There are alternations of mood. Depression may be acute to-day and

vanish to-morrow, depending not only upon sleep and nutrition but

the weather and incidents, perhaps trivialities, in the environment.

Irritability may alternate with apathy and the old may lose

self-control and anon exercise a high degree of it. Some days they feel

comfortable and even vigorous and on others are miserable. Now weak

organs or functions, heart, stomach, bowels, rheumatism, or whatever

be the besetting troubles, are much in evidence and symptoms may grow

dangerous until the old have a new sense of the fragile hold they

have upon life, which may end suddenly in some of these weak moments.

Then these symptoms intermit and they feel well and take heart again

till the next “spell.” A few never allow themselves to be caught

without some one or more trusted drugs kept handy for immediate use in

emergencies and much, too, might be written of “warnings” and their

sometimes epochal effects upon both the inner and outer life. Thus

the old may sometimes give way to their feelings and become stormy,

lachrymose, perhaps even violent, and they may react from this to

a state of almost philosophic poise, which passes upon even their

own outbreaks with objective detachment and psychological interest,

phenomena that we may call the “apologetics” of old age. Thus emotivity

and reason may succeed each other.

The old are very dependent upon weather, climate, and seasons. Winter

is hardest on them. Not only does it mean more indoor life and less

activity but cold is one of the chief enemies of the old and winter is

also supercharged with subtle and profound symbolisms of their own

stage of life which deploy more beneath than above the threshold of

their consciousness. What old person does not shudder at the thought

of being buried in snow and ice. Even the autumn is for them full

of somber analogies of the stage of the sere and falling leaves, of

the ripening and garnering of the fruits of the earth, of the first

blighting frosts. All the old long for the rejuvenation of springtime

and perhaps daydream of it when nature is snowbound. Some keep diaries

of wind, temperature, and storm and become weather-wise, while those

who can, seek warmer climes, especially when winter begins to break,

a season statistics show is most fatal for the old. The poet who sang

that he could endure anything but a series of bad days must have had

the psychic barometry of old age. Thus we draw nearer to nature, our

source and our home.

Even sex often does not decline and die without terminal oscillations

in its course and in extreme cases apathy and aversion may alternate

with abnormal erotic outbreaks dangerous alike to the health of the

individual, to domestic happiness, and even to public morals. Those

who have led lustful lives may resort to unnatural and illegal forms

of vice and thus illustrate the various perversions of this function.

While only a few indulge in orgies, very few fail to note occasional

spontaneous but transient calentures here suggestive of potency long

after it was deemed “closed season.” Such recrudescences, though they

seem to be nearly always only partial, are very prone to deceive and

may lead to follies. Instead of being indulged, cultivated, or even

welcomed, as by an inveterate fallacy too prevalent with the young

they too often are, the old should rigorously ignore and suppress

all such manifestations in this field. While the full realization of

impotence brings a psychalgia all its own, it also has physiological

and psychological if not conscious compensations, while belated and,

especially, stimulated activity of reproductive functions not only can

never result in offspring of value to the world but saps vitality and

accelerates the decay of every secondary sex quality of mind and body,

so that complete chastity, psychic and somatic, should be the ideal of

the old. They should be not only embodiments of purity but the wisest

of all counselors in this field. Only to those in whom asceticism and

sublimation have done their perfect work will there come an Indian

summer of calentures for the higher ideals of life and mind, while

those who fail here can never know the true and consummate joy of old

age.

For myself, I frankly confess that the longer I live the more I want to

keep on doing so. Hence in the last two years of retired leisure I have

given far more time and attention to personal hygiene, regimen, and

diet than ever before and have mildly experimented with myself in many

ways. I have tried eating two and four meals daily, going early and

late to bed, forcing myself to lie there a fixed number of hours and at

certain times again retiring and rising with no regularity as I felt

like doing. I have tried systematic rub-downs, self-massage; cold and

warm, frequent and infrequent baths, have equipped a modest gymnasium

and taken mild but systematic exercises with various apparatus and then

abandoned all this or done nothing of it without an inner prompting. I

have followed prescribed diets and tried many special foods, interested

myself in vitamines, beginning with Eddy’s manual and trying out

vegex preparations, although no one has as yet studied the effects of

any of the three species of vitamines upon old age, as has been done

for other stages of life. I even used olive oil, which so many of my

correspondents praise both for internal and external application,

stopped smoking for a week, which seemed greatly to prolong each

day after thirty years of mild addition to nicotine, corrected for a

time and then yielded to the senescent’s tendency to constipation,

experimented with alcohol in several forms, even with Pohl’s spermine

tablets and minimal doses of phosphorus, etc. But out of all these

moderate hygienic adventures I have so far found no topping specific.

It would be interesting to try out the gland-grafting experiments which

seem to have regenerated the famous Vienna surgeon, Lorenz, and others,

and I think I would gladly offer myself as a _corpus vile_ for the

Steinach operation to study its psychological effects at first hand.

Although I have found in the above experiences a few things that I so

far believe helpful to me, I have derived from them all no advice to

offer others except, if time and inclination favor, to try out all

things for themselves. Plenty of moderate exercise out of doors, active

intellectual interests, both just to the point of healthy fatigue

but no more, are fundamental. One must have insight and considerable

power of self-observation to profit therefrom. But the main thing is

to develop and maintain at its highest possible morale a rigorous and

unremitting hygienic conscience that will never let down but always

enforce the doing of what we know to be best. Otherwise we may eat,

sleep, work, and generally do or not do what seems best as we list. I

am even skeptical about the almost universal counsel for tranquillity

and against worrying, for more or less anxiety is not only the normal

lot of man but it gives a tonic sense of responsibility which we all

need.

Special forms of pleasure that have to be prepared for attract us less

but we find soul-filling satisfaction in just living, contemplating

nature wherever we happen to be, eating, sleeping, and in common

converse. All these things acquire a charm unknown before, while

“occasions,” events, and sights that are rare and afar lose their

charm. Thus we come to love each hour of each day and the most wonted

and commonplace experiences, while our work (for no one can be happy

without some task) even though it seemed drudgery before becomes

attractive because we can do it when and as we will and as much or

little of it as our strength permits or inclination impels. Meanwhile

friends grow nearer and dearer, enmities fade, and we enjoy converse

with those toward whom we were formerly indifferent or even averse.

Thus old age may become the most satisfying and deeply enjoyable stage

of life. Hitherto the rest cures we prescribed have been more or less

reversionary to youthful or even primitive scenes and activities.

It may be that this is wrong and that for all such cases we should

prescribe for the young or middle-aged the occupations, attitudes and

regimen of the old and that this would be more therapeutic.

Sensations and movements are the basis of mind and when these are

reduced, as in old age, we often have the phenomena of mental

starvation because the supplies of mental pabulum are lowered. If

the old have little society and do not read, their psychic powers of

digesting their experience run down, not from any inherent weakness

but because they are on short rations for data. The mills could often

grind as fine and as much as ever, and possibly more so, but the grist

is lacking. Thus there are two opposite trends in the old. On the one

hand, their physical state demands attention to themselves so that they

tend to have “too much ego” in their cosmos, grow subjective, and may

become hypochondriacal or preoccupied with their own personal problems.

The simple decree of nature is that we must give more care to our

health and morale and it is excess, defect, or perversion of this deep

instinct that causes so many of our pains and our ill repute. Here lies

our chief need of personal study, psychoanalysis, and reëducation. The

other trend is in the opposite direction, toward depersonalization.

We need to look out, not in; to forget self and to be absorbed in

objectives. We are impelled to escape our environment and interest

ourselves in things that are remote in space and time, in nature, the

stars, great causes and events, personalities, masterpieces, to escape

from our miserable selves by their contemplation. We cannot see the

countenance of things for their soul. It is this fugue from self that

perhaps impels us to so many of our petty pastimes and diversions:

solitaire, idle reveries, our predilection for amusements, fussiness

about our things; as well as, on the negative side, to neglect our

person, really of dwindling value in the great world and soon to be

effaced. All these phenomena are outcrops of the tendency by which

“the individual withers and the world is more and more,” for our

fate is depersonalization and resumption into nature. These symptoms

are anticipations of euthanasia or, to use a phrase now current in

psychology, they are extrovertive and not introvertive, just as the old

were meant to be.

Thus the old need a higher kind and degree of self-knowledge than they

have yet attained. They need to be individually studied and analyzed

to avoid the new, peculiar, and not yet understood dementia præcox now

so liable to supervene upon the youth of age. This is all the more

needful now that the intensity of modern life with its industrial and

managerial strain compels earlier withdrawal from its strenuosities.

We live longer and also begin to retire earlier, so that senescence is

lengthening at both ends. Hence, again, the need of midwives to bring

us into the new world of higher sanity now possible to ever more of us.

Both we and our civilization now so checked, disoriented, and misled by

immaturities are in such crying need of a higher leadership that is not

forthcoming! We are suffering chiefly from unripeness. The human stock

is not maturing as it should. Life is so complicated that the years of

apprenticeship are ever longer and harder, so that we are exhausted ere

we become master workmen in our craft and the rapid age turnover this

involves robs us of too many of the choicest fruits of experience.

Our retirement, even if gradual and not dated, calls attention to our

age, and to our little world we grow old a decade the day it learns

that we have stepped aside while to ourselves we may and ought to

feel that we grow young that day by yet more. The springtide of a new

stage of life stirs our pulses and we feel something of the care-free

happiness of another childhood. Our intimates often remark signs of a

new vitality, physical and mental. If we are normal and not too spent,

we feel new hopes, ambitions, make plans to surpass our old selves and

to at last be, do, say, enjoy something really worth while. As we pass

our life in review, stage by stage, up to the present, it seems so

incomplete, fragmentary, tentative, and altogether unsatisfying that

we almost wonder whether it was we ourselves who really lived it or

someone else whose career we are following with an objective detachment

never felt before toward our own ego. Certain it is that a new veil

falls between us and our past, gauzy and transparent though it be.

Our psychic nature did not intend us for the rôle of reminiscence so

persistently assigned to and so commonly accepted by us. Our juvenile

memories are but the ragbag vestiges of a vaster experience that had to

be forgotten to be completely incorporated in our personality and to

ascribe too much significance to them is the fetishism of senility. If

we write up our lives, we can make them interesting and valuable only

by using our better information about and more sympathetic rapport with

ourselves with the same impartiality that a close and discerning friend

would do if he had all our data. It is for the things of the present

and for the problems of the future that our mental vision becomes

clearer than ever before. Our wish and will to achieve and make our

insights known and prevail acquire new force.

How different we find old age from what we had expected or observed it

to be; how little there is in common between what we feel toward it

and the way we find it regarded by our juniors; and how hard it is to

conform to their expectations of us! They think we have glided into a

peaceful harbor and have only to cast anchor and be at rest. We feel

that we have made landfall on a new continent where we must not only

disembark but explore and make new departures and institutions and give

a better interpretation to human life. Instead of descending toward

a deep, dark valley we stand, in fact, before a delectable mountain,

from the summit of which, if we can only reach it, we can view the

world in a clearer light and in truer perspective than the race has yet

attained. It is all only a question of strength and endurance. That is

the great and only but, when we squarely face it, a staggering proviso.

In all essentials we are better and more fit than ever before save

only for the curse of fatigability, for age and death are nothing but

fatigue advancing and finally conquering life. One single example of

a hale old man dowered by nature and nurture, as immune from tire as

youth is, would give the world a new idea of senectitude.

We were told that the days and years pass more quickly as we advance

in age. What could be more false! Not only do the nights, of which

sound sleep once made us unconscious, often drag slowly through their

watches but each day is so long that we often find time hanging heavily

on our hands; and when we have done all the work we can, we turn to

our friends to amuse us and seek and perhaps invent pastimes or fresh

occupations to kill it. Sermons, lectures, meetings of all kinds, even

the drama, seem long. The winter lingers until we almost fear that

spring will never come or out-of-doors attract us again. When we have

to wait for things, the time stretches as if there were no limit to

its elasticity, and when we turn to reveries of the past, it is a last

resort from the _tedium vitae._ We really have time for anything and to

spare. It is the demon fatigue that makes us so in love with diversion,

for rest is more and more frequently sought and found in change.

They say our emotional life is damped. True, we are more immune

from certain great passions and our affectivity is very differently

distributed. But what lessons of repression we have to learn! If

the fires of youth are banked and smouldering they are in no wise

extinguished and perhaps burn only the more fiercely inwardly because

they cannot vent themselves, as even the Lange-James theory admits for

repressed feelings, inhibition of which really only makes them more

intense. We get scant credit for the self-control that restrains us

from so much we feel impelled to say and do and if we break out, it

is ascribed not to its true cause in outer circumstance but to the

irritability thought characteristic of our years. Age has the same

right to emotional perturbations as youth and is no whit less exposed

and disposed to them. Here, as everywhere, we are misunderstood and

are in such a feeble minority that we have to incessantly renounce

our impulsions. Marie Bashkirtseff has betrayed the secret of how the

pubescent girl, and Karin Michaëlis, of how the woman of forty feels,

but no one has ever attempted to explain the sentimental nature of

aging men or women. Even Solomon and Omar Khayyam presented only the

negations and not the reaffirmations of the will-to-live.

Thus it is no wonder if the old often best illustrate what Henri

Bordeaux describes as “the fear of living.” René Doumic thinks that

there is a new disease in our old civilization and that many in

their prime only make a pretense of living. “We value our peace above

everything and wish to keep it at all hazards, however dearly we

must pay for it. We shun responsibilities, avoid risks and chances

of struggle, flee from adventure and danger, seek to escape from

everything that makes for the charm and value of life. We no longer

have any faith in the future because we no longer have faith in

ourselves.” How well this applies to those brought face to face

with the last stage of life! The fact is, we must find and make new

pleasures as well as new modes of escaping and mitigating the pains of

body and mind and must learn anew how to love, hate, fear, be angry,

pity, and sympathize aright. The serenity ascribed to us would pall

and bring stagnation. It is a profound psychological truth that “out

of the heart are the issues of life” and our heart is not dead; on the

contrary, emotivity probably increases with years and most expressions

of it, unless they become more sublimated, strongly tend to grow more

crass and stormy. We were never more interested in things, persons,

events, causes, in life itself. Slights rankle, neglect chills,

attentions warm, affronts incense, and praise thrills us, and if we

grow censorious, it is because our ideals of conduct and motive have

become higher and purer and we are in a greater hurry to see them

realized. We cannot help these gropings toward a new dispensation and

their very persistence is the best reason for believing that they will

sometime find their goal in a better stage of things and an improved

race of men not in another world but here. Perhaps some of even what

we now call the whimsies of the old will be seen to be the labor pains

of humanity, which is striving thus to surpass itself, to improve the

stock, and to really bring in a new and higher type of man.

Old age is called second childhood. This is all wrong for there is

nothing rejuvenative about it. Childhood is the most active, healthful,

buoyant, and intuitive stage of life; age, the least so. What is there

really common to the morning and evening of life? We even lose much

of the power we once had to understand children and if we love them,

we want them at a distance, while they in turn understand and like us

little by nature. They inherit far less of the results of experience

with grandparents than with parents, for less of us have survived to

see them and the latter often resent or even criticise our relations to

them. We are nearly as immune to their prevailing faults as to their

diseases. They listen to our stories but do not crave our cuddling,

are jealous if we usurp the offices of their parents to them and are

usually a little less free in our presence. Nature has established

an old and close rapport between one generation and the next. Even

young teachers get on best with young, old with maturer pupils. M. L.

Reymert[197] says that his general study shows him that teachers below

twenty and over forty are of less influence than teachers between

these ages. The most efficient man teacher is generally from 25 to

35. The best woman teacher has a little wider range--say, 20 to 40.

But of course mental and physiological age are different. Helen M.

Downey “Old and Young Teachers,” _Ped. Sem._, June, 1918, concludes,

on the basis of questionnaire data, that the younger teacher has other

interests that keep her bright and cheerful; the older teacher excels

in mental and the younger in dispositional traits; the old are careless

of appearance and this does not appeal to children; the older rule by

discipline, not by love and kindness; the young teacher more often

overtaxes her strength; the old are more set in methods, fixed in

opinions, resent suggestions for improvement. Many suggest there should

be an age limit of 60. Health and temper suffer. There are often

negative psychic idiosyncrasies. Older teachers lose contact. Social

traits are a very great factor in consideration of the period of rapid

growth. Dispositional qualities are more impressive than any other. The

favorite teacher is enthusiastic, energetic, young. Pupils’ estimates

do not involve age when they speak of old and young. I know an old and

successful professor, interested in his work to the end, who, when he

retired with powers little abated and much work yet to be completed,

found that in his speech and writing he imagined himself as no longer

addressing minds in the student, even graduate, stage, but wished to be

at home teaching and learning from those not under forty, for at that

age real wisdom begins, the effects of special training having then

faded. A refocalization took place in his mind that involved not only

new methods but, yet more, new topics and subject matter. What student,

however mature, would care for and what curriculum in any university

in the world would include, for example, the theme of this volume. And

who but a _Greis_ would ever have found its preparation a fascinating

task! No, the old are not childish but, if they are normal, have simply

reached a stage of postmaturity that involves much of what Nietzsche

called the transvaluation of all values.

But if we can no longer see over the crest of the divide that separates

age from youth, if the acclivity is shut off, we do see more nearly

and clearly each step of the declivity and find the catabasis of life

no less zestful than its anabasis was in its time, while we have the

great advantage that comes from the power of being able to compare the

two and this itself opens rich mines of thought. The age of the sage

has bid a final adieu not only to all puerilities but to the callow

ardors of the ephebic stage. He is graduated from adulthood and turns,

as by an eschatological instinct, to ultimate human problems, of which

younger minds, though they may be attracted to them, can have only

premonitions. To hear and heed this call is the strength and glory of

those who are complete “grown-ups.” The trouble with mankind in general

is that it has not yet grown up. Its faults, which we see on every

hand, and the blunders that make so large a part of history are those

of immaturity. Man has always felt the need of guardianship and because

he lacked wisdom invented immortal omniscient gods--tribal, national,

or cosmic--to guide him and as embodiments of what he felt lacking in

himself. It is just this need of an all-wise providence that the old

will come to supply if and as humanity slowly ripens.

If and so far as it is true that a woman is as old as she looks and a

man as he feels, all this processional, especially its early stages,

is, on the whole, probably much harder for her than for him. She feels

not only that “the coming of the crow’s foot means the going of the

beau’s foot,” but the first wrinkles about the mouth, eyes, or under

the chin; the loss of fullness about the neck, to which folklore

attributes such significance; the first sagging of the cheeks or the

bust; the first signs of fading complexion; or the first gray hair,

give her bitter food for thought. Her cult of the mirror, that man

progressively eschews, increases. But woman commands far more resources

against all such heralds of decay than man and gives vastly more

time to compensating for them. Youth is her glory and she has more

comeliness to lose than man, who can, however, never quite rival the

hag in ugliness. She has also great powers of compensation by affecting

girlish ways and has a stronger hold on her youth than man and old

women do not feel as old as old men do. Throughout married life, if

she is well, woman usually assumes the rôle of the younger mate, even

though she be not so in years. Though sexual involution comes to her

earlier she remains in far more sympathetic touch with the young than

her husband, so that there is a half truth and not mere gallantry in

the saying that a woman never grows old.

The woman just beginning to feel passé has a psychology all her

own of which even the devotees of that science know little and she

herself yet less, but of which Michäelis in “The Dangerous Age” has

given us a few glimpses. Love, wifehood, and motherhood, as the world

knows, constitute the very heart of woman’s life and as the chance of

these supreme felicities begins to fade, something, which it is no

extravagance to call desperation, begins to supervene. Its processes

may and often do deploy so deep in the subconscious regions of the

soul that even she is but little aware of the transformations that are

taking place there. These she quite commonly ignores, camouflages,

or honestly and resentfully denies. The psychopathologist sees most

clearly the tragedies of aborted Eros as they are writ large in morbid

symptoms. But with the same causes and conditions, the same processes

are always more or less active, however repressed, and the unmated

woman before the close of the third decennium has generally come to

some terms with the death of the phyletic instinct within her, which is

the core and mainspring of her life, and has dimly anticipated all the

significance of old age.

Happily for her dawning senescence, it is one of the great achievements

of our age that she has found a splendid vicarious function in culture

and new social, vocational, professional, and political services, so

that she can now give to mankind much that is best in her that was once

confined to the narrower sphere of domestic life, and be little or none

the worse but perhaps the better for it. This great emancipation is

building a new and higher story to her life, so that as the amative,

heyday charm of her youth begins to abate she need no longer despair.

All her earlier occupational training that fits her for self-support,

complete or even partial, is, thus, anticipatory of this third new

stage of life that the senium now begins to reveal to her. This gives

her now a certain advantage over man. Thus she has found a new call

that means not only more safety but priceless service, to which all

her superfluous energies can be devoted, and the world now waits with

an eagerness that is almost suspense to see whether she will have the

courage to grapple with the most vital problems that confront her sex

and find the wisdom to solve them or, neglecting these, be content with

the effort to do man’s work in man’s ways.

Thus, woman is older than man in the same sense that the child is

older than the adult, because her qualities are more generic and she

is nearer to and a better representative of the race than he and also

in that she sublimates sex earlier and more completely, entering the

outer shadows of senectitude in the thirties. But she is also, at

the same time, younger than he in that she is less differentiated in

tissues or traits, less specialized and in her early decades must learn

better than he to conserve so much that is best in the physique and

_esprit_ of her youth. If her physiological change, when it comes, is

more marked, abrupt, and datable, the psychic changes she undergoes are

far more gradual and imperceptible, while her sympathy with youth and

even childhood, and in general not only her moral but all her normal

instincts, which are the best gift the adolescent stage of life has to

offer, are keener and surer.

This critical age has its own peculiar temptations to which woman

entering middle life sometimes succumbs. She, like man, is prone to

ask of the future whether it is all to be like the present or past

and, if so, what is to become of the unfulfilled dreams of youth. The

Prince Charming never came; or perhaps her ideal has proven only a

clay image; or her affection, or his, may have found another focus

that seems worthier. Hence it is in no wise strange that some women,

hitherto good by the old standards, now make a break with their past,

impelled to do so by an augmented desire to taste all the joys of life

before it is forever too late. Not only does it seem intolerable to

go on to the end as they are but there is perhaps some tempter who

detects and waters these seeds of discontent and helps the middle-aged

woman on to feel that she has been a coward to life. Beaudelaire, who

certainly thought he understood French women, said that for most of

them at thirty-five who are married and perhaps for even more who are

unwed, anything was possible. Even curiosity is a spur to adventure

and fancy, if not conduct, may prompt to cast off all restraints. “Why

not?” is a question that incessantly arises and every answer seems

unsatisfactory. And how many of us can qualify, by being without sin,

to cast the first stone at those who fall here. Such women are too old

to enter upon a life of vice but often form secret and occasionally

very happy alliances with, usually, older men, which may last for years

without involving any abandonment of their stated occupation or leaving

the ranks of respectability and with now, unquestionably, a growing

disposition on the part of society to condone, even though it may

suspect or even know.

Again, as we men grow old, we recognize that we have lost something

of whatever attraction we have had for the other sex generally and

often come to regard most of its members as somewhat trivial and to

prefer the society of other men. Even the love of husbands and wives

happily married takes on a different character; and they are fortunate,

indeed, if the losses are balanced or compensated for by the gains,

as they should ideally be, or if friendship waxes as erotism wanes.

The old beau who devotes attention without intention to younger women

can, at best, only amuse and rarely interest them, although they may

feel subtly flattered. Sometimes they find delectation in cajoling him

and playing upon his weaknesses and they may also come to indulge in

a freedom of speech and manner with him that they would never permit

themselves with men of their own age; while, conversely, friendships

between older women and younger men are always more sincere. The

case of the doddering dotard with the flapper is rare, save in the

literature of senile psychopathology and medical jurisprudence, where

it is by no means uncommon. But this we shall not here discuss.

Senescent men are also too prone to attribute the other manifestations

of their own abatement of philoprogenitive energy to the lessened ardor

of their wives and perhaps to invoke the abnormal stimulus of some

wild love to sustain, or at least to test, their vigor, not realizing

that such a course accelerates rather than retards the involution that

comes with age. The jealousy felt towards young, ardent wives by their

older husbands lest they be made cuckold constitutes probably a far

less frequent triangle and involves, on the whole, less suffering than

that experienced by wives who are growing frigid with years toward

their still lusty spouses. The age disparity of the climacteric may

open a door for suspicions, however groundless, which may secretly

sap the foundations of conjugal harmony. In this connection one must

always take account of the fact that there is not seldom in man an

Indian summer, of months or occasionally years, of enhanced inclination

toward sex before its final extinction, as returns elsewhere reported

show. From personal confessions and medical literature, studies made

in old men’s homes, and sporadic evidence from other sources, I am

convinced that for a very large proportion of old men the progressive

loss of potence, with all the complex phenomena attending it, is one

of the chief, and in many cases the very most psychalgic, experience

of all the changes involved in growing old. There is a very pregnant

sense in which a man is as old as the glands that dominate this phase

of life. Laymen, including most physicians, know very little of and

find it hard to credit the devices that may be resorted to to retard

this atrophy or often to conserve and even enhance the vestiges of this

function, the excessive activity of which is the surest preventative

of a happy old age. While there are those who late in life resort to

vicious and even pathological modes of gratification, those who became

debauchees in youth or middle life very rarely even attain old age and

all should heed the motto to “beware the Indian summer of eroticism.”

Who has not observed among his personal acquaintances, to say nothing

of men conspicuous in public life, the tragic consequences to health,

occupation, and even life, that follow when December weds May; and what

shall we say, even from the eugenic standpoint, of women who prefer

to be an old man’s darling to a young man’s slave. We know, too, that

children born of postmature parents are liable, if they mature at

all, to do so precociously and to show early signs of senility, just

as children born of those of premature age often fail to reach full

maturity. If contraceptive methods are ever justifiable, it is to

prevent offspring of both but perhaps especially the former kind.

On the other hand, we have many clinical cases in which after years

of impotence from psychic causes the removal of these latter not only

restored the procreative function but relieved the patient of often

grave symptoms and brought marked mental rejuvenation. This has been

often recorded, especially for men. In some instances, apparently,

children have been born after such a period of dormancy or latency that

has lasted for years. Not only is the downward slope of this curve

far more gradual than its pubertal rise and, as we have seen, attended

by more oscillations but there is far more individual variation in the

age at which decline begins and ends, so that one man’s norm would be

another man’s disaster and perhaps doom.

The old should be able to think most dispassionately upon such themes

and should feel it incumbent upon them to transmit the wisdom born of

their own experience and observation to the younger generation. In

certain primitive races and modern societies and communities the old,

usually of the same but sometimes even of the opposite sex are expected

to initiate the members of the rising generation in the mysteries of

sex. We now know the dangers and sometimes even incestuous tendencies

with which such a course is sure to be beset; and if parents attempt

to discharge this function for their children, or wherever it is

done personally, there are perils. Indeed, none of the methods of

sex education, of which so many have lately been proposed, have been

entirely satisfactory. Perhaps this kind of training really ought to be

one of the special functions of grandparents and they should prepare

themselves for it. At any rate, while we have learned much in recent

years of sex psychology, pedagogy, and hygiene for the young, we have

almost no literature, and indeed know almost nothing of it for the old;

and this despite the fact that they are in the greatest need of it and

have practically no help in the solution of the novel and intricate

problems they must now face, as best they can, alone.

One reason why treatises on the climacteric are so few and so

inadequate is that the importance of the subject has only lately been

recognized even by psychiatrists, gynecologists, or gerontologists;

while another and more important reason is found in the extreme

reluctance of the old to tell. Psychoanalysis is impossible unless

it can overcome resistance, which it is often put to its wit’s ends

to do. Modesty and perhaps prudery have veiled the physiological and,

far more, the psychological aspect of this function. This instinct of

concealment is no less, and probably far greater, in the old. They

balk, evade, and deceive the investigator at every step. Psychoanalysts

have strangely neglected this theme and generally even refuse to take

patients of over forty or fifty years of age. What can be learned in

homes for old men is usually by observation, from attendants and from

inmates’ talk of each other, and those who answer questionnaires almost

always fail to note facts even remotely related to this theme. Still,

in this _terra incognita_ we occasionally come upon the naked truth,

only to realize that the retreat of Amor is the counterpart of its

advent, as autumn is of springtide. What nature gives so prodigally in

pubescent and adolescent years she garners with no less circumstance

and no less attention to details, so that we are left, in the end,

with no less tendencies to “polymorphic perversity” than before these

were constellated into the normal sex life of maturity. Even some of

the proclivities to auto-erotism and homosexuality may arise. Amatory

reveries may increase as dreams of this character decrease and there

are often flashing recrudescences of desire.

Despite or after the long and sometimes acute perturbations of the

_vita sexualis_ as it draws to its close, there is very commonly a new

and deep peace. We are glad that the storm and stress are passed and

that we are henceforth immune to passion. This is doubtless the normal

and, let us hope, increasingly common course. The sexes approximate

each other in both traits and features as they grow old and thus if

we can no longer love women sensually, we have a new appreciation of

the eternally feminine, its intuitive qualities, and its more general

and moral interests. Old women acquire a new power of sensing things

from man’s point of view and hence companionship between old men and

women may become a noble surrogate for carnal love. Happy the old who

can enjoy comradeship on this plane with a congenial member of the

other sex and thrice happy is the very rare case of well-mated couples

who find, when the time comes, that they have qualified for this

consummation of their union with each other!

Folklore, especially in its grosser forms, but also classical and

medieval,[198] and even modern literature--medical, psychiatric, and

most of all the writings of psychoanalysis--abound in descriptions of

the tragic results that ensue when husband and wife do not grow old

together or when their age disparity is too great. Even in the purest,

most loyal, and best mated pairs there is often a period of unspoken

and perhaps half unconscious suspicion and jealousy, which each partner

regrets and tries to banish from waking thoughts, outcrops of which

often appear in dreams. Roués have always felt that the young wives of

old men were their legitimate prey. The former seem more liable to fall

before temptation than if they had remained single. Bitter, indeed, is

often the lot of Senex who dotes on a young bride and seeks to atone

by lavishing gifts and providing every kind of service and social

enjoyment that infatuation can suggest for waning marital potency.

While society austerely and even ostentatiously condemns such a wife

who errs, it secretly judges her to be not without some excuse and has

little pity, and often only covert derision, for such a husband.

Yet more pathetic is the converse case of the aging wife of a spouse

yet young and lusty. The sense that she is losing her charm for the

man she loves is gall and wormwood to her very soul. She, too, seeks

to atone by making herself physically more attractive, not only to

him but to others that he may see their admiration, by every kind of

personal ministration and often by seeking literary, artistic, or other

success outside the family circle. She becomes painfully conscious of

the attractions of younger or otherwise more favored women whom her

mate meets and easily grows suspicious, not only with but often without

cause. She may feel the lure of incentives other women use to attract

men which her pride will not permit her to cultivate, although she may

make concessions to these more or less unconsciously. Tendencies thus

repressed may find outcrops in other fields and may even take the form

of symptoms, perhaps of fears for the well-being of her mate, even of

physical harm, business failure, social disgrace, or perhaps religious

heresy. In other cases she may be at last forced to admit infidelity on

his part and then it is that she finds herself face to face with the

dour problem of either trying to ignore or condone, and perhaps conceal

or excuse, his fault to others and living a hollow life of sham and

convention on the one hand; or of openly breaking and separating and

living henceforth a more or less isolated life, on the other. She must

thus very carefully weigh not only her own material interests but the

future of her children and the chance of pitiless public scandal.

In the medical literature on the menopause (Kisch, who studied 96

cases; Laudet, 95; Tilt, Faye, and Mayer, 97 each; and especially the

more philosophical Börner and Currier) we find very little save records

of physiological and anatomical changes, so that it has remained

for the Freudians to exploit the perhaps far more important psychic

changes that characterize this stage of life. The love life in the

new and larger sense in which this is now coming to be understood

is the very heart and core of woman’s nature and it plays a vaster

rôle in the life of man than had till lately been suspected. Whatever

thwarts or diverts the _vita sexualis_ from its normal course brings

all kinds of disasters in its train. About all the transformations of

senescence root in the fact that by this recession of the life tide we

are gradually cut loose from the more vital currents of the life of

the race and individuality now has its unique innings. The debauchee,

who marries perhaps late and after long experience with women of easy

virtue, often finds a modest wife disappointing and misses all the arts

of allurement he had found in his orgies. So, too, when the happily

married man finds the earlier ardors of his wife growing cool, he is

only too liable to suspect waning affection, when in fact nature is

only following her inexorable course. He may even wonder if, in the

inscrutable ways Eros has, his wife’s fancy may have unconsciously

strayed to some more engaging man or fallen a victim to some baseless

suspicion of him, or at any rate grown weary of his advances and

perhaps come to a new and deeper realization of some of his faults or

limitations. Feeling that their present relations are not all they

once were, he fails to recognize that it is the very nature of love to

grow sublimated as years pass and to become more and more an affair of

the soul, as it perhaps once was of the body; and that it is just at

this critical point that it normally becomes richer, riper, and more

truly devoted. The wife’s impulse to minister disinterestedly to her

husband is never so strong or pure as at the moment when the power of

giving complete physical satisfaction first begins to wane and it is

at this epoch that it can so easily and naturally be transmuted into

the impulse to serve, help, enter into closer and more sympathetic

mental relations, to know more of his inner life, struggles, ideals,

ambitions and even his business and in general to enlarge the surface

of personal contact. This is thus the psychological moment for man to

interest his mate in the affairs he has most at heart and to make her a

partner, perhaps even of some of the details, of his own vocation. This

golden opportunity, however, is brief, and if it passes unimproved it

will soon be forever too late and each mate will, ere long, find him-

or herself starting on devious ways that will lead them ever further

apart.

Conversely, when a young wife first realizes that her husband is aging,

she should understand that nature now impels him to compensate for

physical by mental devotion and she may have even to face some form

of the above choice whether it is better to be an old man’s darling

or a young man’s slave. In him this is the nascent hour for becoming

interested in her inmost wishes, aims, feelings, ideals, and to help

her actualize them. In extreme cases he may come to devote himself to

dancing attendance upon her wishes and even whims unless she herself

has the good sense to restrain him from this fatuity, for by cleverly

humoring and restraining him she can just now make him very plastic to

her will. Thus her problem sometimes is to save him from an infatuation

for her that might become ridiculous and that some wives are foolish

enough to love to display. She must, however, learn to develop in and

accept from him better succedanea for the more libidinous eros and to

do this she must enter more sympathetically and intellectually into his

life, as instinct now impels him to enter into hers. The impulse in the

physiologically younger partner of every married pair to anticipate

the age of the older one, if wisely met, may result in greater sanity

and more true happiness for both. Who does not know fortunate cases

where just this has occurred, rare though they may be and many as

are the wreckages that have resulted from too great age disparity?

If the wife tends to be in the mother image and the husband in the

image of the father, a rich and rare blend of parent and mate love is

sometimes seen. The feelings of the ideal bridegroom for the ideal

bride are never without a strong ingredient of the affection he once

cherished for his own mother, while one factor of her love for him was

transferred from or first developed toward her father. At the same time

each has a small ingredient of parental feeling toward the other, as if

they were each child and each parent to the other. In all such unions

the younger partner rejuvenates the older far more than the older ages

the younger.

In all of us oldsters the problem of personal hygiene looms up with

new dimensions. In our prime we gave little attention to health. The

body responded to most of the demands we made upon it. If we were very

tired, we slept the sounder. We paid no attention to minor ailments,

which soon righted themselves. We ate or drank what, and as much as,

appetite called for; exposed ourselves to wind and weather, heat and

cold, wet and dry, with impunity. We could go without sleep a night

or two if necessary and feel but little the worse for it; could abuse

our eyes, nerves, heart, digestion, muscles, and more or less escape

all evil consequences; could work at top speed and with an intensity

that rung up all our reserve energies for days or weeks if need be, and

could feel sure that our good constitutions would enable us to bear

the strain and to more or less promptly recuperate. But now our credit

at the bank of health begins to run low. We must husband our resources

lest we overdraw them. Overdoing is a veritable bugaboo. There are

certain symptoms we must never disregard on pain of days of lessened

efficiency. We have had one or more signs of special weaknesses we

must heed. There are some things that we must rigorously refrain from

eating or doing. There is a weak organ, too, that must be humored.

Appetite has perhaps been too keen and must be reined in. We must

select the items of our dietary with discretion and self-restraint. A

typical respondent says he can still indulge his love of hill-climbing,

bicycling, swimming, and even skating, and exercises with diverse

gymnastic apparatus that he has had set up in his garage, to say

nothing of golf, which he holds to be best of all, and autoing, which

has become with him a veritable craze. All these things at the age of

seventy-five he still does occasionally but is becoming shy of doing so

lest he be thought trying to seem young. He lately stole out alone at

twilight to skate, when one urchin called to another, “Hey, Johnnie,

doesn’t that old man skate bully?” He said he felt like cuffing him for

calling him “old” and hugging him for praise of his performance.

One correspondent says in substance that he did his best mental work

evenings, continuing usually until at least one o’clock in the morning

and then tumbling into bed, perhaps after a half an hour spent on a

novel as a nightcap or brain sponge, and falling at once into profound

sleep undisturbed by dreams and with hardly a change of posture till

nature’s demands were entirely satisfied. Now all his serious study

can best be done by daylight and particularly in the early part of the

day and he has a simple set of routine prescriptions for going to bed

and to sleep. He occasionally awakes and even arises before morning,

knows the sounds of all the night watches and is generally aware of

the early dawn despite darkened windows, and is sometimes disturbed by

troublesome dreams. He needs less sleep as measured by hours but is

more dependent upon its soundness. Again, he sometimes feels moody,

depressed, irritable, and wonders if anyone observes it. He has a

new horror of nerves, of constipation, of age lapsing to dotage,

anecdotage, and garrulity or taciturnity. If anything goes physically

wrong, he recuperates more slowly and blesses his stars that his

good heredity pulls him through, and nurses his weaknesses the more

thereafter. He has a notion that by keeping at work all he is able to,

he is conserving an energy that by letting up, if he is ill, will be

drawn upon to restore him to condition; whereas if he were habitually

idle this reserve would be thereby dissipated. With all the precautions

and handicaps thus entailed he is still sometimes able to attain a high

state of morale, to feel again the old youthful joy and exuberance of

life, although it now has a new and unique quality. There are also

certain new ambitions he dares not express. He even longs for new

adventures before it is forever too late. He realizes that all his life

he has been more or less repressed by “the fear of living” and would

now entirely escape it. He is not content to grind over the old mental

stores but would reach out into other fields and find new ones. He

fears intellectual stagnation and routine as the senses begin to grow

dull and that he is not well nourished mentally or suitably prepared

for old age and the psychic marasmus to which it is so prone.

The old tend to grow stale and sterile of soul from two causes: lack of

fresh mental pabulum and abatement of the power of creative ideation,

and so their mentation lapses and they become fatuous about trifles

and feel that just as they must live circumspectly lest their body

suffer some sudden collapse so their psychic self may crumble into

senility and the subtle processes of disintegration and dementia slowly

supervene, a decline of which we are usually far less aware than of

physical decay. All these considerations, however, may and together

should constitute a splendid stimulus to activity. The very danger of

decline or breakdown is a spur to develop the higher powers of man in

this their time.

In such experiences we seem to have a condition of great interest

and also of practical importance. Physical infirmity and accident

which compel special attention to body-keeping often result in such

added care to hygienic condition that we are actually better and more

effective for the impairment. Just as an old man who takes special care

not to fall or to take risks is often safer from injury than a stronger

and less careful man, so in mental work consciousness of certain

shortcomings may act as a spur to take more pains and so to do superior

work. To this is added another stimulus. A senescent knows that his

friends and enemies will be liable to ascribe any imperfections in his

intellectual output to failing powers, and his horror of betraying this

is an added incentive to do his very best. If his last product could

be his best, he could die happier, and he cannot bear the thought of

exhibiting signs or stages of senile debility. To be willing to accept

the allowances that his hostile or even his amiable critics would be

willing to make for his years is craven. His chief danger is lest the

standards of self-censorship for his performances should unconsciously

decline and that he should come to judge his own inferior work as

superior. Of this the history of literature has countless examples,

more perhaps than of the opposite tendency.

Unquestionably, too, there is a certain maturity of judgment about men,

things, causes, and life generally that nothing in the world but years

can bring, a real wisdom that only age can teach. But to observe and

rely on this to compensate for thoroughgoing rigorism in demonstration

or mastery of copious details is a fatality too often seen. Finally,

we must realize that our own brain work must be done with less of the

afflatus that often aided us in youth or in maturity. Once our best

ideas came to us in heat after a warming up of our faculties, perhaps

into an erethic or second-breath state. We found ourselves in the grip

of a sort of inspiration that carried us on perhaps far into the night

or impelled us to exceptional activities for days or even weeks and

brought a reaction of lassitude in its train. But now, not only is

this generally less or lacking but our mentation must be more stated,

our hours of intense application must be kept within bounds, and there

is the perennial danger of overdoing and its penalties are surer and

more severe. Thus with age we must develop a new system or method that

recognizes and comports with our true mental age. We must have safely

passed the Scylla and Charybdis of affecting to be younger than we are

and of aping or adhering too conservatively to the manners of thought

and feeling characteristic of earlier youth, on the one hand; or, on

the other, we must escape the opposite attitude that often supervenes

later in the very old of vaunting their years and posing as prodigies

of senescence. In a word, the call to us is to construct a new self

just as we had to do at adolescence, a self that both adds to and

subtracts much from the old personality of our prime. We must not only

command a masterly retreat along the old front but a no less masterly

advance to a new and stronger position and find compensation for

what old age leaves behind in what it brings that is new. What, more

precisely, is this latter?

Youth should anticipate the wisdom of age and age should conserve the

spontaneity of youth, for this latter becomes not less but only more

inward as we advance in years. As the eye dims and the dominance of

optical impressions over attention declines, we see ideas clearer and

follow the associations of thought rather than those of the external

world with some of the same freedom as that which comes to dreams when

we close the eyes in sleep. So, when audition becomes less sensitive,

we turn to the voices of inner oracles. If current events impress and

absorb us less, we can knit up the past, present, and future into a

higher unity. As the muscles grow weak the will, of which they were

the organ, grows strong to make the new adjustments necessary, while

easy fatigue suggests renunciation and the acceptance of fate. Love

that is less individualized may become not only broader but stronger.

We worry because we feel we have not made the new adjustments necessary

or unsealed all the new sources of wisdom and strength. Symptoms call

upon us to develop hygienic sagacity and censoriousness may be only a

negative expression of a higher idealism that longs for a better world.

Schleiermacher[199] developed this thought, insisting that age was not

only conserved but renewed youth, that no one should feel old till he

feels perfect, that age brings us into contact with new sources of life

and gives a new sense of the independence of the soul from the body,

not thus presaging a higher post-mortem existence but being itself an

entirely new life.

If I were charged with the task of compiling a secular bible for

the aged, I would include two great and historic sections from

Aristotle.[200] In the one he describes virtue as the golden mean

between the extremes of excess and defect, as, for example, courage

between timidity and foolhardiness; liberality between avarice and

prodigality; modesty between bashfulness and impudence; courtesy

between rudeness and flattery; vanity between solemnness and

buffoonery, etc., in each of his twelve spheres of life. In the other

passage he characterizes the magnanimous man as slow, dignified in

speech and movement, forgetful of injuries, not seeking praise, open

and not secretive because unafraid, attempting but few things but those

things of gravity, neither shunning nor seeking danger, ready to die

for a great cause, more disposed to bestow than to receive benefits

or favors, inclined to be proud to the proud and kindly to the meek

and humble, always animated by the effort to make his conduct in life

as nearly ideal as possible--or, in a word, making honor his muse and

striving always to be worthy of it. Now, most of these traits belong

more to the ideal of old age than to that of any earlier period in

life. The most advanced regimen and hygiene of to-day--personal,

mental, moral, social, political, judicial, and even religious--have

little better to suggest for old age, in which all the qualities here

implied should culminate, bringing poise and philosophic calm.

This brings me to the main thesis of this book, which is that

intelligent and well-conserved senectitude has very important social

and anthropological functions in the modern world not hitherto utilized

or even recognized. The chief of these is most comprehensively

designated by the general term synthesis, something never so needed as

in our very complex age of distracting specializations.

In the first place, it has been noted that withdrawal from

biological phyletic functions is often marked by an Indian summer of

increased clarity and efficiency in intellectual work. Not only does

individuation now have its innings but the distractions from passion,

the lust for wealth and power, and in general the struggle for place

and fame, have abated and in their stead comes, normally, not only

a philosophic calm but a desire to draw from accumulated experience

and knowledge the ultimate, and especially the moral, lessons of

life--in a word, to sum up in a broader view the net results of all

we have learned of the _comédie humaine_. Taylor even considers the

climacteric as not pathological but as “a conservation process of

nature to provide for a higher and more stable phase of development,

an economic lopping off of functions no longer needed, preparing the

individual for a different form of activity.” Shaler, too, noted

“an enlargement of intellectual interests;” and there is much in

experience and literature to confirm this view. The dangers and

excitements of life are passed. Normal men tend to become more judicial

and benevolent and these traits suggest new possibilities for the race

as vicariate for the loss of the power of physical procreation. Many

think these phenomena are more marked in women but even men who seem to

have crossed the deadline at fifty or even forty are sometimes later

reanimated. Apperceptive data have increased facility for getting

together, perhaps even into a new and larger view of the world and

there may come a genuine psychic erethism or second-breath, half

ecstatic, as the soul on the home stretch expatiates “o’er all the

world of man a mighty maze, yet not without a plan.”

There is, thus, a kind of harvest-home effort to gather the fruitage

of the past and to penetrate further into the future. It is especially

interesting to note that this is a stage of life in which most of

the Freudian mechanisms and impulsions fail to act or strike out

in new ways and very different ones take their place, which as yet

lack any adequate psychology, much as this is needed. This is the

wisdom of Solomon and the Psalmists, the vision of the mystics, and

it exists only in those senescents who have found the rare power of

developing and conserving the morale of their stage of life, which, as

always, consists in keeping themselves at the top of their condition.

The Binet-Simon devotees have furnished us with no inkling of how

physiological and mental age are related in the old. Only when we know

this shall we be able to evaluate the mentality of real sages wise

in the school of life. This kind of sapience has a value quite apart

from and beyond the methods of our most advanced pedagogy. St. John

thinks that there is a certain rejuvenation due to a change from _a

posteriori_ to _a priori_ habits of mind and that subjectivity and

perhaps introversion now have their innings. However this be, ripe

old age has been a slow, late, precarious, but precious acquisition of

the race, perhaps not only its latest but also its highest product.

Its modern representatives are pioneers and perhaps its task will

prove to be largely didactic. It certainly should go along with the

corresponding prolongation of youth and increasing docility in the

rising generation if we are right in charging ourselves with the duty

of building a new story to the structure of human life. Thus, while old

age is not at all venerable _per se_ we have a mandate to make it ever

more so by newer orientation, especially in a land and age that puts a

premium upon its splendid youth, who are now often called to precocious

activities that sometimes bring grief and disaster because we have been

oblivious of the precept, “Old men for counsel.”

True old age is not, as we have seen, second childhood. It is no more

retrospective than prospective. It looks out on the world anew and

involves something like a rebirth of faculties, especially of curiosity

and even of naïveté. Moreover, age is in quest of first principles

just as, though far more earnestly and competently, ingenuous youth

is. We have seen that Plato taught that the love and quest of general

ideas was the true achievement of immortality because it brought

participation in the deathlessness of these consummations of the noetic

urge, for to him philosophy was anticipatory death because it involved

a withdrawal from the specific and particular toward the vastness and

generality of the absolute.

But to-day normal old age cannot be merely contemplative. True, our

very neurons do seem to aggregate into new and more stable unities

as if the elements of our personality were being bound more closely

together, perhaps in order that we might survive some disruptive crisis

or that our souls might not be torn apart by the wind if we chance to

die when it blows. But now we must conceive the synthetic trend as

chiefly in the pragmatic service of mankind. Our message must not be a

mere _morituri salutamus_, however cheerful, but must have a positive

and practical meaning and our outlook tower should have a really

directive significance.

One outstanding and central trait of good old age is disillusionment.

It sees through the shams and vanities of life. Many of the most

brilliant intellectual achievements of youthful geniuses in thought

construction are precocious achievements of the insights that more

properly belong to this later stage of life. Even Carlyle’s _Sartor_,

Hegel’s _Phänomenologie_, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Emerson, and many

more, to say nothing of Jesus and Buddha, show premature age. Young men

who occupy themselves with the highest and most abstract philosophical

problems are unconsciously affecting or striving to anticipate the

most advanced mental age and many of them who discourse so sapiently

on “experience” are really those who have had very little of it.

The ancient Hindus knew this for, as Max Müller tells us, the wise

grandfather rises above all the superstitions of his progeny, who still

worship the old gods while he has come to revere only the great One and

All and to see all faiths and rites as but painted shadows that fancy

casts upon the unknown, while he awaits the blessed absorption into

Nirvana.

Fewest of all are those who ripen to senescence in religion and realize

that there is no external god but only physical and human nature and

no immortality save that of our offspring, our work, or our influence.

All who fall short of this are arrested in juvenile if not infantile

stages of their development. So, in all matters pertaining to sex,

marriage, and the family, most remain slaves of the mores of their age

and do not recognize the pregnant sense in which love and freedom,

the greatest words in all languages, should somehow be wedded, even

though we do not yet know how. Only when the age of sex passes can

we look dispassionately upon all these problems and glimpse the ways

that easier divorce, backfires to lust and prostitution, some of which

current hypocrisy still taboos the very mention of, can bring. So,

too, in other social and in our economic conditions we are drifting

perilously near to wrecking reefs. The very basis of our civilization

is in the greatest danger for want of the very aloofness, impartiality

and power of generalization that age can best supply. We oldsters do

see these things in a truer perspective and the time has now come to

set them forth, despite the penalty of being voted pessimistic and

querulent.

With all these problems so wide open by and since the war crying

out for solution, surely senescents who have retired and enjoy

a superacademic freedom, with no responsibilities to Boards,

institutions, or corporate interests; with no personal ambitions, no

temptations of the flesh, and leisure for the highest things, have here

an inspiring function which they must rise to. Age, with a competence

sufficient for its needs, freed from anxieties about a future state,

with none of the dangers young men feel lest they impair their future

careers, should not devote itself to rest and rust (_Rast Ich, so rost

Ich_) or to amusements, travel, or self-indulgence of personal taste,

much as the old may feel they have deserved any and all of these, but

should address itself to these new tasks, realizing that it owes a debt

to the world which it now vitally wants it to pay. Great founders of

great institutions have acknowledged this debt and striven to pay it

in the service the rich can render. We intellectuals cannot pay it in

their coin, but we owe it no less and must pay in the currency we can

command.

Thus, old age is not passive and peace-loving but brings a new

belligerency. Many of us longed for the physical ability to enter the

war as soldiers and we did our “bit” in ways open to us with as much

zest as our juniors. We not only want but need spiritual conflicts and

feel reinforced aggressiveness against ignorance, superstition, errors,

the sins of cupidity, and lust. What a list of evils we could make

which we wanted to attack in our prime but lacked courage to grapple

with! One of these is the current idea of old age itself. We have too

commonly accepted the conventional allotment of three-score-and-ten

as applicable now, but the man of the future will be ashamed and feel

guilty if he cannot plan a decade or two more of activity and he will

not permit himself to fall into a thanatopsis mood of mind or retire

to his memories or to the chimney corner because an allotted hour has

struck.

If we have lived aright, nature does give us a new lease of life when

passion and the bodily powers begin to abate and the very danger of

collapse, as we have seen, is in itself a spur. The human race is young

but most are cut off prematurely. It is ours to complete the drama, to

finish the window of Aladdin’s tower, to add a new story to the life

of man, for as yet we do not know what full maturity really is and the

last culminating chapter of humanity’s history is yet to be written.

Never, then, was the world in such crying need of Nestors and Merlins.

What a priceless crop of experience in these postbellum days remains

unharvested for want of precisely the objectivity, impartiality,

breadth, and perspective that age alone can supply! These were the

qualities that enabled the venerable Joffre to make his masterly

two-weeks’ retreat at the Marne. It was done against the will and wish

of every one of his younger generals, who now admit that he saved Paris

and the war and that he was, in a sense, a true superman. The world

never so needed the wisdom, which learning cannot give, that sees the

vanity and shallowness of narrow partisanship and jingoism, of creeds

that conceal more than they reveal, of social shams that often veil

corruption, the insanity of the money hunt that monopolizes most of

the energy of our entire civilization, and realizes that with all our

vaunted progress man still remains essentially juvenile--much as he was

before history began.

What the world needs is a kind of higher criticism of life and all its

institutions to show their latent beneath their patent value by true

supermen who, like Zarathustra, are old, very old, with the sapience

that long life alone can give. We need prophets with vision who can

inspire and also castigate, to convict the world of sin, righteousness,

and judgment. Thus, there is a new dispensation at the door which

graybeards alone can usher in. Otherwise humanity will remain splendid

but incomplete. Heir of all the ages, man has not yet come into his

full heritage. A traveler, he sets out for a far and supreme goal but

is cut off before he attains or even discerns it. The best part of his

history is yet unwritten because it is unmade.[201]

Now that the pressure of outer reality and its duties remit, attention

tends more to focus on self and introspontaneity and mentation may take

on a slightly dreamy character in that it is less under the dominion of

the objective environment, from which there is a new sense of freedom.

The demand for rigorous proof of one’s theorizations is somewhat less

insistent and critics of them are felt to be lacking in insight. There

is a slight shift from inductive to deductive thinking and as the

senses begin to grow dim their verification of our speculations seems

a trifle less imperative. Experience has furnished masses of data that

yet remain uncoordinated and as we feel the need of a deeper synthesis

we grope our way to a bed-rock of first principles that will explain

the riddle of life better and give it more unity and give us new

personal satisfaction. Tendencies that have been repressed during our

active life revive.

Perhaps we take up fads or occupations that have hitherto had only a

secondary place in our lives or indulge ourselves by giving them now

the first place as centers of interest. Now at last we can do things we

have long wanted to do but for which we have had no time or strength.

We can also now indulge our taste in reading in fields we have long

desired to know better, can abandon ourselves to the enjoyment of music

or the fine arts; or we travel, collect, or occupy ourselves with

horticulture, agriculture or farm life. Again, there are more reveries

and these most commonly gravitate to things about us or especially

to the remote past. Thus we often revive and idealize old situations

and incidents. We think of things we said and did and supplement them

by imagining what we could, would, or should have said and done and

fill lost opportunities fuller of “might-have-beens.” Yet many as are

the lost chances such retrospect brings to view, and imperfect as we

realize our responses to circumstances and the environment have been,

we are rarely oppressed by regret and still less often by remorse, so

that the wish to relive our lives is never very strong. The flaws in

our surroundings or our errors in judgment, even in moral conduct, are

usually regarded with leniency and viewed with a certain detachment,

however clearly they are seen and however impersonally they are judged.

This is in part because we have to accept them as inevitable and are

trying to make a virtue of so doing, but yet more perhaps because we

are consoled by the fact that had our mistakes been very grave we

should not have attained our advanced age in such good condition of

body and mind. Thus we make our very age a kind of vindication of our

course of life. We find yet more comfort in the fact that we discover

so many points in which things might have been worse. We have escaped

so many perils and survived so many trials that have overwhelmed many

others that, on the whole, we deem ourselves among the fortunate of the

earth.

I am inclined to think that the above, instead of being an optimistic

should rather be regarded on the whole as a pessimistic view of old

age. Fielding Hall tells us that in Burma, where it is purest, Buddhism

teaches men to “die thinking on their good deeds.” I cannot believe

this is final but opine rather that old age has its positive duties to

the present and to the future as well as its privileges and immunities.

To be sure, if sex love is the mainspring of the most and best in

the human psyche, it follows that when this goes there is little

worth while left in us. Hence, the implications of the new analytic

psychology are most tragic for senescence and man is doomed to spend

the shriveled remnants of life in the contemplation of its only real

stage, which is now gone or fast vanishing. I urge, on the contrary,

that the facts of the soul-life of the aged teach us very clearly that

if the _vita sexualis_ has been anything like normal, we graduate from

it into a larger love of man, nature, and being itself which can never

be complete till the urge of sex has waned.

What are these facts? First, the very incident that the old tend to

develop more sharply their own individuality as the powers of genesis

decline points in this direction. Senescents in the post-climacteric

acuminate their personality, sometimes to the point of idiosyncrasy and

eccentricity. The _Ich-trieb_ now has its innings. This selfishness

of the old, repulsive and unsocial as are now its commonest

manifestations, expresses a deep instinct that is really groping

toward a new and higher type of personality, evolving a new synthesis

of the factors of life when the chord of sex shall have passed in

music out of sight. It means man’s reaffirmation of the self and of

the will-to-live, although this points not, as the immortalists would

argue, to a post-mortem rehabilitation of the ego but only expresses

again the fact that man is as yet incomplete here and that even the old

now die prematurely because they have not yet learned how to build the

last story of the house of many mansions.

Again, as sex love declines friendship takes its place. Old lovers, and

husbands and wives if happily mated, become friends and find new joys

in these new relations. How we prize old friends and feel closer even

to those of our contemporaries we have known but slightly! A fine old

man of my acquaintance made a systematic effort by many letters to get

into touch with all his old schoolmates who were living and to learn

all he could of those who were dead. Another felt wronged whenever a

friend of earlier days died and he had no word of it. Yet another wrote

to a venerable colleague whom he knew but slightly, but whose career he

had followed, exhorting him “not to die yet a while” because he would

feel more lonely in the world with him out of it. There is a unique

loyalty of veterans of war toward each other, although they are little

together and do not always get on well with each other if they attempt

intimacy. Moreover, there is a new type of interest in young people

and in children, whom even grandmothers do not so much fondle and pet

as indulge and serve in ways mothers do not always sympathize with.

The “Borrowed Time” clubs of old men and young people’s associations

are both based chiefly upon the gregarious instinct which is strongest

among adolescents, before woman has taken her place beside man, and

among senescents when the charm of sex as such abates. Most of the

scores of associations and fraternities of men of mature years are

for material advantage and the typical clubman has failed to find, or

else has lost, the normal anchorage of the true home. The homosexual

friendships of the old are not chummy and do not demand close contact.

These have been far too much neglected and their cultivation, which is

greatly needed, is possible under modern conditions as never before. It

is interesting to know that an old people’s journal is projected.

Love in the aged also tends to broaden into the higher and more

sublimated form of interest in the subhuman world, in animals, plants,

trees, gardening, and country life generally. The charm of a rural

contrasted with an urban environment increases. How often the old take

pleasure in planting or setting out trees they will never see mature

or bear fruit and in building homes they know they can at best live in

but for a short time. Burbank knew and Burroughs felt this and Cato

said that all the aged should dwell in the country, as so many of the

old Romans did. The aged rarely have animal pets but they do feel

a new dread of destroying life. They love scenery and commune with

forests and mountains; revisit their rural boyhood homes and find deep

satisfaction in reënvisaging old landmarks.

They are, as we have seen, very susceptible to climate and to weather

changes, which they often become sagacious in predicting, and sometimes

keep note of rain, snowfall, temperature, wind, the phases of the

moon, etc., and are not only accredited oracles in weather wisdom

but are appealed to as local weather bureaus with amazing memory for

exceptional climatic phenomena for years back. Thus it is that their

sympathies often widen until they become almost animistic for things

without life and may come almost to personify ships, vehicles, and

machines. What takes place within the soul of an old man alone with

nature our imperfect psychology cannot tell; nor does he yet know. It

is something resumptive, preparatory for mingling with the elements,

as he will ere long do. His consciousness is a poor witness of what

transpires in the depths of his soul, for he only knows that the

experience of such influences gives him a new poise and calm that is

sweet if it is also sad. It is in such experiences that our nature

points the way to the chief palliative of the ghastly death thought. In

this direction lies the true way back to the all-mother of life, to the

great womb of existence whence we come and to which we must all return.

By various devices nature tends to keep the number of males and females

nearly equal. But when long periods of hardship, especially wars,

reduce the relative number of males, this inequality is rectified by

an increase in the number of males born; while in long periods of

tranquillity females tend to outnumber males. This is well established

by the statistics of natality. Whether nature would thus make good

any such sharp reduction in the relative number of females is less

demonstrable, because there is no such cause of sudden decimation of

this sex. Women do not go to war with each other. This suggests the

question whether nature also tends to regulate the proportion between

the old and the young where this has been abnormally disturbed. We have

already seen that in new communities opened up and settled by vigorous

younger men the relative number of old men, though not of old women,

soon increases because it is the most viable who respond to the call of

adventure and pioneering and who thus, barring the effects of hardship,

tend to live longer than the less enterprising who remain behind.

Selection was less operative for women who went because their men did.

So far as we may identify youth with progressiveness and age with

conservatism, we may safely conclude that nature does exercise the same

regulative function here as in making good sex disparity. At any rate,

radical new departures always bring reactions. Now, young communities

and countries have short, old ones long, memories. In the former,

experience counts too little; in the latter, too much. The one tends

to act perhaps too precipitately, the other to deliberate too long. In

one, precedent and tradition have but little, in the other excessive,

weight. The one tends to make the most and best of their present

opportunity, while the other is chiefly concerned that no good thing of

the past be jeopardized. Thus, the tide of progress, which is always

marked by alternating waves of reform and stabilization, is regulated

and the most fundamental moral basis of all party distinctions is

age. In this sense there are always two, and only two, sides to every

question; two, and only two, parties in every state, town, and family:

the old and the young. Their harmonious action and reaction constitutes

the most favorable condition for real progress. Age is far-sighted and

synthetic, youth myopic and analytic; but public and private welfare

need both, just as science needs both the microscope and the telescope.

All sciences, most of all those that deal with man, are liable to

lack the perspective that only age can give to orient them to direct

their researches toward problems of most value and hold them steadily

to their true course. Even the ablest and most ingenuous of our young

sociologists are most prone to lose sight of wider relations and come

to focus in partial and extreme views, for extreme opinions are always

easiest and in trying to cope with theories too vast for our powers

even sane and vigorous minds show the same traits as feeble, neurotic,

and infantile ones, which find even the problems of their limited

personal lives too hard for them to solve.

In the field of psychology we have now perfected a methodology of

introspection that seeks to be as exact as physics or chemistry in

going back to elemental sensations as if they were elements from

which all higher forms of mental activity were to be evolved by logic

as rigorous as mathematics itself and that ignores evolution. We also

have a behaviorism that focuses upon activities and physiological

processes and would evict the term consciousness, which is the muse of

introspection. The psychoanalysts, again, are most genetic and would

evolve nearly all psychic phenomena from sex by mechanisms that are as

sacred to them as were innate ideas to scholastics and philosophers

before Locke, and their work is still taboo to most orthodox

psychologists. Fourth, we have the testers who are intent upon applying

psychology to the grading of intelligence and the standardization

and calibration of abilities. All this work is valuable but how

grievously we just now need the broader synthetic view that only age

and experience can fully realize and really ought to supply. Age sees

more clearly than youth that studies of the brain, of children, of

instincts, animals, prehistoric man, the insane, defectives, the sexes,

intellect, will, feelings, and even of the history of philosophy and

religion are essential for a sound knowledge of man. For to the real

anthropologist nothing human is alien. He alone sees that the real

value of all such special work is what it contributes to enable us to

make our lives fuller, better, and more worth living.

In religion, most of even our authorized leaders show symptoms of

dementia præcox in clinging to juvenile attitudes that should have long

since been sloughed off. They still antagonize Darwinism, the higher

criticism, and the great philosophies of pantheism, which, rightly

interpreted, constitute the religion of mature and normal senescent

souls. In this oldest of all culture fields the world has suffered most

grievous arrest. The fact that in this direction the old have generally

so often been most reactionary, if not infantile, is one of the most

grievous of all their shortcomings. Here they should lead, as in more

primitive times they often did. The church has too little use for its

aging teachers but prefers young clergymen. Happily, however, a few of

them are now helping to build this higher story of the culture temple

of the race and have bid adieu to the mad immortality quest born of

the age of sexual potency and which should decline and die with it. In

this, as in perhaps no other field, old age should thus be constructive

and build mansions for itself and it will never attain the dignity

nature suggests for it until it does so. This does not mean that its

verdicts should be authoritative for other periods of life since, as

with each of these, its findings are not absolute but true only for its

own stage. But when senescence has found and accepted the faith that

fits its nature and needs, this will at least serve to mitigate the

fanaticism of young converts, rebuke ratiocination, which has so long

impelled immature minds to make dogma out of religious literature, and

check the intolerance of intellectual orthodoxy.

So in all departments of life the function of competent old age is to

sum up, keep perspective, draw lessons, particularly moral lessons.

Homer, tradition tells us, was an old man who synthesized many legends

before unorganized, somewhat as Moses was said to have done in

composing the Pentateuch. The dialogues of Plato that deal with the

deepest problems are, by general consent, ascribed to his old age. Most

of the prophets were old and even the Gospel, which represented the

terminal phase of apostolic inspiration, is ascribed to the very aged

John. The Confucian system is preëminently a product of the senium that

had seen the vanities of the world; and especially of all cults of the

transcendental. Herodotus, Thucydides, and Strabo were said to have

been old. Wells’ synoptical history not only meets the needs of the old

but is something a wise old man might well have undertaken. The popular

lectures of not a few leaders of science--DuBois-Reymond, Helmholtz,

Huxley, Haeckel, and many others--are products of fertile minds

unifying their life work, as befits scientists, before their powers

fail, subjecting it to the supreme test by acceptance of the consensus

of competent contemporaries and thus affirming the influential

immortality of the authors.

The late James Bryce, at the age of 84, said words of supreme

wisdom on national and international affairs at the Williamstown

conference. Who is not heartened to know that Ranke wrote his famous

_Weltgeschichte_--I think in five volumes--beginning at the age of

85; that Michelangelo was drawing the plans of St. Peters at 90; that

Cornaro wrote his last version of _The Temperate Life_ at 95; that W.

S. Smith made his memorable trip around the world alone at the age of

80; that Durand edited a volume of his at 110. And it is satisfying to

find not only scores but hundreds of such records, ancient and modern.

Again, if youth creates, age not only conserves but organizes. Both

these functions are essential in human society and are related

somewhat as are reproductive and connective tissue, as we saw in

Chapter VI. Both youth and age seek truth and thrill when they feel

a deep sentiment of inner conviction. But age lays more stress upon

the pragmatic sanction of working well and can better understand even

Loyola and Machiavelli. Thus it came that while men in their prime

conceived the great religions, the old made them prevail. Thus, too,

instituted and dogmatic religion owes its existence chiefly to men past

the meridian of life. The old did not invent belief in supernatural

powers or persons but needed and used it to sustain their position

when physical inferiority would have otherwise compelled them to step

aside and so they made themselves mediators between gods and men. They

directed and presided over rites and ceremonies and took possession

of the keys of the next world, enforced orthodoxies for the sake of

order, and established and equipped the young to aid them in this work.

They were behind the scenes and held the secrets, realizing the utility

to society and also to themselves of much for which they had lost the

primitive ardor of belief. Thus the revivalist and the reformer have

always found the old arraigned against them. Perhaps they resent “new

bottles” even more then they do new wine.

In the domain of sex, so vitally bound up with religion, the Hebrew

race first taught the world and most of this wisdom came from the old,

against whom the rise of romantic love was one of the greatest revolts

in the history of culture. In many primitive societies the old, as we

have seen, initiate the young of the same and even of the opposite sex

into its mysteries, and in modern mores, as for example, in France,

the counsels of the old are still of influence in the matings of the

young. It is they who insist on prudential considerations and warn

against venery and the follies into which blind Eros may lead. They

have seen and know each scene in the stormy drama to the fall of the

curtain. Thus to-day, though less only in degree, the sharpest phase of

the eternal warfare between the old and young is just where it was in

the ancient tribes in which the old barred the young from the females.

Youth seeks indulgence and resents the restraint and control for which

the old stand.

This eternal war between the young and the old begins at birth and

increases with every restraint and prohibition imposed on the former by

the latter. The infant would subject its mother’s life to its service

and the psychoanalysts who urge that we begin life with a sense of

omnipotence are quite as near right as those who, like Schleiermacher,

found this stage of life characterized by a feeling of absolute

dependence, of which he thought all religions are formulations. Both

are always present and in incessant conflict, now one and now the

other predominating. The child revolts, yet must submit and obey its

elders. It asserts its freedom by defiance, evasion, running away, by

deceits, by fancies of escaping all control and doing all it wishes.

It seeks to lead its own life and to live out completely its present

state regardless of all the claims of the future and of all domination

by adults, whose very existence much of his play ignores. The father

especially is a tyrant and is often hated as well as loved. Younger

children are always bullied by older. Every school grade seeks to

dominate that below. The teacher is always imposing a wisdom that is

not yet demanded by the child and that is accepted by it unwillingly,

cramming the memory pouches with things that can be only imperfectly

appreciated, picking open buds of interest and knowledge before their

time, imposing standards that are too grown up, checking natural

expressions of instinct and insisting on discipline, training, the

often painful acquisition of skills and conformity to manifold

conventions. There is always a sense in which the school is an offense

to the nature of the child. Older minds prescribe what must be learned,

and how, and when, and the scholiocentric still predominates over the

paidocentric method of education.

The state also subjects youth and enforces rights of property and

person to which the young have to be broken in. All kinds and degrees

of apprenticeship and the age and meaning of attaining majority are

prescribed. In many lands the parents control the marriage of their

offspring as they do property and the older make and administer laws

for the younger. After all these forms and degrees of servitude of the

younger to the older it is no wonder that the former not only very

often show symptoms of revolt all the way from the cradle to complete

maturity but, along with gratitude and respect, also cherish, if more

unconsciously, an enmity that they can neither entirely express nor

control against all kinds of masters, perhaps especially when their

power and authority begin to wane with age. The push of the advancing

upon the retiring generation is not consciously to feed fat such

ancient grudges by subjecting elders in their turn as they were once

subjected and yet there is a deep and persistent sense, which even

psychology has but little realized, in which every advance in history,

every insurrection or rebellion, every protestant movement against the

established order or custom, and every reform in religion, politics,

or life generally is only an expression of the eternal revolt of youth

against age, of which the extreme reaction of parricide is the symbol

but which is the deep psychogenetic root of every degree of failure in

care and respect. LeBon[202] sees and well presents the insurrectionary

tendencies rife in the world to-day but does not realize the extent,

nor does he find or seek the ultimate cause, of the present universal

“revolt.” Thus the aged everywhere still suffer from the imperfections

with which they and even their remote forbears exercised the parental

function.

On the other hand, it should not, of course, be forgotten that there is

always the more obvious and countervailing tendency to respect parents

as age brings the insight that in what they compelled and forbade they

were wiser than we, and to feel grateful that they did not leave us to

follow our own sweet wills. Just so far as we come to realize not only

how they lived for their children and did so wisely and well we both

love them more for all they did for us, and, if we are wise, we realize

that their counsels may still be helpful and we draw the moral that

there is always somewhere a wisdom superior to our own, an experience

from which we may profit, and an authority somewhere to which we must

always remain docile and toward which our proper attitude is that of

a loyalty that is essentially filial. It is of this impulse that all

kinds of ancestor worship are belated expressions, while at the same

time it is compensatory for all ill wishes and treatment directed

toward them while they lived. In a finished civilization the old will

enjoy their full meed of reverence while they are yet alive and every

sort of post-mortem canonization will be seen to be only the symbol of

a _devoir present_.

Perhaps in the large Aristotelian sense of the word politics is,

_par excellence_, the work of and for old age. Statecraft must look

not at the transient fluctuations of current and popular opinion but

must look beyond the present or the next election, must rise above

the selfishness of party interest and look to the far future. It must

think not in terms of the exigencies of the hour but of decades and

generations and not of local or partisan but of national and humanistic

interests. From the patriarchs down the old have been the wisest

shepherds of the people and if young men have succeeded in diplomacy it

is because they have been prodigies of precocity who have also devoted

themselves to the intensive study of history, which is at best only a

proxy for experience. To have read ever so exhaustively of a war of a

century before, for example, can give the young student no such sense

of its horrors, nor of the urgency of using every honorable means of

averting it, as to have actually lived through it with a vivid personal

memory of its incidents. Veterans of old wars would be cautious about

entering new ones.

Thus it is well that the old are with us “lest we forget” and in

exigencies we often turn to them if living and read and quote them with

respect long after they are dead. Great statesmen are those who have

not only identified themselves with the past, present, and future of

the nations they serve but beyond this have felt themselves charged

with the interests of mankind as a whole. We surely need all possible

ripeness of knowledge and maturity of judgment in this field and if the

span of experience personally demanded by leaders could have been a

full century, many of the great disasters that have befallen the race

might have been avoided.

The fact is that, as the Athenians seemed to the old Egyptian priest

who had known of Atlantis, we are all children who have to play the

rôle of real adults because the latter have not yet arrived, so they we

have come to think ourselves really mature.

Again, if the young are the best advocates, the old are by nature

the best judges. They can best weigh facts and ideas in the scale of

justice. The moral faculties ripen more slowly. Thus the old can best

supplement the technicalities of law by equity and give ethics its

rights in their verdicts. They should be the keepers of the standards

of right and wrong and mete out justice with the impartiality and

aloofness that befit it. Even in private life we have a judicial

function, which, though often ignored and even resented, is also often

sought and respected if we have the tact to praise and do not become

censorious. Our approval or disapproval, even if mild and unspoken,

may count for more than is admitted or even realized by our family and

friends.

Such philosophy as my life and studies have taught me begins and ends

in the thesis that the supreme criterion of everything, including

religion, science, art, property, business, education, hygiene, and

every human institution and everything in our environment, is what

it contributes to make life longer, fuller, and saner, so that each

individual shall live out more completely all the essentials in the

life of the race. If the best survive, it is not the good but the

bad and unfit who die young. To have lived long but narrowly is just

as bad. Both have really only half lived and it is just those who

have failed of realizing their full humanity in this life that most

feel the need of another and imprecate the cosmos as having cheated

them if it has not provided one. A rich old age is thus the supreme

reward of virtue. Thus what is education but fitting us for a more

advanced stage of life. It consists largely in giving to the young the

products of older minds and thus advancing our mental age beyond our

years. Childhood longs to die into youth and youth into maturity and

so the latter in its turn should long to pass away into age. And how

childish much in the adult world seems to those who have achieved the

true sagehood of age; and how unripe, full of folly, vanity, error,

and passion! How little the world has realized its debt in the past

to aging men and women in whom knowledge has ripened into wisdom and

how much more age owes and will yet give to the world when human life

becomes complete and realizes its higher possibilities!

Now, too, many of those who attain advanced years are battered,

water-logged, leaky derelicts without cargo or crew, chart, rudder,

sail, or engine, remaining afloat only because they have struck no

fatal rocks or because the storms have not quite yet swamped them;

or, to change the figure, because they have withered, not ripened,

on the tree. How many of us really ought to be dead because we are

useless to ourselves and to others. It is because there are so many

such that the rôle assigned to the best of us is often so hard and so

repugnant to our nature and to our needs. Hence it comes that we are

not only handicapped but are sorely tempted to accept a sham old age

that is false to all the best that is in us, instead of justifying and

illustrating a better one.

Thus, in fine, all not later than the fourth decade or whenever they

note that their youth has fled or that any of their powers have begun

to abate, should not only boldly face the fact that they are aging

but begin serious preparations for old age, so that this stage of

life be not only happier but more efficient than it is and that it

render to the world a service never so needed and never so possible to

render as now. Men and women in all the earlier and often in the later

postmeridional phases of life are cowards in facing for themselves

and arrant tricksters in deceiving others about their physiological

and psychological age. If all the psychic energy now directed to

concealment, pretense, and the maintenance of illusions here were put

to better uses, then health, prolongation of life, and efficiency in

later decades, to say nothing of happiness, would be greatly increased.

The dawn of adolescence, like that of senescence, has its peculiar

possibilities and its very trying probationary years before the age of

nubility; but youth always has the advantage, if it will only utilize

it, of the counsels of those who have weathered its storm and stress.

There is a vast amount of wreckage from which puberty often suffers.

The old, however, have no older initiators into the last stage of

life and must find or make their own way as best they can. But they

should realize that all the fluctuations and circumnutation phenomena

they experience in the middle decades of life are gropings toward new

adjustments in the domain of hygiene and morale that are necessary when

their income of vital energy does not quite balance its expenditure.

All these phenomena are really only labor pains by which nature is

trying to bring into the world a new and higher and more complete

humanity. To repeat, our function is to finish a structure that still

lacks an upper story and give it an outlook or conning tower from which

man can see more clearly the far horizon and take his bearings now and

then by the eternal stars.

The old who are really so, who are not merely spent projectiles,

relics, vestiges, or ruins that time has chanced to spare, do sometimes

attain vision and even prophetic power, and their last real words to

the world they are leaving are not like the inane babblings of the

dying, which friends so often cherish, but are often the best and most

worth heeding by their juniors of all their counsels. Some have told

us that if the long-awaited superman ever arrives, he will come by way

of the prolongation of adolescence and others have said it would be by

the fuller maturity of man in his prime. No doubt both these stages

of life would be enriched and potentialized, but his first advent and

his greatest improvement over man of to-day will be in the form of

glorified old age. Nietzsche was right in making Zarathustra old and

he himself was the overman whose message he brought to the world. He

was intent on the future of man and not on his present, still less on

his past. Thus the ideal old man will be chiefly concerned for what

is yet to be. Whatever he knows of history, he is more concerned with

the better history not yet written because it has not yet happened. If

he thinks of his childhood and his forbears, he thinks still more of

posterity. His chief desire is to see the young better born and better

provided for so as to come to a fuller maturity.

In fine, it cannot be too strongly urged or too often repeated that at

present we know little of old age and that little is so predominantly

of its inferior specimens, its unfavorable traits and defects and

limitations, that the old have been prone to repudiate their years.

Some even in the seventies and eighties to whom I ventured to send

my questionnaire resented it as imputing to them an age they denied

all knowledge of, while others had come precociously to not only

accept a padded life but to even crave services and sympathy and

demand privileges and immunities to which they were not entitled, thus

growing querulous because of a helplessness more affected than real.

The fundamental passion of the normal old is to serve, to subordinate

self, and, if in some ways they must be served, to help others in turn

in such ways as they can. This instinct of expropriation of self is

the voice of nature pointing to the effacement that awaits them. The

fact that age is so often selfish should not blind us to the fact that

in its true nature it is altruistic and thus in its later stages often

finds its greatest trial in the progressive abatement of its power of

actually benefiting others. Its greatest bitterness is that it must

be so much ministered to, and one of my correspondents regretted that

he could not die at sea or his corpse, when he was done with it, be

left to nature so that his relatives might not have the fuss of a

funeral and burial. Indeed, he seemed to have grown morbid about the

trouble he was thus to make them. Even the new love of the country and

of inanimate as well as animate nature into which they are soon to

be resolved may be another outcrop of the deep but blind and groping

immolation motive. It is love disengaging itself from persons and

special objects and perfecting itself by attaining its goal, which is

nothing less than the love of, and the resolution of self into, the

cosmos from which we sprang. Hence there is a sense in which chemistry

and physics, and even the Einstein doctrine of relativity, are studies

of man’s immortality.

Old age and death are eloquent of voices that call us to come home or

back to nature, the all-mother, and to the earth from which we sprang

and which is the terminal resting place of all who have gone before,

with whose remains our dust will mingle. The more we know of the

chemistry and physics of matter and energy, and even of the history,

constitution, and contents of the earth’s crust, the less dreadful do

the grave and the processes that take place in it seem, and the less

prone are we to become cowards, slackers, or malingerers in facing the

Great Enemy. What we know of what is still often called brute matter

shows it to be so much more dynamic and lawful than life and life is

so much more fecund and complex than mind that there is now a new

and most pregnant sense in which the way of even physical death is

upward, not downward. Who, too, yet knows just how much of the charm of

æsthetic contemplation of inanimate nature or even the urge that impels

science to know ever more of it is due to what it does and will entomb.

At any rate, as we realize far more clearly that none of the sons of

men ever did or ever can come back, we can now find some compensation

in the ever clearer understanding of the immortality of our somatic

elements and see the meaning of the deep instinct that inclines the old

to the country and to closer communion with nature as they withdraw

from life.

The greatest influence of the old upon the young has, from time

immemorial, been near the dawn of puberty, when almost every race

initiates youth into manhood. This, too, is still the age of most

conversions and church confirmations. Here education culminates and

here, too, in a sense, it began and extended slowly upward toward

the university and downward toward the kindergarten as civilization

advanced. The age of nubility, which follows, is the period of the

greatest break with the preceding generation for young couples

generally set up for themselves and the increase of the interval

between generations generally means a prolonged period of subjection

and docility. When a third generation was added and grandparents

became common in the families, conservative influences were increased,

and if four living generations ever become common in the same family

progress would probably be retarded and great-grandparents would think

grandparents more or less radical or innovative, so that it is well

that the former do not linger superfluous on the stage for this would

make the tension between the past and the future too great. Thus the

Great Silencer’s work of oblivion is benign for the race.

Such excessive contemporaneity of generations is not the goal of

eugenics, for while it tends to prolong life it also increases the

average span of years between generations and the longer-lived are

also more fecund. Should it ever come that ancestors of half a dozen

or a dozen generations live together, the advance of the world would

probably be greatly retarded, perhaps to the point of stagnation.

Therefore, for both their influence and for our love of them it is

fortunate that they are well dead and live only in our memory, in the

vitality they have bequeathed to us, and in the works that follow them.

As it is, it is old minds and those that they have mainly influenced

that have kept evolution, which is more charged with culture stimulus

than any influence in the modern intellectual world, so largely out

of our educational system. It is due to them that so large a part

of Christendom has repudiated the higher criticism, another great

achievement that has reanimated all scriptures and made them glow

with a new light and has given insight and zest where before there

was a confusion and indifference that kept religious consciousness so

medieval and ultra-conservative. It is psychological age that makes

statesmen suddenly confronted with new and vast world problems too

large for them take refuge in the counsels of Washington, which were

wise in their day but utterly inadequate for meeting the issues of our

own time.