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 thecomédie 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 froma posterioritoa priorihabits of mind and that subjectivity and perhaps introversion now have their innings. Howeverthis 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 venerableper sewe 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 meremorituri 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’sSartor, Hegel’sPhänomenologie, 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 bewedded, 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 didour “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, ofcreeds 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 synthesiswe 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 vindicationof 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 thevita sexualishas 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. TheIch-triebnow 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 thefactors 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 ofmature 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 issomething 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, radicalnew 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 sensationsas 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 inmore 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 fewleaders 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 famousWeltgeschichte—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 ofThe Temperate Lifeat 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 ceremoniesand 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 andin 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 enmitythat 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. LeBon202sees 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 remaindocile 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 adevoir 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 themselvescharged 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 failedof 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 notonly 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 areleaving 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 suchways 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 morefecund and complex than mind that there is now a new and most pregnant sense in which the way of even physical death is upward, not downward. Who, too, yet knows just how much of the charm of æsthetic contemplation of inanimate nature or even the urge that impels science to know ever more of it is due to what it does and will entomb. At any rate, as we realize far more clearly that none of the sons of men ever did or ever can come back, we can now find some compensation in the ever clearer understanding of the immortality of our somatic elements and see the meaning of the deep instinct that inclines the old to the country and to closer communion with nature as they withdraw from life.
The greatest influence of the old upon the young has, from time immemorial, been near the dawn of puberty, when almost every race initiates youth into manhood. This, too, is still the age of most conversions and church confirmations. Here education culminates and here, too, in a sense, it began and extended slowly upward toward the university and downward toward the kindergarten as civilization advanced. The age of nubility, which follows, is the period of the greatest break with the preceding generation for young couples generally set up for themselves and the increase of the interval between generations generally means a prolonged period of subjection and docility. When a third generation was added and grandparents became common in the families, conservative influences were increased, and if four living generations ever become common in the same family progress would probably be retarded and great-grandparents would think grandparents more or less radical or innovative, so that it is well that the former do not linger superfluous on the stage for this would make the tension between the past and the future too great. Thus the Great Silencer’s work of oblivion is benign for the race.
Such excessive contemporaneity of generations is not the goal of eugenics, for while it tends to prolong life it also increases the average span of years between generations and the longer-lived are also more fecund. Should it ever come that ancestors of half a dozen or a dozen generations live together, the advance of the world would probably be greatly retarded, perhaps to the point of stagnation. Therefore, for both their influence and for our love of them it is fortunate that they are well dead and live only in our memory, in the vitality they have bequeathed to us, and in the works that follow them. As it is, it is old minds and those that they have mainly influenced that have kept evolution, which is more charged with culture stimulus than any influence in the modern intellectual world, so largely out of our educational system. It is due to them that so large a part of Christendom has repudiated the higher criticism, another great achievement that has reanimated all scriptures and made them glow with a new light and has given insight and zest where before there was a confusion and indifference that kept religious consciousness so medieval and ultra-conservative. It is psychological age that makes statesmen suddenly confronted with new and vast world problems too large for them take refuge in the counsels of Washington, which were wise in their day but utterly inadequate for meeting the issues of our own time.
The World War was not primarily a young men’s war, for most of them were sent by their elders and met their death that the influence of the latter might be augmented. Men may be made senile by their years without growing wise. Thus the world is without true leaders in this hour of its greatest need till we wonder whether a few score funerals of those now in power would not be our greatest boon. A psychological senility that neither learns nor forgets is always a menace and a check insteadof being, as true old age should be, a guide in emergencies. Thus we have not grown old aright and are paralyzed by a wisdom that is obsolete or barnacled by prejudice. How often is it said of reforms great and good that they are earnestly needed and entirely practical but must wait for their accomplishment until certain venerable but obstructive personages of a generation that is passing are out of the way, because they are prone to think the old good and the new bad, and that every change, therefore, must be for the worse. Thus many live too long and undo the usefulness of their earlier years.
In fine, not only has the Western world now lost the exhilarating sense of progress that has for generations sustained and inspired it but civilization faces to-day dangers of decay such as have never confronted it since the incursion of the barbarians and of the Moslems into Europe. Other more disastrous wars are possible. Class hatred and the antagonisms of capital and labor, national and individual greed, race jealousies and animosities, the ferment of Bolshevism, the ascendency of the ideals ofkulturover those of culture in our institutions for higher education in every land, industrial stagnation and unemployment, the crying lack of leaders and the dominance of mediocrity everywhere, the decay of faith and the desiccation of religion, the waning confidence in democracy: these are the prospects we must face if we are not to flee from reality and be cowards to life as it confronts us. If men still believed in an omnipotent all-wise god they would expect him to now intervene by a new, perhaps a third, dispensation such as Renan believed in. But the good old All-Father that saved a remnant and drowned the rest in the days of Noah and that sent His Son later to save the world when it seemed lost is dead and survives only as a memory, and we realize to-day that man must be his own savior or perish.
There seem at present three and only three ways of escape, each of them radical, arduous, slow, and perhaps desperate, and which only those who have the supreme power of presentification or the genius that sees all problems in terms of the here and now can clearly discern. The first of these is (1) eugenics. We must learn to breed a better race of men. This is, indeed, a religion and already has its apostles and martyrs and a growing body of disciples who are propagandists of its new gospel. But the obstacles of ignorance and prejudice are appalling. The fact remains, however, as poor Nietzsche realized, that if man cannot surpass his present self he is lost.
(2) Others, like H. G. Wells to-day and like Comenius in his day, see our chief hope not so much in nature and preformation as in nurture and epigenesis and would reconstruct, vastly enlarge, and unify our entire educational system, reversing many a present consensus to the end of ultimately obliterating all national boundaries and racial prejudices and organizing a world state, “a parliament of man, a federation of the world.”
(3) Others, like Metchnikoff and Bernard Shaw, look for salvation in the prolongation of human life that man may have the longer apprenticeship he now needs in order to wisely direct the ever more complex affairs of civilization. Compared with the task it now imposes, the wisest and ablest are only children and the disasters of our day are because young Phaethons have thought they could drive the chariot of the sun when in fact they were “nicht dazu gewachsen.” If man could live and learn, not seventy but two or three times seventy years, and could begin to be at his best when he now declines and retires, he might know enough to guide the world in its true course. He must absorb more knowledge, and of a different kind, and assimilate it better in order to secrete the wisdom now needed. As the adolescent decade preparesfor maturity, so the senescent decades must prepare for old age and look forward to it with all the anticipation with which youth now looks forward to maturity. The limitations of old age must be made spurs to its greater efficiency just as so many in middle life have had to do with the chronic handicaps of poor health. Two prevalent traditions must be ruthlessly broken and destroyed. The first is that old people’s hold on life is so precarious that medical care is less likely to be rewarded with success than at earlier stages of life. The fact is that normal and healthy age is not only immune to many diseases common to middle life but often has exceptional recuperative powers, while even under present conditions the percentage of deaths is not so very much increased at seventy. Physicians who specialize in gerontology could do very much here. The other vicious tradition is that retirement or marked abatement of activity should occur at a certain age. This ought to be always a personal matter and all who can really “carry on” should do so with all the powers they possess as long as they are fully able.
An “Indian summer” should be both expected and utilized to the uttermost for this is a precious bud of vast potentialities. In it we already glimpse the superhumanity yet to be. We can already guess something of the soteriological functions that now lie concealed and are yet to be revealed in it. It brings a new poise and a new perspective of values and hence a new orientation and new and deeper insights into essentials. The very fact that the old who have approximated ever so remotely this ideal have so far been exceptions and, in a sense, “sports” should at least open our eyes to the fact that the great all-mother can still show her original wish and intent.
The old are remarkably and uniquely suggestible in all matters that pertain to the suppression or augmentationof life. They give up and die prematurely as victims of a tradition that it is time for them to do so and they survive no less remarkably not only troubles and hardships but even surgical operations if they feel that they can do so. We need not be faith-curers but must be vitalists and believe in some kind ofélan vitalor creative evolution, as opposed to materialistic or mechanistic interpretations of life, to understand the true psychology of age. It is the nascent period of a new and unselfish involution of individuation which is impossible under the domination of egoism. The new self now striving to be born is freer from the dominion of sense and of the environment and has an autonomy and spontaneity that is reinforced and recharged with energy from the primal springs of life, and man may well look to this as one of the great sources of hope in his present distress.
With the sublimation of sex in the Indian summer of the senium, thus, comes normally a higher type of individuation than is possible before. It is freer from passion, sense, selfish interest, clearer and farther sighted, but sees the identity of the individual and the race with which it is becoming incorporate. This is the first step toward the final merging into mother nature. The isolation from the outer world that comes with dimming senses, the abatement of erotism, and the reduced vocational activities are compensated for by a new noetic or meditative urge that comes straight from the primal sources of all vital energy and gives a new and deeper sense of these and, if we are philosophical, brings a new sympathy with vitalistic theories like those of Lotze, Samuel Butler, Fechner, and Bergson, to say nothing of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, or the long line of evolutionists before Darwin, which goes back at least to Heraclitus. This final rally of powers just when the processes of bodily decay are accelerated, which in times past sometimes took the form of outbreaks ofprophecy, admonition, or clairvoyance as to the meaning of present tendencies for the far future of the race and the further development of which is one of the great present hopes of a world in which the processes of degeneration are now being greatly accelerated, can be nothing else than the birth throes of a new and higher stage in the evolution of man. The task now rests upon us to intensify and prolong this stage and to assure it to an ever larger number. We already see that we here escape from many, and must learn to escape from more, of Metchnikoff’s disharmonies in life. Sometime we shall both breed and educate for it, make it the ideal and goal for the young, and look for and heed its deliverances in the favored old. Having attained it, although death will seem all the darker by contrast with its regenerative light, man can meet it with less regret because he will not feel that he must be consoled by the sequel of another life. All forms of belief in the latter are, in fact, only surrogates expressive of a deeper faith and these symbols of it have served the precious purpose of keeping alive in his breast the sense that his life here was an unfinished fragmentary thing. The true Indian summer of life, when its possibilities are developed, is all that they mean, for in it all man’s belated powers will ripen and the final harvest of his life be garnered.
As to death, normal old age loves it no better than do the young. Metchnikoff, who postulated an instinct for death as the reversal of the love for life and which he thought should supervene at the end, looked for it in himself when he faced imminent and certain death at nearly three-score-and-ten; but in vain. The late Secretary Lane, facing it, was praised for saying, “I accept,” but the psychologist doubts whether anyone ever did or could welcome death understanding it to be extinction. The suicide may murder his instinctive will to live; the martyr may die in the hope of a better world beyond; thedisappointed lover or the coward to life may turn to it as the lesser of two evils. A man may surrender his life as a sacrifice to a cause he deems greater than self but it is nevertheless a supreme sacrifice. A soldier accepts the fatal thrust of the bayonet and a criminal mounts the scaffold or sits in the death chair because he cannot help it. For how can life accept its own negation? It can never hope to know more of it than the sun can know of shadows, which are where it is not. Thus the old are no wiser and no more willing to die than the young, if indeed they are as much so, because it means more to the latter who have more to lose by it. All that philosophy or religion can do is to direct our minds from its full and stark envisagement.
Growing old hygienically is like walking over a bridge that becomes ever narrower so that there is progressively less range between thelicetand thenon licet, excess and defect. The bridge slowly tapers to a log, then a tight-rope, and finally to a thread. But we must go on till it breaks or we lose balance. Some keep a level head and go farther than others but all will go down sooner or later.
Several of my respondents say that they never on any account admit to themselves that they are old and a few advise us to avoid by every possible means all thought of death, using every method of diversion from it. One thinks that to dwell upon this theme is positively dangerous because the thought tends to bring the reality. I believe, on the contrary, that such an attitude is not only cowardly but that it involves self-deception because thememento moriis in fact always present, if unconsciously, in the old and to face the Great Enemy squarely really brings easement and safeguards us from a thanatophobia that may have far more dangerous outcrops. To have once deliberately oriented ourselves to death before our powers fail gives us a new poise whateverattitude toward it such contemplation leads us to.
My own conclusion that death is the end of body and soul alike, while it gives me a profound sense of satisfaction as having reached and accepted the final goal of all present culture tendencies which all serious souls feel impelled toward but which many of them still fight down also brings me, I frankly confess, a new joy in and love of life which is greatly intensified by contrast with the blankness beyond. As a dark background brings out a fading picture, so whatever remains of life is vastly more precious and more delectable day by day and hour by hour than it could possibly be if at the door of the tomb we only saidau revoir. The very minutes seem longer because the departure into eternity is so near. Although death treats our psyche just as it does our soma, this is not so bad on our present views of the universe and insight lifts us above the need of consolation and even gives a sense of victory though Death do his worst, which those who expect another personal life never attain. And so I am grateful to senescence that has brought me at last into the larger light of a new day which the young can never see and should never be even asked to see. Thus if any of them should ever read my book thus far I would dismiss them here and in the following chapter address myself to the aged alone. That Jesus faced, and consciously, this absolute death at the close of his career seems to me now to have been made clear by modern critical and psychological investigation. But it was a sound pedagogic instinct that led the evangelists to veil this extreme experience of their Master.203