age of the sage
has bid a final adieu not only to all puerilities but to the callow
ardors of the ephebic stage. He is graduated from adulthood and turns,
as by an eschatological instinct, to ultimate human problems, of which
younger minds, though they may be attracted to them, can have only
premonitions. To hear and heed this call is the strength and glory of
those who are complete “grown-ups.” The trouble with mankind in general
is that it has not yet grown up. Its faults, which we see on every
hand, and the blunders that make so large a part of history are those
of immaturity. Man has always felt the need of guardianship and because
he lacked wisdom invented immortal omniscient gods--tribal, national,
or cosmic--to guide him and as embodiments of what he felt lacking in
himself. It is just this need of an all-wise providence that the old
will come to supply if and as humanity slowly ripens.
If and so far as it is true that a woman is as old as she looks and a
man as he feels, all this processional, especially its early stages,
is, on the whole, probably much harder for her than for him. She feels
not only that “the coming of the crow’s foot means the going of the
beau’s foot,” but the first wrinkles about the mouth, eyes, or under
the chin; the loss of fullness about the neck, to which folklore
attributes such significance; the first sagging of the cheeks or the
bust; the first signs of fading complexion; or the first gray hair,
give her bitter food for thought. Her cult of the mirror, that man
progressively eschews, increases. But woman commands far more resources
against all such heralds of decay than man and gives vastly more
time to compensating for them. Youth is her glory and she has more
comeliness to lose than man, who can, however, never quite rival the
hag in ugliness. She has also great powers of compensation by affecting
girlish ways and has a stronger hold on her youth than man and old
women do not feel as old as old men do. Throughout married life, if
she is well, woman usually assumes the rôle of the younger mate, even
though she be not so in years. Though sexual involution comes to her
earlier she remains in far more sympathetic touch with the young than
her husband, so that there is a half truth and not mere gallantry in
the saying that a woman never grows old.
The woman just beginning to feel passé has a psychology all her
own of which even the devotees of that science know little and she
herself yet less, but of which Michäelis in “The Dangerous Age” has
given us a few glimpses. Love, wifehood, and motherhood, as the world
knows, constitute the very heart of woman’s life and as the chance of
these supreme felicities begins to fade, something, which it is no
extravagance to call desperation, begins to supervene. Its processes
may and often do deploy so deep in the subconscious regions of the
soul that even she is but little aware of the transformations that are
taking place there. These she quite commonly ignores, camouflages,
or honestly and resentfully denies. The psychopathologist sees most
clearly the tragedies of aborted Eros as they are writ large in morbid
symptoms. But with the same causes and conditions, the same processes
are always more or less active, however repressed, and the unmated
woman before the close of the third decennium has generally come to
some terms with the death of the phyletic instinct within her, which is
the core and mainspring of her life, and has dimly anticipated all the
significance of old age.
Happily for her dawning senescence, it is one of the great achievements
of our age that she has found a splendid vicarious function in culture
and new social, vocational, professional, and political services, so
that she can now give to mankind much that is best in her that was once
confined to the narrower sphere of domestic life, and be little or none
the worse but perhaps the better for it. This great emancipation is
building a new and higher story to her life, so that as the amative,
heyday charm of her youth begins to abate she need no longer despair.
All her earlier occupational training that fits her for self-support,
complete or even partial, is, thus, anticipatory of this third new
stage of life that the senium now begins to reveal to her. This gives
her now a certain advantage over man. Thus she has found a new call
that means not only more safety but priceless service, to which all
her superfluous energies can be devoted, and the world now waits with
an eagerness that is almost suspense to see whether she will have the
courage to grapple with the most vital problems that confront her sex
and find the wisdom to solve them or, neglecting these, be content with
the effort to do man’s work in man’s ways.
Thus, woman is older than man in the same sense that the child is
older than the adult, because her qualities are more generic and she
is nearer to and a better representative of the race than he and also
in that she sublimates sex earlier and more completely, entering the
outer shadows of senectitude in the thirties. But she is also, at
the same time, younger than he in that she is less differentiated in
tissues or traits, less specialized and in her early decades must learn
better than he to conserve so much that is best in the physique and
_esprit_ of her youth. If her physiological change, when it comes, is
more marked, abrupt, and datable, the psychic changes she undergoes are
far more gradual and imperceptible, while her sympathy with youth and
even childhood, and in general not only her moral but all her normal
instincts, which are the best gift the adolescent stage of life has to
offer, are keener and surer.
This critical age has its own peculiar temptations to which woman
entering middle life sometimes succumbs. She, like man, is prone to
ask of the future whether it is all to be like the present or past
and, if so, what is to become of the unfulfilled dreams of youth. The
Prince Charming never came; or perhaps her ideal has proven only a
clay image; or her affection, or his, may have found another focus
that seems worthier. Hence it is in no wise strange that some women,
hitherto good by the old standards, now make a break with their past,
impelled to do so by an augmented desire to taste all the joys of life
before it is forever too late. Not only does it seem intolerable to
go on to the end as they are but there is perhaps some tempter who
detects and waters these seeds of discontent and helps the middle-aged
woman on to feel that she has been a coward to life. Beaudelaire, who
certainly thought he understood French women, said that for most of
them at thirty-five who are married and perhaps for even more who are
unwed, anything was possible. Even curiosity is a spur to adventure
and fancy, if not conduct, may prompt to cast off all restraints. “Why
not?” is a question that incessantly arises and every answer seems
unsatisfactory. And how many of us can qualify, by being without sin,
to cast the first stone at those who fall here. Such women are too old
to enter upon a life of vice but often form secret and occasionally
very happy alliances with, usually, older men, which may last for years
without involving any abandonment of their stated occupation or leaving
the ranks of respectability and with now, unquestionably, a growing
disposition on the part of society to condone, even though it may
suspect or even know.
Again, as we men grow old, we recognize that we have lost something
of whatever attraction we have had for the other sex generally and
often come to regard most of its members as somewhat trivial and to
prefer the society of other men. Even the love of husbands and wives
happily married takes on a different character; and they are fortunate,
indeed, if the losses are balanced or compensated for by the gains,
as they should ideally be, or if friendship waxes as erotism wanes.
The old beau who devotes attention without intention to younger women
can, at best, only amuse and rarely interest them, although they may
feel subtly flattered. Sometimes they find delectation in cajoling him
and playing upon his weaknesses and they may also come to indulge in
a freedom of speech and manner with him that they would never permit
themselves with men of their own age; while, conversely, friendships
between older women and younger men are always more sincere. The
case of the doddering dotard with the flapper is rare, save in the
literature of senile psychopathology and medical jurisprudence, where
it is by no means uncommon. But this we shall not here discuss.
Senescent men are also too prone to attribute the other manifestations
of their own abatement of philoprogenitive energy to the lessened ardor
of their wives and perhaps to invoke the abnormal stimulus of some
wild love to sustain, or at least to test, their vigor, not realizing
that such a course accelerates rather than retards the involution that
comes with age. The jealousy felt towards young, ardent wives by their
older husbands lest they be made cuckold constitutes probably a far
less frequent triangle and involves, on the whole, less suffering than
that experienced by wives who are growing frigid with years toward
their still lusty spouses. The age disparity of the climacteric may
open a door for suspicions, however groundless, which may secretly
sap the foundations of conjugal harmony. In this connection one must
always take account of the fact that there is not seldom in man an
Indian summer, of months or occasionally years, of enhanced inclination
toward sex before its final extinction, as returns elsewhere reported
show. From personal confessions and medical literature, studies made
in old men’s homes, and sporadic evidence from other sources, I am
convinced that for a very large proportion of old men the progressive
loss of potence, with all the complex phenomena attending it, is one
of the chief, and in many cases the very most psychalgic, experience
of all the changes involved in growing old. There is a very pregnant
sense in which a man is as old as the glands that dominate this phase
of life. Laymen, including most physicians, know very little of and
find it hard to credit the devices that may be resorted to to retard
this atrophy or often to conserve and even enhance the vestiges of this
function, the excessive activity of which is the surest preventative
of a happy old age. While there are those who late in life resort to
vicious and even pathological modes of gratification, those who became
debauchees in youth or middle life very rarely even attain old age and
all should heed the motto to “beware the Indian summer of eroticism.”
Who has not observed among his personal acquaintances, to say nothing
of men conspicuous in public life, the tragic consequences to health,
occupation, and even life, that follow when December weds May; and what
shall we say, even from the eugenic standpoint, of women who prefer
to be an old man’s darling to a young man’s slave. We know, too, that
children born of postmature parents are liable, if they mature at
all, to do so precociously and to show early signs of senility, just
as children born of those of premature age often fail to reach full
maturity. If contraceptive methods are ever justifiable, it is to
prevent offspring of both but perhaps especially the former kind.
On the other hand, we have many clinical cases in which after years
of impotence from psychic causes the removal of these latter not only
restored the procreative function but relieved the patient of often
grave symptoms and brought marked mental rejuvenation. This has been
often recorded, especially for men. In some instances, apparently,
children have been born after such a period of dormancy or latency that
has lasted for years. Not only is the downward slope of this curve
far more gradual than its pubertal rise and, as we have seen, attended
by more oscillations but there is far more individual variation in the
age at which decline begins and ends, so that one man’s norm would be
another man’s disaster and perhaps doom.
The old should be able to think most dispassionately upon such themes
and should feel it incumbent upon them to transmit the wisdom born of
their own experience and observation to the younger generation. In
certain primitive races and modern societies and communities the old,
usually of the same but sometimes even of the opposite sex are expected
to initiate the members of the rising generation in the mysteries of
sex. We now know the dangers and sometimes even incestuous tendencies
with which such a course is sure to be beset; and if parents attempt
to discharge this function for their children, or wherever it is
done personally, there are perils. Indeed, none of the methods of
sex education, of which so many have lately been proposed, have been
entirely satisfactory. Perhaps this kind of training really ought to be
one of the special functions of grandparents and they should prepare
themselves for it. At any rate, while we have learned much in recent
years of sex psychology, pedagogy, and hygiene for the young, we have
almost no literature, and indeed know almost nothing of it for the old;
and this despite the fact that they are in the greatest need of it and
have practically no help in the solution of the novel and intricate
problems they must now face, as best they can, alone.
One reason why treatises on the climacteric are so few and so
inadequate is that the importance of the subject has only lately been
recognized even by psychiatrists, gynecologists, or gerontologists;
while another and more important reason is found in the extreme
reluctance of the old to tell. Psychoanalysis is impossible unless
it can overcome resistance, which it is often put to its wit’s ends
to do. Modesty and perhaps prudery have veiled the physiological and,
far more, the psychological aspect of this function. This instinct of
concealment is no less, and probably far greater, in the old. They
balk, evade, and deceive the investigator at every step. Psychoanalysts
have strangely neglected this theme and generally even refuse to take
patients of over forty or fifty years of age. What can be learned in
homes for old men is usually by observation, from attendants and from
inmates’ talk of each other, and those who answer questionnaires almost
always fail to note facts even remotely related to this theme. Still,
in this _terra incognita_ we occasionally come upon the naked truth,
only to realize that the retreat of Amor is the counterpart of its
advent, as autumn is of springtide. What nature gives so prodigally in
pubescent and adolescent years she garners with no less circumstance
and no less attention to details, so that we are left, in the end,
with no less tendencies to “polymorphic perversity” than before these
were constellated into the normal sex life of maturity. Even some of
the proclivities to auto-erotism and homosexuality may arise. Amatory
reveries may increase as dreams of this character decrease and there
are often flashing recrudescences of desire.
Despite or after the long and sometimes acute perturbations of the
_vita sexualis_ as it draws to its close, there is very commonly a new
and deep peace. We are glad that the storm and stress are passed and
that we are henceforth immune to passion. This is doubtless the normal
and, let us hope, increasingly common course. The sexes approximate
each other in both traits and features as they grow old and thus if
we can no longer love women sensually, we have a new appreciation of
the eternally feminine, its intuitive qualities, and its more general
and moral interests. Old women acquire a new power of sensing things
from man’s point of view and hence companionship between old men and
women may become a noble surrogate for carnal love. Happy the old who
can enjoy comradeship on this plane with a congenial member of the
other sex and thrice happy is the very rare case of well-mated couples
who find, when the time comes, that they have qualified for this
consummation of their union with each other!
Folklore, especially in its grosser forms, but also classical and
medieval,[198] and even modern literature--medical, psychiatric, and
most of all the writings of psychoanalysis--abound in descriptions of
the tragic results that ensue when husband and wife do not grow old
together or when their age disparity is too great. Even in the purest,
most loyal, and best mated pairs there is often a period of unspoken
and perhaps half unconscious suspicion and jealousy, which each partner
regrets and tries to banish from waking thoughts, outcrops of which
often appear in dreams. Roués have always felt that the young wives of
old men were their legitimate prey. The former seem more liable to fall
before temptation than if they had remained single. Bitter, indeed, is
often the lot of Senex who dotes on a young bride and seeks to atone
by lavishing gifts and providing every kind of service and social
enjoyment that infatuation can suggest for waning marital potency.
While society austerely and even ostentatiously condemns such a wife
who errs, it secretly judges her to be not without some excuse and has
little pity, and often only covert derision, for such a husband.
Yet more pathetic is the converse case of the aging wife of a spouse
yet young and lusty. The sense that she is losing her charm for the
man she loves is gall and wormwood to her very soul. She, too, seeks
to atone by making herself physically more attractive, not only to
him but to others that he may see their admiration, by every kind of
personal ministration and often by seeking literary, artistic, or other
success outside the family circle. She becomes painfully conscious of
the attractions of younger or otherwise more favored women whom her
mate meets and easily grows suspicious, not only with but often without
cause. She may feel the lure of incentives other women use to attract
men which her pride will not permit her to cultivate, although she may
make concessions to these more or less unconsciously. Tendencies thus
repressed may find outcrops in other fields and may even take the form
of symptoms, perhaps of fears for the well-being of her mate, even of
physical harm, business failure, social disgrace, or perhaps religious
heresy. In other cases she may be at last forced to admit infidelity on
his part and then it is that she finds herself face to face with the
dour problem of either trying to ignore or condone, and perhaps conceal
or excuse, his fault to others and living a hollow life of sham and
convention on the one hand; or of openly breaking and separating and
living henceforth a more or less isolated life, on the other. She must
thus very carefully weigh not only her own material interests but the
future of her children and the chance of pitiless public scandal.
In the medical literature on the menopause (Kisch, who studied 96
cases; Laudet, 95; Tilt, Faye, and Mayer, 97 each; and especially the
more philosophical Börner and Currier) we find very little save records
of physiological and anatomical changes, so that it has remained
for the Freudians to exploit the perhaps far more important psychic
changes that characterize this stage of life. The love life in the
new and larger sense in which this is now coming to be understood
is the very heart and core of woman’s nature and it plays a vaster
rôle in the life of man than had till lately been suspected. Whatever
thwarts or diverts the _vita sexualis_ from its normal course brings
all kinds of disasters in its train. About all the transformations of
senescence root in the fact that by this recession of the life tide we
are gradually cut loose from the more vital currents of the life of
the race and individuality now has its unique innings. The debauchee,
who marries perhaps late and after long experience with women of easy
virtue, often finds a modest wife disappointing and misses all the arts
of allurement he had found in his orgies. So, too, when the happily
married man finds the earlier ardors of his wife growing cool, he is
only too liable to suspect waning affection, when in fact nature is
only following her inexorable course. He may even wonder if, in the
inscrutable ways Eros has, his wife’s fancy may have unconsciously
strayed to some more engaging man or fallen a victim to some baseless
suspicion of him, or at any rate grown weary of his advances and
perhaps come to a new and deeper realization of some of his faults or
limitations. Feeling that their present relations are not all they
once were, he fails to recognize that it is the very nature of love to
grow sublimated as years pass and to become more and more an affair of
the soul, as it perhaps once was of the body; and that it is just at
this critical point that it normally becomes richer, riper, and more
truly devoted. The wife’s impulse to minister disinterestedly to her
husband is never so strong or pure as at the moment when the power of
giving complete physical satisfaction first begins to wane and it is
at this epoch that it can so easily and naturally be transmuted into
the impulse to serve, help, enter into closer and more sympathetic
mental relations, to know more of his inner life, struggles, ideals,
ambitions and even his business and in general to enlarge the surface
of personal contact. This is thus the psychological moment for man to
interest his mate in the affairs he has most at heart and to make her a
partner, perhaps even of some of the details, of his own vocation. This
golden opportunity, however, is brief, and if it passes unimproved it
will soon be forever too late and each mate will, ere long, find him-
or herself starting on devious ways that will lead them ever further
apart.
Conversely, when a young wife first realizes that her husband is aging,
she should understand that nature now impels him to compensate for
physical by mental devotion and she may have even to face some form
of the above choice whether it is better to be an old man’s darling
or a young man’s slave. In him this is the nascent hour for becoming
interested in her inmost wishes, aims, feelings, ideals, and to help
her actualize them. In extreme cases he may come to devote himself to
dancing attendance upon her wishes and even whims unless she herself
has the good sense to restrain him from this fatuity, for by cleverly
humoring and restraining him she can just now make him very plastic to
her will. Thus her problem sometimes is to save him from an infatuation
for her that might become ridiculous and that some wives are foolish
enough to love to display. She must, however, learn to develop in and
accept from him better succedanea for the more libidinous eros and to
do this she must enter more sympathetically and intellectually into his
life, as instinct now impels him to enter into hers. The impulse in the
physiologically younger partner of every married pair to anticipate
the age of the older one, if wisely met, may result in greater sanity
and more true happiness for both. Who does not know fortunate cases
where just this has occurred, rare though they may be and many as
are the wreckages that have resulted from too great age disparity?
If the wife tends to be in the mother image and the husband in the
image of the father, a rich and rare blend of parent and mate love is
sometimes seen. The feelings of the ideal bridegroom for the ideal
bride are never without a strong ingredient of the affection he once
cherished for his own mother, while one factor of her love for him was
transferred from or first developed toward her father. At the same time
each has a small ingredient of parental feeling toward the other, as if
they were each child and each parent to the other. In all such unions
the younger partner rejuvenates the older far more than the older ages
the younger.
In all of us oldsters the problem of personal hygiene looms up with
new dimensions. In our prime we gave little attention to health. The
body responded to most of the demands we made upon it. If we were very
tired, we slept the sounder. We paid no attention to minor ailments,
which soon righted themselves. We ate or drank what, and as much as,
appetite called for; exposed ourselves to wind and weather, heat and
cold, wet and dry, with impunity. We could go without sleep a night
or two if necessary and feel but little the worse for it; could abuse
our eyes, nerves, heart, digestion, muscles, and more or less escape
all evil consequences; could work at top speed and with an intensity
that rung up all our reserve energies for days or weeks if need be, and
could feel sure that our good constitutions would enable us to bear
the strain and to more or less promptly recuperate. But now our credit
at the bank of health begins to run low. We must husband our resources
lest we overdraw them. Overdoing is a veritable bugaboo. There are
certain symptoms we must never disregard on pain of days of lessened
efficiency. We have had one or more signs of special weaknesses we
must heed. There are some things that we must rigorously refrain from
eating or doing. There is a weak organ, too, that must be humored.
Appetite has perhaps been too keen and must be reined in. We must
select the items of our dietary with discretion and self-restraint. A
typical respondent says he can still indulge his love of hill-climbing,
bicycling, swimming, and even skating, and exercises with diverse
gymnastic apparatus that he has had set up in his garage, to say
nothing of golf, which he holds to be best of all, and autoing, which
has become with him a veritable craze. All these things at the age of
seventy-five he still does occasionally but is becoming shy of doing so
lest he be thought trying to seem young. He lately stole out alone at
twilight to skate, when one urchin called to another, “Hey, Johnnie,
doesn’t that old man skate bully?” He said he felt like cuffing him for
calling him “old” and hugging him for praise of his performance.
One correspondent says in substance that he did his best mental work
evenings, continuing usually until at least one o’clock in the morning
and then tumbling into bed, perhaps after a half an hour spent on a
novel as a nightcap or brain sponge, and falling at once into profound
sleep undisturbed by dreams and with hardly a change of posture till
nature’s demands were entirely satisfied. Now all his serious study
can best be done by daylight and particularly in the early part of the
day and he has a simple set of routine prescriptions for going to bed
and to sleep. He occasionally awakes and even arises before morning,
knows the sounds of all the night watches and is generally aware of
the early dawn despite darkened windows, and is sometimes disturbed by
troublesome dreams. He needs less sleep as measured by hours but is
more dependent upon its soundness. Again, he sometimes feels moody,
depressed, irritable, and wonders if anyone observes it. He has a
new horror of nerves, of constipation, of age lapsing to dotage,
anecdotage, and garrulity or taciturnity. If anything goes physically
wrong, he recuperates more slowly and blesses his stars that his
good heredity pulls him through, and nurses his weaknesses the more
thereafter. He has a notion that by keeping at work all he is able to,
he is conserving an energy that by letting up, if he is ill, will be
drawn upon to restore him to condition; whereas if he were habitually
idle this reserve would be thereby dissipated. With all the precautions
and handicaps thus entailed he is still sometimes able to attain a high
state of morale, to feel again the old youthful joy and exuberance of
life, although it now has a new and unique quality. There are also
certain new ambitions he dares not express. He even longs for new
adventures before it is forever too late. He realizes that all his life
he has been more or less repressed by “the fear of living” and would
now entirely escape it. He is not content to grind over the old mental
stores but would reach out into other fields and find new ones. He
fears intellectual stagnation and routine as the senses begin to grow
dull and that he is not well nourished mentally or suitably prepared
for old age and the psychic marasmus to which it is so prone.
The old tend to grow stale and sterile of soul from two causes: lack of
fresh mental pabulum and abatement of the power of creative ideation,
and so their mentation lapses and they become fatuous about trifles
and feel that just as they must live circumspectly lest their body
suffer some sudden collapse so their psychic self may crumble into
senility and the subtle processes of disintegration and dementia slowly
supervene, a decline of which we are usually far less aware than of
physical decay. All these considerations, however, may and together
should constitute a splendid stimulus to activity. The very danger of
decline or breakdown is a spur to develop the higher powers of man in
this their time.
In such experiences we seem to have a condition of great interest
and also of practical importance. Physical infirmity and accident
which compel special attention to body-keeping often result in such
added care to hygienic condition that we are actually better and more
effective for the impairment. Just as an old man who takes special care
not to fall or to take risks is often safer from injury than a stronger
and less careful man, so in mental work consciousness of certain
shortcomings may act as a spur to take more pains and so to do superior
work. To this is added another stimulus. A senescent knows that his
friends and enemies will be liable to ascribe any imperfections in his
intellectual output to failing powers, and his horror of betraying this
is an added incentive to do his very best. If his last product could
be his best, he could die happier, and he cannot bear the thought of
exhibiting signs or stages of senile debility. To be willing to accept
the allowances that his hostile or even his amiable critics would be
willing to make for his years is craven. His chief danger is lest the
standards of self-censorship for his performances should unconsciously
decline and that he should come to judge his own inferior work as
superior. Of this the history of literature has countless examples,
more perhaps than of the opposite tendency.
Unquestionably, too, there is a certain maturity of judgment about men,
things, causes, and life generally that nothing in the world but years
can bring, a real wisdom that only age can teach. But to observe and
rely on this to compensate for thoroughgoing rigorism in demonstration
or mastery of copious details is a fatality too often seen. Finally,
we must realize that our own brain work must be done with less of the
afflatus that often aided us in youth or in maturity. Once our best
ideas came to us in heat after a warming up of our faculties, perhaps
into an erethic or second-breath state. We found ourselves in the grip
of a sort of inspiration that carried us on perhaps far into the night
or impelled us to exceptional activities for days or even weeks and
brought a reaction of lassitude in its train. But now, not only is
this generally less or lacking but our mentation must be more stated,
our hours of intense application must be kept within bounds, and there
is the perennial danger of overdoing and its penalties are surer and
more severe. Thus with age we must develop a new system or method that
recognizes and comports with our true mental age. We must have safely
passed the Scylla and Charybdis of affecting to be younger than we are
and of aping or adhering too conservatively to the manners of thought
and feeling characteristic of earlier youth, on the one hand; or, on
the other, we must escape the opposite attitude that often supervenes
later in the very old of vaunting their years and posing as prodigies
of senescence. In a word, the call to us is to construct a new self
just as we had to do at adolescence, a self that both adds to and
subtracts much from the old personality of our prime. We must not only
command a masterly retreat along the old front but a no less masterly
advance to a new and stronger position and find compensation for
what old age leaves behind in what it brings that is new. What, more
precisely, is this latter?
Youth should anticipate the wisdom of age and age should conserve the
spontaneity of youth, for this latter becomes not less but only more
inward as we advance in years. As the eye dims and the dominance of
optical impressions over attention declines, we see ideas clearer and
follow the associations of thought rather than those of the external
world with some of the same freedom as that which comes to dreams when
we close the eyes in sleep. So, when audition becomes less sensitive,
we turn to the voices of inner oracles. If current events impress and
absorb us less, we can knit up the past, present, and future into a
higher unity. As the muscles grow weak the will, of which they were
the organ, grows strong to make the new adjustments necessary, while
easy fatigue suggests renunciation and the acceptance of fate. Love
that is less individualized may become not only broader but stronger.
We worry because we feel we have not made the new adjustments necessary
or unsealed all the new sources of wisdom and strength. Symptoms call
upon us to develop hygienic sagacity and censoriousness may be only a
negative expression of a higher idealism that longs for a better world.
Schleiermacher[199] developed this thought, insisting that age was not
only conserved but renewed youth, that no one should feel old till he
feels perfect, that age brings us into contact with new sources of life
and gives a new sense of the independence of the soul from the body,
not thus presaging a higher post-mortem existence but being itself an
entirely new life.
If I were charged with the task of compiling a secular bible for
the aged, I would include two great and historic sections from
Aristotle.[200] In the one he describes virtue as the golden mean
between the extremes of excess and defect, as, for example, courage
between timidity and foolhardiness; liberality between avarice and
prodigality; modesty between bashfulness and impudence; courtesy
between rudeness and flattery; vanity between solemnness and
buffoonery, etc., in each of his twelve spheres of life. In the other
passage he characterizes the magnanimous man as slow, dignified in
speech and movement, forgetful of injuries, not seeking praise, open
and not secretive because unafraid, attempting but few things but those
things of gravity, neither shunning nor seeking danger, ready to die
for a great cause, more disposed to bestow than to receive benefits
or favors, inclined to be proud to the proud and kindly to the meek
and humble, always animated by the effort to make his conduct in life
as nearly ideal as possible--or, in a word, making honor his muse and
striving always to be worthy of it. Now, most of these traits belong
more to the ideal of old age than to that of any earlier period in
life. The most advanced regimen and hygiene of to-day--personal,
mental, moral, social, political, judicial, and even religious--have
little better to suggest for old age, in which all the qualities here
implied should culminate, bringing poise and philosophic calm.
This brings me to the main thesis of this book, which is that
intelligent and well-conserved senectitude has very important social
and anthropological functions in the modern world not hitherto utilized
or even recognized. The chief of these is most comprehensively
designated by the general term synthesis, something never so needed as
in our very complex age of distracting specializations.
In the first place, it has been noted that withdrawal from
biological phyletic functions is often marked by an Indian summer of
increased clarity and efficiency in intellectual work. Not only does
individuation now have its innings but the distractions from passion,
the lust for wealth and power, and in general the struggle for place
and fame, have abated and in their stead comes, normally, not only
a philosophic calm but a desire to draw from accumulated experience
and knowledge the ultimate, and especially the moral, lessons of
life--in a word, to sum up in a broader view the net results of all
we have learned of the _comédie humaine_. Taylor even considers the
climacteric as not pathological but as “a conservation process of
nature to provide for a higher and more stable phase of development,
an economic lopping off of functions no longer needed, preparing the
individual for a different form of activity.” Shaler, too, noted
“an enlargement of intellectual interests;” and there is much in
experience and literature to confirm this view. The dangers and
excitements of life are passed. Normal men tend to become more judicial
and benevolent and these traits suggest new possibilities for the race
as vicariate for the loss of the power of physical procreation. Many
think these phenomena are more marked in women but even men who seem to
have crossed the deadline at fifty or even forty are sometimes later
reanimated. Apperceptive data have increased facility for getting
together, perhaps even into a new and larger view of the world and
there may come a genuine psychic erethism or second-breath, half
ecstatic, as the soul on the home stretch expatiates “o’er all the
world of man a mighty maze, yet not without a plan.”
There is, thus, a kind of harvest-home effort to gather the fruitage
of the past and to penetrate further into the future. It is especially
interesting to note that this is a stage of life in which most of
the Freudian mechanisms and impulsions fail to act or strike out
in new ways and very different ones take their place, which as yet
lack any adequate psychology, much as this is needed. This is the
wisdom of Solomon and the Psalmists, the vision of the mystics, and
it exists only in those senescents who have found the rare power of
developing and conserving the morale of their stage of life, which, as
always, consists in keeping themselves at the top of their condition.
The Binet-Simon devotees have furnished us with no inkling of how
physiological and mental age are related in the old. Only when we know
this shall we be able to evaluate the mentality of real sages wise
in the school of life. This kind of sapience has a value quite apart
from and beyond the methods of our most advanced pedagogy. St. John
thinks that there is a certain rejuvenation due to a change from _a
posteriori_ to _a priori_ habits of mind and that subjectivity and
perhaps introversion now have their innings. However this be, ripe
old age has been a slow, late, precarious, but precious acquisition of
the race, perhaps not only its latest but also its highest product.
Its modern representatives are pioneers and perhaps its task will
prove to be largely didactic. It certainly should go along with the
corresponding prolongation of youth and increasing docility in the
rising generation if we are right in charging ourselves with the duty
of building a new story to the structure of human life. Thus, while old
age is not at all venerable _per se_ we have a mandate to make it ever
more so by newer orientation, especially in a land and age that puts a
premium upon its splendid youth, who are now often called to precocious
activities that sometimes bring grief and disaster because we have been
oblivious of the precept, “Old men for counsel.”
True old age is not, as we have seen, second childhood. It is no more
retrospective than prospective. It looks out on the world anew and
involves something like a rebirth of faculties, especially of curiosity
and even of naïveté. Moreover, age is in quest of first principles
just as, though far more earnestly and competently, ingenuous youth
is. We have seen that Plato taught that the love and quest of general
ideas was the true achievement of immortality because it brought
participation in the deathlessness of these consummations of the noetic
urge, for to him philosophy was anticipatory death because it involved
a withdrawal from the specific and particular toward the vastness and
generality of the absolute.
But to-day normal old age cannot be merely contemplative. True, our
very neurons do seem to aggregate into new and more stable unities
as if the elements of our personality were being bound more closely
together, perhaps in order that we might survive some disruptive crisis
or that our souls might not be torn apart by the wind if we chance to
die when it blows. But now we must conceive the synthetic trend as
chiefly in the pragmatic service of mankind. Our message must not be a
mere _morituri salutamus_, however cheerful, but must have a positive
and practical meaning and our outlook tower should have a really
directive significance.
One outstanding and central trait of good old age is disillusionment.
It sees through the shams and vanities of life. Many of the most
brilliant intellectual achievements of youthful geniuses in thought
construction are precocious achievements of the insights that more
properly belong to this later stage of life. Even Carlyle’s _Sartor_,
Hegel’s _Phänomenologie_, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Emerson, and many
more, to say nothing of Jesus and Buddha, show premature age. Young men
who occupy themselves with the highest and most abstract philosophical
problems are unconsciously affecting or striving to anticipate the
most advanced mental age and many of them who discourse so sapiently
on “experience” are really those who have had very little of it.
The ancient Hindus knew this for, as Max Müller tells us, the wise
grandfather rises above all the superstitions of his progeny, who still
worship the old gods while he has come to revere only the great One and
All and to see all faiths and rites as but painted shadows that fancy
casts upon the unknown, while he awaits the blessed absorption into
Nirvana.
Fewest of all are those who ripen to senescence in religion and realize
that there is no external god but only physical and human nature and
no immortality save that of our offspring, our work, or our influence.
All who fall short of this are arrested in juvenile if not infantile
stages of their development. So, in all matters pertaining to sex,
marriage, and the family, most remain slaves of the mores of their age
and do not recognize the pregnant sense in which love and freedom,
the greatest words in all languages, should somehow be wedded, even
though we do not yet know how. Only when the age of sex passes can
we look dispassionately upon all these problems and glimpse the ways
that easier divorce, backfires to lust and prostitution, some of which
current hypocrisy still taboos the very mention of, can bring. So,
too, in other social and in our economic conditions we are drifting
perilously near to wrecking reefs. The very basis of our civilization
is in the greatest danger for want of the very aloofness, impartiality
and power of generalization that age can best supply. We oldsters do
see these things in a truer perspective and the time has now come to
set them forth, despite the penalty of being voted pessimistic and
querulent.
With all these problems so wide open by and since the war crying
out for solution, surely senescents who have retired and enjoy
a superacademic freedom, with no responsibilities to Boards,
institutions, or corporate interests; with no personal ambitions, no
temptations of the flesh, and leisure for the highest things, have here
an inspiring function which they must rise to. Age, with a competence
sufficient for its needs, freed from anxieties about a future state,
with none of the dangers young men feel lest they impair their future
careers, should not devote itself to rest and rust (_Rast Ich, so rost
Ich_) or to amusements, travel, or self-indulgence of personal taste,
much as the old may feel they have deserved any and all of these, but
should address itself to these new tasks, realizing that it owes a debt
to the world which it now vitally wants it to pay. Great founders of
great institutions have acknowledged this debt and striven to pay it
in the service the rich can render. We intellectuals cannot pay it in
their coin, but we owe it no less and must pay in the currency we can
command.
Thus, old age is not passive and peace-loving but brings a new
belligerency. Many of us longed for the physical ability to enter the
war as soldiers and we did our “bit” in ways open to us with as much
zest as our juniors. We not only want but need spiritual conflicts and
feel reinforced aggressiveness against ignorance, superstition, errors,
the sins of cupidity, and lust. What a list of evils we could make
which we wanted to attack in our prime but lacked courage to grapple
with! One of these is the current idea of old age itself. We have too
commonly accepted the conventional allotment of three-score-and-ten
as applicable now, but the man of the future will be ashamed and feel
guilty if he cannot plan a decade or two more of activity and he will
not permit himself to fall into a thanatopsis mood of mind or retire
to his memories or to the chimney corner because an allotted hour has
struck.
If we have lived aright, nature does give us a new lease of life when
passion and the bodily powers begin to abate and the very danger of
collapse, as we have seen, is in itself a spur. The human race is young
but most are cut off prematurely. It is ours to complete the drama, to
finish the window of Aladdin’s tower, to add a new story to the life
of man, for as yet we do not know what full maturity really is and the
last culminating chapter of humanity’s history is yet to be written.
Never, then, was the world in such crying need of Nestors and Merlins.
What a priceless crop of experience in these postbellum days remains
unharvested for want of precisely the objectivity, impartiality,
breadth, and perspective that age alone can supply! These were the
qualities that enabled the venerable Joffre to make his masterly
two-weeks’ retreat at the Marne. It was done against the will and wish
of every one of his younger generals, who now admit that he saved Paris
and the war and that he was, in a sense, a true superman. The world
never so needed the wisdom, which learning cannot give, that sees the
vanity and shallowness of narrow partisanship and jingoism, of creeds
that conceal more than they reveal, of social shams that often veil
corruption, the insanity of the money hunt that monopolizes most of
the energy of our entire civilization, and realizes that with all our
vaunted progress man still remains essentially juvenile--much as he was
before history began.
What the world needs is a kind of higher criticism of life and all its
institutions to show their latent beneath their patent value by true
supermen who, like Zarathustra, are old, very old, with the sapience
that long life alone can give. We need prophets with vision who can
inspire and also castigate, to convict the world of sin, righteousness,
and judgment. Thus, there is a new dispensation at the door which
graybeards alone can usher in. Otherwise humanity will remain splendid
but incomplete. Heir of all the ages, man has not yet come into his
full heritage. A traveler, he sets out for a far and supreme goal but
is cut off before he attains or even discerns it. The best part of his
history is yet unwritten because it is unmade.[201]
Now that the pressure of outer reality and its duties remit, attention
tends more to focus on self and introspontaneity and mentation may take
on a slightly dreamy character in that it is less under the dominion of
the objective environment, from which there is a new sense of freedom.
The demand for rigorous proof of one’s theorizations is somewhat less
insistent and critics of them are felt to be lacking in insight. There
is a slight shift from inductive to deductive thinking and as the
senses begin to grow dim their verification of our speculations seems
a trifle less imperative. Experience has furnished masses of data that
yet remain uncoordinated and as we feel the need of a deeper synthesis
we grope our way to a bed-rock of first principles that will explain
the riddle of life better and give it more unity and give us new
personal satisfaction. Tendencies that have been repressed during our
active life revive.
Perhaps we take up fads or occupations that have hitherto had only a
secondary place in our lives or indulge ourselves by giving them now
the first place as centers of interest. Now at last we can do things we
have long wanted to do but for which we have had no time or strength.
We can also now indulge our taste in reading in fields we have long
desired to know better, can abandon ourselves to the enjoyment of music
or the fine arts; or we travel, collect, or occupy ourselves with
horticulture, agriculture or farm life. Again, there are more reveries
and these most commonly gravitate to things about us or especially
to the remote past. Thus we often revive and idealize old situations
and incidents. We think of things we said and did and supplement them
by imagining what we could, would, or should have said and done and
fill lost opportunities fuller of “might-have-beens.” Yet many as are
the lost chances such retrospect brings to view, and imperfect as we
realize our responses to circumstances and the environment have been,
we are rarely oppressed by regret and still less often by remorse, so
that the wish to relive our lives is never very strong. The flaws in
our surroundings or our errors in judgment, even in moral conduct, are
usually regarded with leniency and viewed with a certain detachment,
however clearly they are seen and however impersonally they are judged.
This is in part because we have to accept them as inevitable and are
trying to make a virtue of so doing, but yet more perhaps because we
are consoled by the fact that had our mistakes been very grave we
should not have attained our advanced age in such good condition of
body and mind. Thus we make our very age a kind of vindication of our
course of life. We find yet more comfort in the fact that we discover
so many points in which things might have been worse. We have escaped
so many perils and survived so many trials that have overwhelmed many
others that, on the whole, we deem ourselves among the fortunate of the
earth.
I am inclined to think that the above, instead of being an optimistic
should rather be regarded on the whole as a pessimistic view of old
age. Fielding Hall tells us that in Burma, where it is purest, Buddhism
teaches men to “die thinking on their good deeds.” I cannot believe
this is final but opine rather that old age has its positive duties to
the present and to the future as well as its privileges and immunities.
To be sure, if sex love is the mainspring of the most and best in
the human psyche, it follows that when this goes there is little
worth while left in us. Hence, the implications of the new analytic
psychology are most tragic for senescence and man is doomed to spend
the shriveled remnants of life in the contemplation of its only real
stage, which is now gone or fast vanishing. I urge, on the contrary,
that the facts of the soul-life of the aged teach us very clearly that
if the _vita sexualis_ has been anything like normal, we graduate from
it into a larger love of man, nature, and being itself which can never
be complete till the urge of sex has waned.
What are these facts? First, the very incident that the old tend to
develop more sharply their own individuality as the powers of genesis
decline points in this direction. Senescents in the post-climacteric
acuminate their personality, sometimes to the point of idiosyncrasy and
eccentricity. The _Ich-trieb_ now has its innings. This selfishness
of the old, repulsive and unsocial as are now its commonest
manifestations, expresses a deep instinct that is really groping
toward a new and higher type of personality, evolving a new synthesis
of the factors of life when the chord of sex shall have passed in
music out of sight. It means man’s reaffirmation of the self and of
the will-to-live, although this points not, as the immortalists would
argue, to a post-mortem rehabilitation of the ego but only expresses
again the fact that man is as yet incomplete here and that even the old
now die prematurely because they have not yet learned how to build the
last story of the house of many mansions.
Again, as sex love declines friendship takes its place. Old lovers, and
husbands and wives if happily mated, become friends and find new joys
in these new relations. How we prize old friends and feel closer even
to those of our contemporaries we have known but slightly! A fine old
man of my acquaintance made a systematic effort by many letters to get
into touch with all his old schoolmates who were living and to learn
all he could of those who were dead. Another felt wronged whenever a
friend of earlier days died and he had no word of it. Yet another wrote
to a venerable colleague whom he knew but slightly, but whose career he
had followed, exhorting him “not to die yet a while” because he would
feel more lonely in the world with him out of it. There is a unique
loyalty of veterans of war toward each other, although they are little
together and do not always get on well with each other if they attempt
intimacy. Moreover, there is a new type of interest in young people
and in children, whom even grandmothers do not so much fondle and pet
as indulge and serve in ways mothers do not always sympathize with.
The “Borrowed Time” clubs of old men and young people’s associations
are both based chiefly upon the gregarious instinct which is strongest
among adolescents, before woman has taken her place beside man, and
among senescents when the charm of sex as such abates. Most of the
scores of associations and fraternities of men of mature years are
for material advantage and the typical clubman has failed to find, or
else has lost, the normal anchorage of the true home. The homosexual
friendships of the old are not chummy and do not demand close contact.
These have been far too much neglected and their cultivation, which is
greatly needed, is possible under modern conditions as never before. It
is interesting to know that an old people’s journal is projected.
Love in the aged also tends to broaden into the higher and more
sublimated form of interest in the subhuman world, in animals, plants,
trees, gardening, and country life generally. The charm of a rural
contrasted with an urban environment increases. How often the old take
pleasure in planting or setting out trees they will never see mature
or bear fruit and in building homes they know they can at best live in
but for a short time. Burbank knew and Burroughs felt this and Cato
said that all the aged should dwell in the country, as so many of the
old Romans did. The aged rarely have animal pets but they do feel
a new dread of destroying life. They love scenery and commune with
forests and mountains; revisit their rural boyhood homes and find deep
satisfaction in reënvisaging old landmarks.
They are, as we have seen, very susceptible to climate and to weather
changes, which they often become sagacious in predicting, and sometimes
keep note of rain, snowfall, temperature, wind, the phases of the
moon, etc., and are not only accredited oracles in weather wisdom
but are appealed to as local weather bureaus with amazing memory for
exceptional climatic phenomena for years back. Thus it is that their
sympathies often widen until they become almost animistic for things
without life and may come almost to personify ships, vehicles, and
machines. What takes place within the soul of an old man alone with
nature our imperfect psychology cannot tell; nor does he yet know. It
is something resumptive, preparatory for mingling with the elements,
as he will ere long do. His consciousness is a poor witness of what
transpires in the depths of his soul, for he only knows that the
experience of such influences gives him a new poise and calm that is
sweet if it is also sad. It is in such experiences that our nature
points the way to the chief palliative of the ghastly death thought. In
this direction lies the true way back to the all-mother of life, to the
great womb of existence whence we come and to which we must all return.
By various devices nature tends to keep the number of males and females
nearly equal. But when long periods of hardship, especially wars,
reduce the relative number of males, this inequality is rectified by
an increase in the number of males born; while in long periods of
tranquillity females tend to outnumber males. This is well established
by the statistics of natality. Whether nature would thus make good
any such sharp reduction in the relative number of females is less
demonstrable, because there is no such cause of sudden decimation of
this sex. Women do not go to war with each other. This suggests the
question whether nature also tends to regulate the proportion between
the old and the young where this has been abnormally disturbed. We have
already seen that in new communities opened up and settled by vigorous
younger men the relative number of old men, though not of old women,
soon increases because it is the most viable who respond to the call of
adventure and pioneering and who thus, barring the effects of hardship,
tend to live longer than the less enterprising who remain behind.
Selection was less operative for women who went because their men did.
So far as we may identify youth with progressiveness and age with
conservatism, we may safely conclude that nature does exercise the same
regulative function here as in making good sex disparity. At any rate,
radical new departures always bring reactions. Now, young communities
and countries have short, old ones long, memories. In the former,
experience counts too little; in the latter, too much. The one tends
to act perhaps too precipitately, the other to deliberate too long. In
one, precedent and tradition have but little, in the other excessive,
weight. The one tends to make the most and best of their present
opportunity, while the other is chiefly concerned that no good thing of
the past be jeopardized. Thus, the tide of progress, which is always
marked by alternating waves of reform and stabilization, is regulated
and the most fundamental moral basis of all party distinctions is
age. In this sense there are always two, and only two, sides to every
question; two, and only two, parties in every state, town, and family:
the old and the young. Their harmonious action and reaction constitutes
the most favorable condition for real progress. Age is far-sighted and
synthetic, youth myopic and analytic; but public and private welfare
need both, just as science needs both the microscope and the telescope.
All sciences, most of all those that deal with man, are liable to
lack the perspective that only age can give to orient them to direct
their researches toward problems of most value and hold them steadily
to their true course. Even the ablest and most ingenuous of our young
sociologists are most prone to lose sight of wider relations and come
to focus in partial and extreme views, for extreme opinions are always
easiest and in trying to cope with theories too vast for our powers
even sane and vigorous minds show the same traits as feeble, neurotic,
and infantile ones, which find even the problems of their limited
personal lives too hard for them to solve.
In the field of psychology we have now perfected a methodology of
introspection that seeks to be as exact as physics or chemistry in
going back to elemental sensations as if they were elements from
which all higher forms of mental activity were to be evolved by logic
as rigorous as mathematics itself and that ignores evolution. We also
have a behaviorism that focuses upon activities and physiological
processes and would evict the term consciousness, which is the muse of
introspection. The psychoanalysts, again, are most genetic and would
evolve nearly all psychic phenomena from sex by mechanisms that are as
sacred to them as were innate ideas to scholastics and philosophers
before Locke, and their work is still taboo to most orthodox
psychologists. Fourth, we have the testers who are intent upon applying
psychology to the grading of intelligence and the standardization
and calibration of abilities. All this work is valuable but how
grievously we just now need the broader synthetic view that only age
and experience can fully realize and really ought to supply. Age sees
more clearly than youth that studies of the brain, of children, of
instincts, animals, prehistoric man, the insane, defectives, the sexes,
intellect, will, feelings, and even of the history of philosophy and
religion are essential for a sound knowledge of man. For to the real
anthropologist nothing human is alien. He alone sees that the real
value of all such special work is what it contributes to enable us to
make our lives fuller, better, and more worth living.
In religion, most of even our authorized leaders show symptoms of
dementia præcox in clinging to juvenile attitudes that should have long
since been sloughed off. They still antagonize Darwinism, the higher
criticism, and the great philosophies of pantheism, which, rightly
interpreted, constitute the religion of mature and normal senescent
souls. In this oldest of all culture fields the world has suffered most
grievous arrest. The fact that in this direction the old have generally
so often been most reactionary, if not infantile, is one of the most
grievous of all their shortcomings. Here they should lead, as in more
primitive times they often did. The church has too little use for its
aging teachers but prefers young clergymen. Happily, however, a few of
them are now helping to build this higher story of the culture temple
of the race and have bid adieu to the mad immortality quest born of
the age of sexual potency and which should decline and die with it. In
this, as in perhaps no other field, old age should thus be constructive
and build mansions for itself and it will never attain the dignity
nature suggests for it until it does so. This does not mean that its
verdicts should be authoritative for other periods of life since, as
with each of these, its findings are not absolute but true only for its
own stage. But when senescence has found and accepted the faith that
fits its nature and needs, this will at least serve to mitigate the
fanaticism of young converts, rebuke ratiocination, which has so long
impelled immature minds to make dogma out of religious literature, and
check the intolerance of intellectual orthodoxy.
So in all departments of life the function of competent old age is to
sum up, keep perspective, draw lessons, particularly moral lessons.
Homer, tradition tells us, was an old man who synthesized many legends
before unorganized, somewhat as Moses was said to have done in
composing the Pentateuch. The dialogues of Plato that deal with the
deepest problems are, by general consent, ascribed to his old age. Most
of the prophets were old and even the Gospel, which represented the
terminal phase of apostolic inspiration, is ascribed to the very aged
John. The Confucian system is preëminently a product of the senium that
had seen the vanities of the world; and especially of all cults of the
transcendental. Herodotus, Thucydides, and Strabo were said to have
been old. Wells’ synoptical history not only meets the needs of the old
but is something a wise old man might well have undertaken. The popular
lectures of not a few leaders of science--DuBois-Reymond, Helmholtz,
Huxley, Haeckel, and many others--are products of fertile minds
unifying their life work, as befits scientists, before their powers
fail, subjecting it to the supreme test by acceptance of the consensus
of competent contemporaries and thus affirming the influential
immortality of the authors.
The late James Bryce, at the age of 84, said words of supreme
wisdom on national and international affairs at the Williamstown
conference. Who is not heartened to know that Ranke wrote his famous
_Weltgeschichte_--I think in five volumes--beginning at the age of
85; that Michelangelo was drawing the plans of St. Peters at 90; that
Cornaro wrote his last version of _The Temperate Life_ at 95; that W.
S. Smith made his memorable trip around the world alone at the age of
80; that Durand edited a volume of his at 110. And it is satisfying to
find not only scores but hundreds of such records, ancient and modern.
Again, if youth creates, age not only conserves but organizes. Both
these functions are essential in human society and are related
somewhat as are reproductive and connective tissue, as we saw in
Chapter VI. Both youth and age seek truth and thrill when they feel
a deep sentiment of inner conviction. But age lays more stress upon
the pragmatic sanction of working well and can better understand even
Loyola and Machiavelli. Thus it came that while men in their prime
conceived the great religions, the old made them prevail. Thus, too,
instituted and dogmatic religion owes its existence chiefly to men past
the meridian of life. The old did not invent belief in supernatural
powers or persons but needed and used it to sustain their position
when physical inferiority would have otherwise compelled them to step
aside and so they made themselves mediators between gods and men. They
directed and presided over rites and ceremonies and took possession
of the keys of the next world, enforced orthodoxies for the sake of
order, and established and equipped the young to aid them in this work.
They were behind the scenes and held the secrets, realizing the utility
to society and also to themselves of much for which they had lost the
primitive ardor of belief. Thus the revivalist and the reformer have
always found the old arraigned against them. Perhaps they resent “new
bottles” even more then they do new wine.
In the domain of sex, so vitally bound up with religion, the Hebrew
race first taught the world and most of this wisdom came from the old,
against whom the rise of romantic love was one of the greatest revolts
in the history of culture. In many primitive societies the old, as we
have seen, initiate the young of the same and even of the opposite sex
into its mysteries, and in modern mores, as for example, in France,
the counsels of the old are still of influence in the matings of the
young. It is they who insist on prudential considerations and warn
against venery and the follies into which blind Eros may lead. They
have seen and know each scene in the stormy drama to the fall of the
curtain. Thus to-day, though less only in degree, the sharpest phase of
the eternal warfare between the old and young is just where it was in
the ancient tribes in which the old barred the young from the females.
Youth seeks indulgence and resents the restraint and control for which
the old stand.
This eternal war between the young and the old begins at birth and
increases with every restraint and prohibition imposed on the former by
the latter. The infant would subject its mother’s life to its service
and the psychoanalysts who urge that we begin life with a sense of
omnipotence are quite as near right as those who, like Schleiermacher,
found this stage of life characterized by a feeling of absolute
dependence, of which he thought all religions are formulations. Both
are always present and in incessant conflict, now one and now the
other predominating. The child revolts, yet must submit and obey its
elders. It asserts its freedom by defiance, evasion, running away, by
deceits, by fancies of escaping all control and doing all it wishes.
It seeks to lead its own life and to live out completely its present
state regardless of all the claims of the future and of all domination
by adults, whose very existence much of his play ignores. The father
especially is a tyrant and is often hated as well as loved. Younger
children are always bullied by older. Every school grade seeks to
dominate that below. The teacher is always imposing a wisdom that is
not yet demanded by the child and that is accepted by it unwillingly,
cramming the memory pouches with things that can be only imperfectly
appreciated, picking open buds of interest and knowledge before their
time, imposing standards that are too grown up, checking natural
expressions of instinct and insisting on discipline, training, the
often painful acquisition of skills and conformity to manifold
conventions. There is always a sense in which the school is an offense
to the nature of the child. Older minds prescribe what must be learned,
and how, and when, and the scholiocentric still predominates over the
paidocentric method of education.
The state also subjects youth and enforces rights of property and
person to which the young have to be broken in. All kinds and degrees
of apprenticeship and the age and meaning of attaining majority are
prescribed. In many lands the parents control the marriage of their
offspring as they do property and the older make and administer laws
for the younger. After all these forms and degrees of servitude of the
younger to the older it is no wonder that the former not only very
often show symptoms of revolt all the way from the cradle to complete
maturity but, along with gratitude and respect, also cherish, if more
unconsciously, an enmity that they can neither entirely express nor
control against all kinds of masters, perhaps especially when their
power and authority begin to wane with age. The push of the advancing
upon the retiring generation is not consciously to feed fat such
ancient grudges by subjecting elders in their turn as they were once
subjected and yet there is a deep and persistent sense, which even
psychology has but little realized, in which every advance in history,
every insurrection or rebellion, every protestant movement against the
established order or custom, and every reform in religion, politics,
or life generally is only an expression of the eternal revolt of youth
against age, of which the extreme reaction of parricide is the symbol
but which is the deep psychogenetic root of every degree of failure in
care and respect. LeBon[202] sees and well presents the insurrectionary
tendencies rife in the world to-day but does not realize the extent,
nor does he find or seek the ultimate cause, of the present universal
“revolt.” Thus the aged everywhere still suffer from the imperfections
with which they and even their remote forbears exercised the parental
function.
On the other hand, it should not, of course, be forgotten that there is
always the more obvious and countervailing tendency to respect parents
as age brings the insight that in what they compelled and forbade they
were wiser than we, and to feel grateful that they did not leave us to
follow our own sweet wills. Just so far as we come to realize not only
how they lived for their children and did so wisely and well we both
love them more for all they did for us, and, if we are wise, we realize
that their counsels may still be helpful and we draw the moral that
there is always somewhere a wisdom superior to our own, an experience
from which we may profit, and an authority somewhere to which we must
always remain docile and toward which our proper attitude is that of
a loyalty that is essentially filial. It is of this impulse that all
kinds of ancestor worship are belated expressions, while at the same
time it is compensatory for all ill wishes and treatment directed
toward them while they lived. In a finished civilization the old will
enjoy their full meed of reverence while they are yet alive and every
sort of post-mortem canonization will be seen to be only the symbol of
a _devoir present_.
Perhaps in the large Aristotelian sense of the word politics is,
_par excellence_, the work of and for old age. Statecraft must look
not at the transient fluctuations of current and popular opinion but
must look beyond the present or the next election, must rise above
the selfishness of party interest and look to the far future. It must
think not in terms of the exigencies of the hour but of decades and
generations and not of local or partisan but of national and humanistic
interests. From the patriarchs down the old have been the wisest
shepherds of the people and if young men have succeeded in diplomacy it
is because they have been prodigies of precocity who have also devoted
themselves to the intensive study of history, which is at best only a
proxy for experience. To have read ever so exhaustively of a war of a
century before, for example, can give the young student no such sense
of its horrors, nor of the urgency of using every honorable means of
averting it, as to have actually lived through it with a vivid personal
memory of its incidents. Veterans of old wars would be cautious about
entering new ones.
Thus it is well that the old are with us “lest we forget” and in
exigencies we often turn to them if living and read and quote them with
respect long after they are dead. Great statesmen are those who have
not only identified themselves with the past, present, and future of
the nations they serve but beyond this have felt themselves charged
with the interests of mankind as a whole. We surely need all possible
ripeness of knowledge and maturity of judgment in this field and if the
span of experience personally demanded by leaders could have been a
full century, many of the great disasters that have befallen the race
might have been avoided.
The fact is that, as the Athenians seemed to the old Egyptian priest
who had known of Atlantis, we are all children who have to play the
rôle of real adults because the latter have not yet arrived, so they we
have come to think ourselves really mature.
Again, if the young are the best advocates, the old are by nature
the best judges. They can best weigh facts and ideas in the scale of
justice. The moral faculties ripen more slowly. Thus the old can best
supplement the technicalities of law by equity and give ethics its
rights in their verdicts. They should be the keepers of the standards
of right and wrong and mete out justice with the impartiality and
aloofness that befit it. Even in private life we have a judicial
function, which, though often ignored and even resented, is also often
sought and respected if we have the tact to praise and do not become
censorious. Our approval or disapproval, even if mild and unspoken,
may count for more than is admitted or even realized by our family and
friends.
Such philosophy as my life and studies have taught me begins and ends
in the thesis that the supreme criterion of everything, including
religion, science, art, property, business, education, hygiene, and
every human institution and everything in our environment, is what
it contributes to make life longer, fuller, and saner, so that each
individual shall live out more completely all the essentials in the
life of the race. If the best survive, it is not the good but the
bad and unfit who die young. To have lived long but narrowly is just
as bad. Both have really only half lived and it is just those who
have failed of realizing their full humanity in this life that most
feel the need of another and imprecate the cosmos as having cheated
them if it has not provided one. A rich old age is thus the supreme
reward of virtue. Thus what is education but fitting us for a more
advanced stage of life. It consists largely in giving to the young the
products of older minds and thus advancing our mental age beyond our
years. Childhood longs to die into youth and youth into maturity and
so the latter in its turn should long to pass away into age. And how
childish much in the adult world seems to those who have achieved the
true sagehood of age; and how unripe, full of folly, vanity, error,
and passion! How little the world has realized its debt in the past
to aging men and women in whom knowledge has ripened into wisdom and
how much more age owes and will yet give to the world when human life
becomes complete and realizes its higher possibilities!
Now, too, many of those who attain advanced years are battered,
water-logged, leaky derelicts without cargo or crew, chart, rudder,
sail, or engine, remaining afloat only because they have struck no
fatal rocks or because the storms have not quite yet swamped them;
or, to change the figure, because they have withered, not ripened,
on the tree. How many of us really ought to be dead because we are
useless to ourselves and to others. It is because there are so many
such that the rôle assigned to the best of us is often so hard and so
repugnant to our nature and to our needs. Hence it comes that we are
not only handicapped but are sorely tempted to accept a sham old age
that is false to all the best that is in us, instead of justifying and
illustrating a better one.
Thus, in fine, all not later than the fourth decade or whenever they
note that their youth has fled or that any of their powers have begun
to abate, should not only boldly face the fact that they are aging
but begin serious preparations for old age, so that this stage of
life be not only happier but more efficient than it is and that it
render to the world a service never so needed and never so possible to
render as now. Men and women in all the earlier and often in the later
postmeridional phases of life are cowards in facing for themselves
and arrant tricksters in deceiving others about their physiological
and psychological age. If all the psychic energy now directed to
concealment, pretense, and the maintenance of illusions here were put
to better uses, then health, prolongation of life, and efficiency in
later decades, to say nothing of happiness, would be greatly increased.
The dawn of adolescence, like that of senescence, has its peculiar
possibilities and its very trying probationary years before the age of
nubility; but youth always has the advantage, if it will only utilize
it, of the counsels of those who have weathered its storm and stress.
There is a vast amount of wreckage from which puberty often suffers.
The old, however, have no older initiators into the last stage of
life and must find or make their own way as best they can. But they
should realize that all the fluctuations and circumnutation phenomena
they experience in the middle decades of life are gropings toward new
adjustments in the domain of hygiene and morale that are necessary when
their income of vital energy does not quite balance its expenditure.
All these phenomena are really only labor pains by which nature is
trying to bring into the world a new and higher and more complete
humanity. To repeat, our function is to finish a structure that still
lacks an upper story and give it an outlook or conning tower from which
man can see more clearly the far horizon and take his bearings now and
then by the eternal stars.
The old who are really so, who are not merely spent projectiles,
relics, vestiges, or ruins that time has chanced to spare, do sometimes
attain vision and even prophetic power, and their last real words to
the world they are leaving are not like the inane babblings of the
dying, which friends so often cherish, but are often the best and most
worth heeding by their juniors of all their counsels. Some have told
us that if the long-awaited superman ever arrives, he will come by way
of the prolongation of adolescence and others have said it would be by
the fuller maturity of man in his prime. No doubt both these stages
of life would be enriched and potentialized, but his first advent and
his greatest improvement over man of to-day will be in the form of
glorified old age. Nietzsche was right in making Zarathustra old and
he himself was the overman whose message he brought to the world. He
was intent on the future of man and not on his present, still less on
his past. Thus the ideal old man will be chiefly concerned for what
is yet to be. Whatever he knows of history, he is more concerned with
the better history not yet written because it has not yet happened. If
he thinks of his childhood and his forbears, he thinks still more of
posterity. His chief desire is to see the young better born and better
provided for so as to come to a fuller maturity.
In fine, it cannot be too strongly urged or too often repeated that at
present we know little of old age and that little is so predominantly
of its inferior specimens, its unfavorable traits and defects and
limitations, that the old have been prone to repudiate their years.
Some even in the seventies and eighties to whom I ventured to send
my questionnaire resented it as imputing to them an age they denied
all knowledge of, while others had come precociously to not only
accept a padded life but to even crave services and sympathy and
demand privileges and immunities to which they were not entitled, thus
growing querulous because of a helplessness more affected than real.
The fundamental passion of the normal old is to serve, to subordinate
self, and, if in some ways they must be served, to help others in turn
in such ways as they can. This instinct of expropriation of self is
the voice of nature pointing to the effacement that awaits them. The
fact that age is so often selfish should not blind us to the fact that
in its true nature it is altruistic and thus in its later stages often
finds its greatest trial in the progressive abatement of its power of
actually benefiting others. Its greatest bitterness is that it must
be so much ministered to, and one of my correspondents regretted that
he could not die at sea or his corpse, when he was done with it, be
left to nature so that his relatives might not have the fuss of a
funeral and burial. Indeed, he seemed to have grown morbid about the
trouble he was thus to make them. Even the new love of the country and
of inanimate as well as animate nature into which they are soon to
be resolved may be another outcrop of the deep but blind and groping
immolation motive. It is love disengaging itself from persons and
special objects and perfecting itself by attaining its goal, which is
nothing less than the love of, and the resolution of self into, the
cosmos from which we sprang. Hence there is a sense in which chemistry
and physics, and even the Einstein doctrine of relativity, are studies
of man’s immortality.
Old age and death are eloquent of voices that call us to come home or
back to nature, the all-mother, and to the earth from which we sprang
and which is the terminal resting place of all who have gone before,
with whose remains our dust will mingle. The more we know of the
chemistry and physics of matter and energy, and even of the history,
constitution, and contents of the earth’s crust, the less dreadful do
the grave and the processes that take place in it seem, and the less
prone are we to become cowards, slackers, or malingerers in facing the
Great Enemy. What we know of what is still often called brute matter
shows it to be so much more dynamic and lawful than life and life is
so much more fecund and complex than mind that there is now a new
and most pregnant sense in which the way of even physical death is
upward, not downward. Who, too, yet knows just how much of the charm of
æsthetic contemplation of inanimate nature or even the urge that impels
science to know ever more of it is due to what it does and will entomb.
At any rate, as we realize far more clearly that none of the sons of
men ever did or ever can come back, we can now find some compensation
in the ever clearer understanding of the immortality of our somatic
elements and see the meaning of the deep instinct that inclines the old
to the country and to closer communion with nature as they withdraw
from life.
The greatest influence of the old upon the young has, from time
immemorial, been near the dawn of puberty, when almost every race
initiates youth into manhood. This, too, is still the age of most
conversions and church confirmations. Here education culminates and
here, too, in a sense, it began and extended slowly upward toward
the university and downward toward the kindergarten as civilization
advanced. The age of nubility, which follows, is the period of the
greatest break with the preceding generation for young couples
generally set up for themselves and the increase of the interval
between generations generally means a prolonged period of subjection
and docility. When a third generation was added and grandparents
became common in the families, conservative influences were increased,
and if four living generations ever become common in the same family
progress would probably be retarded and great-grandparents would think
grandparents more or less radical or innovative, so that it is well
that the former do not linger superfluous on the stage for this would
make the tension between the past and the future too great. Thus the
Great Silencer’s work of oblivion is benign for the race.
Such excessive contemporaneity of generations is not the goal of
eugenics, for while it tends to prolong life it also increases the
average span of years between generations and the longer-lived are
also more fecund. Should it ever come that ancestors of half a dozen
or a dozen generations live together, the advance of the world would
probably be greatly retarded, perhaps to the point of stagnation.
Therefore, for both their influence and for our love of them it is
fortunate that they are well dead and live only in our memory, in the
vitality they have bequeathed to us, and in the works that follow them.
As it is, it is old minds and those that they have mainly influenced
that have kept evolution, which is more charged with culture stimulus
than any influence in the modern intellectual world, so largely out
of our educational system. It is due to them that so large a part
of Christendom has repudiated the higher criticism, another great
achievement that has reanimated all scriptures and made them glow
with a new light and has given insight and zest where before there
was a confusion and indifference that kept religious consciousness so
medieval and ultra-conservative. It is psychological age that makes
statesmen suddenly confronted with new and vast world problems too
large for them take refuge in the counsels of Washington, which were
wise in their day but utterly inadequate for meeting the issues of our
own time.
The World War was not primarily a young men’s war, for most of them
were sent by their elders and met their death that the influence of
the latter might be augmented. Men may be made senile by their years
without growing wise. Thus the world is without true leaders in this
hour of its greatest need till we wonder whether a few score funerals
of those now in power would not be our greatest boon. A psychological
senility that neither learns nor forgets is always a menace and a check
instead of being, as true old age should be, a guide in emergencies.
Thus we have not grown old aright and are paralyzed by a wisdom that
is obsolete or barnacled by prejudice. How often is it said of reforms
great and good that they are earnestly needed and entirely practical
but must wait for their accomplishment until certain venerable but
obstructive personages of a generation that is passing are out of the
way, because they are prone to think the old good and the new bad, and
that every change, therefore, must be for the worse. Thus many live too
long and undo the usefulness of their earlier years.
In fine, not only has the Western world now lost the exhilarating
sense of progress that has for generations sustained and inspired it
but civilization faces to-day dangers of decay such as have never
confronted it since the incursion of the barbarians and of the Moslems
into Europe. Other more disastrous wars are possible. Class hatred
and the antagonisms of capital and labor, national and individual
greed, race jealousies and animosities, the ferment of Bolshevism,
the ascendency of the ideals of _kultur_ over those of culture in our
institutions for higher education in every land, industrial stagnation
and unemployment, the crying lack of leaders and the dominance of
mediocrity everywhere, the decay of faith and the desiccation of
religion, the waning confidence in democracy: these are the prospects
we must face if we are not to flee from reality and be cowards to life
as it confronts us. If men still believed in an omnipotent all-wise
god they would expect him to now intervene by a new, perhaps a third,
dispensation such as Renan believed in. But the good old All-Father
that saved a remnant and drowned the rest in the days of Noah and that
sent His Son later to save the world when it seemed lost is dead and
survives only as a memory, and we realize to-day that man must be his
own savior or perish.
There seem at present three and only three ways of escape, each of them
radical, arduous, slow, and perhaps desperate, and which only those who
have the supreme power of presentification or the genius that sees all
problems in terms of the here and now can clearly discern. The first
of these is (1) eugenics. We must learn to breed a better race of men.
This is, indeed, a religion and already has its apostles and martyrs
and a growing body of disciples who are propagandists of its new
gospel. But the obstacles of ignorance and prejudice are appalling. The
fact remains, however, as poor Nietzsche realized, that if man cannot
surpass his present self he is lost.
(2) Others, like H. G. Wells to-day and like Comenius in his day, see
our chief hope not so much in nature and preformation as in nurture and
epigenesis and would reconstruct, vastly enlarge, and unify our entire
educational system, reversing many a present consensus to the end of
ultimately obliterating all national boundaries and racial prejudices
and organizing a world state, “a parliament of man, a federation of the
world.”
(3) Others, like Metchnikoff and Bernard Shaw, look for salvation
in the prolongation of human life that man may have the longer
apprenticeship he now needs in order to wisely direct the ever more
complex affairs of civilization. Compared with the task it now imposes,
the wisest and ablest are only children and the disasters of our day
are because young Phaethons have thought they could drive the chariot
of the sun when in fact they were “_nicht dazu gewachsen_.” If man
could live and learn, not seventy but two or three times seventy years,
and could begin to be at his best when he now declines and retires, he
might know enough to guide the world in its true course. He must absorb
more knowledge, and of a different kind, and assimilate it better
in order to secrete the wisdom now needed. As the adolescent decade
prepares for maturity, so the senescent decades must prepare for old
age and look forward to it with all the anticipation with which youth
now looks forward to maturity. The limitations of old age must be made
spurs to its greater efficiency just as so many in middle life have
had to do with the chronic handicaps of poor health. Two prevalent
traditions must be ruthlessly broken and destroyed. The first is that
old people’s hold on life is so precarious that medical care is less
likely to be rewarded with success than at earlier stages of life.
The fact is that normal and healthy age is not only immune to many
diseases common to middle life but often has exceptional recuperative
powers, while even under present conditions the percentage of deaths
is not so very much increased at seventy. Physicians who specialize
in gerontology could do very much here. The other vicious tradition
is that retirement or marked abatement of activity should occur at a
certain age. This ought to be always a personal matter and all who can
really “carry on” should do so with all the powers they possess as long
as they are fully able.
An “Indian summer” should be both expected and utilized to the
uttermost for this is a precious bud of vast potentialities. In it
we already glimpse the superhumanity yet to be. We can already guess
something of the soteriological functions that now lie concealed
and are yet to be revealed in it. It brings a new poise and a new
perspective of values and hence a new orientation and new and deeper
insights into essentials. The very fact that the old who have
approximated ever so remotely this ideal have so far been exceptions
and, in a sense, “sports” should at least open our eyes to the fact
that the great all-mother can still show her original wish and intent.
The old are remarkably and uniquely suggestible in all matters that
pertain to the suppression or augmentation of life. They give up and
die prematurely as victims of a tradition that it is time for them
to do so and they survive no less remarkably not only troubles and
hardships but even surgical operations if they feel that they can do
so. We need not be faith-curers but must be vitalists and believe
in some kind of _élan vital_ or creative evolution, as opposed to
materialistic or mechanistic interpretations of life, to understand the
true psychology of age. It is the nascent period of a new and unselfish
involution of individuation which is impossible under the domination of
egoism. The new self now striving to be born is freer from the dominion
of sense and of the environment and has an autonomy and spontaneity
that is reinforced and recharged with energy from the primal springs of
life, and man may well look to this as one of the great sources of hope
in his present distress.
With the sublimation of sex in the Indian summer of the senium,
thus, comes normally a higher type of individuation than is possible
before. It is freer from passion, sense, selfish interest, clearer
and farther sighted, but sees the identity of the individual and the
race with which it is becoming incorporate. This is the first step
toward the final merging into mother nature. The isolation from the
outer world that comes with dimming senses, the abatement of erotism,
and the reduced vocational activities are compensated for by a new
noetic or meditative urge that comes straight from the primal sources
of all vital energy and gives a new and deeper sense of these and, if
we are philosophical, brings a new sympathy with vitalistic theories
like those of Lotze, Samuel Butler, Fechner, and Bergson, to say
nothing of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, or the long line of
evolutionists before Darwin, which goes back at least to Heraclitus.
This final rally of powers just when the processes of bodily decay are
accelerated, which in times past sometimes took the form of outbreaks
of prophecy, admonition, or clairvoyance as to the meaning of present
tendencies for the far future of the race and the further development
of which is one of the great present hopes of a world in which the
processes of degeneration are now being greatly accelerated, can be
nothing else than the birth throes of a new and higher stage in the
evolution of man. The task now rests upon us to intensify and prolong
this stage and to assure it to an ever larger number. We already see
that we here escape from many, and must learn to escape from more, of
Metchnikoff’s disharmonies in life. Sometime we shall both breed and
educate for it, make it the ideal and goal for the young, and look
for and heed its deliverances in the favored old. Having attained
it, although death will seem all the darker by contrast with its
regenerative light, man can meet it with less regret because he will
not feel that he must be consoled by the sequel of another life. All
forms of belief in the latter are, in fact, only surrogates expressive
of a deeper faith and these symbols of it have served the precious
purpose of keeping alive in his breast the sense that his life here was
an unfinished fragmentary thing. The true Indian summer of life, when
its possibilities are developed, is all that they mean, for in it all
man’s belated powers will ripen and the final harvest of his life be
garnered.
As to death, normal old age loves it no better than do the young.
Metchnikoff, who postulated an instinct for death as the reversal of
the love for life and which he thought should supervene at the end,
looked for it in himself when he faced imminent and certain death at
nearly three-score-and-ten; but in vain. The late Secretary Lane,
facing it, was praised for saying, “I accept,” but the psychologist
doubts whether anyone ever did or could welcome death understanding
it to be extinction. The suicide may murder his instinctive will to
live; the martyr may die in the hope of a better world beyond; the
disappointed lover or the coward to life may turn to it as the lesser
of two evils. A man may surrender his life as a sacrifice to a cause he
deems greater than self but it is nevertheless a supreme sacrifice. A
soldier accepts the fatal thrust of the bayonet and a criminal mounts
the scaffold or sits in the death chair because he cannot help it. For
how can life accept its own negation? It can never hope to know more
of it than the sun can know of shadows, which are where it is not.
Thus the old are no wiser and no more willing to die than the young,
if indeed they are as much so, because it means more to the latter who
have more to lose by it. All that philosophy or religion can do is to
direct our minds from its full and stark envisagement.
Growing old hygienically is like walking over a bridge that becomes
ever narrower so that there is progressively less range between the
_licet_ and the _non licet_, excess and defect. The bridge slowly
tapers to a log, then a tight-rope, and finally to a thread. But we
must go on till it breaks or we lose balance. Some keep a level head
and go farther than others but all will go down sooner or later.
Several of my respondents say that they never on any account admit to
themselves that they are old and a few advise us to avoid by every
possible means all thought of death, using every method of diversion
from it. One thinks that to dwell upon this theme is positively
dangerous because the thought tends to bring the reality. I believe, on
the contrary, that such an attitude is not only cowardly but that it
involves self-deception because the _memento mori_ is in fact always
present, if unconsciously, in the old and to face the Great Enemy
squarely really brings easement and safeguards us from a thanatophobia
that may have far more dangerous outcrops. To have once deliberately
oriented ourselves to death before our powers fail gives us a new poise
whatever attitude toward it such contemplation leads us to.
My own conclusion that death is the end of body and soul alike, while
it gives me a profound sense of satisfaction as having reached and
accepted the final goal of all present culture tendencies which all
serious souls feel impelled toward but which many of them still fight
down also brings me, I frankly confess, a new joy in and love of life
which is greatly intensified by contrast with the blankness beyond. As
a dark background brings out a fading picture, so whatever remains of
life is vastly more precious and more delectable day by day and hour
by hour than it could possibly be if at the door of the tomb we only
said _au revoir_. The very minutes seem longer because the departure
into eternity is so near. Although death treats our psyche just as it
does our soma, this is not so bad on our present views of the universe
and insight lifts us above the need of consolation and even gives a
sense of victory though Death do his worst, which those who expect
another personal life never attain. And so I am grateful to senescence
that has brought me at last into the larger light of a new day which
the young can never see and should never be even asked to see. Thus
if any of them should ever read my book thus far I would dismiss them
here and in the following chapter address myself to the aged alone.
That Jesus faced, and consciously, this absolute death at the close of
his career seems to me now to have been made clear by modern critical
and psychological investigation. But it was a sound pedagogic instinct
that led the evangelists to veil this extreme experience of their
Master.[203]
CHAPTER IX
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH
The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as recapitulating
that of the race--Suicide--The death-wish--Necrophilism--The
Black Death--Depopulation by the next war--The evolutionary
nisus and death as its queller--Death symbolism as pervasive as
that of sex--Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of
death--Schopenhauer’s view of death--The separation of ghosts
from the living among primitive races--The thanatology of the
Egyptians--The journey of the soul--Ancient cults of death and
resurrection in the religions about the eastern Mediterranean,
based on the death of vegetation in the fall and its revival
in the spring, as a background of Pauline Christianity--The
fading belief in immortality and Protestantism which now at
funerals speaks only of peace and rest--Osler’s five hundred
death beds--Influential, plasmal, and personal immortality and
their reciprocal relations--Moral efficacy of the doctrine of
future rewards and punishments--Belief in a future life for the
individual being transformed into a belief in the future of the
race on earth and the advent of the superman--Does man want
personal immortality--Finot’s immortality of the decomposing body
and its resolution into its elements--The Durkheim school and the
Mana doctrine--Schleiermacher--The Schiller-James view of the
brain and consciousness as repressive of the larger life of the
great Autos--The views of Plato and Kant--Have God and nature
cheated and lied to us if the wish to survive is false--Noetic
and mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of
general ideas--Views of Howison, Royce, and others--Is there a
true euthanasia or thanatophilia--Diminution of the desire for
personal immortality with culture and age--Thanatopsis.
From infancy to old age the conceptions of death undergo characteristic
changes in the individual not unlike those through which the race has
passed. The death fear or thanatophobia is, thus, a striking case of
recapitulation. The infant, like the animal, neither knows nor dreads
death. The death-feigning instinct in animals is only cataplexy and the
horror of blood that some herbivora feel is not related to death. From
Scott’s 226 cases[204] and my own 299 returns to questionnaires[205]
it appears that the first impression of death often comes from a
sensation of coldness in touching the corpse of a relative and the
reaction is a nervous start at the contrast with the warmth that
the contact of cuddling and hugging was wont to bring. The child’s
exquisite temperature sense feels a chill where it formerly felt heat.
Then comes the immobility of face and body where it used to find prompt
movements of response. There is no answering kiss, pat, or smile. In
this respect sleep seems strange but its brother, death, only a little
more so. Often the half-opened eyes are noticed with awe. The silence
and tearfulness of friends are also impressive to the infant, who often
weeps reflexly or sympathetically. Children of from two to five are
very prone to fixate certain accessories of death, often remembering
the corpse but nothing else of a dead member of the family. But
funerals and burials are far more often and more vividly remembered.
Such scenes are sometimes the earliest recollections of adults. Scrappy
memory pictures of these happenings may be preserved when their meaning
and their mood have entirely vanished and but for the testimony of
others they would remain unable to tell what it was all about.
Little children often focus on some minute detail (thanatic fetishism)
and ever after remember, for example, the bright pretty handles or the
silver nails of the coffin, the plate, the cloth binding, their own or
others’ articles of apparel, the shroud, flowers, and wreaths on or
near the coffin or thrown into the grave, countless stray phrases of
the preacher, the music, the incidents of the ride to the graveyard,
the fear lest the bottom of the coffin should drop out or the straps
with which it is lowered into the ground should slip or break, a
stone in the first handful or shovelful of earth thrown upon the
coffin, etc. The hearse is almost always prominent in such memories
and children often want to ride in one. This, of course, conforms to
the well-known laws of erotic fetishism by which the single item in a
constellation of them that alone can find room in the narrow field of
consciousness is over-determined and exaggerated in importance because
the affectivity that belongs to items that are repressed and cannot get
into consciousness is transferred to those that can do so.
Children often play they are dead, even when alone. They stretch out in
bed, fold their hands, and hold their breath as long as they can to see
how it feels to be dead. A few in fancy feel ill, imagine doctor and
nurse, go through the last agony, imagine others standing about weeping
and praising them, or perhaps picture themselves as the bystanders and
see the imaginary death of a friend and try to weep. Real grief is hard
for them and late to understand and they often think tears a pretense.
They sometimes pick out pretty coffins for themselves or their chums
and imagine becoming burial frocks. The odor of varnish from a coffin
sometimes has an incredible persistence and power to call up feelings
and emotions. Many children fear the corpse will wake and sit up--“he
is not dead but sleepeth,” etc. Many are the records of how by calling,
touching, pounding, or otherwise doing either forbidden or commendable
things children strive to provoke or coax their dead relatives to awake.
Death has many degrees to children. The buried body is deadest. It
is more so in the coffin than before being placed there. A very sick
person who may die begins to be invested with the same awe. Lying in
bed by day, the doctor, the silent nurse, the smell of medicines,
often suggest that death has begun. Toward very old people children
feel something of the same awe because they must soon die. According
to some of our data some young children are incipient necrophiles,
persistently trying to stroke, handle, or even kiss and hug the corpse.
Scott’s curves indicate that up to and at the age of five death is
more likely to be interesting if not attractive, while at about nine
its real horror first begins to be felt. Some, at a very tender age,
acquire associations that persist for years, perhaps through life,
and which are liable to be evoked by specific instances. This is, for
example, the case with the sight and smell of tuberoses, a black box or
boat, a crepe veil or bow on a door, hat, or garment, tolling of bells
or even the ringing of them, etc. Certain phrases in Scripture and in
some morbid cases all allusions to death are liable to cause hysterical
outbreaks. Some thanatophobes in whom these infantile fetishistic fears
persist cannot go past an undertaker’s show window but go far around to
avoid it. One such young man felt a sudden and strong aversion toward
a young lady to whom he was attached as soon as he learned that she
was employed in an undertaker’s establishment. These aversions often
spring up suddenly, perhaps in the form of a convulsive sob, tears, or
inexplicable depression, although they are usually of infantile origin.
Children’s funerals and interments of pets are now represented by a
small literature.
For young children the dead are simply absent and curious questions are
asked as to where they have gone, when they will return, why the child
cannot go with them. The infantile mind often makes strange mixtures of
its own naïve constructions with adult insight. The distinction between
psyche and soma, of which death is the chief teacher, is hard for the
realistic minds of children. Told that Papa or Mama rest or sleep in
the ground, they ask why they are there, where it is so cold and dark,
why they do not wake, what they eat, who feeds them, impulsions in
the race that primitive burial customs often elaborately answered by
preparing bodies for reanimation, leaving food and utensils with the
corpse, etc. When told of heaven above, children have strange, crass
fancies, such as that the body is shot up to heaven, the grave dug
open by angels, the body passed down through the earth and then around
up, etc. It generally gets out of the grave and goes to its abode by
night.
As ideas of the soul begin to be grasped it is conceived as a tenuous
replica of the body hovering about somewhere, sometimes seen though
rarely felt. It may even be talked to or fancied as present, though
unseen. Children’s dreams of the dead are often vivid and rarely
dreadful. In general the child thinks little or nothing but good of
the dead and the processes of idealization, aided by adults, often
almost reach the pitch of canonization so that later the memory of
a dead parent may become a power in the entire subsequent life of
sentiment as if all the instincts of ancestor worship were focalized on
the individual parent. Indeed, we find some adults who maintain quiet
sacred hours for thought of or ideal communion with their departed
dear ones and such yearnings, of course, make a favorable soil for the
ghost cult of spiritism. This component of our very complex attitude
toward dead friends is also the stratum that crops out in the holy
communion sacrament of the ghost dances of our American Indians, in
which the souls of all the great dead of their tribe are supposed to
come back and commune with their living descendants. Just in proportion
as the dead are loved does death work its charm of sublimation and
idealization, and just as a child of either sex has loved the parent of
the other will he or she idealize a chosen mate snatched away by death.
Thus, too, one factor in the belief in immortality is love that must
conserve its object though deceased, this factor being quite distinct
from the transcendental selfishness that would conserve our own ego.
Young children often seem rather to rejoice in than to fear death.
The excitement of all its ceremonies is new and impressive. Some even
express a wish, after a funeral is over, that someone else would die.
In their funeral games they quarrel as to who shall assume the central
rôle of the corpse, which they feign well. One abnormal four-year-old
tried to kill a younger mate and I find records of a number of
pathological children who have actually done so, largely in order to
enjoy the excitement of death, funeral, and burial. A sweet young girl
was found dancing on the fresh grave of her younger sister, chanting,
“I am so glad she is dead and I am alive,” suggesting not the ancient
days of famine when every death left more food for the survivors so
much as jealousy at the diversion of parental attention and care to the
younger child.
Neurotic children often play with unusual abandon, as if to compensate
for the depression, when they have just left a room where brothers or
sisters have breathed their last. A small boy who lost his father said,
“Now I will milk, cut wood, bring up coal,” etc., attempting thus to
assume the father’s rôle, perhaps even putting on some of his attire;
while girls whose mothers die become more tender to their fathers
or the other children, feeling themselves to be in some degree the
surrogate of the mother. Just as children of tender age far more often
fear the death of others than they do their own, so they vastly more
often wish the death of those they hate than they feel any suicidal
impulse. Children’s propensity to play with death-shudders in their
talk and thought was well illustrated in the case of two girls of
perhaps seven whom I overheard while they were watching a man on a very
high roof. One said, “Oh, I wish he would fall right down backwards and
kill himself.” “And they pick him up all bloody,” giggled the other.
“His bones all broke,” said the first. “And put him in a black box in
the grave,” said the second. “And all his children cry,” said number
one. “And starve to death,” added the other. They were getting more
excited and spoke lower as they passed out of my hearing. The horror
and also the fascination of rooms in which people have died often shows
a conflict that is psychologically the same.
If death is thus distorted by misconceptions in infancy it looms up
as a great and baffling mystery to fledgling _youth_. So little is it
really understood by them that it is hard to utilize the fear of it
even for motivating hygienic regimen. To tell a boy or girl in the
teens that it has been proven that by conforming to certain established
laws of health life may be prolonged on an average of fifteen years
seems to them a far cry and it has little power as an incentive
because they are so absorbed in living out all the possibilities of
the present. There are certain perils, too, in using the death fear
as a euthenic motive for the young. Yet during adolescence the death
problem often becomes a veritable muse inspiring endless dreads,
reveries, perhaps obsessions and complexes of the most manifold kind,
especially in neurotics, in whom infantile impulses and adult insights
are strangely mingled, producing weird perversions in later life. All
these mazes we can never thread without a knowledge of the impression
death has made upon the impressionable soul of man at every stage of
life and perhaps most of all in the adolescent period, when youth first
comes into close contact with the death thought.
When the young are achieving adulthood at the most rapid rate they
are often overwhelmed with a sense of insufficiency, inferiority, or
incompleteness against which they have to react as best they can.
Tolstoi gave us a good illustration of this from his own boyhood. His
tutor flogged him and he reacted as the only way in which he could “get
even” by not merely the thought of suicide but the vivid imagination,
well set in scene, of himself as dead and his father dragging the
horrified tutor before his beautiful corpse and accusing him of
having murdered his son, while the friends around bemoaned him as so
brilliant and so tragically slain. It seems strange that at that period
of life when both vitality and viability are greatest and the will to
live seems to have its maximal momentum the death thought is so prone
to be obsessive. But death is very hard to conceive and interpretations
of what it really means differ with every age, race, individual, and
perhaps almost every moment of life. It is so negative, privative, and
human nature, like physical nature, abhors a vacuum so much that the
soul balks not only at the idea of annihilation but at every thought
of the arrest of life. Recent studies of children’s suicides show that
although they begin at the early dawn of school age they are augmented
by all repressions of their natural interests and instincts. Only at
puberty or after, when the life of the race begins to dominate that
of the individual, do children begin to comprehend what death really
means; and even then, as the 58 suicides of German school children
per year from 1883 to 1905 show, many, if not most, are sudden and
impulsive and probably the majority, at least those of pubescent girls,
are largely for the sake of the effect their death will have upon those
nearest them. What child has not seriously considered suicide, at least
in reverie? Several partial censuses have been unable to find one.[206]
As to the death wish, this may be often felt and even expressed
impulsively on some special provocation and then the realization of
it may bring not only horror but in neuropathic children may set up
a prolonged and morbid corrective process to strangle it. We have
many cases in which overtenderness to parents or relatives, which had
become so insistent as to be troublesome, was motivated by the impulse
to atone for a vivid death wish that took form in a moment of anger.
In general we have only a life wish for our friends and reserve the
death wish for enemies. Even in the most highly evolved emotional lives
this is perhaps only a question of predominance, for psychoanalysts
tell us that never was there a death, even of a lover, that did not
bring some small modicum of joy to the survivor, swallowed up and
overwhelmed as this component might be in grief. Were this not so,
comforters and consolers would have no resources. We strive to think
that our dear ones are happier, comforting ourselves with memories,
and ascribe to the dead superior powers of transcendental enjoyment;
while, conversely, no savage ever killed the bitterest foe of his tribe
without elements of pity or perhaps phrases to atone for the soul of
the victim or to his friends by saying propitiatory words or performing
placatory rites. Even hell and devils never kill the soul and there are
spots and spells of remission of torment so that surcease and nepenthe
are not unknown, even in the inferno.
The death thought in some of our data seems to be spontaneous, that
is, it may break out obsessively, not only on the slightest occasion
but without any ascertainable cause. Some young people have spells
of crying with wild abandon at the thought that they must die, which
sometimes seems to sound out to them as if from the welkin. It is worst
nights. It seems so unspeakably dreadful that they cannot steady their
voice. The thought in the infant prayer, “If I should die before I
wake,” etc., made one child more or less neurotic for years with horror
of hell and judgment and she was wont to fancy herself found dead in
the morning and used to pose for it to look her best. This, too, plays
its rôle in revival hysteria. Some who have been very near death by
drowning or other accident magnify this experience in memory until it
may come to haunt them. Indeed, it seems characteristic of adolescence
that although it may occur at later stages of life, in some quiet hour,
perhaps when alone on the shore or in the forest or in a wakeful moment
at night, the thought, “I must die,” seems to spring and fasten upon
the soul like a beast of prey. It flashes out with great and absorbing
vividness. Occasionally a voice seems to pronounce the sentence. In a
few cases it is so intense that a child fancies itself in the act of
dying and springs up in terror. Probably all morbid fears of death are
regressive or reversionary and have childish features. One clergyman
was so haunted by it that he could not conduct funerals and only after
years was he able to find self-control in the conviction that he might
live on till Christ’s second coming.[207]
In my teens in the country I often, and with a willingness that was
hard for myself or my parents to understand, took my turn in watching
with the sick and dying neighbors or “setting up” with corpses. On two
occasions, once entirely alone, I performed as best I could the office
of “laying out” the body of an old neighbor who died in the middle of
the night. Other young people of my acquaintance were generally very
ready to perform such offices although they involved great nervous
tension, and in general a companion watcher was sought or provided.
Another personal experience illustrates the persistence of juvenile
attitudes toward death in mature life. As a boy in the country I had
to pass, in going to and coming from the village, a lonely country
church yard, by which I used to run and in which many of my relatives
for generations were buried. Only a few years ago I yielded, during a
sojourn at the village inn, to the whim of revisiting this graveyard
by moonlight one midnight. I forced myself to climb over the high
black entrance gate, for all was surrounded by a wall of dark-colored
stone and by a row of pine trees. I walked deliberately through the
graveyard and back, striking a match on my grandfather’s tomb to light
a cigar as a culmination of a kind of bravado that left nothing that
an observer could detect as indicating anything but perfect poise and
control. I did not even quite shudder when, as I stood amidst the grave
stones, a dark cloud obscured the moon, and after walking back and
forth there for a time I leisurely clambered out and went back. But the
strange thing about it all was a nervous tension, the flitting fears
and fancies that had to be kept under and that constantly impelled me
to turn and run. On returning I found myself in a state of high nervous
excitement and realized that almost any sudden unexpected shock would
have caused me, as the sudden obscurity of the moon nearly did, to
yield to precipitate flight.
Thus, we see in the young buds of about all of the many and diverse
attitudes the race has assumed toward death. Most of them are
polymorphic and perverse, some merely organic residua of long phyletic
influences. Thus, as in sex, the components of the death attitudes
are early present but are not organized into unity until puberty,
when the racial experiences in both fields come to be more or less
unified. It would seem that death has no business with young people or
they with it and that it is as absurd for them to occupy themselves
with it at this age as it would be for them to worry about posterity
before the dawn of adolescence. Since the life and growth of the
psyche and soma are now at their flood-tide, it would seem that every
intimation of death would be not only foreign to the very nature
of young people but would be arrestive of the course of nature and
should be veiled in reticence, like sex, before its time, with only
provisional answers to the genuine questions about it. Indeed, the
above data seem to show that the genetic impulse itself seems to shield
the child by diverting it from the central fact of death to countless
irrelevancies, trivialities, and accessories. Just as the instinct of
the race has blindly striven to avoid sex precocity, if not to delay
puberty, and more consciously and purposively to enforce a period of
repression between the age of pubescence and that of nubility, so myth,
primitive religion, and especially Christianity, have provided ways
of mitigating, even for adults but more especially for the young, the
nameless horror of direct envisagement of the fact that all must die
and cease to be, body and soul, or, like the Nirvana cult, to make this
conviction more tolerable.
Indeed, it is probably a normal instinct of compensation that often
leads young people to visit morgues and perhaps dissecting rooms,
to develop a certain immunity from such obsessive tendencies as the
above.[208] Great earthquakes, disastrous floods, and, above all, war
and pestilence compel us to face the death thought at close quarters
for a season and there are always those who revel in describing it
in its most gruesome details, although there is a tacit consensus of
the press to suppress the most horrible of them. Soldiers have to
be hardened to inflict it in its most direct and personal way, as,
for example, by the bayonet, as well as to keep cool when they are
first under fire and to carry on and not turn and flee in panic when
their comrades are torn to pieces about them. Such experiences, while
they often mature the unripe and give a new poise to character, also
tend to make human life seem cheaper, so that it is not strange that
wars are followed by crime waves and especially by marked increase in
assaults. For disguise it as we may, war is at root licensed murder and
its heroes are they who have killed the most of those who have been
declared enemies. Indeed, it is self-evident that the normal man who
can deliberately stake his life in a fight in which he knows that he
must either kill or be killed does so because he realizes that there is
something that he values more than he does his life, and to have had
one such experience marks an epoch of the utmost moral import. Perhaps
it is not too much to say that only those who have made this supreme
sacrifice in spirit are finished and complete men.
When death holds high carnival and whole populations are depleted,
long periods of readjustment follow and human nature breaks out in
strange ways. Defoe’s very realistic though fictive story of the
Great Plague showed this. J. W. Thompson[209] says that the Black
Death, A.D. 1348–1349, swept away at least one-third of the population
of Europe and brought in its train economic chaos, social unrest,
profiteering, lack of production, phrenetic gayety, dissipation, wanton
spending, recklessness, greed, debauchery, avarice, hysteria, and
decay of morals. The nerves of the people were shattered. Goods were
without owners but everything movable was immediately appropriated by
survivors. Prices first shrank very low and then rose to preposterous
heights. The Plague was like an invasion and there were great
migrations for years. There was administrative inefficiency for the
trained class was cut down. The machinery of government almost stopped
and there were thousands of ignorant and incompetent men in important
public places. The church was no better off and it had to press unfit
raw recruits into its service. Flagellants exhibited a mixture of
religion and sex rivaling the psychology of the crusades. Thought went
off on all kinds of tangents. There were charlatans, mind-readers,
sorcerers, witch doctors, soap-box preachers, and the Pied Piper
very likely really did lead the excited children with his mad antics
and weird music to wander off with him until, as in the children’s
crusade, they were lost. Thompson points out that although there are
many points of difference, there are more very significant analogues
between the after-effects of this plague and those of the World War. A
Danish historian estimates that in the latter ten million soldiers died
in battle or of wounds, three million were permanently disabled, and
probably some thirty million more people would have been alive to-day
but for it. Such a decimation of Europe has certainly brought social,
economic, and psychological changes that it would take us long to
evaluate.
Meanwhile, we cannot entirely escape the looming prospect of a far
more disastrous war that may yet come. W. Irwin[210] has cleverly hit
off some of the possibilities of the awful holocaust that death would
probably celebrate if such a conflict ever came to pass. Instead of
liquid flame we have now Lewisite gas, which is invisible, sinks, and
would search out every dugout and cellar, while it also attacks the
skin and almost always kills, having a spread fifty-five times greater
than that of any other poison gas. He quotes an expert as saying that
a dozen Lewisite air-bombs of the greatest size and under favorable
atmospheric conditions would practically eliminate the population of
Berlin and we even have hints of a gas beyond this. Gas will very
likely be the chief weapon of the future war. Moreover, the bombing
airplane has a range, of course, far beyond any gun. Bombs grew in
size during the war from that of a grapefruit to eight feet in length,
with half a ton of explosives and gas-generating chemicals, costing
some $3,000 each and the planes carrying these will be directed by
wireless, so that the airplane is thus the supergun. Hitherto warfare
has been directed against soldiers, but in the future it will be
against whole peoples and this generation may see a great metropolis
suddenly made into a necropolis. Formal declaration of war, too, will
become as obsolete as a Fauntleroy courtesy. Killing will be not by
hand but by machinery; not in retail but by wholesale. War will be not
between individual nations or small groups of them but will embrace
the entire world, even the East, so that there will be no neutrals.
Tanks will be used as super-dreadnoughts and poison gases will perhaps
paralyze the soil for years, as indeed they have done to some extent
in eastern France. Thus if war in the future becomes one hundred per
cent efficient in the use of the resources at present at its command
and those that it is only the part of common sense to anticipate, the
depopulation caused will be incalculable and the world may experience
again all the phenomena that Europe did after the Black Death, and
perhaps more.
There is an evolution larger than Darwinism and far older than science
in which all who think have everywhere and always believed. The common
phenomena of growth suggest it to every mind. It is almost of the
nature of thought to seek origins and to trace things to their simple
beginnings. Indeed, the most perfect knowledge of anything is the
description of the processes of its development. Special creation
myths, cosmogonies, and religious theories of the world and man,
philosophies and histories, are all products of the same deep instinct
to know the cosmos as a whole and also its parts genetically. And it
is a deep and dominant noetic instinct that has given us the far more
highly evolved evolutionism that now prevails in every department of
human knowledge. Thus, even those who oppose its recent applications to
man are only halting at the last step in a path that all have traveled
far and long.
The will-to-live, the struggle for survival, the _élan vital_,
libido, etc., are only new names given to the impelling forces of the
growth-urge in its higher stages; but these have become types and
symbols, if a bit anthropomorphic, of all the more basal and earlier
processes by which the homogeneous tends to differentiate itself.
Thus we may conceive the universe as being from the first in labor to
produce life. Everything that lives hungers to do so more intensely
and as for man “’tis life of which our nerves are scant, more life and
fuller--that we want.” Macrobiotism was the term used to designate the
lust to maximize our lives, to make them vivid and long, and to exhaust
all the possibilities of human experience; but, more especially, to
enlarge the pleasure field and narrow that of pain, which is arrestive.
We want to enjoy everything of which man’s estate is capable and we
want it here and now. In youth, particularly, we long for wealth,
knowledge, power, strength, fame, health, and beauty because these make
us glow and tingle with life. The things to which we ascribe worth and
value are those that enhance the joy of living. All of them are only
forms of the affirmation of the will-to-live or fulfillments of the
wish to be well, happy, and of consequence to ourselves and others.
Progress, reform, enlightenment, enterprise, efficiency, are terms
used as we climb the heights of the excelsior mount of promise. “More
life and fuller”--we want nothing else here or hereafter.
But death, ghastly, inevitable death, is our goal. It is the great
and universal negation of life and coregent with it of the world. All
that lives must die. How the death-thought sometimes springs like a
beast of prey from its ambush upon youth when life is most intense
and how it blights, sears, stings, and wounds but nevertheless charms
and fascinates! Here is the first of all dualisms, the greatest of
all contrasts, and the most universal of all conflicts. Death is
dissolution, defeat, retreat, abnegation, the processes of which begin
with life itself and even the old who still “carry on” know that they
must soon become carrion and that no funeral pomp or tomb can do more
than camouflage putridity in order to divert us from the horrid thought
to escape which the very concept of the soul itself was entified and
immortalized, just as all the devices of modesty and all the precepts
of sexual morality were evolved to divert us from the envisagement of
bare sex organs and acts. Death is not only the king of terrors but to
the genetic psychologist every fear is at bottom the fear of death,
for all the scores of phobias that prey upon man are of things and of
experiences that abate life. Death is thus a matter of infinite degrees
from the loss of a penny or a sore tooth to that of a friend or to our
own extinction. Freudians rightly ascribe many ailments of mind and
body to abnormalities and disharmonies of sex love, which presides
over the life of the race. But this now needs to be supplemented by
quite another and probably no less important psychoanalysis that will
show, when it is explored, that the fear of death or of life-abatement
for the individual is no whit less pervasive and dominant than are
love and hunger, which are so often said to rule the world. Only one
psychologist has, although but very partially, recognized this and his
findings are résuméd as follows.
W. Stekel says that not only has death played a great rôle in poetry,
folklore, myth, religion, and art, but it is a more or less disguised
theme of many dreams, especially those of neurotics.[211] He urges that
not only the death fear but the death wish, masked in very diverse
symbolic forms, is extremely common in the dreams of psychopaths.
He ascribes a thanatic meaning to very many factors that analytic
Freudians have usually interpreted as having only a sexual significance
and holds that the same mechanisms apply to both. He would have all
psychoanalysts look for the death thought, which he believes hardly
less common and quite as disguised and illusive as sex, not only in
dreams but in the illusions of the insane. To our bestial unconscious
self, which in these experiences escapes the censor, the ego is supreme
and finds its ultimate goal only in the destruction of others; and
if it does not kill those in our way, it pictures their death or
finds some way for their removal. This, indeed, is involved in the
realization of very many of our secret hopes. A woman loves a man whom
she cannot see and so she dreams that her child dies, for she knows
that he would attend the funeral and there see and also pity her. A man
has more or less unconsciously ceased to love his wife but suppresses
the realization of the fact from his waking consciousness and so dreams
of her as talking with his grandfather, long since dead. Another man in
a like state of mind dreamed that his wife suddenly and mysteriously
vanished.
The most common death symbols are going away, a journey, wandering;
or there may be still more remote focalization of the death wish upon
sandals, feet, footsteps, a path, going home, passing through a narrow
street or door, growing small; or even vehicles of any sort or anything
suggestive of transportation may signify death. Instead of a skeleton
or skull the dream may conceive death under the form of a rider,
huntsman upon a white or black horse, a deaf mute--suggestive of the
silence of the grave--or blindness, symbolic of its darkness; a doctor,
perhaps Doctor White or Doctor Black, a tailor cutting a thread, a
messenger, raven, black cat or dog, thirteen, a clergyman, priest,
weeping willow, a woodman felling a tree, a mower or reaper, a small
house or room, fire or flood.
Death in our unconscious is a wondrous masquerader and it very often
appears as sleep. The grave is a bed; the churchyard, a dormitory;
catacombs, berths. Water symbolism, too, is very common, for example,
the crossing of a dark river to the other shore, a boat, a narrow
strait, a stormy or a deep dark sea across which we pass to an island
or a new continent, the abode of the dead; and we speak of going out
with the ebb of the tide, shipwreck, stranding, etc. Death may also
appear as a fire that consumes or purifies. Processions and even crowds
may suggest burial or funerals; and so sometimes do festivals or even
weddings. A chest or trunk may mean a coffin, and graduation or even
promotion in school may stand for “passing out.” Sometimes the basis of
the primitive impulse to kill, which made man a wolf to his fellow-man,
may crop out in dreams or insanity without either camouflage or
repression and the sleeper tries poison, pistol, dagger, knife, etc.
Perhaps man still has in his unconscious, deep down at the bottom of
his soul, the sin of father-murder, as some now tell us, and reaction
to this brings remorse and later a sense of atonement from the original
sin and guilt for which man has for ages sought remission and fancied
resurrection. At any rate, many psychoneurotic souls seek to compensate
for instinctive death wishes by excessive tenderness to friends and
relatives, whose removal, they realize with horror, they have sometimes
caught themselves desiring. Nietzsche says that we should never
pity the old who are about to die; but under the law of bipolarity
the worship and even the tyranny of the dead hand, or mortmain, has
sometimes developed to such a degree that the dead have been or should
be made to die again to free us from their control.
If these views are at all correct, our larger, older unconscious soul
is still full of reverberations of suffering, inflicting, and observing
death. Man became man when he knew that he must die, and to defer or
escape death has been the basal motivation of all of his culture.
That he might not starve he accumulated property, the primitive form
of which, as Leternau has shown, was food. To escape death by the
rigors of climate he devised clothing and shelter. To avoid it by
wild beasts and human enemies he devised weapons and organized the
hunt and warfare. To keep himself alive when attacked by disease, the
medicine man and later the healing art were evolved. Now he insures
not only against death but against the partial death involved in
the loss of limbs, accident, and illness; he safeguards his person
and his goods by codes and law courts; and regulates diet, regimen,
mores, and social hygiene with a view to more and fuller life. All
these institutions are impelled by the instinct of self-preservation,
reinforced as it now is in man by the knowledge of his mortality. Man
may thus be redefined as the death-shunner. He does not and cannot
begin to realize how much he fears death and dreads it now and always
has. The reason for this is that while the knowledge that he must die
is so certain and ineluctable, the opposite impulse to forget, repress,
and deny this fact also has behind it the momentum of ages. The rank,
raw death-thought that our late dear ones are, and that we shall soon
become, masses of rotting putridity, most offensive of all things
to sense and sources of loathsome and mortal contagion, is so rarely
allowed to escape its inveterate censorship that we are all liable to
become neurotic toward it if it does so.
One envisagement of an erstwhile dear one who had become this most
loathsome of all objects drove Buddha to renounce his throne, wealth,
and family, and to become a mendicant and a seeker for, if not an
antidote at least a palliative for the awful death-thought. The great
religion he founded is essentially a religion of pity for man because
he is doomed to die. Its founder aspired to be the world’s great
consoler, accepting frankly the stark and gruesome thought of death
with all its horrifying implications.
Schopenhauer, who had a very morbid fear of death till near the close
of his life, when it seemed to quite abate, developed views about it
that have had immense influence throughout the world, especially in
Germany. He believed his views to be modern expressions of ancient
Hindu philosophy and also that all systems of philosophy are primarily
either comforts for or antidotes to death.[212] The power behind
creative evolution he calls the will-to-live, which is blind and
unreasonable. “It is not the knowing part of our ego that fears death,
but the _fuga mortis_ proceeds entirely and alone from the blind will
with which everything is filled.” Only the will as it exhibits itself
in the body is destroyed by death. We should no more dread the time
when we shall not be than we regret the time before birth when we were
not. The infinite time before us is no more dreadful than the infinite
time that preceded us. As of sleep, we may say: Where we are, death is
not; and where death is, we are not. “If one knocked on the graves and
asked the dead whether they wished to rise again, they would all shake
their heads.” We were enticed into life by the hope of more favorable
conditions of existence and death is disappointment and return to the
womb of nature, who is all the while entirely indifferent to both our
birth and death. Only small minds fear it. It is to the species what
sleep is to the individual. All that exists is worthy only of being
destroyed.
We come into life buoyant and happy but before leaving it have to pay
for all the joy by pain enough to compensate. True, the intellect,
which is an individual acquisition, is sloughed off by death, while
the will is given its freedom again. “The will of man, in itself
individual, separates itself in death from the intellect,” so that new
generations get new intellects. This is the truth that underlies the
doctrine of metempsychosis or palingenesis and is the faith of half
the world. Here, too, roots the philosophy of eternal recurrence. The
present generation in its inner metaphysical nature, that is, in its
will, is identical with every generation that has preceded, but we do
not recognize either our previous form of existence or the friends we
once knew in a former state because the intellect, with its memory
and perceptions, is only phenomenal and individual. Christianity gave
itself a needlessly hard task in representing the soul as created _de
novo_ and in failing to recognize that pre- and post-existence support
each other. “Death is the great reprimand which the will-to-live, or
more especially the egoism which is essential to this, receives through
the course of nature, and it may be conceived as a punishment for
our existence. It is the painful loosening of the knot which the act
of generation has tied with sexual pleasure, the violent destruction
coming from without of the fundamental error of our nature, the great
disillusion. We are at bottom something that ought not to be; therefore
we cease to be.” The loss of our individuality is thus only apparent
or phenomenal. “Death is the great opportunity to be no longer I.”
“During life the will of man is without freedom. Death looses his
bonds and gives him his true freedom which lies in his _esse_, not in
his _operari_.” Individuality is one-sided and “does not constitute
the inner kernel of our being” but is rather to be conceived as an
aberration of it. Thus death is a “_restitutio ad integrum_.” The wise
man wishes to die really and not merely apparently and so desires no
continuation of his personality. “The existence which we know we will
all give up; what we get instead of it is, in our eyes, nothing because
our existence with reference to that is nothing” (Nirvana).
It is an illusion to place the ego in consciousness because in fact
“my personal phenomenal existence is just as infinitely small a part
of my true nature as I am of the world.” “What is the loss of this
individuality to me who bear in me the possibility of innumerable
individualities?” Individuality is thus “a special error, a false step,
something that had better not be, nay something which it is the real
end of life to bring us back from.” Death is, thus, the awakening from
the dream of life, which is made up of trivialities and contradictions,
time being only one of the principles of individuation and having no
absolute existence but being merely a form of knowledge of it. Will
is the true thing itself. It is human nature that is perdurable.
It is true that we know only even our will as phenomenon and not
what it really and absolutely is in itself. Knowledge is entirely
distinct from will but the latter is always and everywhere primal. The
inveterate blunder of philosophers is to place the eternal element in
the intellect while in fact it lies solely in the universal will and
struggle to live, which is indestructible. We cannot know it because
of the essential limitations of consciousness _per se_, but in the
true being of things free from these forms the latter distinction
between the individual and the race disappears and the two are
identical. The continuation of the species is really the image of the
indestructibility of the individual.
We are lured into life by the hope of pleasure and retained in it by
fear of death; but both are equally illusions. It is strange that
the only thing in us that really fears death, namely, the will, is
precisely that which is never affected by it. “Thus, although the
individual consciousness does not survive death, yet that survives
it which alone struggles against it, namely, the will.” Neither the
intellect nor anything in it is indestructible for knowledge is only
secondary and derived from the objectivizations of the will. “The
intellect is dropped when it has served its purpose. Death and birth
are the constant renewal of the consciousness of the will, in itself
without end and without beginning, which alone is, as it were, the
substance of existence.” When in death the will is separated from the
intellect, it feels lost because it has so long depended on it, and
hence we fear. Life is only a heavy dream into which the will-to-live
has fallen. To the dying we may say, “Thou ceasest to be something
which thou hadst done better never to become.” Thus generations of
individuals are constantly reappearing, each fitted out with new
intellects. But every new form of life is only an assumption in another
form of the same will. Thus for Schopenhauer death is emancipation of
the will from its slavery to consciousness, a breaking down of the
wall it has erected between individuals, a regression to the ultimate
momentum that underlies evolution, so that new individuals made of the
same will, but disencumbered of the limitations life and mind impose,
are ever starting again. The race is immortal and even back of that
nature herself is still more so. The rhythm of life and death does
change the nature or the form of the eternal currents of existence.
But, leaving Schopenhauer, we must go back to the very beginnings of
humanity to realize all that the death-thought has done in the world
and to understand how man has always wrestled with it, tried to fight
it down, and devised so many ways and means of escaping from it.
Probably there was never a stage of human life so low that corpses
were not separated from the living and put away by themselves, so that
necrophilism hardly seems to be an atavistic psychic rudiment. Man
disposes of corpses by fire, water, or inhumation, towers of silence,
tombs, cemeteries and other homes set apart for them, while animals do
nothing of this kind. He alone cannot endure the spectacle of the fate
that nature provides and so shroud, coffin, flowers, monuments, shrubs,
trees, serve to divert attention from what is going on in the sepulchre
below.
But the great diversion, coeval with the beginning of corpse disposal,
was the conception of a soul separable from the body and surviving it,
and this is as old as animism. Other factors, of course, contributed to
the primitive belief in souls but when and wherever it arose it became
the chief distractor from and the great negator of the death-thought.
Now, as the body is not all, death is not complete and some part of
us, however tenuous, lives on. Let the carcass rot. We can now focus
our attention upon a spirit that outlives the flesh and this invention
is the chief panacea mankind has found against the most gruesome of
all its ills. In the very crudest and crassest form of belief in a
separable soul lie the promise and potency of all the quellers of
death-thoughts that have arisen from it; and so, when in the course of
time it came that the air was becoming as full of ghosts as the earth
was of corpses, they too had to be partitioned off from the living
and given their own abode beyond some river, sea, mountain or other
barrier, or beneath or above the earth. Whatever betide, the souls of
the departed must be driven and kept away by apotropic rites or by
sacrifices, the motto of which was _do ut abais_. Thus the living had
to herd the souls of the dead as they had their bodies in order that
they themselves might be free and sane. This was a great achievement,
which spiritists and psychic researchers tend to undo, for ghosts must
be laid just as bodies must be buried and the decomposing souls that
appear in seances are only less offensive to common sense than the
mouldering bodies are to sense.
Thus the fear of death has always called attention more strongly than
anything else to the soul and to psychology. Something leaves the
human body at death and has some power of independent existence; but
just as the body must be put away so ghosts must be laid or driven
off. In primitive culture the souls of the dead tend to linger near
the body. Sometimes widows are plunged into water to drown off the
souls of their dead husbands before they can marry again. Some tribes
turn out _en masse_ at stated times to frighten away the spirits, as
they do to get rid of vermin and rats or to clean house. Ghosts may be
burned in effigy. A window or hole in the roof must be opened for the
soul of the dead to escape and afterwards closed. The body is carried
several times around the house so that the soul cannot find its way
back. Those unjustly treated or not buried may return for vengeance.
Some think tombstones were primitively to hold down the souls of the
dead, just as the Tiber was turned and Attila buried in its bed and
it was then made to flow back again so as to keep him in the land
of spirits. In Gurney’s _Phantasms of the Living_ ghosts have their
chief power at or near the moment of death. It is one of the great
functions of the medicine man to dispose of the spirits of the dead and
many rites were devised to relegate them to some place appointed. The
living have their own domain and their own rights, which the dead must
respect. Only the witch makes havoc with this order by bringing back
the souls of the departed. Thus many kinds of barriers grew up between
the living and the dead--distance, oblivion, a stream, a belt of fire,
a deep chasm, a high divide, etc., so that the ghost world became hard
to get to or from. Thus, in general, man does not wish to go to the
realm of ghosts or to have them trespass upon his preserves. The New
Zealanders conceived such preserves for their dead over the precipice
of Reinga; the Fiji Islanders in their deep and fiery cañons; the
Sandwich Islanders in the subterranean abodes of Akea; the Kamchatkans
in an underground Elysium; the Indians in a Happy Hunting Ground; the
Greenlanders deep under the sea; the old Teutons in Walhalla, the
temple of the slain with its columns of spears and roof of shields; and
the Greeks and Romans in the realm of Pluto. There are many roads and
many ushers to conduct souls to their own home--sunbeams, the Milky
Way, paths through caverns, or over the rainbow bridge Bifröst; while
in Greece Charon and in Egypt Anubis carried souls across or through
the interval or partition. In all these ways man has sought to conceive
of the souls of the dead as effectively shepherded in folds of their
own.
Other studies show that there is a sense in which every incident of a
funeral tends to lay ghosts. If we simply hear at a distance of the
death of our friends, we are far more liable to receive visits from
their revenient spirits or dream of them as alive than if we have
actually seen them buried, because all the incidents of this ceremony
bring home, even to our unconscious selves, the fact that they are
really dead and gone from us, soul and body. Thus the tears, Scripture
reading, badges of mourning, and even the expense tend to reef in our
sense of our dead friend’s personality and to make it powerless to
project ghostly phantasms, because such ceremonials are cathartic and
preventative of all such hallucinations.
Thus, at this stage of the story of the immortality cult we have two
worlds well apart and the _Jenseits_, or the realm of death, can
perhaps be reached from the _Diesseits_ of the body only by a long and
dangerous journey that the psyche must take after leaving the soma to
moulder. Why has man always stood in such awe of the ghosts of even
his friends? The answer is not simple. It is partly because he wanted
to be free from their constraint. They included his parents, from
whose control even youth, at a certain stage, wants to be well rid.
Even his dearest ones might cherish some secret grudge that could now
be indulged in with impunity. As spirits they have certain unknown
new powers for mischief, whereas if they were enemies they could use
these powers for revenge. Toward the dead we generally have a bad
conscience. They can often read our secret motives while we cannot read
theirs. Thus man propitiated the pallid shades of Orcus by offerings
and sacrifices to abate their malevolence and secure their good-will.
However remotely he banished them, he has never been able to realize
the fact that they were utterly dead forever, soul as well as body.
All his will to rid himself of them has always stopped short of entire
fulfillment.
On the contrary, some of the great dead he has not only immortalized
but deified. Others may still come back at midnight in a dream or
vision at some weird haunted spot or in dire emergencies; or if
conjured by constraining spells of sufficient potency; perhaps if they
have not been rightly buried; or to deliver some pregnant message; or,
again, to pronounce a curse or benediction. It is generally hard for
them to get to us and also, having done so, to make their presence felt
and they are perhaps so exhausted by this effort that they can tell us
nothing; while it is given to but few mortals to visit their abode and
come back unscathed and to fewer yet it is given to bring back others
with them.
One of the most momentous steps in culture was taken by the ancient
Egyptians, whose religion, more than that of any other race, might,
in view of our recent knowledge of it, be called the cult of the dead
_par excellence_. The new step here taken consisted, in a word, in
making the postmortem status of the soul dependent upon virtue in this
life, thus enlisting the mighty power of the next world in behalf of
morals. Their famous book of the dead presupposes “a religious belief
in the actual revivification of the body,” because of which hoped-for
event the Egyptians took the greatest possible care to preserve and
afterwards to hide the bodies of the dead. This famous book treats of
the soul’s journey through Amenti, of the gods and other residents
there, with formulæ that will deliver the migrant thither from foes.
It contains prayers and hymns to the great gods intended to recommend
him to all of them; texts that must be inscribed on both the amulets
and bandages of the mummies; plan and arrangement of the mourning
chamber; the confession before the assessors; the scene where the heart
is weighed in the hall of Osiris; and a representation of the Elysian
fields, etc.
At death, relatives and mourners emerged from their houses to the
streets, placed mud upon their heads, fasted, and priests pronounced
an oration describing the good works of the great dead. There were
sometimes accusations and formal judgments by the forty elders as to
whether or not the burial should be in due form to convey the soul to
the gods. If the verdict was favorable, the gods were entreated to
admit him into the place reserved for the good; if not, he was deprived
of burial and must lie in his own house. If there were debts, the body
was given to creditors as a pledge until the sacred duty of redeeming
it was performed. The details of embalmment during the seventy-two days
of mourning were given in great profusion for each part of the body.
Each bandage had its text and the tomb must be made a proper dwelling
place for the ka, or soul, which will stay there as long as the body
does. Each process, pledget, and wrapping, had its name and there was
an elaborate trade in bitumen, which is the meaning of the word mummy.
The people felt great satisfaction in preserving and seeing the
simulated features of their ancestors, whom they came to regard in
some sense as contemporaneous. The welfare of the soul in the nether
world depended upon the completeness of all the funeral processes.
At the height of this central cult of Egypt, bulls, antelopes,
cats, crocodiles, ibis, hawk, frog, toad, scorpion, snake, fish,
hippopotamus, cow, lion, sphinx, were sacred to the gods and were
mummified, while the scarab was loaded down with symbolic meanings and
became central in all funeral rites. These ceremonials did not decline
until the third or fourth century of our era and only when Christianity
taught that the body would be given back in a changed and incorruptible
form, did it cease to be necessary to preserve it with drugs. This
necrophilism was all for the sake of the soul and both expressed and
strengthened belief in it. The cult of no race has been so saturated
with thanatism.
In all we know of the folk-soul there is no more striking illustration
of geneticism than the slow but sure establishment in recent years, by
comparing ancient myths and rites with the findings of excavations, of
the fact that in the great countries about the eastern Mediterranean,
especially Thrace, Asia Minor, and Egypt, the highest religious
consciousness of these races was expressed in elaborate cults of death
and resurrection, to have participated in which is said to have made
the celebrants over and initiated them into a new and higher life.
All was so secret and oath-bound that it found little representation,
save the most incidental allusions in history and literature, so
that it was reserved for modern research to uncover, reconstruct, and
understand its tremendous power.
Osiris, Persephone, Attis, the lover of the all-mother Cybele, Demeter
and Dionysius in the Eleusinian mysteries, Astar in her restoration of
Phanæus and many others, some with very high and full and some with
very scanty and fragmentary developments of the myth and cult, died
and perhaps went to Hades and came back bringing, now one, now many
with them. Typical of these ceremonies were the funereal sadness,
death dirge, wailings, active symbolic manifestations of grief and
despair, as if to attain the very acme of psychalgia. The great, good,
beautiful, divine hero is not only dead but has perhaps gone over
into the nether-world to defy death and the power of evil in their
stronghold and to conquer and bind them. There is, then, a phase of
painful, anxious, silent suspense. Will he succeed and return or will
he fail and never reappear? Then, when the tension is at the very
breaking-point, comes the thumic ebb, rebound, or reversal. Someone
whispers or cries aloud, “He has won and comes back,” and then all
is changed. Lights flare out in the darkness. Instead of tears and
sobs there is joy unrestrained, congratulations, embraces, and soon
frantic ecstasy, leaping, shouting, wine, song, revelry, bells,
fireworks, and sometimes in degenerate days, drunkenness and gluttony
with the sacramental elements and, in token of the triumphs of the
higher love, perhaps carnal debauch and revelry and always ecstasy and
inebriation with euphoria. Thus from three to six centuries B.C. men
strove to attain an immunity bath that should safeguard them from all
excessive pain and pleasure of life by participation in a pageantry or
dramatization of the eternal struggle between the greatest evil, death,
and the dread of it and the greatest joy of the most intense living,
thus ensuring their souls against being led captive by the pleasures
or pains of life, neither of which could be so extreme as these, by
keeping wide open the way from the extremest depression to the maximum
of exaltation.
Now all this rests in every case where it can be traced upon the
retreat of the sun and the death of the world, symbolized by winter
and the return of spring, reinforced, of course, by the alternations
of day and night. These deities or their prototypes were originally
gods of vegetation and their resurrections are vernal. The everlasting
bars that broke were snow and ice. The king of glory that came in when
the gates were lifted was spring, the conqueror, or dawn; and in these
secular changes of the year are found the first preformations of the
soul and the momentum that still subconsciously reinforces belief in a
life after death and supplies always an anodyne and often an antidote
for the death-fear.
It was on this basis that Christianity, especially as interpreted by
Paul, arose.[213] The culminating event in its story took place in the
few days between the burial of Jesus and the Pentecostal outburst.
Never in history, if it be history, and never in the subject story of
Mansoul, if this be the stage on which it was all accomplished, has
there been such an _au rebours_ from the nadir of depression of the
disciples, because the type-man of their race, who had grown to their
minds to be a fully diplomated God-man, was completely dead--and that
in shame and ignominy--and his corpse sealed up to moulder and rot in
a rock. Then came first the timid and then the plenary conviction that
He had conquered death and even hell, risen from the dead, walked and
conversed with friends in an attenuated body and had visibly ascended
to Heaven and God. Once fully convinced that this was all veritably
true, witnessed and attested by every sense and proof, the great
incubus of ages was thrown off and Death, the supreme terror, was
abolished. This brought an ecstasy or intoxication of joy called the
gift of the Holy Spirit, which possessed the lives of believers. The
ecstatic disciples shouted in weird unknown tongues until onlookers
thought them “full of new wine” (Acts 2:13, 15), gazed all day into
Heaven, henceforth the home of souls, and had to be exhorted to
cease their raving jubilations and go to work. In this exhilarating
new joy and freedom they, and later their successors, met the nine
persecutions, during which martyrdom became a passion and tender youths
and maidens could hardly be restrained from throwing themselves to the
wild beasts in the arena as the supreme crown and testimony to their
faith.
So, too, Christian asceticism followed from the same motive. This life
was mean and it mattered little how squalid it was, for it was only
a provisional, probationary moment compared to the eternal joy and
happiness where all real worths and values were confidently awaited
and compared to which those of earth were only dross. “There is no
death. What seems so is transition” to an infinitely higher state than
this. Never did the other world so absorb the power of this. Visions,
trances, homilies, poems, poetry and theology fitted the other world
out with every good and the chief offices of the church were to keep
the keys of the transcendental world and to wield its tremendous
sanctions in a way to dominate life and determine good and evil. Thus
never was the greatest _Verdrängung_ (repression) that ever oppressed
the human race so completely removed. The most essential claim of
Christianity is to have obviated the fear of death and made the king
of terrors into a good friend, if not into a boon companion, by this
the most masterly of all psychotherapies. If it be only a pragmatic
postulate or hypothesis or _Als Ob_ (As If) in Vaihinger’s sense,
it has worked well on the whole. Despite the ever present dangers of
transcendental selfishness that prompts only to save one’s own soul,
it is nevertheless the supreme demonstration of the “_Allmacht_”
(omnipotence) of the folksoul to minister to its own gravest diseases
and banish its greatest enemy, the death fear.
Thus Jesus is most widely known as the Man of the Cross and the
crucifix and even the fragments of the Cross are revered throughout
the Christian world. In no other religion has the death of the founder
had such prominence or efficacy. All the events of Holy Week have
been wrought out in great detail by tradition and art. Its story is
the world’s great masterpiece of pathos. The ecstasy of the passover
represents the culmination of the conquest of the death-fear by
Mansoul. The gift of the Holy Spirit was simply the conviction that
death itself was dead. For centuries preaching consisted of nothing
else than telling this story, which was the gospel of the gladdest of
all glad tidings. If Christ is not arisen, our faith is vain. To doubt
this has always been the most culpable of all heresies save that of
atheism itself.
Thus night, day; sleep, waking; autumn, spring--cadence the soul to
life and death. To these were added the higher symbolisms of sin and
holiness, illness and health, old age and rejuvenation, crushing
despair and triumphant hope, pessimism and optimism, with the latter
and not the former, as had often been the case before, final and
triumphant. Every known race of man initiates the young at puberty by
a ritualized pain and pleasure treatment that anticipates all this.
Youth was isolated, made to fast, scarified, tattooed, made to endure
extreme hardship, fatigue, sometimes partial burial; and then followed
remission, dance, feasting, perhaps orgies, only after which did the
young become full members of the tribe. Thus it is the inveterate
consensus of man through all his history that on the threshold of
mature life each individual should be oriented to its sovereign
master’s pain and pleasure by extreme experience with each in turn,
as if thereby to develop the power of elasticity, resilience, and
reaction, and to impress upon it throughout all its profoundest depths
the conviction that there is no defeat that should not be followed
by victory, no darkness so black as that which just precedes day, no
virtue like that which has just overcome evil, no passivity that will
not tend to react toward progressiveness. Indeed, this is a kind of
modulus that Christianity has impressed upon the entire occidental
world and it is this that has given it its courage, _élan_, and
enterprise. This is the chief imprint it has left upon the human soul,
even for those who have forgotten or denied all its tenets. Thus there
is a deep psychological sense in which all those who have not passed
rigorously through the experience that Christianity symbolizes by the
phrase “dying and rising with Jesus” are not initiated into life and
remain immature.
It is they who are more liable to be arrested in the trough of the
wave and to become discouraged or even melancholic and when they meet
the ills and hardships of life to flee from reality and seek some
refuge from its stern demands, because life in them has not conquered
death. They have not learned the great law of taking their pleasure and
pain in the things they ought and in a measure proportionate to each.
Indeed, modern psychotherapy is, for the most part, a new application
of this old mode of rescue for such souls in distress. Maeder[214] has
well and wisely found all its processes typified in Dante’s descent
into hell at the nethermost center of the earth where Satan himself
was; and his emergence a slow ascent up the purgatorial mount to the
infinite joys of paradise, first under the guidance of a human sage
and then led by Beatrice, a type of the supreme self-directing oracle
within. Dante, as everyone knows, called his poem a comedy because it
had a happy ending, but every modern novel and drama is constructed
according to the same formula that Christianity made current.
And who would read a story or see a play in which at the end the hero
or heroine did not achieve all they desired? And, again, why do we
love to experience all the desperate miseries to which our favorites
in story and on the stage are subjected before the happy dénouement
begins to show but that we are dead sure that in the end both the
villain and the virtuous will get their deserts. Indeed, at least one
German “pithiatric” psychiatrist prescribes a drastic experience of the
story of the Cross as a therapeutic method in certain cases. All this,
of course, has no reference to the question whether the story is all
fact or all fancy. The psychologist only studies its effects and its
inner mechanisms, which, save for those who have grown scrupulous under
the influence of modern controversy, are no more relevant than is the
historicity of Hamlet, Lear, or Portia to the audience in a theater.
In the patristic and in the Middle Ages, and even now, children and
neurotics have suffered almost to the point of stigmatization at any
realistic description or at the Ober-Ammergau dramatization of the
items of the crucifixion and feel with all the vicariousness that
sympathy can yield the thorns, bitter cup, nails, spear, etc., as we
have elsewhere shown in detail.[215]
But despite all the realistic pedagogy of the church the conviction of
another life is very rapidly fading from the modern consciousness and
even within the church itself is becoming an ineffective shadow of a
shade. Dr. George A. Gordon of the Old South Church, Boston, preaching
to the Congregational State Association in 1902, said: “We ministers
of the Lord Jesus Christ know as no other persons in the community
what a paralysis has come over intelligent and thinking people in
regard to the reality of the other life. So many doubt it; so few have
any strong confidence in regard to it.” This opinion, of course, was
posited not only on the confidences of the pastor’s study but also on
the confidences of the sick room and the death chamber. The tendency
has steadily increased and in funeral services we hear little of future
rewards and punishments and only of rest and peace. The old evidence
from death-beds is fallacious.
Sir William Osler[216] says:
I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds,
studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and
the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concerns us here.
Ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one sort or another,
eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one
expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The
great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their
birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting. The Preacher
was right: in this matter man hath no preëminence over the
beast--“as the one dieth so dieth the other.”[217]
This belief persists, thus, only as a dead article of faith which men
no longer live by. It is a desiccated herbarium specimen and not a
living plant. If common observation did not sufficiently show this,
it has appeared very significantly and statistically in many recent
studies.[218] These showed that it diminishes progressively as we go
up the educational grades from high school through the university and
that, in general, the more cultivated man becomes, the less he believes
in any form of personal survival. If we had a similar investigation
of the old as compared with the young, my own partial studies incline
me to believe that this conviction of personal persistence beyond the
grave in general loses its force in senescence, as indeed it becomes
vital only at adolescence. If it be thus a creed that first blossoms
with the advent and tends to decay at the close of sexual life, we have
a new key for understanding both its function and its limitations.
True, it often persists, if only feebly, as with the momentum of a
spent force, in those who have not fully realized the senium, although
they all do not wish to be conserved as old as they really are but to
be rejuvenated as they once were.
In what follows we believe it will appear that upon analysis by
mechanisms akin to metonymy or synecdoche the vigor with which we have
clung to a belief in personal is really motivated by a deeper belief in
racial immortality and that in this latter, when the strophe of life is
succeeded by its antistrophe, the deeper faith tends to come out and
true sages realize what the soul meant by what the tenuous and falsetto
faculty called faith blindly groped its way toward.
The psychic factors that have so overdetermined the hope-wish of
personal immortality are as follows.
I. First is the desire to be remembered and esteemed by survivors.
The soul abhors oblivion somewhat as it does extinction. We wish
our friends not only to think of us but to think well of us. How
satisfying this is both to those who die and to those who live is
seen in Confucianism, where ancestor worship vicariates for belief
in personal immortality. It would almost seem that some of the good
and great would think more of the certainty of being canonized in due
time or perpetuated in the form of bronze or marble, or enrolled in
some temple of fame, than of personal immortality. At any rate, this
mundane, would in some degree compensate for the loss of celestial
perpetuation. Those who die in more or less full consciousness are
prone in their last moments to dwell upon their friends far more than
they do upon their own future state, as if the enshrinement they
chiefly sought were in the hearts and minds of those they leave behind.
Conversely, those who die alone, friendless, or with the execration
of survivors, cling the more to the rehabilitation that death itself
always tends to bring. On the basis of questionnaire data it would seem
that some about to die shudder more at the thought that others would
think they were totally extinct at death than from inwardly facing this
conviction for themselves. We want others to think we are enjoying the
best the universe can provide for its favorites, because in that case
they will think more highly of us since we have obtained the diploma
of the cosmos, that we have stood the test and have graduated _summa
cum laude_ from the terrestrial curriculum. Perhaps if we were early
Christians we should begin to “put on airs” and affect the manners
of a higher life here to impress our own valuation of ourselves upon
others. An ancient sage would rather that others thought him bad and
hated him than to be forgotten. Thus, in fine, if all knew that they
and all their good deeds would never fade from grateful memory of
their descendants, the conviction of a conscious personal existence
beyond the grave would lose one of its preforming determinants and
reinforcements. Therefore, those concerned to keep alive the fate and
hope of another life should foster any agency that keeps the memory of
the dead green. There really ought to be those who sum up effectively
the good lessons and meaning of every life when it closes, as a
kind of mundane judgment day so that no good influence be lost and
no warning fail to have its due effect--a court of the dead to pass
impartially upon each life as it sets out to sea. We censor books and
are beginning to test eugenic marriages, etc.; and so, if all knew that
upon their death an impartial tribunal would pass upon their lives in
the interests of the common weal, even if their verdict came late or
was given only to those most interested to know, ethical culture would
mark a great advance and the fear of death, instead of consoling itself
with belief in a future life, would be set to work in the interests of
normal lives here.
II. The second mundane surrogate for transcendental immortality is
doing things that will affect those who survive or will perpetuate our
will and works to those who know little or nothing of us or of our
name. Many last wills and testaments benefit those who knew nothing
of the donor. Many such have reared buildings, started movements,
built organizations, written books, invented, created works of art,
transformed the face of nature with an instinct of workmanship in
which all thought of self was merged. All our lives are thus greatly
influenced by those who are unknown. The egoistic element tends to
merge in a disinterested desire to make part of the world in some
way better for our having lived. Sometimes, indeed, anonymity is
actively striven for and the individuality of benefactors is hidden.
The phobia here is that we may have lived for naught. Here the idea
of God as an All-Discerner who sees virtue and vice, and rewards or
punishes in secret, coöperates. Such hidden service to the race, with
no thought of any compensation here or hereafter, has a unique charm
all its own. Scientific discoveries and beneficent inventions have
sometimes thus been given freely to all without any personal benefit
and without a personal label. True love sometimes lavishes every gift,
opportunity, and joy upon its object, with no stipulation of love or
gratitude or even recognition in its turn. Indeed, the possession of
wealth compels more or less attention to this field of the immortality
of influence. Unlike the pauper, the millionaire must forecast if he
would try to shape the future; and even if great givers attach their
names to their bequests, they know that to most who profit by them
their name will soon mean nothing. Jubal invented music and wandered
afar and when he came back he found a great festival in honor of his
art and of his name, but could not identify himself and was cast out
as an impostor. “Jubal’s fame and art filled all the sky, while Jubal
lonely laid him down to die,” supremely happy in the thought that he
had done the race a great service. To love and serve man is far higher
than to love and serve God, for we can do nothing for Him save in this
way and He needs and expects no help from us save this. Men come and
go but institutions and influence go on forever and those who start
them share their mundane deathlessness long after they are forgotten.
The cup of cold water illustrates the way of the gentleman or lady
born and bred, best attested by the desire that others be happy and
not that they themselves shine, be aggrandized, or have pleasure. This
is the most ideal conduct and appeals most strongly of all things to
the two great and ultimate standards of conduct, namely, honor and an
approving conscience. And as we achieve this we belong to the order of
the immortals and have triumphed over death. Desjardins, the founder of
the order of the new life, said in substance, “We are never so impelled
to snap our fingers in the face of death, to despise all its pomp and
horror, and to defy him to do his worst to body and soul, as when
we have just performed some such act of pure but passionate duty or
kindness.” Then only can we truly feel that “no evil can befall a good
man living or dead” and that the cosmos is moral to the core.
III. The third killer of the death-fear is children and posterity. To
die childless, knowing that our heredity that began with the amœba
and came down to us in an unbroken line dies, sharpens the sting of
death; while, on the other hand, to have many well born and well reared
children to rise up and call us blessed is one of the best antidotes
to its baleful psychic virus. As every one knows, every creature, man
included, lives about as long after the maximum power to propagate
as his offspring requires to become mature, so that the prolongation
of the period of immaturity means the prolongation of old age. Our
foremost duty is to transmit the sacred torch of life undimmed, to give
the maximal momentum and right direction to the nature and nurture of
offspring and to bring rising generations to their full maturity--that
is the highest criterion of an ever rising nation, including
civilization itself. The true parent lives not only in and for the
children but is the ancestor of their souls as well as of their bodies
and even his belief in a future life is a good or bad thing according
as it affects this. We feel this life incomplete, unfinished, and in
need of a supplement because its possibilities are as yet unrealized.
But we feel all this so much the less if we have children, while the
dread of the inevitable hour becomes that of a kind of second or dual
death for the childless because not only they but their line die in
them. Yet, on the other hand, they have less ties and so less to lose,
even though they may feel that they have, in a sense, lived in vain.
What parent was ever so world-weary, so strong a believer in postmortem
joy, that he would not rather live on here and see his children’s
children thrive than go on hence to any conceivable future state?
Those who leave offspring have had less time to develop morbid fears
of Lethe’s waters and if they expect to enter a great peace beyond,
they often find their chief joy in contemplating the fruits of their
loins on earth. We have seen how the death thought begins with the life
of sex and when the latter, if it has been normal and happy, comes
to an end, death has already begun and we are advancing deeper into
the shades of the dark valley, so that there is already less to lose.
Thus the death of the aged is less tragic and less inconsolable; and,
what is far more important, normal and cultured souls think and care
progressively less about another life.
IV. As for the good old doctrine of personal immortality, we cannot yet
escape the great law that the next life is compensatory. If men are
wretched here, the future becomes a refuge and grows not only actual
but attractive; while, conversely, if this life is rich and abounding,
the next tends to fade. No Christian age was ever so heedless of
the latter as our own. For most intelligent, prosperous women, and
especially men, it has lapsed to little more than a mere convention
or trope or fetish of an effete orthodoxy, and hell is at most
only a nightmare of the past, a childish phantom. Our actual _modus
vivendi_ is as if another life did not exist and death were the end. No
priestcraft can longer make men content with misery here in the hope of
compensation hereafter. All make the most and best of this life as if
it were all they were sure of and the motto of most believers is, “One
life at a time and this one now.” Only in a kind of secondary falsetto
Sunday consciousness do their thoughts turn to the future and does a
flickering hope that death is not the end appear. Extinction is black
by contrast in proportion as life is bright, happy, and absorbing, so
that the death dread is in some respects growing as our life becomes
richer, while it is at the same time being more and more banished from
consciousness. The chief attractiveness it now has is that it brings
rest and peace, for our tropes of it are more and more borrowed from
sleep. Thus if the idea of the negation of life was never so dreadful,
there was never such diversion from its closer envisagement. Thus,
too, although suppressed, it was never so potent a factor in governing
conduct, in improving hygiene, and providing for our offspring.
Although we take a chance at saving our souls by church membership it
is more and more bad form to discuss such matters. The real treasure
of the soul is laid up elsewhere than in heaven and the growing phobia
of death has now psychotherapies that are more and more effective.
Its power is far greater than we know and there are endless uses to
which it can yet be put in helping on the world’s work. Just as every
pain that depresses the vital spirits a few points on the scale of
euphoria, though they still remain far above zero, inclines to death,
so when life is at its optimum or flood-tide man is wonderfully immune
and recuperative in body and soul and the higher up the euphoric scale
we live, the more difficult it is to fear or even think of death.
Thus every legitimate fear of death is in a sense a life-preserver and
-prolonger. Our business is to live and not to die, to keep at the very
top of our condition and as far as possible from death, which is the
_summum malum_.
As to the relation of these four immortalities, nominal, influential,
plasmal, and orthodox, to each other, geneticism and the revelations
of the dynamism of the folk-soul have shed much new light. This may
be summarized in the statement that each of them is correlated with
all the others. Even he who is chiefly intent on perpetuating his name
is gratifying the deep instinct of transcending the limits of his
own personal life and to know that he is remembered is not without
consoling power even in the loss of property or if the conviction
arises that death means extinction; while, conversely, the prospect
of death in utter obscurity and of being completely forgotten tends
to reinforce any or all of the other immortalities. Were we to
rehabilitate hell in a modern sense, one of its horrors would be a
sentence of summary oblivion even to our friends: “Let his name be
forever taboo from mention or even from memory.” Of course, we shall
all sooner or later fall under this sentence despite all our pathetic
efforts to leave durable names behind.
As to anonymous influence, we are all sure of it to a degree, for the
world we are born into is made by those who preceded us and we help to
shape the future. In the social field we have endless illustrations
of a service that involves more or less emulation. The case in
point is a woman I knew who, having lived a most disinterested and
self-sacrificing life, when told that God would reward her in the next
world replied that she had never had either conviction or interest
about another life but had been too busy doing good to think about it.
If another life was in the order of things, all would be well, but
if annihilation were in store, that, too, would be just as welcome,
for she had found her pay in the satisfaction that each day’s work
brought. She had no children and wanted no outer recognition but was
content that her good deeds registered in others’ lives would follow
her and nothing else really mattered in her scheme of life. The point
is that in any other ages or environments the same instinct to enlarge
life might have found expression in either of the other forms. Some
even commit colossal crimes from a perverted form of _Geltung’s_
propensity. Because they cannot be potent for good they make themselves
so for evil. Anonymity is often a passion and finds outcrops not only
in religion and philosophy but also in science. Indeed, very much of
our civilization is composed of innumerable influences originated by
those whose names no history or _Acta Sanctorum_ have preserved and are
products of this deep basal trend in the human soul.
As to plasmal immortality, who knows how much of all the good done
in the world, if traced to its genetic roots, comes straight from
the original momentum of the instinct to make the world better for
posterity? To be sure, many of them are now broken erratic trends,
forgetful of their source, which is really a nest-building instinct
so irradiated and sublimated as to have lost orientation toward
both its origin and goal. The first constructions in the world were
nidifications. The first animal societies were stirpicultural. The
primal examples of self-sacrifice were for the young. Everything for
the world is good that squares with the functions of parenthood broadly
conceived, and all is bad that contravenes it. Psychotherapy is slowly
leading us to the astonishingly new insight that aberrations of the
life-transmitting, young-rearing propensities constitute very many
if not most of our mental abnormalities and that the rectification
of these functions has marvelous therapeutic efficiency. The race is
immortal, at least back to the first protozoan and indeed infinitely
beyond. And so, in the future, our race and it only is immortal to the
cosmic end. If we are tips of the twigs of a vast buried tree, these
twigs may become themselves roots of a yet greater one and even a
true superman may yet be born in the line of any of us. Thus, perhaps
all the other immortalities have their dynamogeny in the instincts of
parenthood.
As to the venerable belief in personal immortality, it was of course
selfishness transcendentalized so as to subordinate every other goal in
life to that of insuring our own happiness in a postmortem world. And
we have to-day only contempt for the squalid ascetic who made his life
miserable with the prime end of saving his own soul. But this crude
doctrine now stands forth in a very new light, for psychology shows it
to have been an ugly cyst or cast that enclosed and sheltered through
hard dark ages a precious and beauteous thing now just emerging. Its
content, as now revealed by analysis, is really man’s ineluctable
conviction that his own life was insignificant compared with its larger
meanings. Its real lesson is the subordination of the individual to
the greater whole toward which it gave him a correct _Einstellung_.
The close attachment of this doctrine to the ego was incorrect, for
the self is only a trope or metaphor of the race, but even this was
necessary at an earlier stage of race pedagogy. The transcendentality
ascribed to a self freed from the body was inevitable because that
was the only symbol by which the greater life of the race could be
described or comprehended. This belief stored up and conserved the
psychic promise and potency that is now again flowing over by transfer
to the other outcrops of the immortality instinct. It did not say what
it meant but was a pragmatic masterpiece, like so many great creations
of the folksoul. From the soul of the race it went straight home to
that of the individual and if it overstressed individuation for a time,
that, too, was at first needful. Had man not so long or so inevitably
believed in the great work of saving souls for the next world, he would
now be less effective in saving them from the evils of this world.
Had he not so cherished the conviction of a future heaven, he would
have lost much of the very energy of his soul, which now strives to
transform this world into a paradise and to populate it well. Thus
we have here a great field in which the laws of the transposition of
psychic trends into their kinetic equivalents, with very many different
forms but with persistence of identical content, are abundantly shown.
Man’s instinct has always been right and only his more superficial
conscious interpretations of it wrong.
Excess or defect of either of at least the first three immortalities
hypertrophies or dwarfs the others. The doctrine of conscious personal
survival was not only developed in unconscious conformity to this
principle but has an even more important pedagogic rôle for the young
than we had hitherto supposed. It is a pragmatic, artistic, and in no
sense a scientific fact. It utterly fails before the criteria of reason
but it has worked far better results than it could have done had these
requirements been alone regarded. It should not only be inculcated in
the young but has immense therapeutic value and to doubt this is only
another side illustration of the fact that cultivated adults have, the
world over and particularly in our country, unprecedentedly lost touch
with youth. Wherever the instincts of parenthood have not degenerated,
it must be clear that belief in future personal rewards and punishments
is a wholesome regulative of the lives of the young at a stage when
feeling and impulse are at their strongest and before reason is mature.
V. But there is a fifth form of immortality concept somewhat more apart
and uncorrelated with the others because newer and which comes from
the lure of the infinitesimal elements which science now finds at the
basis of the universe. What Dalton called atoms are now known to be
planetary systems of unimaginably minute corpuscles, one thousandth the
mass of an atom of hydrogen and, if they are solely electrical, “their
size must be one millionth of the linear dimensions of an atom,” or
relatively as a period on the printed page is to a large theater. Their
groupings constitute the chemical elements, so that matter is dynamic
to a degree we cannot conceive; and if so-called inorganic matter were
proven to contain germs of man and mind, this would add but little to
the new marvel of it. Matter is so active and subtle that the modern
conceptions of it that have come from the study of radium make us
feel that in a sense it is more spiritual than we have ever conceived
spirit itself to be. In this new world, which may be homogeneous with
mind, there is nothing like death anywhere to be found, and there is
an unbroken gradation from the corporative unity of electrons in an
atom up to the aggregations of man in society--and some think further
still. On this view death is not only non-existent but inconceivable.
True, more complex aggregations are reduced to simpler, more transient
to more permanent ones by it, but matter is not only not dead but
more intensely active than mind, so that the student of the ultimate
constitution of matter and the persistence of energy is in a sense
studying immortality, for this is the basis from which all orders of
animal nature arose and into which they will all be resolved.
Thus we are told that the new physics and chemistry are really
investigating death and regeneration. Our brains have little sense of
the marvelous and lawful processes that underlie all their activities.
While we have deemed evolution upward, there is another sense in
which it is a fall or a series of departures from a more durable and
elemental state, so that the gain is not all one way and catabolism
has its own attractions. If our lives affect these more permanent
electrons, this is survival and our ego is only part of a larger
continuum and is without end or beginning, although inconceivably
changed. The disintegration of our elements is the harvest-home back to
the cosmos from which we arose and may involve increase, not decrease,
to the sum total of good. This unselfing or “fusing with all we flow
from” is the direction in which love, whether of man, woman, animals,
or nature itself, as well as subordination of self to others and the
world, inclines us. Thus the conscious soul of man is swept by tides
of which our poor psychology as yet knows but little. Should such a
conception of the world become general, it could still use many of our
religious phrases, litanies, and symbols, but they would be inundated
with fresh meanings.
Jean Finot’s book[219] is marvelously learned, his view is unique, and
his style fascinating. It rapidly passed through fourteen editions and
was translated into many languages. He has almost nothing to say of
the soul, so that his volume might be entitled The Immortality of the
Body, or Death, the Great Illusion. He is bitter against theologians
for having made death such an all-dominating fear fetish in the world.
Tolstoi feared death all his life and writes, “Nothing is worse than
death, and when we consider that it is the inevitable end of all which
lives, we must also recognize that nothing is worse than life.” We
are told that the dread of it poisoned the life of Daudet and that
Zola trembled before the thought, “which obsessed him and caused him
nightmares and insomnia.” Renan says, “We may sacrifice all to truth
and good, which are the ends of life, and when we have done say,
‘Following the call of this interior siren we have reached the turn
where the rewards should lie. Oh, dreadful consoler, there is none!’
The philosophy which promised us the secret of death stammers excuses.”
Finot says, “A study of the evolution of death in the literature of the
past and to-day would become almost a history of literature itself.”
“The meditations of the fathers of the church and the monks of the
Middle Ages would shine particularly in this concert of vociferations
against death (‘If the slightest wound made on one finger can cause
so great a pain, what a horrible torture must be death, which is the
corruption or dissolution of the entire body’). We can look fixedly
neither at the sun nor at death.” Mme. de Sévigné says, “I am swallowed
up in the thoughts of death and find it so terrible that I hate life
more because it leads there.” It is no great consolation to say with
Renan, “We shall live by the trace which each of us leaves upon the
bosom of the infinite.” “All that lives is simply preparing for death.”
Belief in the perdurability of the soul is an alternative or placation,
a mirage. Only Confucianism and Taoism, if they had remained faithful
to the teachings of their creators, would close to their initiates all
possibilities of an after life; but they did not remain faithful. Even
Luther at the beginning of his campaign against Rome classed the dogma
of immortality of the soul as amongst “the monstrous fables which are
part of the Roman dung heap,” although he later became reconciled to it.
The very fear of death has killed many. “Sick persons who gather from
their doctor a presentiment of their term usually die before reaching
it.” The Western world should take heart from the millions of Buddhists
who view the prospect of death with enchantment. For subjective
idealists like Berkeley, who tell us that we can really know nothing
of the external world, death only deprives us of our conceptions and
we may really take consolation in the fact that our individuality is
composed of a whole hierarchy of more or less independent centers,
each of them made up of more complex units, until our ideas of
immortality merge with those of the conservation of energy.
Finot’s own views begin with his conception of “life in the coffin.”
“The underground existence of our body is far more animated than that
which is led above the earth.” “The fathers of some few human beings
upon the earth, we become the fathers of myriads of beings within its
depths,” and man perhaps gives more pleasure to his grave companions
than he ever enjoyed. He specifies nine species of insects, mostly
strikingly colored flies and coleoptera, which in regular order, one
after another, live upon and copulate, lay their eggs and rear their
maggots in corpses that are paradises to them, and he praises the work
of Francisco Redi who gave us “the admirable science of the entymology
of graves,” which now takes the place of the old ideas of Tartarus and
the Elysian fields. The foods brought to the tomb and frankly meant
for the dead, who were often conceived as hungry, were really consumed
by the “worms” that devour us. He tells us of a young woman caught
singing at a grave who, seeing that she was observed, remarked, “My
mother liked the Casta Diva.” The Greeks certainly did not believe that
those beneath the earth were quite quit of existence and perhaps the
first religion was that of the grave or tomb, which was a factor in the
birth of patriotism. The tomb is democratic because all bodies suffer
exactly the same fate if exposed alike to the elements. We may really
be interested in “our offspring” in the grave, for they, at least to
biologists, have more interest than do the poetic conceptions that we
become flowers, trees, or drifting clouds. We may thus “facilitate the
body’s immortal diffusion into immortal nature.”
Indeed, each of the thirty trillion cells of our body has its own
partial elemental life and, while we live, these partake in the
general life of the common wealth. Each has to eliminate waste, ingest
food, and their energy is such that “we should need a force of several
hundred thousand horsepower to kill simultaneously” and instantly all
these cells. Even molecules have infinitely little lives, each after
its own fashion. The chemist’s view of even putrefaction, which appeals
so repulsively to one of our senses, makes it interesting. Thus the
elements of our body carry on after what we call death, for life dwells
in each cell and even molecule. The very first germ was immortal.
True, we cannot analyze the consciousness of a cell, if it has one.
Back of all this there is the life of inanimate nature. Again, many
of the organs and elements of our body continue to live and grow, if
sufficiently nourished, after the death of the body as a whole, though
a part does not have the power, as in some animals, of regenerating the
whole. The heart has been revived after thirty hours of death. Bits of
skin have been removed and preserved and grafted on to other bodies
six months after detachment and this process might go on indefinitely,
the same skin being transferred for generations to new bodies. True,
organs, like cells, lose their subordination at what we call death.[220]
At this point Finot introduces a very long argument against cremation
because it interferes with all these processes. He seems to have a
rancor against it that is somewhat like that of the Western believer in
personal immortality against Oriental pantheism, which holds that the
soul melts into the universe like a drop into the ocean. He finds great
comfort in the scientific phenomena, which he résumés as “the life of
so-called inanimate matter,” which, we are coming to realize, is by no
means dead. Indeed, molecules lead an intensely active life, changing
their place, perhaps vibrating, traveling, grouping themselves in very
many different ways, so that metals have a kind of physiology and even
therapy of their own. Perhaps, indeed, crystallized matter represents
the most perfect and stable arrangement to which the particles of the
body are susceptible. Thermodynamics shows us that motion and heat
are related in metals as in our bodies. Metals suffer fatigue and
recuperate from rest, as Bosé has shown. Perhaps even the soul of life
is here and we are just beginning to know the powers of ferments, which
seem on the borderline between the organic and inorganic. Both are
subject to evolution.
Again, there is no sharp line between animal and vegetable life.
Protoplasms are as different or must be so as individuals. Both have
variability. Both the cabbage and the rat, as standard biological
experiments show, breathe. Plants are affected by narcotics. Sick
vegetables respond to some of the same medicaments that animals do,
while some actually have a sensorium. Philosophers like Descartes have
tried to break down all the identities between man and animals and
give the former a unique place in the universe. Fechner, who believed
plants besouled, and even Haeckel knew better, although Wundt insisted
to the last that “all psychic activity is conscious.” The unconscious,
which comparative psychology must admit, opens the door downward toward
the very dawn of life, so that perhaps even unicellular organisms have
elemental souls. Very many of the earlier philosophers, when human
thought was fresh and untrammeled by tradition, insisted on the unity
of life and mind. For a long period animals were thought to be moral
beings and courts were held in which they were tried. Indeed, we may
conclude that “a living being is always living” and back of this life
merges by imperceptible gradations into the larger life of the cosmos.
All religion, says Finot, is based on a belief in a soul independent
of the body and while so many Western philosophers have insisted on
a perdurable and even immaterial personality, there has always been
a background of thought repressed by current opinion to the contrary
view, till we have developed a kind of “sentiment of the end.” In point
of fact, those near death have first a feeling of beatitude, then
complete insensibility to the outer world and to pain, and lastly great
rapidity of thought, so that dying is a kind of beatitude. Finot thinks
modern biology by its experiments, not on spontaneous generation but on
the control of fertilization, has gone some way toward realizing the
goal of the alchemists, which was to create homunculi; and he wonders
whether man may not sometime be thus able to control the very sources
of life.
Alchemy, which for centuries was the mystic philosophy of the wise
but has seemed to modern minds only a mass of felted symbols that
could never be resolved except in the new light shed upon it by the
studies of A. E. Hitchcock, Silberer, and others, represents in one
of its aspects a unique trend of the quest for immortality. The lower
alchemist strove to reduce the baser metals back to a common element,
menstruum, or materia prima, for which there were fifty mythological
expressions, and then and there to transmute them into the purest and
the most precious of all metals, gold. The later higher alchemy left
all this behind and strove to bring not only life but the homunculus
itself out of various rotting putridities or out of decomposition
backward and downward to evolve something endowed with exceptional
vitality. Near this devolutive pole lie the deep sources of creative
energy, the antæus touch of which brings regeneration. So regression to
the “within” causes the soul to arise from the body and the spirit from
the soul. It is like the transmutation of experience into heredity or
individuality reinforcing itself by contact with the mighty spirit of
the race. The personal is united with the world’s will or with that
of God and is transmuted into it. Symbols are always a product of
“apperceptive insufficiency” but the higher anagogic meaning of many
of them in the hermetic field is that askesis, sacrifice, the death of
egoism, and renunciation lead to the great treasure, the new light,
self-impregnation with Pneuma, a new birth, joy, the _summum bonum_,
etc. To some alchemists this goal was like that of the Yogi cult,
depersonalization if not annihilation, while to others it was more like
a distillation of a quintessential supersoul from its sarcous base, as
mercury and even lead are transmuted into gold. Palingenesis is the
purpose not only of experimentation but of the prayer and meditation
that must precede it. In the sex symbolisms the subject fuses with the
object as the male and female principle unite in conjugation. Old age
is regression or retreat toward the fountain heads of life and the new
life may be formed within the old body before its collapse, so that
there is no break of either conscious or physical continuity. Where and
when there is most death, there is also most life, for the two are true
reciprocals.
But the alchemists did not make gold nor evolve an homunculus nor
achieve even spontaneous generation according to our criteria.
Diligently as they sought for them, they never found the philosopher’s
stone, the fountain of youth, or the _elixir vitæ_. Active as were
their immortal longings and intricate as were their products, they
were all abortive. They groped toward chemistry and metallurgy and
these came in due time, although they were no more products of it than
the modern building trades are of freemasonry. But their quest for a
transmortal life neither achieved nor was followed by any after results
that seem to us to be of value.
Modern astronomy tells us that the stellar universe is at least
250,000 light years in diameter, so that if one of the remoter stars
went out we should not know it for that number of years. The extensions
outside the range of even our Euclidean axioms which we now know
were only provisional and where time is only a fourth dimension of
space (Einstein); suns a million times larger than ours; thousands of
millions of celestial bodies in all stages of evolution and devolution,
yet all composed of nearly the same chemical elements as our tiny
planet and all following the same laws of gravity, light, heat, the
conservation of energy through all its transformations so that none
of it is ever or anywhere lost, with illustrations of every stage of
planetary development and dissolution, some of them probably evolving
life and creatures far higher than man:--it is out of this universe
that our world and we came and back into it we shall both be resolved
sooner or later. As we advance in life we turn our backs to all this
but when the retreat begins we face the stupendous whole of it again
and death is freedom from the progressive limitations involved in
individuation and a return home to the One and All. It is restoration,
resumption, emancipation, diffusion, reversion, and all worlds and
systems as well as men are thus destined to die of old age, perhaps
by collision or other accident, since time is as boundless as space
and the history of our solar system is but a single tick of the cosmic
clock-work which we know is always running down even though it may
have the power of eternally winding itself up again. If “our hearts
like muffled drums are beating funeral marches to the grave,” so is
also the heart of the universe. As we “join the majority” when we die,
so do suns that become extinct and those we see with the strongest
telescope may be but a handful compared to those that within its range
have suffered “entropy.” Thus the true death thought is the transcender
of all horizons and its muse points us straight to infinity as our
goal. Along with this there is a deep conviction that there is no
void or vacuum but that even though the existence of universal ether
is now doubted by certain experts the cosmos is somehow a plenum
full to repletion of being as it is of energy and teeming with the
possibilities of even life far richer and more abundant than we can
conceive. Thus we see again that personality is arrest, exclusion from
all this, which ceases at death when we reënter the great current
that sweeps onward all that is. Thus the solar system, earth, man,
and finally our own ego involve descent as from a _summum_ genus
to an _infima_ species. This progressive individuation is at every
step arrest which death removes and reverses, so that the energies
which during all our lives have held up and hampered us by so many
disharmonies and conflicts are gone forever.
VI. Next come the noetic theories of immortality. Gnostics, illuminati,
mystics, logicians of the categories, and all who seek salvation
and perdurability by the noetic way assume that as the soul leaves
individual things and persons and passes to species, to genera, and
on to the abstract and unconditioned, certainty increases until it
tends to become cataleptic in the old Stoic sense. The ultimate goal
is pure absolute being, knowledge of which brings ecstasy, love of,
and identification with it. Self is merged and lost in the infinite.
Negatively this seems not merely death but annihilation. It should
be regarded positively as the great affirmation and realization of
true existence and the proper and only true finish and completion of
human life, the last stage of psychogenesis. It is involution, the
at last fully developed counterpart and complement of evolution. To
this the genetic life impulse with which each of us starts will take
us if its trajectory suffers no arrest and does not swerve from its
proper course. This ontological immortality is Oriental, eleatic, and
frankly pantheistic. It is a product not only of old thinkers but
of old races and civilizations. It goes with retirement from and not
with useful advent into the world. Those who begin this involution
by, for example, knowing that they know, knowing that they know they
know, etc., find that at the mathematical point when they reach the
center of the involucre, the universe bursts in upon them. By tracing
self-consciousness to its deepest root all that is conscious is lost in
an unconscious that is utterly without bounds or orientation.
The religious instinct has always been vastly wiser than it knew
but it always needs reconstruction, often radical in form. Thus, if
at death the psyche is disintegrated as much as the body is and the
disintegration goes down into molecules or any of the basal forms of
energy, death is not absolute. The difference is like that between the
mountains and the sea level when compared with that from the surface
of the earth to its center. Hering and Simon tell us that what we have
called heredity is really memory. The world beyond is like an ocean
to an ant accustomed to its own ant-hill but floating out to sea on a
straw. The subconscious is greater than the conscious and we do not
dread this in sleep and so biology is greater than psychology, just
as folklore is broader than psychology or philosophy. We want to feel
ultimately forces and powers that are not our own, to be inundated with
a larger strength, to fall back into everlasting arms. Thus, back of
Christianity is an older, larger, meta-Christian, meta-human religion
found in the love of nature, and old men ought to grow progressively
interested first in animals, then in plants, then in the inanimate
world, with a view to the ending of life in a pantheistic absorption.
This view has had another great reinforcement of late from studies
that originated with Durkheim and Lévy-Brühl, from which it appears
that back of primitive animism there are always found traces of some
kind of mana cult, which is not unlike that of Om in India. Man is
anthropic or upward-gazing. We address the sky not as “our father in
heaven” but as a vastated navel-gazing orientation toward the source
of all things. Schleiermacher, who conceived religion as absolute
dependence and in his earlier writings made it pantheistic at root,
sought to console a young widow who said that her whole soul went out
to her dead husband and she could not possibly feel that he would be
resolved back into the great One-and-All by saying that this should
bring her no grief for it meant merging into the highest life of the
infinite whole and no longer setting up for self--“If he is now living
in God and you love him eternally in God as you loved and knew God in
him, can you think of anything sublimer or anything more glorious? Is
not this the highest end of love?” etc. Mailander held that pantheistic
divinity died in giving birth to the world and that all its processes
are self-destructive, pointing ultimately to a Nirvana; that everything
is traveling the road to death, the desire for which is really the
universal motive, so that we are unconsciously seeking this kind of
absorptive death in all we do or say. Man’s business is to know the
great whole and thus he will enjoy the prospect of annihilation and
attain the full and glorious will to die. We must be resolved back into
primal energy, which is nothing only in the sense that it is too great
to be defined.
Meyer-Denfey urges that no part of the soul can be lost any more than
can any element of the body and that the fuller our life has been
the more of these modifications of cosmic matter and energy does it
effect. Pantheism has resources for meeting the death fear which the
Western world knows little of. It should also be noted that to the
psychologist consolations drawn from the persistency of the elements
of our body in the above sense are related to world-soul theories
merely by ambivalent variance. Psychogenetically there is little
difference between concepts of absolute mind back of all conscious and
sentient beings and those of preëxisting energy, stress, nebulæ, or
any other mother-lye of the universe. The Schiller-James view is that
matter limits the expression of the absolute mind back of all. Our
brain is a thin place in the veil through which the great life of soul
breaks into the world but always in restricted forms. The philosopher,
Schelling, thought mind and nature at root identical but Schiller is
more dualistic and regards the body as a “mechanism for inhibiting
consciousness.” “With our brains we are able to forget.”
Still, the mind is in rapport, however dim, in contact, if not indeed
continuous with a larger consciousness of unknown and perhaps universal
scope that is disclosed to us in our subliminal self. On this view the
brain does not secrete thought but obstructs it like a bad conductor,
so that when the thought currents of the great Autos make the nerves
glow, the phosphorescence or incandescence caused by the resistance
of the brain is what appears to our fragmentary subliminal mind as
consciousness. Ideation is thus a transmissive function of the brain
and when it perishes, personality, which means limitation, is dissolved
into the larger life of the whole. Mind stuff, like force and matter,
may preëxist in minute and disseminated fragments, which our bodies
mass and our brains combine into what we call souls. And on this view
these fragmentary psychic elements, whether they be combined in a human
or even animal ego or not, must also be immortal for all the reasons we
are. Perhaps the highest combinations may be grouped into yet higher
beings, which would be resolved back again into us on their way to more
elemental states.
If our soul is the mouthpiece of an absolute soul, as the word
_persona_ is often interpreted to imply, inadequate though it be it is
still to those lower mausolized souls somewhat as the more definite
and absolute soul is to us; and as their voices are absorbed in us so
we are in infinite being. We are bundles, vincula, or parentheses of
more ultimate elements that preceded and will survive us, but we are
somehow helping these immortal components on to their own goal, so
that the real value of life is theirs and not ours. But if subliminal
functions are most immortal, the dissolution of our consciousness
might be desiderated, for organization obscures the ultimate reals
and the massing of lower monads involves a larger sum of arrest, so
that perhaps our lives really hinder rather than help on the cosmic
process of evolution or redemption. As in chemistry the more complex
combinations are unstable and tend to disintegrate, so the higher
psychic compounds we cause and that make our minds persist a while
will be resolved into lower and simpler ones that outlast them. Thus,
at best the problem and conduct of our earthly life would be akin to
that of a careful breeder who would leave permanent variations in the
vegetable and animal species to be cultivated that would persist long
after he himself is forgotten. If this soul of the world is conscious,
as we are, death is lapsing down the evolutionary scale. But this
ideolatry of consciousness is passing. And if the unconscious is higher
and the basal cosmic energies are greater, more perfect, and more
important than our psyche and soma, then we have lost our sense of
direction and devolution is really upward.
VII. As to the philosophic attempts to prove the doctrine of personal
immortality, no genetic psychologist can to-day despise even the most
proletarian form of belief in a principle that survives death. Although
the time is past when the old theological arguments for immortality
are convincing, save to those whose religious development has been
arrested, they will always deserve respect not only because they have
done so much to sustain great souls in the past but because, as we now
interpret them, they mean a larger and more complete life for man here
in the future. Disregarding these, we must, however, briefly pass in
review the chief views that the philosophic minds have evolved that the
soul lives on.
We begin with Plato, who finds not one but many proofs of it. In the
_Phaedrus_ he finds it in the spontaneity and power of self-motion of
the soul. In the _Timaeus_ he finds it in the fact that the soul is
the _chef d’œuvre_ of the world, so wondrous and beautiful that the
gods would and could not really let it die. Elsewhere he finds proof
of its immortality in the soul’s struggle for knowledge, the impulse
to progress to ever more general ideas, which, as we have seen, he
thought akin to death. Again, he deemed it immortal because he thought
no sin or evil could kill it. Once more, as all that live must die,
so the correlate must hold that all the dead live or, as Cebes puts
it, the latter is a necessary postulate to the idea of life. The soul,
too, is simple and undecomposable and so can never be destroyed. His
doctrine of reminiscence was that we remember previous incarnations,
preëxistence being long thought to be as necessary and as demonstrable
as postexistence. Plato found Greek life and mind confused and sought
by cross-examination and induction in the psychic field to attain a
few fixed ideas that the soul could anchor to in the sophistic flux,
minds be drawn together, and Greece thus saved from disintegration
as the old theological views crumbled. The products of all this
Socratic midwifery were basal concepts, the eternal patterns of which
by participation in things made them real. These Aristotle and many
later writers elaborated and defined as a table of categories and in
nature they were interpreted as _summa genera_ or fixed species or
types. It was the persistence of belief in these that both Darwin and
Locke attacked. The species and entities of the scholastics, which
underlay even the doctrine of the Eucharist, and not only nativism and
apriorism but all forms of philosophic realism, as well as absolutism,
metaphysics, ontology, rational transcendentalism, the passion for
deducing conclusions from presuppositionless data elsewhere derived,
and even the Stoic and Kantian conscience--all rest upon the assumption
of definite and abiding norms in nature or mind that are simple and
undecomposable by psychic analysis and from which all thinking starts
and in which it ends. Thus the doctrine of ideas has been the key not
only to philosophic orthodoxy but to much of the thought and most
of the great controversies of the world. Not only theologians but
Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, and also no less but in a different
manner, mystics, illuminati, rationalists, scientists in their quest
for constants and laws of nature, and even the codifiers of Roman law,
were all inspired by belief in attaining ultimate principles, and all
these were looking toward immortality.
Now, all noetic theories of immortality agree in holding that it
is attained when the intellect intuits or grasps one or more of
these ultimate truths and thus partakes of or participates in their
perdurability. They are so high and abstract that Plato considered
philosophy not only as the withdrawal from sense and the world toward
the solitariness of the infinite but as the active practice of death.
Hegel thought them the inner constitution of the mind of God, and to
know God is eternal life. The great bliss and peace of what Aristotle
described and praised as the theoretic life have thus often been
interpreted as a foretaste of heaven. Thus the love and struggle
for knowledge have been said to be motivated by the desire for an
incorporeal existence.
Wordsworth’s “truths that wake to perish never,” “high instincts before
which our mortal nature trembles like a guilty thing surprised,” is
based upon the doctrine of reminiscence. When the soul has attained
the unconditioned, and even when it experiences a love that is felt to
be stronger than death, or a pure autonomous oughtness, or conceives
the idea of God as the greatest and best being, which Descartes said
it could not do if such a being did not exist; when it envisages a
beauty that is transcending and seems to take the mind above time and
space into pure being and whenever we reach generalizations of such a
high degree that they include soul and body, life and death, and all
things else, man has been told in countless ways that he was becoming
immortal, that in such experiences the soul was outsoaring mortality,
as if the subject were parasiting on to its object, absorbed in ecstasy
of contemplation, till the subject and object fused in a unique way.
The soul that harbors such great thoughts and has passed through such
experiences thereby acquires a quality of permanence, whether it acts
by _apperçus_ or by severe logical ratiocination.
All such arguments, however, from their very nature are fallacious.
Knowledge is not participation in this sense. A being of low may know
one of a far higher order, but the chasm between subject and object
remains unbridged. To know beauty and power is not to attain them. The
further epistemological assumption that the world of ideas is itself
a projection, just as subjective idealism asserted the world of sense
to be, would also be necessary. But even this colossal postulate would
not suffice for a world that is all eject and ends as well as begins
with man. On this hypothesis the mind creates its own saving principle
and was saved by its products. Indeed, such a method begs the whole
question, which becomes again one of fact. Does or does not such a
power exist in our psychic nature? The only possible support for such
a hypothesis is the degree of coherence of its own parts with each
other and with experience. All such arguments, however, are really
pantheistic and leave little room for personality but are rather
destructive of it. Nothing individual can persist in the absolute for
in it all distinctions are merged.
Connected with this view is that which assumes that because we have the
idea of or the wish for immortality and because this is so generally
implanted in human nature, the latter is a lie if it is not a fact. Of
this class of proofs the most common are those that urge it because
of its practical utility for morality. In the other-worldness of
early Christian centuries, where eschatology was more developed than
cosmology, fear of hell and hope of heaven performed the greatest
service for virtue and its progress was advanced by these artificial
and extraneous supports. The danger is lest they have undue weight and
be relied on long after their function should have been progressively
replaced by the conception of virtue as its own reward. Luther thought
that the chief motive of morality would be gone if there were no future
life. Andrews Naughton said there could be no religion without it.
Theodore Parker said: “If I perish in death I know no law but passion.”
Chalmers urged that without it God would be stripped of wisdom,
authority, and honor. Walt Whitman exclaimed: “If rats and maggots end
us, then alarum! for we are betrayed.” Human nature has been called
a lie and God a liar if there is no future life and those who do not
desire it have been called in reality already dead. It is a potent
motive to escape eternal pain and secure eternal bliss for our own ego
hereafter. “If,” says one, “our souls do not hold the latchstring of
a new world’s wicket, then goodbye, put out the lights, ring down the
curtain. We have had our turn and it is all so nauseating that even
suicide is a welcome spectacle.” One need only glance over a few of the
five thousand titles of Alger’s very incomplete and quite out-of-date
bibliography upon the subject to be able to draw up a long list of
desperate things that would happen in the world and that individual
writers would do, or of imprecations on God’s character and the nature
of the universe, if it were proven false or if none of the strands in
the complex net of theories and demonstrations that have been flung to
the other shore should hold. All virtues, piety, honor, integrity, and
civilization itself would perish, men become brutes, God a malign fiend
gloating over the unbridled lust and supreme selfishness that would
slowly sweep man from the earth, etc.
The most vivid portraitures of heaven and hell have been made. Isaac
Taylor deemed the sun heaven although a later contemporary thought it
hell, adding that its dark spots were the souls of the damned. The
great comets in the last century were called hell making its rounds
to gather its victims. The old Saxon catechist pronounced the setting
sun red because it looked on hell. Thus the flood of evil now held in
restraint would deluge the earth and chaos break loose if, when pay day
came, men found a future life of rewards and punishments bankrupt.
All this assumes that it is proven because it has aided virtue
and because a belief so general must be true. But even the good
Bishop Butler argued that men must be prepared to find themselves
misled--“Light deceives, why not life?” From childhood to the grave,
from savagery to the present, man’s history has been one of disillusion
and disenchantment. His mind has been far more fertile of error than of
truth. Few of his wants have been satisfied and no wise man would feel
secure in arguing from desire to attainment. The impetuous diathesis of
the West may have grown neurotic as it became free, rich, and powerful,
but it is all unavailing. Despite all that pragmatism can say, truth
is very different from utility. In view of all this we might, with
Bishop Courtney, refute all proofs of post-mortem existence, insisting
that all men die, body and soul, and are extinguished but at some
appointed time their spirits are resurrected by the power of God. The
other alternative is more familiar. “If our ship never reaches port and
if there be no haven, it becomes us to keep all taut and bright, sails
set, and to maintain discipline.” All we want even of a future life is
opportunity for virtue.
A special form of this argument from ideas to reality was developed
by Kant. Reason always seeks the unconditioned by its very nature and
nothing but the _summum bonum_ will satisfy it. This includes two
things, perfection and happiness, the two great desires of the ages.
The ancients thought each implied the other. The old Hebrews believed
that righteousness brought happiness in this world. The Stoics held
that the highest joy was implicit in the practice of virtue from its
very nature, while the Epicureans taught, conversely, that the highest
happiness involved virtue. This does not suffice. The unity between
the two must not be analytic but synthetic and causal. That is, each
must bring out the other. In the world of experience this is not true
and yet they belong together and so must find each other in a higher
intelligible world.
Thus the very idea of immortality is the greatest perfection joined
to the greatest happiness. They must be united completely. Whereas in
the phenomenal world their development and union are only partial,
there must be an infinite progression to bring them completely together
because a being destined for perfection cannot be arrested. If this
were the case there would be no perfect virtue and we are immortal
because the latter must be attainable. Thus, heaven and hell must rise
and fall together. True, the sense of justice by which we judge life,
the drama, literature, and novels demands that the good always get
their reward and the bad their punishment. This instinct is very deep
and underlies law and society but we have no warrant for believing
that the universe is built upon this principle. There is abundant
evidence to the contrary. Neither intellectual intuition nor conscience
are constitutive principles. Moreover, only the Western world demands
personal immortality, so that the conviction that no evil can befall
a good man is only a sentiment or postulate. Who knows but what it is
only the _hubris_ or fatal pride of man, which the gods would destroy,
that has impelled him to believe that his wishes, ideas, or even his
ego itself are too good to be allowed to perish.
Pluralistic views of immortality may be very roughly grouped together.
Howison,[221] for example, makes pluralism absolute by advocating an
eternal or metaphysical world of many minds, all self-active, the
items and orders of experience of which constitute real existence,
even time and space. About everything is logically implicit in their
self-developing consciousness, and the recognition of each by the
other constitutes the moral order. This makes an eternal republic or
city of God, who is “the fulfilled type of their mind and the living
bond of their union.” They control the natural world, are sources of
law, and are free, for their essence is mutual relation. In the world
of spirits God is not solitary and there is room for the freedom of
all. The joint movement that we call evolution is transient and can
never enter the real world. Creation is not an event with a date but a
metaphor. The key of everything is conscience and teleology. This view
differs from Leibnitz’s monadology only in denying grades and castes in
these figurations of God. It makes objects in nature the manifestations
of mental activity and therefore just as real as they. So the eternal
reality of the individual is the supreme fact.
Royce, too, does not teach a psychology without a soul.
Individualities are basal and teleological. They are aspects of the
absolute life and therefore have a meaning. But in this present life,
much as we strive to know and love individuals, there are no true
individuals which our present minds can know or express. As we strive,
therefore, to find real others, we realize that all we know of them
is but a system of hints of an individuality not now revealed to us
which cannot be represented by a consciousness that is made up of our
own limited experience. Therefore the real individualities we loyally
seek to express get from the absolute viewpoint their final expression
in a life that is conscious, the only life that idealism recognizes
and that in its meaning, but not in time and space, is continuous with
the fragmentary, flickering existence wherein we now see so dimly our
relations to God and to eternal truth.[222]
This argument, so dear to and so ably advocated by its author, is
obviously suggested by the Kantian postulate. Is it true in fact,
however, that the closest companionship, friendship, and even love
do not take us to the real individuality of the objects of these
impulsions? Though man has always been gregarious and social, it would
seem that this instinct is abortive if Royce is correct and also that
the reality of such an individuality as he postulates would not be
conscious but rather trans-conscious or frankly unconscious.
Miss Calkins in her various writings, although not consciously intent
upon proving immortality, belongs to this group. The constant sense
of self, which she postulates in the teeth of the modern studies of
multiple personality, harks back to Descartes and she seems to be a
good illustration of Royce’s persistent quest for a self that from
its very nature cannot be known, a quest that in her has its chief
strength, if analytically considered, in the personal satisfaction
coming from the subconscious reinforcement by reading and thinking in
maturity of a juvenile stage of development, which originated in a
theological and here deploys in a metaphysical stage.
C. T. Stockwell[223] assumes that there is something related to the
germ plasm from which the individual sprang as it is to the rest of the
body, and Shaler[224] concludes: “We may therefore say that the most
complicated part of life is not that which goes out with the body’s
death but that which is cradled in the infinitesimal molecule that is
known to us as the germ of another life evolution.” Edwin Arnold[225]
is platonic in assuming that life is so beautiful that “we may rightly
feel betrayed if dysentery and maggots end everything.” So our fears
may be as ridiculous as those of Don Quixote hanging from a window by
the wrist over what he thought was an abyss but, when the thong was
cut, falling only four inches. Such an authentic and transfiguring Yes
might be pronounced if we could recombine the chemical elements of a
man analyzed in the South Kensington museum into a vigorous youth.
An anonymous author asks why should the soul, the noblest and last
goal of evolution, perish and the cosmos throw away its crown. It is
the entelechy of all evolution. In general the best survive and only
the worst become extinct. The great _biologos_ has wrought from the
beginning to give itself an organ to think through and mirror itself
in, and this momentum of self-preservation is too great to be entirely
arrested at death. So individuality must have absolute worth and be
eternized because it is the key to and the paragon of existence. It
must be an _ens realissimum_ because it has cost so much. Democracy,
too, hypertrophies individuality. The Orient knew _one_ was eternal;
the Middle Ages knew a _few_ were; and only lately did man begin to
think _all_ were so. Our motto, thus, must be _Impavi progrediamur_
shouted with bravura. Self-conscious life is the highest of all
possible categories, the model of all other units by which they are
understood, and not merely a symbol of ultimate reality but the thing
itself.
S. D. McConnell revives the somewhat patristic idea that man is by
nature mortal but is also immortable and can attain another life by
piety and knowledge, as of old the Eucharist developed the potentiality
of another life or as the infant is a man, only dynamically. Man may
become indestructible by a higher process of biogenesis. John Fiske,
too, says, “At some period in the evolution of humanity this divine
spark may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to
survive the wreck of material form and endure forever.” To be deified
by righteousness would be a fit climax. This life is a period of
probation and gestation in a new sense. Thus, too, hell is obsolete and
the bad die, so that the great choice is now between continuation and
extinction. Some crude prelusions of this were found among the Taoists,
who held that “the grosser elements of man’s nature may be refined
away and immortality attained even in this world.” This could be done
by an elixir of life, the desire to discover which a century or two
before and even after Christ became in many places a veritable craze.
So-called pills of immortality taken in connection with certain rites
and regimen, like alchemy, which could make gold out of baser metals,
would purge away mortal elements and transfiguration and sublimation
might result, even for animals. But where do we draw the line between
the mortal and immortal, for this may be as far above as the Taoists
thought it was below us?
All arguments of this kind are provincial. Man may be a mere microbe
on our little dirt ball, which the high gods could hardly see if the
lentiform Milky Way were the object-glass of a celestial microscope.
What reason have we to think that the cosmos accepts us at our own
valuation? The great sphinx has for ages suckled children at its breast
only to destroy them with its claws and when men die it recks and cares
not. As Fechner says, the plant world might say it was supreme and
that insects, animals, and men lived to manure its seeds. Vegetation
preceded, nourishes, and might at any time send out bacteria and miasma
to rid the world of all animal life. Man is perhaps mean compared to
the denizens of other worlds and even his type, so precious compared
to individuals, may be worthless or serving other ends. Despite his
decadent but titanic pride and monumental nescience of self he is
really pathetic. So tempting to the vengeance of the gods is his pride
that to be disappointed about another life serves him right. The
great saurians were once the highest creatures and seemed the pets of
nature and the goal of all, but although their period was far longer
than man’s they have passed. So, perhaps the superman will sometime
quarry and explore, trace by trace, the evidences of a human biped
representing our own stage of existence, and man as he is to-day be
classified in a tongue as yet unborn. Are we really nearer any ultimate
goal than was the amphioxus? We may be only a link to the higher man
and that link may sometime be missing.
What right have we to assume anything so sacrosanct and fetchingly
irresistible in the human type that the great Goodheart will never seek
to evolve anything better but accept us as a stereotype of finality.
Such suppositions are naïve and man as a race ought to rejoice if
he can serve even infinitesimally in a greater purpose. In fact, in
many quarters it is now bad form to even discuss the question of
personal immortality because the world is becoming--in the phrase
of Osler--Laodicean, indifferent, or even antagonistic to such views
and leaves passionate affirmations of a future life, so in fashion in
the days of Tennyson and Browning, to mystics, clerical rhapsodists,
pectoralists, or to those steeped in cardiac emotions.
There are many reasons challenging the generality or strength of
the desire for another life. From a questionnaire of the Psychic
Research Society it was found that very many did not feel it of urgent
importance, did not wish to know for certain about it, and many did
not desire it, although a few, like Huxley, “would prefer hell, if
the conditions were not too rigorous,” to annihilation. Perhaps we
are still haunted by submerged reminiscences of the immortality of
our primeval unicellular ancestors, which, as we have seen, divide
forever and never die. Man is certainly at present a very defective
creature, a bundle of anachronisms with organs new and old. Even the
aged die with a minority, and very often a majority of their organs
and faculties charged with potencies of a longer life. Man may be not
a paragon but a fluke or sport of the anthropoid apes and his death is
commonly a gruesome execution by microbes, accidents, or hereditary
handicaps. His sex nature may be abnormal. Unlike the beasts, he seems
to have lost his hygienic or dietetic instinct or conscience. He knows
more than he can practice. His consciousness is often abnormal and not
remedial as it should be. It is very fallible, always partial, and by
no means the oracle he has deemed it to be. It may be nothing but a
thing of shreds and patches, extemporized, accidental, transient, made
up of fragmentary outcrops of unconscious forces that, deep below the
threshold, rule his life. To truly know himself he must go down stratum
by stratum, study every outcrop of older formations, every denudation
caused by disease, every psychic fossil of tics, obsessions, whims,
every anatomical clue, every hint from comparative psychology, disease,
crime, rudimentary organs of body or soul; and in his efforts to
maximize himself must realize that if all the studies of his nature
that have been made were to be depurated of the lust for a future life
it would leave a vast void, for the passion for immortality has left
its mark on all his cultural history.
But the fear of death and the forms of mitigating this fear are
chiefly because man still dies young. If we had experienced and
explored senescence fully we should find that the lust of life is
supplanted later by an equally strong counter will to die. We should
have no immortality mania for we should be satisfied with life here
without demanding a sequel to it. Our present dreams of all forms of
post-mortem existence would become a nightmare. True macrobiotism
means not only more years but completeness of experience, absence of
repression and limitation. Had we lived out the whole of our lives
and drained all the draughts of bitter and sweet that nature has ever
brewed for us, we should feel sated. The fact is, man is now cut off
in his prime with many of his possibilities unrealized. Hence he is a
pathetic creature doomed to a kind of Herodian slaughter and because he
has dimly felt this he has always cried out to the gods and to nature
to have mercy. He has imagined answers to the heartrending appeal he
shouted into the void: if a man dies shall he live again? and on the
warrant of fancied answers has supplemented this by another life,
which, when psycho-analyzed in all its processes, means only that he
has a sense that the human race is unfinished and that the best is yet
to come. And so it is. Man’s future on this earth is the real, only,
and gloriously sufficient fulfillment of this hope. It will be found
only in the prolonged and enriched life of posterity here. The man of
virtue will realize all desires and live himself completely out so
that nothing essentially human will be foreign to his own personal
experience.
Thus the wish for and belief in immortality is at bottom the very best
of all possible augurs and pledges that man as he exists to-day is
only the beginning of what he is to be and do. He is only the pigmoid
or embryo of his true and fully entelechized self. Thus when he is
completed and has finished all that is now only begun in him, heavens,
hells, gods, and discarnate ghosts will all fade like dream fabrics
or shadows before the rising sun. All doctrines of another life are
thus but symbols and tropes in mythic form of the true superman as he
will be when he arrives. The great hope so many have lived and died by
will be fulfilled, every jot and tittle of it, not in our own lives
but in the perfect man whose heralds we really are without knowing it.
Deathbed visions will come true more gloriously than the dying thought.
They hunger for more life but the perfect man will die of satiety
passing over into aversion and the story will be completed not in a
later number but in this.
Is there any true thanatophilia, the opposite of thanatophobia? Does
the most complete and harmonious life bring not only the quest for
death but an active striving toward Nirvana? Will man ever come to
observe the approach of death in himself and in others just as we love
to study and observe growth? The records of centenarians do not show
it; nor do the superannuated now generally feel it. Even Nothnagel, who
observed himself clinically almost up to the moment of his death, did
not find it. True euthanasia is not mere resignation or the exhaustion
of the momentum to live or satiety with life. We know nothing of truly
natural death. But we do know that psychogenetically the old lust for
personal immortality has made man now more anxious to prolong and
enlarge this mundane life. We can no longer postpone our ideas of
happiness. The great and good things man once expected beyond he now
strives to attain here. He wants more, not less in this life because he
expected so much of the other. Thus the belief in immortality is one
of the psychic roots of modern hygiene although the question whether
it can all go over into orthobiosis and humaniculture still remains
open. If all were cut off in their prime, like Jesus, for example,
another life would be even more desired and believed in, for the longer
and better we live the less we care about it. Thus the answer to the
problem of euthanasia strictly considered must remain in abeyance,
at least until humanity is more complete. Biological studies and new
therapies may develop, give more importance to, and help us to a far
better knowledge of, the gerontic stage of life. At any rate, I hope
and believe that the data I have gathered and presented in this volume
may contribute its mite to make the status of the old more interesting
to themselves and to increase the sense that they still owe important
duties to a world never more in need of the very best that is in them.
THANATOPSIS
By WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;--
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around--
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air--
Comes a still voice--Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings,
The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,--the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods--rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,--
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.--Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings--yet the dead are there;
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep--the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man--
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
CROSSING THE BAR
By ALFRED TENNYSON
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep,
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark.
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
THE END
FOOTNOTES
[1] In the preceding paragraphs I have incorporated, with minor
changes, parts of my anonymous article on “Old Age” in the _Atlantic
Monthly_ of January, 1921, with the kind permission of the editor.
[2] _Scientific American_, March 25, 1905.
[3] See _Pop. Sci. Mo._, July, 1902.
[4] “Age and Eminence,” _Pop. Sci. Mo._, vol. 66, 1904–05, p. 538.
[5] _The Age of Mental Virility_, The Century Co., 1908.
[6] “What the World Might Have Missed,” _Century_, 1908, p. 113, _et
seq._
[7] “The Age Limit,” _Living Age_, 1914, p. 214.
[8] “The Old Folks and the War,” _Living Age_, 1918.
[9] _The Psychology of Senescence_, Master’s Thesis, Clark University,
Worcester, Mass., 1912.
[10] P. Birukoff, _Leo Tolstoy, His Life and Work_. London, 1906; A.
Maude, _The Life of Tolstoy_, London, 1908.
[11] W. Wundt, _Gustav Theodor Fechner_, Leipzig, 1901; K. Lasswitz,
_Gustav Theodor Fechner_, Stuttgart, 1896; G. S. Hall, _Founders of
Modern Psychology_, New York, 1907.
[12] See J. Croley, _The Love Life of Auguste Comte_, Modern Thinker,
2d ed., 1870; also J. Mill, _Auguste Comte and Positivism_, London,
1907, 5th ed.; also A. Poey, _The Three Mental Crises of Auguste
Comte_, Modern Thinker, 2d ed., London, 1870.
[13] G. Trobridge, _Emanuel Swedenborg, His Life, Teachings, and
Influence_, London, 1911; also B. White and B. Barrett, _Life and
Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg_, 1876; also J. Wilkinson, _Emanuel
Swedenborg, a Biography_, Boston, 1849. See also Emerson’s essay.
[14] See Karl Abraham’s work of this title (Leipzig, 1911), based on
Seravia’s biography.
[15] J. Sadger, _Aus dem Liebeslebens Nicolaus Lenaus_, Leipzig, 1909,
96 p. See also his biography by B. E. Castle.
[16] J. Sadger in _Grenzfragen des Nerven und Seelenlebens_, 1910, pp.
5–63.
[17] G. Vorberg, _Guy de Maupassant’s Krankheit_, 1908, 27 p.
[18] Otto Kaus, _Schriften des Vereins freie psychoanalytische
Forschung_, No. 2, 1912, 81 p.
[19] P. J. Moebius, _Ueber Scheffel’s Krankheit_, 1907, p. 40.
[20] E. T. Cook, _Life of John Ruskin_, _London_, 1911, vol. ii, p. 19.
[21] Frau Foerster-Nietzsche, _The Life of Nietzsche_.
[22] “On Growing Old,” _Atlan._, 1915, p. 803.
[23] “Concerning Age,” _Sci. Amer. Sup._, Nov. 15, 1919.
[24] “The Moral and Religious Psychology of Late Senescence,” _Biblical
World_, 1918, p. 75.
[25] _The Dangerous Age_, London, 1912.
[26] See W. L. Comfort’s _Midstream_ for the same crisis in men (1914).
[27] _The Salvaging of Civilization: The Probable Future of Mankind_,
New York, 1921. 199 p.
[28] _The Old World in the New_, 1914, p. 27.
[29] _The Longevity of Birds._
[30] _On the Comparative Longevity of Man and Animals_, 1870.
[31] _Men of the Old Stone Age_, New York, 1915, p. 40.
[32] See my “What We Owe to the Tree-life of Our Ape-like Ancestors,”
_Ped. Sem._, 23:94–116, 1916.
[33] _Adolescence_, Ch. XIII, “Savage Pubic Initiations,” etc.
[34] _Primitive Folk_, p. 42.
[35] _The American Indian_, p. 177.
[36] _Among the Eskimos of Labrador_, p. 111.
[37] “Old Age and Death,” _Am. Jour. Psychol._, October, 1896.
[38] _With a Prehistoric People: The Akikuyu of British East Africa_,
p. 157.
[39] _Savage Man in Central Africa_, p. 176.
[40] _The Life of a South-African Tribe_, p. 131.
[41] “Physiological and Medical Observations on the Indians of
Southwest United States and Mexico,” Bureau Amer. Ethnol., Bull. 34.
[42] _Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde_, Chap. 74.
[43] _On Centenarians and the Duration of the Human Race_, 1899.
[44] A few even recent writers have gone to the extreme of doubting the
authenticity of every record of human life beyond a century, although
Young seems to have demonstrated it in his twenty-two annuitants. All
such contentions are only doctrinnaire. Lives exceptionally prolonged
may be abnormal, like dwarfs and giants, and extreme skepticism here
has hardly more justification than extreme credulity. In 1799 James
Easton believed he had demonstrated that 712 persons between the years
A.D. 66 and the above date had attained a century or upward. He found
three whom he thought had lived between 170 and 175 years; two who had
lived 160 to 170; three, 150–160; seven, 140–150; twenty-six, 130–140;
eighty-four, 120–130; and thirteen hundred and ten, 100–110. Even
Babbage assumed 150 as the limit of age in his abstract tables based
upon seventeen hundred and fifty-one persons who had attained 100 or
more. A. Haller (1766) accepted the age of Parr and Jenkins and is
quite uncritical, saying that over one thousand men have lived to be
100–110, and twenty-five have lived to between 130–140. He even accepts
Pliny’s story of a man who lived to be 300, and another 340 years.
Hufeland seems to approve the traditional 157 years of Epimenides, 108
of Gorgias, 139 of Democritus, 100 of Zeno, 105 of St. Anthony, and
credited J. Effingham in Cornwall with 144 years. W. J. Thoms (_Human
Longevity: Its Facts and Its Fictions_, 1873) is skeptical of great
longevities and found no sure case of centenarians in any noble family.
J. Pinney (1856) went to the limit of credulity, believing that there
were three eras in which men lived to 900, 450, and 70 respectively. G.
C. Lewis thinks there is no authentic record of a life exceeding 100
years. W. Farr in 1871 said that in 1821 there were 216 centenarians in
England; in 1841, 249; 1851, 215; 1861, 201; 1871, 160, making a total
of 1,041, of whom 716 were females. Walford (in his _Insurance Guide
and Handbook_) compiled a list of 218 centenarians from what he deemed
authentic sources, and J. B. Bailey in 1888 in his _Modern Methuselahs_
discussed the question; while Humphry (1889) in his nine hundred
returns, found 52 centenarians, 36 of whom were women.
[45] “The days of our years are three-score years and ten, and if by
reason of strength they may be four-score years, yet is there strength,
labor, and sorrow for it is cut off and we fly away.”
[46] _Oriental Studies_, Boston, 1894.
[47] _Das Lebensalter in der Jüdischen Literatur_, 1875.
[48] M. D. Conway, _The Wandering Jew_, 1881, and T. Kappstein,
_Ahesver in der Weltpoesie_, 1906.
[49] _Greek Life and Thought_, London, 1896.
[50] E. Bard, in _Chinese Life in Town and Country_, p. 39, says,
“In the worship of ancestors we have the keystone to the arch of the
social structure of this strange country [China]. Hundreds of millions
of living Chinese are bound to thousands of millions of dead ones.
The cult induces parents to marry off their children almost before
maturity so that they should have offspring to make their lives after
death pleasant by means of worship and oblations. No matter how great
the squalor, there must be many children in the family,” etc. “Funeral
expenses for parents are the most sacred of all obligations, and it
is not uncommon for the living to sell their estates to the very last
foot and often their houses to be able to render proper homage to the
deceased.” Presents of coffins, elaborate ones, are often very common.
The sons of a deceased parent must at least wear mourning for three
years, though this has been lately reduced to twenty-seven months. The
expenses of elaborate funerals are enormous.
[51] Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander_, p. 34.
[52] _The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us_, 1912.
[53] _Republic_, 329.
[54] _Talks with Athenian Youth, tr. anon._, New York, 1893, 178 p.
[55] _Aristotle on Youth and Old Age, Life and Death and Respiration_,
tr. by Ogle, London, 1897, 135 p.
[56] Book II, Chap. 13.
[57] _Ibid._, Book I, Chap. 5.
[58] See Black’s _Law Dictionary_, 2d ed., 1910.
[59] Cicero, _Cato Major or Old Age_, tr. by Benjamin Franklin.
[60] “Woman as Witch” in his _Chances of Death_, 1897, vol. 2, pp. 1–50.
[61] _History of Witchcraft in England, 1557–1718_, p. 114.
[62] _Notes on Witchcraft_, Amer. Antiquarian Society.
[63] _The New Stone Age in Northern Europe._ New York, Scribner, 1921.
[64] “Old Age and Death.” _Amer. Jour. Psychol._, Oct., 1896, vol. 8,
pp. 67–122.
[65] _Die Hygiene des Lebensalters._
[66] “Four Types of Protestants: A Comparative Study in the Psychology
of Religion,” _Jour. of Relig. Psychol._, Nov., 1908, vol. 3, pp.
165–209.
[67] _The Vedanta Philosophy_, London, 1914, p. 16 _et seq._
[68] R. H. Lowie, _Primitive Society_, 1920.
[69] _Altersklassen und Männerbünde_, 1902.
[70] _Atlantic Monthly_, 1915, p. 385.
[71] See Le Bon: _The World in Revolt_, 1921.
[72] _The Art of Living Long_, tr. 1914, 207 p.
[73] _History of Life and Death._
[74] _Spectator_, Oct. 17, 1711.
[75] _The Anatomy of Melancholy._
[76] _Gulliver’s Travels_, Chap. X.
[77] _After Noontide_, Boston, 1883, 168 p.
[78] _Old People_, Boston, 1909, 236 p.
[79] _Three-score and Ten._ Dedicated to Chauncey Depew.
[80] _The Secret of Long Life_, London, 1871, 146 p.
[81] _Masters of Old Age_, Milwaukee, 1915, 280 p.
[82] “When Is Man Immortal?” _Technical World_, March, 1914.
[83] “A Physical Marvel at Seventy-three,” _Amer. Mag._, Dec., 1917.
[84] _Old Age: Its Cause and Preservation_, The story of an old body
and face made young, New York, 1912, 309 p.
[85] “Young at Seventy,” _Am. Rev. of Revs._, vol. 57, p. 415.
[86] _The Secret of a Much Longer Life and More Pleasure in Living It_,
1906.
[87] “Why I am Well at Eighty,” _Ladies Home J._, April, 1919.
[88] “How I Came to Be Doing More Work at Seventy-Seven than at
Forty-Seven,” _Ibid._
[89] “Viewpoint of a Sexagenarian Contributor,” _Unpartizan Rev._,
July, 1920.
[90] James M. Ludlow, _Along the Friendly Way_, Reminiscences and
Impressions, New York, 1919, 362 p.
[91] “Confessions of a Septuagenarian Contributor,” _Unpartizan Rev._,
July, 1920.
[92] _Old Age._
[93] _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, Chap. VII, and also in
_Over the Teacups_, p. 26, _et seq._
[94] _Old Age and Immortality_, 1893.
[95] “Eighty Years and After,” _Harper’s_, 1919, p. 21.
[96] “De Senectute,” _Atlantic_, 1913, p. 163.
[97] “I Refuse to Grow Old,” _Amer. Mag._, Sept., 1919.
[98] “The Passing of Old Age,” _Independent_, Jan., 1914.
[99] “At Seventy-Three and Beyond,” _Atlan._, 1914, p. 123.
[100] _The Pursuit of Happiness_, 1893.
[101] _The Individual: A Study of Life and Death_, 1910, especially
Chap. 13, “The Period of Old Age.”
[102] _The Fixed Period_, New York, 1881.
[103] _The Man in the Street_, 1907, 405 p.
[104] Richard le Gallienne, “Not Growing Old,” _Harper’s_, 1921.
[105] “Young and Old,” _Nineteenth Century_, June, 1920.
[106] _Worry and Old Age_, 1909, Chap. 14.
[107] London, 1908.
[108] _Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch_, New York,
1921, 400 p.
[109] See my _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, New York,
1917, Chap. XI, p. 694, _et seq._
[110] See the end of the last chapter.
[111] _Ibid._
[112] By permission of, and special arrangement with, Doubleday, Page &
Co.
[113] By permission of, and special arrangement with, Houghton Mifflin
Co.
[114] From Webb’s _New Dictionary of Statistics_, 1911, p. 471.
[115] _A Discussion of Age Statistics_, Rept. 13, Bull. Bur. Census,
1904.
[116] _Life Insurance_, N. Y., 1915.
[117] _World Almanac_, 1921, p. 438.
[118] _Report of a Special Inquiry Relative to Aged and Dependent
Persons in Massachusetts_, 1915.
[119] _The Elements of Vital Statistics_, Lond., 1909, 326 pp.
[120] “Death Rate and Expectation of Life,” _Science_, vol. 43, 1916.
[121] _Table of Mortality Statistics._
[122] “The Influence of Vital Statistics on Longevity.” Address at the
sixth annual meeting of the Association of American Life Insurance
Presidents, Dec., 1912.
[123] _The Duration of Life and Conditions Associated with Longevity_:
A study of the Hyde genealogy (dealing with 8,797 persons) ending, for
the most part, with the year 1825.
[124] “Who Shall Inherit Long Life?” _Nat. Geog. Mag._, June, 1919.
[125] _Social Adjustment_, New York, 1911.
[126] “Report on National Vitality,” Bulletin of the Committee of One
Hundred on National Health, July, 1909, No. 30.
[127] _How to Live_, New York, 1915, Section 7.
[128] “The Extension of Human Life,” _Sci. Am. Sup._, May 4, 1916.
[129] _Social Insurance_, New York, 1913, Chap. 12, “The Old Man’s
Problem in Modern Industry.”
[130] “The Biology of Death,” _Sci. Mo._, March-Sept, 1921, _incl._
[131] _Old Age Pensions: Their actual working results in the United
Kingdom_, London, 1915, 196 pp.
[132] Edith Sellers, “From the Old Age Pensioners’ Standpoint,”
_Nineteenth Century_, Jan., 1920.
[133] _Report of the Massachusetts Commission on Old Age Pensions,
Annuities and Insurance_, Jan., 1910, 409 pp.
[134] “Canadian Government Annuities,” _Polit. Sci. Quar._, 1915, p.
425 _et seq._
[135] _Old Age Poverty in Greenwich Village_, 1915, 105 pp.
[136] Joseph Swain, “State Pension Systems for Public School Teachers,”
_Bureau of Education Bull._, 1916.
[137] “Report on Teachers’ Pensions,” _N. E. A. Proc._, 1919, vol. 57,
p. 145 _et seq._
[138] See Paul Studensky, _Teachers’ Pension Systems in the United
States_, New York, 1920, and the companion volume of Lewis Meriam,
entitled _Principles Governing the Retirement of Public Employees_, New
York, 1918.
[139] “Problem of Poverty and Pensions in Old Age,” _Amer. J. Soc._,
vol. xiv, 1908–9, p. 282 _et seq._
[140] See Spender, _Treatise on State Pensions in Old Age_, London,
1892; G. Drage, _The Problems of the Aged Poor_, London, 1895, 375 pp.;
Metcalf, _Universal Old Age Pensions_, London, 1899, 200 pp.; Booth,
_Pauperism and the Endowments of Old Age_, New York, 1906. For extended
inquiries see _The Report of the Royal Commission on Old Age Pensions_
by the Commonwealth of Australia, 1906; also, William Sutherland, _Old
Age Pensions in Theory and Practice_, London, 1907.
[141] _Old Age Dependency in the United States_, New York, 1912, 361
pp. a masterly book.
[142] _The Survey_, vol. 31, 1914–15, p. 483.
[143] _Clinical Lectures on Senile and Chronic Diseases_, Lond., 1881,
Lecture 1.
[144] “Old Age and the Changes Incident to it,” _Brit. Med. J._, March
9, 1885.
[145] “Old Age,” _Brit. Med._, Oct 2, 1891.
[146] “Senility, Premature Senility, and Longevity,” _Med. Jour._, New
York, July 10, 1915.
[147] “Nature of Old Age and of Cancer,” _Brit. Med. J._, Dec. 27, 1913.
[148] “Degeneration, Senescence, and New Growth,” _J. Med. Research_,
vol. 33, 1918, p. 485.
[149] _The New Pathology of Syphilis_, Harvey Lectures 1917–19, p. 67.
[150] “Die Psychosen des Rückbildungs- und Greisenalters,” _Handbuch
der Psychiatrie_, Spezieller Teil, 5 Abteilung, Leipzig, 1912.
[151] “Senile Mentality,” _Inter. Clin._, vol. 4, 1916, p. 48.
[152] “Some Clinical Indications of Senility,” _Inter. Clin._, vol. 2,
1914, p. 93.
[153] _Old Age: Its Care and Treatment in Health and Disease_, London,
1913, 312 pp.
[154] _Old Age Deferred: The Causes of Old Age and Its Postponement by
Hygienic and Therapeutic Measures_, Philadelphia, 1911, 572 pp.
[155] “The Medical Significance of Old Age,” _Med. Press and Circ._,
London, May 20, 1914.
[156] “The Delay of Old Age and the Alleviation of Senility,” _Jour.
Amer. Med. Assn._, July 15, 1905.
[157] “Centenarians and Nonagenarians,” _Med. Rec._, Feb. 15, 1913.
[158] “Ancient and Modern Theories of Age,” _Maryland Med. Jour._, vol.
49, Feb., 1906.
[159] _Fads of on Old Physician_ (Sequel to _Plea for a Simpler Life_),
London, 1897.
[160] “The Conservation of Energy in Those of Advancing Years,” _Pop.
Sci. Mo._, 1903.
[161] “Evidences of Full Maturity and Early Decline,” _Pop. Sci. Mo._,
1917, p. 411.
[162] _Über Altern und Sterben_, Wien, 1913, 33 pp.
[163] See his articles in _Sci. Mo._, March-Sept., 1921.
[164] _The Germ Plasm_, 1893, p. 198 _et seq._
[165] See his _Essays Upon Heredity and Other Biological Problems_,
vol. i, 1889, especially Chaps. I, “The Duration of Life,” and III,
“Life and Death.”
[166] In his able and brilliant discussion on “The Biology of Death,”
_Scientific Monthly_, March, 1921, p. 202.
[167] _American Handbook of Physiology_, 1897, p. 883.
[168] Mildly challenging Weismann’s non-inherited ability of acquired
qualities is Irving Fisher’s “Impending Problems of Eugenics,” _Sci.
Mo._, Sept., 1921.
[169] _The Nature of Man_, 1904, 309 pp. and _The Prolongation of
Life_, 1907, 343 pp.
[170] See a valuable but unprinted thesis of W. T. Sanger, a pupil of
mine, “The Study of Senescence,” Clark University, 1915.
[171] In her fascinating life of her husband, “Life of Elie
Metchnikoff,” (1920) the widow of Metchnikoff describes him in his last
days as anxious “that his end, which seemed premature at first sight,
did not contradict his theories but had deep causes, such as heredity,
and the belated introduction of a rational diet, which he began to
follow only at fifty-three.” He was very anxious that his example of
serenity in the face of death should be encouraging and comforting.
He had no illusions and knew for a long time that he was living only
from day to day. He speculated whether the end would come to-day or
to-morrow and had several specific “death sensations,” pledging his
wife to hold his hand when the end came. He was interested in the
completion of her biography of him, begged for enough pantopon to bring
an eternal sleep, directed his friend how to perform his autopsy and
what to look for in the different organs, provided for his cremation
and the final disposition of his ashes, etc. All was done as he wished,
with no funeral and no speeches, flowers, or invocations, and his
ashes now lie in an urn, as he directed, in the library of the Pasteur
Institute.
[172] _The Problem of Age, Growth, and Death; A study of
Cytomorphosis_, 1908, 280 pp.
[173] See his monumental textbook, _A Laboratory Textbook of
Embryology_, 1903, 380 pp.
[174] _Senescence and Rejuvenescence_, 1915, 481 pp.
[175] For our purpose his views are best summed up in his _The Organism
as a Whole from a Physiochemical Viewpoint_, 1916, 379 pp. See more
specifically his “Natural Death and Duration of Life,” _Science_, 1919,
p. 578 _et seq._
[176] Prof. W. J. V. Osterhout, “On the Nature of Life and Death,”
_Science_, April 15, 1921, thinks that we can measure by quantitative
methods such fundamental conceptions as vitality, injury, recovery,
and death, by electrical resistance, which, he thinks, is an excellent
index of what is normal condition. He believes that this holds for
both plants and animals, for all agents known to be injurious change
the electrical resistance at once. He also thinks this resistance
proportional to a substance he believes he found and decomposed by a
series of consecutive reactions and that on this basis we can write an
equation that permits us to predict the course of the death process
under various conditions, so that we can say that at a certain stage
it is one-fourth or one-half completed. Stated chemically, the normal
life process consists of a series of reactions in which a substance
_O_ is broken down into _S_, and this in turn breaks down into _A_,
_M_, _B_, and so on. “Under normal conditions _M_ is formed as readily
as it is decomposed and this results in a constant condition of the
electrical resistance and other properties of the cell. When, however,
conditions are changed so that _M_ is decomposed more rapidly than it
is formed, the electrical resistance decreases” and other properties
are simultaneously altered. Thus death results from a disturbance in
the relative rates of the reactions that constantly go on.
[177] _Sci. Mo._, Aug., 1921.
[178] _Sci. Mo._, Apr., 1921.
[179] Genevieve Grandcourt, “The Immortality of Tissues: Its Bearing
on the Study of Old Age,” _Sci. Am._, Oct. 20, 1912. Also “What is Old
Age?: Carrel’s Research on the Mechanism of Physical Growth,” _Sci.
Am._, Nov. 23, 1918.
C. Pozzi, “_Vie Manifestée Permanente de La Tissue_,” _La Preusse
Médicale_, p. 532.
Alexis Carrel, “Present Condition of a Strain of Connective Tissue
Twenty-eight Months Old,” _Jour. Exper. Med._, July 1, 1914, and
“Contributions to the Study of the Mechanism of the Growth of
Connective Tissue,” _Jour. Exper. Med._, Sept., 1913. See also
_Science_, vol. 36, 1912, p. 789.
[180] “Geschlechtstrieb und echt sekundäre Geschlechtsmerkmale als
Folge der Innersekretorischen Funktion der Keimdrüsen,” _Zeit. f.
Physiologie_, Sept., 1910.
[181] “Pubertätsdrüsen und Zwitterbildung,” _Archiv. f. Entwicklung der
Organismen_, vol. 42, 1916, pp. 307–332.
[182] “Erhöhte Wirkungen der inneren Sekretion bei Hypertrophie der
Pubertätsdrüsen,” _Archiv. f. Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen_,
vol. 42, 1916, pp. 490–507.
[183] “Klima und Mannbarkeit,” _Archiv. f. Entwicklungsmechanik der
Organismen_, vol. 46, 1920, p. 391.
[184] “Verjüngung durch Experimentelle Neubelebung der alternden
Pubertäts Drüse,” _Archiv. f. Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen_,
vol. 46, 1920, Part 4.
[185] “Steinach’s Forschungen über Entwicklung, Beherrschung,
und Wandlung der Pubertät,” _Ergebnisse der Inneren Medizin und
Kinderheilkunde_, 1919, vol. 17, pp. 295–398.
[186] “Eugene Steinach’s Work on Rejuvenation,” _N. Y. Med. J._, vol.
112, 1920, p. 612.
[187] “Steinach’s Rejuvenation Operation,” _Central. f. Chirurgie_,
Sept. 11, 1920.
[188] “Further Observations on Sex-Gland Implantation” _Jour. Am. Med.
Assn._, vol. 72, 1919, p. 396.
[189] H. E. Goodale of the Massachusetts Experiment Station, Amherst,
says (_Science_, Oct. 23, 1914, p. 594.): “A brown Leghorn male was
castrated completely when twenty-four days of age, and the ovaries from
two brood sisters, cut in several pieces, were placed beneath the skin
and also in the abdominal cavity. At the date of writing the bird is as
obviously female as its brood sisters. Skilled poultrymen have called
it a pullet. While it has all the female characteristics, there can be
little doubt, from the scars still visible as well as other things,
that it was a male.” It is not likely that its peculiar individuality
was feminized owing to constitutional condition. The author believes it
was feminized by the implanted ovaries in similar fashion to the rats
and guinea pigs of Steinach.
[190] _Life: A Study of the Means of Restoring Vital Energy and
Prolonging Life_, New York, 1920, 160 p.
[191] _The Glands Regulating Personality_: A study of the glands of
internal secretion in relation to the types of human nature. New York,
MacMillan, 1921. 300 p.
[192] Book X, Epigram 23 D.
[193] _Spoon River Anthology._
[194] _Morale: The Supreme Standard of Life and Conduct_, New York, D.
Appleton Co., 1920. 376 pp.
[195] _Belief in God and Immortality: A Psychological, Anthropological,
and Statistical Study_, Boston, 1906.
[196] See my _Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 113 _et seq._
[197] “The Psychology of the Teacher,” _Ped. Sem._, vol. 24, p. 531 _et
seq._
[198] See Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_, sec. 3.
[199] _Monologen._
[200] _Ethics_, Book II, Chaps. 3 and 6 and Book IV, Chap. 3.
[201] In the last few paragraphs I have, thanks to the courtesy of
the editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, freely used material from my
anonymous article on “Old Age” in the January, 1921, number.
[202] _The World in Revolt_, New York, 1921, 256 pp.
[203] See my _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, Chapters
VII and XI.
[204] _Am. J. Psychology_, vol. 8, p. 67 _et seq._
[205] “A Study of Fears,” _Am. J. Psy._, vol. 8, pp. 147–249; see also
Street, “A Genetic Study of Immortality,” _Ped. Sem._, vol. 6, p. 167
_et seq._
[206] L. Proal, _L’éducation et le suicide des enfants_, Paris, 1907,
p. 204; G. Budde, _Schülerselbstmorde_, Hanover, 1908, p. 59; E. Neter,
_Der Selbstmord im kindlichen und jugendlichen Alter_, 1910, p. 28;
L. Gurlitt, _Schülerselbstmorde_, n. d., p. 59; Baer, _Der Selbstmord
im Kindesalter_, Liepzig, 1901, p. 85; Eickhoff, “Die Zunahme der
Schülerselbstmorde an den höheren Schulen,” _Zts. f. d. evangel.
Religionsunter, an höheren Lehranstalten_, 1909, vol. 4; Eulenberg,
“Schülerselbstmorde” in _Der Saemann_, 1909, vol. 5, p. 30; Gebhard,
“Über die Schülerselbstmorde,” _Monatss. f. höhere Schulen_, 1909,
vols. 3 and 4, p. 24; Wehnert, _Schülerselbstmorde_, Hamburg, 1908, p.
81.
[207] Mersey “La Tanatophilie dans la famille des Hapsbourg,” _Rev. d.
Psychiatr._ Nr. 12, 1912, p. 493, describes the strange case of love of
death in the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and also Charles V. The
former, after the death of her husband, Philip the Beautiful, whom she
loved with a consuming jealousy, had his body embalmed and only with
great difficulty could she leave the coffin where it lay. Sometimes
she had it open for a time to kiss the bare corpse and did so with the
greatest passion. This state had periods of remission and exacerbation.
The history of Charles, too, can be paralleled in many modern
instances, while dreams show us still more clearly how necrophilic man
can be.
Witry says that from his own practice he believes thanatophobiacs are
almost always from the professional or upper middle classes, those from
the lower classes meeting death with more stoicism than those of the
upper. Catholics, he says, have little fear of death. Thanatophobes
are usually neuropaths of degenerate heredity. One of his cases, a
girl of 18, was suddenly seized by a violent fear that she was to die
within an hour. She was put to sleep by suggestion and woke up normal.
A woman teacher of 49 had three acute attacks, cured by suggestion. A
middle-aged physician, after being drunk, had acute fear of death and
Hell, which yielded to medical treatment. Old priests, we are told, are
especially subject to it if neuropathic or “_scrupuleux_.” Some feel
it acutely when, after fighting a long reluctance to do so, they have
compelled themselves to make a will.
Ferrari, “La peur de la morte,” _Rev. Scient._, 1896, vol. 5, p. 59,
describes several cases of tolerably healthy people who have had sudden
premonitions of death, with acute fear, and who have shortly thereafter
died, some of them from no ascertainable cause. Hence he raises the
question whether an obsession of death can be so strong as to cause it.
Fiessinger gives a case, which he thinks directly due to the symptoms
of _angina pectoris_, and discusses whether patients should be told
their disease and its gravity, in view of this possible phobia.
Ferrero, “La crainte de la morte,” _Rev. Scient._, 1895, vol. 3, p.
361, thinks the natural man has little fear or thought of death and its
representations in art and religion are not painful, on account of the
sustaining influences of our organic sensations. Still, the thought
of death does have much influence upon our ideas, and to some extent
our sentiments. The mathematical chances of death plays a small rôle
in affecting the choice of professions. It is only the prospect of
impending death that shocks. Chronic invalids have little fear but only
hope for life, for example, consumptives, while to some, for example,
Indian widows, lovers, it is attractive. Hence he thinks it normally
indifferent and sometimes agreeable but becomes an object of fear only
by association.
Levy, “Die agoraphobie,” _Wien. allg. medizin. Zeitung_, 1911, nr. 10,
gives a case of an agoraphobia that was rooted in a very distinct dread
of death by a special disease. A Dubois psychotherapeutic conversation,
which proved the fallacy of its grounds and to which the patient
attended, although with great effort, did not quiet but only increased
excitement. Excitement and exhaustion were the chief symptoms and the
case yielded only to isolation and rest.
[208] A striking illustration of this comes to me, as I write, in
a popular song with lugubrious music that many of my young friends
persist in singing and humming as if haunted by it.
SOME SWEET DAY
Did you ever think as the hearse rolled by
That some day or other you must die?
In an old churchyard, in a tiny lot,
Your bones will wither and then they’ll rot.
The worms’ll crawl up, the worms’ll crawl in,
They’ll crawl all over your mouth and chin.
They’ll bring their friends, and their friends’ friends, too;
You’ll look like hell when they’re through with you.
[209] _Am. J. Sociology_, March, 1921.
[210] _The Next War_, New York, 1921.
[211] _Die Sprache des Traumes_, 1911, pp. 214–284.
[212] _The World as Will and Idea_, vol. iii, p. 249 _et seq._
[213] See my _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, Chap. XI,
“Death and Resurrection of Jesus.”
[214] _Guérison et Evolution dans la Vie de l’Âme._
[215] See my _Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology_, Vol. II,
Ch. 11.
[216] _Science and Immortality_, Boston, 1904, 54 pp.
[217] G. Lionel Taylor (_The Stages of Human Life_, N. Y., Dutton,
1921, 363 p.) says that there are four stages in the process of what
he believes to be normal dying: first there is an appealing, anxious,
puzzled look at the approach of a great crisis, as if wondering what
the person will meet in the great darkness that is supervening, all not
without an element of fear; then there supervenes a peace and poise, in
which stage leavetakings are often made; third, when the last breath
is drawn there is a strong impression on the bystanders that there has
been a real departure, that something very actual has left, so that
the body is no longer the friend. Then for perhaps an hour there is on
the face of the dead a look of unnatural beauty and tranquillity which
slowly fades and corruption begins.
Some in contemplating their own demise think chiefly of the isolation
it involves. The most sympathetic friend can only go to the brink
of the dark river which we must all cross absolutely alone. Suicide
lovers sometimes vainly attempt companionship. Those about to die who
are conscious of their impending departure may bid sad farewells to
their friends. Aging and sickly people conscious of an impending end
but with their faculties intact realize the inevitableness of dying
alone no matter how many friends are about but are silent about it with
an instinctive reluctance to betray any of the perturbations which
weaklings, patheticists, and hystericals seek refuge in.
To others the thought of their own death centers in the idea of
their body. They see themselves in thought pale, rigid, insentient,
and follow the fate of their corpse in every detail at least up
to interment or cremation, and some cannot resist a rather strong
imaginative experience as to how their living sentient body would feel
the rigidity, the cold, the treatment to which it is subjected, the
gazing of friends, a custom which some interdict.
A third group focus on the cessation of activities which begins in the
dimming of the senses and the weakening of motor or other powers, and
here, too, we find two attitudes: that of compulsive but regretful
renunciation, and the other of longing as for rest. In this sense death
begins with the first abatement of powers, and as we have time slowly
to adjust to progressive enfeeblement we do so more and more readily.
[218] See especially J. H. Leuba, _The Belief in God and Immortality_,
1916, 340 pp.
[219] _The Philosophy of Long Life_, Tr. from the French by Harry
Roberts, 1903, 305 pp.
[220] See Chapter VI.
[221] _The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays_, New York, 1901.
[222] _The Conception of Immortality._ Also _The World and the
Individual_.
[223] _The Evolution of Immortality._
[224] _The Study of Life and Death._
[225] _Death and Afterward._
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Page 425: “so they we have come” was printed that way, but may
be a misprint for “so that we have come”.
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