This suggests another octogenarian I knew, a great leader in mathematics and a man of international fame, who in his latest years believed that he had poetic gifts and wooed the muses, even the goddess of love, with canticles that amazed his friends, who wondered whether he was just making his acquaintance with poetry for the first time or had known it more discriminatingly earlier in life and lost his standards. Another eminent man I knew whose name is known throughout the literary world, and who was also a physician, believed in and practiced frequent naps, in which I have seenhim indulge between the courses of a long public dinner, in the intervals of which he would converse with all his old sprightliness and vigor and at the close make the best speech of the occasion. There was no record of even midday sleeps with the naturalist above described. He usually did his best work in the forenoon but occasionally, even in the last years of his life, worked till late at night and resumed early in the morning, doing this for some days as with a kind of afflatus. He also kept up an active interest in public affairs until his increasing illness compelled him to narrow down his interests more and more, so that toward the end they seemed to center entirely in himself.
A man of eighty ceased manual work at fifty and had a marked intellectual renaissance and became an author. He has come to realize the limitations of doctors and, although he employs them, is his own ultimate judge in all matters pertaining to his health. He has withdrawn from the influence of the clergy. “My science and reason say that there is no hereafter while my faith says that there is but I do not give myself any trouble about their quarrel for it will all be decided soon enough.” “I am more disposed to take the far view of things and try to estimate wider relations than formerly.” “I feel that my duty is to the race and to humanity rather than to any section of it.” He reads science and occasionally a good story, although the latter “must have some interest besides that of love.” “I formerly was fond of hunting and fishing but the killing instinct has faded with age, as it does with most people; but the forest and field, the sea and land, are beautiful beyond compare and their infinitely varied forms are more bewitching than ever.” Everyone, he thinks, should have some Bohemia into which he should retreat when overtaken by age and has leisure, and his has been genealogy, mainly getting acquainted with his own ancestorsand trying to visualize them as men and women, feeling that he owes to them all his qualities, mental, moral, and physical.
A liberal clergyman approaching the eighties after a life of unique eminence and service writes: “As for a future life for the soul of man, I believe it is a moral necessity to explain and justify his ethical conduct in the present sphere of existence. If, nevertheless, after death there should be no continued existence, individually and consciously, I am ready to accept this solution as also wise and right because ordained by Him who is all-wise and good—‘I cannot drift beyond His loving care.’” He believes that his devotion to great causes that he has seen advance, while “conserving divine ideals below, which ever find us young and ever keep us so,” has contributed to his exceptional vigor and his message to the young is to prepare for old age physically, economically, intellectually, morally, and religiously. He grows more charitable and appreciative, feels deep personal gratitude to physicians, who have more than once saved his life; blesses his long-lived parents for the rare constitution that has not only carried him through but given him a recuperative power at which he has often marveled, dreads the excess of sentiment he often notes in others of his age, who too readily become lachrymose; deplores the excessive freedom and growing self-affirmation, lack of restraint and modesty, courtesy, and thoughtfulness for others in the rising generation; thinks, with Goethe, that if as he grows older he has less keenness of sympathy for suffering, he thrills more deeply in the contemplation of every noble and disinterested act; finds satisfaction in knowing that his ashes (for he has long been an advocate of cremation) will lie near other dear ones on a beautiful hillside in sight of the Pacific; and takes satisfaction in reviewing his life from a large ethical standpoint.
A naturalist of seventy-two of international reputation, who has done perhaps more creative work for the benefit of the human race in his field than any other living man, first realized that he was old at sixty-five, when digestion and elimination were very slightly reduced. Feeling the need of companionship he married at sixty-seven and found increased happiness and rejuvenation. Frail when young, he learned early to take better care of himself, restricting the amount of starchy foods and stressing the importance of the daily use of one ounce of agar-agar, one ounce of wheat bran, and half an ounce of liquid paraffin, which has become an absolute necessity. He writes three hours and works his head and body outdoors eight hours per day, covering rarely less than twelve miles. He is not only his own doctor but has often helped others by his experience. “I never worry about dying or think of the hereafter,” he says. “I have done good work for my fellow men, have never injured, over-reached, or cheated a human being in all my life and hope to live in the hearts of others so that my works and words may be of value to those who follow.” “I have no earthly or heavenly use for the clergy or church; am my own minister to my soul.” “I have no regrets whatever for anything I have ever done through life but have been ‘done for’ several times by others.” “Since about fifty I have taken more interest in public and community affairs and the future life of those who are to come after.” His great temptation is physical and mental overwork, which it requires constant care to curb. “I am now in the ‘Indian summer’ of mental clarity, finding myself able to do very much heavier and better work than at any other time in life, and only wish I could continue to carry on these experiments throughout the ages but am limiting myself to experiments that will not last more than ten or twentyyears.” He receives several score letters a day and is editing a comprehensive work of eight volumes describing perhaps the most complicated creative work that has fallen to the hands of man to do.
One of America’s most eminent educators and leaders in science, and the creator of a great university, who has made his mark on the world as an advocate of peace, believing, however, that when we were once in the war we should push it with the utmost vigor, regrets only that he has, on one or two occasions, been misunderstood. He has traveled and lectured very extensively and is widely known by his books outside his own specialty. He ascribes his vigor to his early life on a farm and his outdoor life as a student of nature. Although he became a doctor of medicine in 1875 he has had occasion to feel the deepest appreciation of the services a few other members of that profession have rendered him. He says: “I have good friends among the clergy and often preach to them. They have no special pull on my future. I shall probably have to go out alone; I came in that way.” He writes:
When man shall come to Manhood’s destinyWhen our slow-creeping race shall be full-grownDeep in each human heart a chamber loneOf holies, holiest shall builded be;And each man for himself shall hold the key,Each one shall kindle his own altar fires,Each burn an offering of his own desires,And each at last his own high-priest must be.
When man shall come to Manhood’s destinyWhen our slow-creeping race shall be full-grownDeep in each human heart a chamber loneOf holies, holiest shall builded be;And each man for himself shall hold the key,Each one shall kindle his own altar fires,Each burn an offering of his own desires,And each at last his own high-priest must be.
When man shall come to Manhood’s destinyWhen our slow-creeping race shall be full-grownDeep in each human heart a chamber loneOf holies, holiest shall builded be;And each man for himself shall hold the key,Each one shall kindle his own altar fires,Each burn an offering of his own desires,And each at last his own high-priest must be.
When man shall come to Manhood’s destiny
When our slow-creeping race shall be full-grown
Deep in each human heart a chamber lone
Of holies, holiest shall builded be;
And each man for himself shall hold the key,
Each one shall kindle his own altar fires,
Each burn an offering of his own desires,
And each at last his own high-priest must be.
A Quaker lady of seventy-four has reread Emerson, Browning, Tennyson, Shakespeare, and other masters, and found them more intelligible and charged with meaning than ever before. Hence she is convinced that she has a new mental clarity, not only in regard to these but to the fundamental questions of life. Sheshrinks from companionship with the very old and infirm but loves society more than ever, especially of those somewhat younger than herself. She feels no temptation except to indulge too much in day-dreaming, has less love for young children individually but found more enthusiasm than in anything else in a cause that saved the lives of many and improved the condition of yet more. She is deeply religious, reading the Bible daily and hoping to see her departed friends in another life, although “I have my doubts.”
One venerable respondent wrote in substance that no words could describe the rest and peace that slowly supervened after he had ridded his mind of every vestige of the old belief in which he was trained of a future personal life and realized that he would live on only in the contribution he had made to the sum of human knowledge and welfare, in the grateful memory of his friends, in his posterity, and that his individuality, with all its limitations, would be resolved into or rendered back to the cosmos with his mouldering corpse. When he realized that death would end all forever for him and was once free from all the harassing hopes and fears about a postmortem state, the new serenity and poise made him believe that he had penetrated to a deeper psychic level than that explored and bequeathed to the Christian world by the marvelously gifted but epileptic apostle, Paul, and that he had struck the bedrock of humanity and attained a fuller and larger completeness of life as it was meant to be and will be if man ever comes to full maturity. He compares the attainment of this new attitude toward death to the change that took place in Bunyan’s Christian when he turned his back upon the city of Vanity Fair and faced the Delectable Mountain.
An able respondent who has given much attention to these subjects concludes that deep in his soul everycandid mind feels that all arguments for immortality are more or less falsetto and do not ring true, are factitious, and are neither born of nor have the power to bring inner conviction. Their propounders, if they are honest to the core and also if they have the power to analyze their own mental processes in constructing such so-called proofs, feel, though they may not know it, that they are really reasoning against their own profounder convictions or seeking to convince themselves against their own intuitions. They vilipend skepticism because they hope thus to drown its still small voice in themselves. In no other field of thought does it begin to be so hard to be sincere with ourselves and in no other domain of belief do men accept such specious and inconclusive evidence. Most demonstrators of immortality within the Christian pale fall back sooner or later, some more and some less, upon the myth of revelation and the postulated faculty called faith which, when we study its psychology, turns out to be only a hope-wish born of the unspent momentum of the will-to-live and this deploys in the individual in which it is thus falsely interpreted, as egoism wants it to be. Rich and rank as have been its products for the imagination, they are fancy bred and, in fact, superstitions, extra-beliefs orAberglaubenof the psyche and their acceptance as authentic or final is always and everywhere a craven flight from reality, for the sentence of execution is already passed upon all of us and is only suspended for a season.
One thoughtful respondent who is facing his sunset years says that he has heard some sixty-five hundred sermons and has reversed certain of his opinions so that he has felt compelled to resign as a trustee of his church since he has a new and clear idea of the kind of church he wants. He cannot longer believe in the kind of deity who likes to be flattered, thanked, entreated, and listento Te Deums. “We inherit such ideas from vain Oriental kings.” “Symbolisms a thousand years old are not suited to us or to our times.” “I cannot subscribe to that stock idea—‘the religion I got from my mother’s knee is good enough for me’—for by the same token we should now be idolaters or Druids.” “Now that the church has become a man it ought to ‘put away childish things’ and should no longer use ‘bottles’ and ceremonies two or three thousand years old.” “If we judge the church by its results in suppressing selfishness or even vice, it is a failure and any other agency in any other field or business not being able to show any better and faster results, that is, in reducing crime, unrest, selfishness, and hate between classes, races, and nations, especially as evidenced by the experiences of the decade 1911–1921, would have to resign.” “If Christianity had not been, almost from the very start, handicapped by the church in creating irrelevant and quarrelsome issues and diverting emphasis to a future life, instead of improving the conditions of the present one, it is fair to say that our present social, moral, and spiritual condition would have been very different from and better than it is.” The church atmosphere, hymns, prayers, sermons, ceremonies, “are all age-musty and dominated by and saturated with miracles and sanguinary and puzzling atonement and trinity theology, things with which I am no longer in sympathy and the emphasis of which is offensive to me.” “I think all these things are man-made incrustations. I sometimes think the wonder is not why so many men stay away from church but why so many attend it. Religion must be rescued. I do not know how but it has got to be done.”