CHAPTER IV

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.