It would seem that we lawyers have taken insufficient account of the
characteristics of senility. These characteristics are as definitive as
those of childhood or of sex, and to overlook them may lead to serious
consequences. We shall not consider that degree of old age which is
called second childhood. At that stage the question seriously arises
whether we are not dealing with the idiocy of age, or at least with a
weakness of perception and of memory so obvious that they can not be
mistaken.
The important stage is the one which precedes this, and in which a
definite decline in mental power is not yet perceivable. Just as we see
the first stage of early youth come to an end when the distinction
between boy and girl becomes altogether definite, so we may observe that
the important activity of the process of life has run its course when
this distinction begins to degenerate. It is essentially defined by the
approximation to each other of the external appearance of the two
sexes,--their voices, their inner character, and their attitude. What is
typically masculine or feminine disappears. It is at this point that
extreme old age begins. The number of years, the degree of intelligence,
education, and other differences are of small importance, and the
ensuing particularities may be easily deduced by a consideration of the
nature of extreme old age. The task of life is ended, because the
physical powers have no longer any scope. For the same reason resistance
to enemies has become lessened, courage has decreased, care about
physical welfare increased, everything occurs more slowly and with
greater difficulty, and all because of the newly-arrived weakness which,
from now on, becomes the denotative trait of that whole bit of human
nature. Hence, Lombroso[289] is not wrong in saying that the
characteristic diseases of extreme old age are rarer among women than
among men. This is so because the change in women is not so sudden, nor
so powerful, since they are weak to begin with, while man becomes a weak
graybeard suddenly and out of the fullness of his manly strength. The
change is so great, the difference so significant and painful, that the
consequence must be a series of unpleasant properties,--egoism,
excitability, moroseness, cruelty, etc. It is significant that the very
old man assumes all those unpleasant characteristics we note in
eunuchs--they result from the consciousness of having lost power.
It is from this fact that Kraus (loc. cit.) deduces the crimes of
extreme old age. “The excitable weakness of the old man brings him into
great danger of becoming a criminal. The excitability is opposed to
slowness and one-sidedness in thought; he is easily surprised by
irrelevancies; he is torn from his drowse, and behaves like a somnolent
drunkard.... The very old individual is a fanatic about rest--every
disturbance of his rest troubles him. Hence, all his anger, all his
teasing and quarreling, all his obstinacy and stiffness, have a single
device: ‘Let me alone.’”
This somnolent drunkenness is variously valued. Henry Holland, in one of
his “Fragmentary Papers,” said that age approximates a condition of
dreams in which illusion and reality are easily confused. But this can
be true only of the last stages of extreme old age, when life has become
a very weak, vegetative function, but hardly any crimes are committed by
people in this stage.
It would be simpler to say that the old man’s weakness gives the earlier
tendencies of his youth a definite direction which may lead to crime.
All diseases develop in the direction of the newly developing weakness.
But selfishness or greed are not young. Hence we must assume that an
aging man who has turned miser began by being prudent, but that he did
not deny himself and his friends because he knew that he was able to
restore, later, what they consumed. Now he is old and weak, he knows
that he can no longer do this easily, i.e., that his money and property
are all that he has to depend on in his old age, and hence, he is very
much afraid of losing or decreasing them, so that his prudence becomes
miserliness, later mania for possession, and even worse; finally it may
turn him into a criminal.
The situation is the same sexually. Too weak to satisfy natural
instincts in adults, he attacks immature girls, and his fear of people
he can no longer otherwise oppose turns him into a poisoner. Drobisch
finds that by reason of the alteration of characteristics, definite
elements of the self are distinguishable at every stage. The
distinguishing element in extreme old age, in senility, is the loss of
power, and if we keep this in mind we shall be able to explain every
phenomenon characteristic of this period.
Senile individuals require especial treatment as witnesses. An accurate
study of such people and of the not over-rich literature concerning them
will, however, yield a sufficient basis to go on. What is most important
can be found in any text-book on psychology. The individual cases are
considerably helped by the assumption that the mental organization of
senility is essentially simplified and narrowed to a few types. Its
activities are lessened, its influences and aims are compressed, the
present brings little and is little remembered, so that its collective
character is determined by a resultant, composed of those forces that
have influenced the man’s past life. Accurate observation will reveal
only two types of senility.[290] There is the embittered type, and there
is the character expressed in the phrase, “to understand all is to
forgive all.” Senility rarely succeeds in presenting facts objectively.
Everything it tells is bound up with its judgment, and its judgment is
either negative or positive. The judgment’s nature depends less on the
old man’s emotional character than on his experience in life. If he is
one of the embittered, he will probably so describe a possibly harmful,
but not bad event, as to be able to complain of the wickedness of the
world, which brought it about, that at one time such and such an evil
happened to him. The excusing senile will begin with “Good God, it
wasn’t so bad. The people were young and merry, and so one of them--.”
That the same event is presented in a fundamentally different light by
each is obvious. Fortunately, the senile is easily seen through and his
first words show how he looks at things. He makes difficulties mainly by
introducing memories which always color and modify the evidence. The
familiar fact that very old men remember things long past better than
immediate occurrences, is to be explained by the situation that the
ancient brain retains only that which it has frequently experienced. Old
experiences are recalled in memory hundreds and hundreds of times, and
hence, may take deep root there, while the new could be repeated, only a
few times, and hence had not time to find a place before being
forgotten. If the old man tells of some recent event, some similar
remote event is also alive in his mind. The latter has, however, if not
more vivid at least equally vigorous color, so that the old man’s story
is frequently composed of things long past. I do not know how to
eliminate these old memories from this story. There are always
difficulties, particularly as personal experiences of evil generally
dominate these memories. It is not unjust, that proverb which says “If
youth is at all silly, old age remembers it well.”