INTRODUCTION
Ourlife, bounded by birth and death, has five chief stages, each of which, while it may be divided into substages, also passes into the next so gradually that we cannot date, save roughly and approximately, the transition from one period to that which succeeds it. These more marked nodes in the unity of man’s individual existence are: (1) childhood, (2) adolescence from puberty to full nubility, (3) middle life or the prime, when we are at the apex of our aggregate of powers, ranging from twenty-five or thirty to forty or forty-five and comprising thus the fifteen or twenty years now commonly called our best, (4) senescence, which begins in the early forties, or before in woman, and (5) senectitude, the post-climacteric or old age proper. My own life work, such as it is, as a genetic psychologist was devoted for years to the study of infancy and childhood, then to the phenomena of youth, later to adulthood and the stage of sex maturity. To complete a long-cherished program I have now finally tried, aided by the first-hand knowledge that advancing years have brought, to understand better the two last and closing stages of human life.
In fact ever since I published myAdolescencein 1904 I have hoped to live to complement it by a study of senescence. The former could not have been written in the midst of the seething phenomena it describes, as this must be. We cannot outgrow and look back upon old age, for the course of time cannot be reversed, as Plato fancied life beginning in senility and ending in the mother’s womb. The literature on this theme is limitedand there are few specialists in gerontology even among physicians. Its physiological and pathological aspects have been treated not only for plants and animals but for man, and this has been done best by men in their prime. For its more subjective and psychological aspects, however, we shall always be dependent chiefly upon those who are undergoing its manifold metamorphoses and therefore lack the detachment that alone can give us a true and broad perspective.
Again, youth is an exhilarating, age a depressing theme. Both have their zest but they are as unlike as the mood of morning and evening, spring and autumn. Despite the interest that has impelled the preparation of these chapters there is, thus, a unique relief that they are done and that the mind can turn away from the contemplation of the terminal stage of life. An old man devoting himself for many months to the study of senectitude and death has a certain pathetic aspect, even to those nearest him, so that his very household brightens as his task draws toward its close. It was begun, not chiefly for others, even for other old people, but because the author felt impelled upon entering this new stage of life and upon retirement from active duties, to make a self-survey, to face reality, to understand more clearly what age was and meant for himself, and to be rightly oriented in the post-graduate course of life into which he had been entered. The decision to publish came later in the hope that his text might prove helpful, not only to fellow students in the same curriculum but to those just passing middle life, for the phenomena of age begin in the early forties, when all should think of preparing for old age.
Resent, resist, or ignore it as we will, the fact is that when we are once thought of as old, whether because of mental or physical signs or by withdrawal from our wonted sphere of activities, we enter a class more or lessapart and by ourselves. We can claim, if we will, certain exemptions, privileges, immunities, and even demand allowances; but, on the other hand, we are liable to feel set aside by, or to make room for, younger people and find that even the new or old services we have a new urge to render may be declined. Many things meant or not meant to do so, remind us of our age. Friends and perhaps even critics show that they take it into consideration. Shortcomings that date from earlier years are now ascribed to age. We feel, often falsely, that we are observed or even spied upon for signs of its approach, and we are constantly tempted to do or say things to show that it is not yet upon us. Only later comes the stage of vaunting it, proclaiming openly our tale of years and perhaps posing as prodigies of senescence. Where the transition from leadership toward the chimney corner is sudden, this sense of aloofness and all its subjective experiences becomes acute, while only if it is very gradual may we pass into innocuous desuetude and hardly know it. Thus in all these and other ways isolation and the enhanced individuation characteristic of age separate us until in fact we feel more or less a caste apart. Despite all, however, there is a rapport between us oldsters, and we understand each other almost esoterically. We must accept and recognize this better knowledge of this stage of life as part of our present duty in the community.
Thus the chief thesis of this book is that we have a function in the world that we have not yet risen to and which is of the utmost importance—far greater, in fact, in the present stage of the world than ever before, and that this new and culminating service can only be seen and prepared for by first realizing what ripe and normal age really is, means, can, should, and now must do, if our race is ever to achieve its true goal. For both my purposes, the personal and later public one, it has seemedwisest to give much space to a conspectus of opinions by way of epitomes of the views of those who have considered the subject from the most diverse standpoints, and thus to let them speak for themselves. Both my own standpoint and my conclusions I believe to be justified by these data.
But, first, in a lighter and more personal vein and by way of further introduction, let me state that after six years of post-graduate study abroad, two of teaching at Harvard, and eight of professoring at the Johns Hopkins, I found myself at the head of a new university, from which latter post, after thirty-one years of service, I have just retired and become a pensioner. In this last left position I had to do creative educational work and shape new policies. I was given unusual freedom and threw my heart and soul into the work, making it more or less of a new departure. I nursed the infancy of the institution with almost maternal solicitude, saw it through various diseases incident to the early stages of its development, and steered it through several crises that taxed my physical and mental powers to their uttermost. In its service I had to do, as best I could, many things for which I was little adapted by training or talent and some of which were personally distasteful. But even to these I had given myself with loyalty and occasionally with abandon, as my “bit” in life, remembering that while men come and go, good institutions should, like Tennyson’s brook, “go on forever.”
There is always considerable publicity in such work and one has always to consider, in every measure, its effects upon the controlling board in whom the prime responsibility for its welfare is vested, the public, the faculty, and the students; and between the points of view of these four parties concerned there are often discrepancies so wide that if any of them knew how the others felt there might be serious trouble. Occasionally, too,my own opinion differed from all the others, and this involved a fifth factor to be reckoned with. Thus, much effort had to be directed toward compounding different interests and not infrequently the only way open seemed to be concealment, temporary at least, of the views of one of these elements, because untimely disclosure might have brought open rupture. However, I had muddled on as best I could, learning much tact and diplomacy and various mediatorial devices as the years rolled by.
And now I have resigned, and after months of delay and with gratifying expressions of regret, another younger captain, whom, happily, I can fully trust, is in my place. I had always planned that my retirement, when it came, should be complete. I would do my full duty up to the last moment and then sever every tie and entirely efface myself, so far as the institution I had served was concerned, and would distinctly avoid every worry, even as to the fate of my most cherished policies. This was only fair to my successor and all my interests must henceforth be vested elsewhere. But what a break after all these decades! It seemed almost like anticipatory death, and the press notices of my withdrawal read to me not unlike obituaries. The very kindness of all these and of the many private letters and messages that came to me suggested that their authors had been prompted by the old principle,De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
For more than forty years I have lectured at eleven o’clock and the cessation of this function leaves a curious void. My friends have already fancied that I tend to grow loquacious at that hour. If I speak or write now, it must be to a very different clientele. During all these years, too, I have held a seminary nearly every Monday night, and now when this evening comes around my faculties activate, even ifbombinantes in vacuo. On those evenings I have been greatly stimulated by familiarcontact with vigorous student minds, for on these occasions they and I have inspired each other to some of our bestaperçus. But now this contact is gone forever. MyJournal, which for more than thirty years had taken so much of my care and, at first in its nursling period, of my surplus funds and had become for me an institution in itself, is also now transferred to better hands.
Thus, I am rather summarily divorced from my world, and it might seem at first as if there was little more to be said of me save to record the date of my death—and we all know that men who retire often die soon afterwards. So my prayer perhaps should beNunc dimittis. Ex-presidents, like founders of institutions, have often lived to become meddling nuisances, so that even those whom they have most profited, secretly and perhaps unconsciously long to participate in an impressive funeral for them. What can remain but a trivial postscript? And would not some of the suggested forms of painless extinction be worthy of consideration? Of course it is bitter to feign that I am suddenly dead to these interests I have so long lived for, as all the proprieties demand I should do and as I inexorably will to do for my very heart and soul went into them. But I did not build a monument to myself in any sense but strove only to fashion an instrument of service and such I know it will remain—and, I hope, far more effectively than under my hand.
But I thank whatever gods there are that all this painful renunciation has its very satisfying compensations and that there are other counsels than those of despair, seeing which I can take heart again, and that these are so satisfying that I do not need to have recourse to wood-sawing, like the Kaiser, though I have a new sympathy even for him.
My very first and hardest duty of all is to realize that I am really and truly old. Associated for so manyyears with young men and able to keep pace with them in my own line of work, carrying without scathe not a few extra burdens at times, and especially during the war, and having, varied as my duties were, fallen into a certain weekly and monthly routine that varied little from year to year, I had not realized that age was, all the while, creeping upon me. But now that I am out the full realization that I have reached and passed the scripturally allotted span of years comes upon me almost with a shock. Emerson says that a task is a life-preserver, and now that mine is gone I must swim or go under. To be sure, I had been conscious during half a decade of certain slight incipient infirmities and had had moments of idealizing the leisure which retirement would bring. But when it came I was so overwhelmed and almost distracted by its completeness that I was at a loss, for a time, to know how to use it. I might travel, especially in the Orient, as I had long wanted to do, for I feel that I have a certain right to a “good time” for myself since my life has been a very industrious one and almost entirely in the service of others. I might live much out-of-doors on my small farm; read for pleasure, for I have literary tastes; move to a large city and take in its amusements, of which I am fond; devote myself more to my family, whom I now feel I have rather neglected; or give more time to certain avocations and interests in which I have dabbled but have never had time to cultivate save in the crudest way. Or, finally, I could do a little of all or several of these things in turn. But no program that I can construct out of such possibilities seems entirely satisfactory. I surely may indulge myself a little more in many ways but I really want and ought to do something useful and with a unitary purpose. Thus, I might have spent much time asSenex quærans institutum vitæbut for the saving fact that there are certain very specific things whichfor years I have longed to do, and indeed have already well begun, and to which, with this new leisure, I can now devote myself as never before.
As preliminary to even this, it slowly came to me that I must, first of all, take careful stock of myself and now seek to attain more of the self-knowledge that Socrates taught the world was the highest, hardest, and last of all forms of knowledge. I must know, too, just how I stand in with my present stage of life. Hence I began with a physical inventory and visited doctors. The oculist found a slight but unsuspected defect in one eye and improved my sight, which was fairly good before, by better glasses. The aurist found even the less sensitive ear fairly good. Digestion was found to be above the average. I had for years been losing two or three pounds a year, but this rather than the opposite tendency to corpulence was pronounced good (Corpora sicca durant), and I was told that I might go on unloading myself of superfluous tissue for fifteen or twenty years before I became too emaciated to live, which humans, like starving animals, usually do on losing about one-third of their weight. My heart would probably last about the same length of time if I did not abuse it, and smoking in moderation, a great solace, was not forbidden. A little wine, “the milk of old age,” was not taboo and I was given a prescription to enable me to get it if I desired, even in these prohibition days. One suggested that I insure my life heavily and another advised an annuity; but I thought neither of these quite fair in view of the above findings, for I did not wish to profiteer on my prospects of life.
This hygienic survey reinforced what I had realized before, namely, that physicians know very little of old age. Few have specialized in its distinctive needs, as they have in the diseases of women and children and the rest. Thus the older a man is, the more he must dependupon his own hygienic sagacity for health and long life. The lives of nearly all the centenarians I have been able to find show that they owe their longevity far more to their own insight than to medical care, and there seems to be a far greater individual difference of needs than medicine yet recognizes. Of the philosopher, Kant, it was said that he spent more mentality in keeping his congenitally feeble body alive and in good trim to the age of eighty than he expended in all the fourteen closely printed volumes of his epoch-makingWorks.
Thus, again, I realized that I was alone, indeed in a new kind of solitude, and must pursue the rest of my way in life by a more or less individual research as to how to keep well and at the top of my condition. In a word, I must henceforth, for the most part, be my own doctor. All of those I consulted agreed that I must eat moderately, slowly, oftener, less at a time, sleep regularly, cultivate the open air, exercise till fatigue came and then promptly stop, be cheerful, and avoid “nerves,” worry, and all excesses. But with these commonplaces the agreement ceased. One said I needed change, as if, indeed, I was not getting it with a vengeance. One suggested Fletcherizing, while another thought this bad for the large intestine, which needed more coarse material to stimulate its action. One thought there was great virtue in cold, another in warm baths. Two prescribed a diet, while another said, “Eat what you like, with discretion.” One suggested thyroid extract and perhaps Brown-Sequard’s testicular juices, and there seemed to be a more general agreement that a man is as old, not as his heart and arteries as was once thought, but as his endocrine glands. One would give chief attention to the colon and recommended Metchnikoff’s tablets. One prescribed Sanford Bennett’s exercises which made him an athlete at seventy-two. Rubbing or self-massage on rising and retiring was commended.Battle Creek advises bowel movements not only daily but oftener, while others insist that constipation should and normally does increase with old age. Pavlovists, especially Sternberg in his writings, would have us trust appetite implicitly, believing that it always points true as the needle to the pole to the nutritive needs of both sick and well and that it gives the sole momentum to all the digestive processes, even down to the very end of the alimentary canal; while others prescribe everything chemically, calculating to a nicety the proportions of carbohydrates, fats, calories, and the rest, with no reference to gustatory inclination.
Perhaps I should try out all these suggestions in turn and seek to find by experiment which is really best for me. I almost have the will to do so because I certainly illustrate the old principle that as life advances we love it not less but more, for the habit of living grows so strong with years that it is ever harder to break it. All things considered, however, it would rather seem that the longer we live the harder it is to keep on doing so, and that with every year of life we must give more attention to regimen if we would put off the great life-queller, which all the world fears and hates as it does nothing else, beyond its normal term, which most generally agree is very largely hereditary. In fact, as Minot shows, all creatures begin to die at the very moment when they begin to live. All theories of euthanasia ignore the fact that death is essentially a negation of the will-to-live, so that a conscious and positive will-to-die is always only an artifact.
So much I gathered from the doctors I saw or read. Their books and counsels cost me a tidy sum but it was well worth it. I now know myself better than they, and it is much to realize that henceforth an ever-increasing attention must be given to body-keeping if one would stay “fit” or even alive. Now that the averagelength of human life is increased and there are more and more old people, a fact that marks the triumph of science and civilization, there is more need of studying them, just as in recent decades children have been studied, for medically, at least after the climacteric, they constitute a class in the community that is somewhat alien, its intrinsic nature but little known, and the services it was meant to render but little utilized.1
As my horizon changed and I became more at home with myself, and personal problems grew nearer and clearer, I realized that I must make a new plan of life, in which both tasks and also a program of renunciation played a very prominent initial part. This began with a literal house-cleaning. My home, from attic to cellar, and even the large barn were more or less full of disused articles of every kind—furniture and even wearing apparel, still serviceable but displaced by better ones, which it was now plain could never be of use to us but might be so to others. About some of these so many old associations clustered that it was a pang to part with them, but it was selfish to keep them longer. And so, by distribution to persons and institutions, then by sales, and finally by dumpage, they were rigorously gotten rid of, room by room, and we all felt relieved physically, mentally, and morally, by this expropriation, even though a few heirlooms were sacrificed. This process has many analogies with those by which the body is rid of waste material.
Next came books, of which my purchases, when I was enthusiastic and had a passion for ownership and completeness in my favorite topics, had been extravagant for my means and which, by many hundreds of publisher’s gifts for review in my journals, had overflowedfrom both study and library into nearly every room. These, in open shelves for greater accessibility and laboriously and systematically arranged, could not be disturbed often or dusted and are a housekeeper’s abomination. I had for years collected pamphlets and bound volumes on many topics in the vague hope of some future use, but which I now realize will never be warmed up again. So, section by section, shelf by shelf, I went over them, reserving all on topics I might yet study, and after inviting colleagues and the Library to take freely what they would I shipped the residue in boxes to antiquarian and second-hand dealers and accepted with equanimity the pittance they paid. This work done in leisure hours for months, was a wrenching process because every step in it involved the frustration of activities once thought possible but which now seemed to be no longer so. Little, thus, remained outside my own quite definitely narrowed field of work which I hope yet to do, and only a few gifts and sets, along with texts studied in younger and those taught in later days in which my descendants may sometime come to feel an interest, remain. This riddance of the residue of superfluous printed matter is not unlike anti-fat regimens, which are disagreeable but strengthening.
Next, I attacked a formidable pile of old lecture notes, beginning with a few small and faded records of college exercises in bound sheets, including theHeftenof European courses, and finally the far more voluminous memoranda of my own lectures for nearly two-score years. How crude and impossible now were these earlier reminders of my professorial activity! What a prodigious amount of work, time, and even manual labor they involved! What hardihood of inference and conclusion! What immaturity and even foolhardiness of judgment on some of the greatest problems of life! If I wanted to dignify or even glorify my old age at the expenseof my youth, here are abundant data for so doing. But I do not, and so I found peculiar pleasure in consigning, with my own hands, armfuls of such manuscript to the flames. How hard I rode my own hobbies! What liberties I took—and all with perfect innocence of intent—with the ideas of others, which insinuated themselves unconsciously into all of my mental complexes! And yet, at the same time, how voraciously I read, how copiously I quoted, and how radically I changed the form, substance, and scope of my favorite courses each year, slowly improving them in clarity and coherence! And how many special themes in my field, once central, have lapsed to secondary importance or become obsolete! Such breaks with the past, which psychology regards as analogues of a catharsis that relieves constipation, have a certain insurance value not only against ultra-conservatism but against the inveterate tendency of the old to hark back to past stages of life.
As a part of the process of reorientation I felt impelled, as I think natural enough for a psychologist, to write my autobiography and get myself in focus genetically. To this I devoted the first year after my retirement. It is now complete and laid safely away and may or may not be published sometime, although certainly not at present. Its preparation served me well in advancing my understanding of the one I know best of all, and I would earnestly prescribe such an occupation as one of the most pleasant and profitable services intelligent old people can render to themselves and perhaps their posterity and friends, if not to the world at large. The reading of “lives,” too, is often one of the most absorbing and sometimes almost exclusive intellectual occupation of the old.
Incidental to this work I unearthed many written data of the past—my youthful diaries, school exercises, some two feet of letters from my parents, especially mymother, for more than a quarter of a century after I left home and before her death; and several hundred large envelopes of carefully filed correspondence with many friends and strangers on many topics. All these had to be at least cursorily glanced over. Part of this voluminous material no one, I am convinced, will ever care to reperuse. My own offspring have no interest in it, so why not consign it to oblivion now that it has served its final purpose? There is little of value to the living or of special credit to the dead in it all; so I conclude there is more of real piety, even to the memory of my mother, to select a number of the best of her missives which most clearly show her constant and affectionate solicitude and love, and burn all the rest. I am sure that both she and my father would heartily commend this course. So, as I watched them burn in the grate one solitary spring at evening twilight, I felt that I had completed a filial function of interment of her remains. No profane ear can now ever hear what she whispered into mine. She tried to convey everything good in her beautiful soul to me, her eldest, wanted me to do everything commendable that she could not and realize all her own thwarted ambitions. I hope that I may yet do something more worthy of her fondest hopes. If I seem to have cremated her very soul, or so much of it as she gave me, I feel that I have thus done the last and most sacred act of service which such a son can render such a mother.
By all this purgation I have, at any rate, saved my offspring from a task that could not be other than painful and embarrassing to them, and relieved them from inheriting a burden of impedimenta which they themselves would not have the hardihood to destroy, at least for years after my demise, and which could be of no earthly use to them or any one else.
And now it only remained for me to make my lastwill and testament and bequeath all that I have left where I hope it may do most good. This should have been done long ago but I have been withheld from this duty, partly by preoccupation but far more by the instinctive reluctance all feel to thus anticipate their own death. A dozen modes of disposing of my modest estate had occurred to me and there were countless considerations to be weighed. Some provisions were obvious but more were beset with a puzzling array ofprosandcons. But the time was over-ripe, and so I nerved myself for this ordeal, feeling sure there would be regrets, revisions, or perhaps codicils every year I lived. But when it was duly signed and witnessed there was, on the whole, great relief, as from having accomplished a long-looming and difficult task.
For myself, I feel thrice fortunate in having really found mygoru, the one thing in which I am up to date and seething with convictions, which I have never before had the courage to express, and that I can now hope to devote myself to with all my spirit and understanding and with the abandon the subject really demands. I will not accept the subtle but persistently intrusive suggestion that it will do no good or that former colleagues whom I esteem, and whose judgment I greatly prize, will ignore it because other old men have written fatuously. I can, at least, speak more honestly than I have ever dared to do before, and if I am never read or even venture into print, I shall have the satisfaction of having clarified and unified my own soul.
But before I can enter fully into the functions or the service age ought to render and begin the one thing I have always planned for this stage of life, I would know more about what it really is, find out its status, estimate its powers, its limitations, its physical and mental regimen; and especially, if I can, look death, which certainly cannot be very far off, calmly in the face. It is in thisfinal stage of preparation for what I yet hope to do later that I invite the reader to accompany me through the following pages in the fond hope that not only the old may be helped to better realize their estate and their responsibilities and duties in the world of to-day but that those just emerging from middle life and for whom the shadows have just begun to lengthen may be better fitted to meet old age when it overtakes them.