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Title: Senescence, the Last Half of Life

Author: G. Stanley Hall

Release date: October 14, 2021 [eBook #66534]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: D. Appleton and Company, 1922

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SENESCENCE,
THE LAST HALF OF LIFE ***

SENESCENCE
THE LAST HALF OF LIFE

BY G. STANLEY HALL

SENESCENCE
RECREATIONS OF A
PSYCHOLOGIST
MORALE
ADOLESCENCE
YOUTH
EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS
FOUNDERS OF MODERN
PSYCHOLOGY
ASPECTS OF CHILD LIFE
AND EDUCATION

D. APPLETON AND
COMPANY
Publishers New York

SENESCENCE
THE LAST HALF OF LIFE

BY

G. STANLEY HALL, Ph.D., LL.D.
Author of “Adolescence,” “Educational Problems,” “Founders
of Modern Psychology,” “Morale,” “Recreations

of a Psychologist,” etc.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: MCMXXII :: LONDON

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FOREWORD
In this book I have tried to present the subjects of Old Age and Death
from as many viewpoints as possible in order to show how the ignorant and
the learned, the child, the adult, and the old, savage and civilized man,
pagans and Christians, the ancient and the modern world, the
representatives of various sciences, and different individuals have viewed
these problems, letting each class, so far as I could, speak for itself. This
part of the task has been long and arduous and my conspectus is not entirely
encyclopedic, as it set out to be. I have also tried to develop an idea of
death, and especially of old age, which I believe to be, if not essentially
new, more true to the facts of life and mind than those now current, and
which I think much needed by the world just now. Despite the great and
growing interest that has impelled this study, its themes have proved
increasingly depressing, so that its conclusion brings a unique relief that I
may now turn to more cheerful occupations, although it would be craven to
plead this as an extenuation of the shortcomings of which I am increasingly
conscious. If I have at certain points drawn too frankly upon my own
personal experiences with age I realize that this does not compensate for my
limitations in some of the special fields I ventured to enter. I have had in
mind throughout chiefly the nature and needs of intelligent people passing
or past middle life quite as much as of those actually entering old age. It is
hoped that the data here garnered and the views propounded may help to a
better and more correct understanding of the nature and functions of old
age, and also be a psychologist’s contribution to the long-desired but long-
delayed science of gerontology.
It is a pleasant duty to express my personal obligations to the Library of
Clark University and its staff, and particularly to my secretary, Miss Mary
M. McLoughlin, who has not only typed and read the proof of all the book
but has been of great assistance in finding references and made many
helpful suggestions.
G. Stanley Hall

INTRODUCTION
Our life, bounded by birth and death, has five chief stages, each of
which, while it may be divided into substages, also passes into the next so
gradually that we cannot date, save roughly and approximately, the
transition from one period to that which succeeds it. These more marked
nodes in the unity of man’s individual existence are: (1) childhood, (2)
adolescence from puberty to full nubility, (3) middle life or the prime, when
we are at the apex of our aggregate of powers, ranging from twenty-five or
thirty to forty or forty-five and comprising thus the fifteen or twenty years
now commonly called our best, (4) senescence, which begins in the early
forties, or before in woman, and (5) senectitude, the post-climacteric or old
age proper. My own life work, such as it is, as a genetic psychologist was
devoted for years to the study of infancy and childhood, then to the
phenomena of youth, later to adulthood and the stage of sex maturity. To
complete a long-cherished program I have now finally tried, aided by the
first-hand knowledge that advancing years have brought, to understand
better the two last and closing stages of human life.
In fact ever since I published my Adolescence in 1904 I have hoped to
live to complement it by a study of senescence. The former could not have
been written in the midst of the seething phenomena it describes, as this
must be. We cannot outgrow and look back upon old age, for the course of
time cannot be reversed, as Plato fancied life beginning in senility and
ending in the mother’s womb. The literature on this theme is limited and
there are few specialists in gerontology even among physicians. Its
physiological and pathological aspects have been treated not only for plants
and animals but for man, and this has been done best by men in their prime.
For its more subjective and psychological aspects, however, we shall
always be dependent chiefly upon those who are undergoing its manifold
metamorphoses and therefore lack the detachment that alone can give us a
true and broad perspective.

Again, youth is an exhilarating, age a depressing theme. Both have
their zest but they are as unlike as the mood of morning and evening, spring
and autumn. Despite the interest that has impelled the preparation of these
chapters there is, thus, a unique relief that they are done and that the mind
can turn away from the contemplation of the terminal stage of life. An old
man devoting himself for many months to the study of senectitude and
death has a certain pathetic aspect, even to those nearest him, so that his
very household brightens as his task draws toward its close. It was begun,
not chiefly for others, even for other old people, but because the author felt
impelled upon entering this new stage of life and upon retirement from
active duties, to make a self-survey, to face reality, to understand more
clearly what age was and meant for himself, and to be rightly oriented in the
post-graduate course of life into which he had been entered. The decision to
publish came later in the hope that his text might prove helpful, not only to
fellow students in the same curriculum but to those just passing middle life,
for the phenomena of age begin in the early forties, when all should think of
preparing for old age.
Resent, resist, or ignore it as we will, the fact is that when we are once
thought of as old, whether because of mental or physical signs or by
withdrawal from our wonted sphere of activities, we enter a class more or
less apart and by ourselves. We can claim, if we will, certain exemptions,
privileges, immunities, and even demand allowances; but, on the other
hand, we are liable to feel set aside by, or to make room for, younger people
and find that even the new or old services we have a new urge to render
may be declined. Many things meant or not meant to do so, remind us of
our age. Friends and perhaps even critics show that they take it into
consideration. Shortcomings that date from earlier years are now ascribed to
age. We feel, often falsely, that we are observed or even spied upon for
signs of its approach, and we are constantly tempted to do or say things to
show that it is not yet upon us. Only later comes the stage of vaunting it,
proclaiming openly our tale of years and perhaps posing as prodigies of
senescence. Where the transition from leadership toward the chimney
corner is sudden, this sense of aloofness and all its subjective experiences
becomes acute, while only if it is very gradual may we pass into innocuous
desuetude and hardly know it. Thus in all these and other ways isolation and
the enhanced individuation characteristic of age separate us until in fact we
feel more or less a caste apart. Despite all, however, there is a rapport

between us oldsters, and we understand each other almost esoterically. We
must accept and recognize this better knowledge of this stage of life as part
of our present duty in the community.
Thus the chief thesis of this book is that we have a function in the
world that we have not yet risen to and which is of the utmost importance—
far greater, in fact, in the present stage of the world than ever before, and
that this new and culminating service can only be seen and prepared for by
first realizing what ripe and normal age really is, means, can, should, and
now must do, if our race is ever to achieve its true goal. For both my
purposes, the personal and later public one, it has seemed wisest to give
much space to a conspectus of opinions by way of epitomes of the views of
those who have considered the subject from the most diverse standpoints,
and thus to let them speak for themselves. Both my own standpoint and my
conclusions I believe to be justified by these data.
But, first, in a lighter and more personal vein and by way of further
introduction, let me state that after six years of post-graduate study abroad,
two of teaching at Harvard, and eight of professoring at the Johns Hopkins,
I found myself at the head of a new university, from which latter post, after
thirty-one years of service, I have just retired and become a pensioner. In
this last left position I had to do creative educational work and shape new
policies. I was given unusual freedom and threw my heart and soul into the
work, making it more or less of a new departure. I nursed the infancy of the
institution with almost maternal solicitude, saw it through various diseases
incident to the early stages of its development, and steered it through
several crises that taxed my physical and mental powers to their uttermost.
In its service I had to do, as best I could, many things for which I was little
adapted by training or talent and some of which were personally distasteful.
But even to these I had given myself with loyalty and occasionally with
abandon, as my “bit” in life, remembering that while men come and go,
good institutions should, like Tennyson’s brook, “go on forever.”
There is always considerable publicity in such work and one has
always to consider, in every measure, its effects upon the controlling board
in whom the prime responsibility for its welfare is vested, the public, the
faculty, and the students; and between the points of view of these four
parties concerned there are often discrepancies so wide that if any of them
knew how the others felt there might be serious trouble. Occasionally, too,

my own opinion differed from all the others, and this involved a fifth factor
to be reckoned with. Thus, much effort had to be directed toward
compounding different interests and not infrequently the only way open
seemed to be concealment, temporary at least, of the views of one of these
elements, because untimely disclosure might have brought open rupture.
However, I had muddled on as best I could, learning much tact and
diplomacy and various mediatorial devices as the years rolled by.
And now I have resigned, and after months of delay and with gratifying
expressions of regret, another younger captain, whom, happily, I can fully
trust, is in my place. I had always planned that my retirement, when it
came, should be complete. I would do my full duty up to the last moment
and then sever every tie and entirely efface myself, so far as the institution I
had served was concerned, and would distinctly avoid every worry, even as
to the fate of my most cherished policies. This was only fair to my
successor and all my interests must henceforth be vested elsewhere. But
what a break after all these decades! It seemed almost like anticipatory
death, and the press notices of my withdrawal read to me not unlike
obituaries. The very kindness of all these and of the many private letters and
messages that came to me suggested that their authors had been prompted
by the old principle, De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
For more than forty years I have lectured at eleven o’clock and the
cessation of this function leaves a curious void. My friends have already
fancied that I tend to grow loquacious at that hour. If I speak or write now,
it must be to a very different clientele. During all these years, too, I have
held a seminary nearly every Monday night, and now when this evening
comes around my faculties activate, even if bombinantes in vacuo. On those
evenings I have been greatly stimulated by familiar contact with vigorous
student minds, for on these occasions they and I have inspired each other to
some of our best aperçus. But now this contact is gone forever. My Journal,
which for more than thirty years had taken so much of my care and, at first
in its nursling period, of my surplus funds and had become for me an
institution in itself, is also now transferred to better hands.
Thus, I am rather summarily divorced from my world, and it might
seem at first as if there was little more to be said of me save to record the
date of my death—and we all know that men who retire often die soon
afterwards. So my prayer perhaps should be Nunc dimittis. Ex-presidents,

like founders of institutions, have often lived to become meddling
nuisances, so that even those whom they have most profited, secretly and
perhaps unconsciously long to participate in an impressive funeral for them.
What can remain but a trivial postscript? And would not some of the
suggested forms of painless extinction be worthy of consideration? Of
course it is bitter to feign that I am suddenly dead to these interests I have
so long lived for, as all the proprieties demand I should do and as I
inexorably will to do for my very heart and soul went into them. But I did
not build a monument to myself in any sense but strove only to fashion an
instrument of service and such I know it will remain—and, I hope, far more
effectively than under my hand.
But I thank whatever gods there are that all this painful renunciation
has its very satisfying compensations and that there are other counsels than
those of despair, seeing which I can take heart again, and that these are so
satisfying that I do not need to have recourse to wood-sawing, like the
Kaiser, though I have a new sympathy even for him.
My very first and hardest duty of all is to realize that I am really and
truly old. Associated for so many years with young men and able to keep
pace with them in my own line of work, carrying without scathe not a few
extra burdens at times, and especially during the war, and having, varied as
my duties were, fallen into a certain weekly and monthly routine that varied
little from year to year, I had not realized that age was, all the while,
creeping upon me. But now that I am out the full realization that I have
reached and passed the scripturally allotted span of years comes upon me
almost with a shock. Emerson says that a task is a life-preserver, and now
that mine is gone I must swim or go under. To be sure, I had been conscious
during half a decade of certain slight incipient infirmities and had had
moments of idealizing the leisure which retirement would bring. But when
it came I was so overwhelmed and almost distracted by its completeness
that I was at a loss, for a time, to know how to use it. I might travel,
especially in the Orient, as I had long wanted to do, for I feel that I have a
certain right to a “good time” for myself since my life has been a very
industrious one and almost entirely in the service of others. I might live
much out-of-doors on my small farm; read for pleasure, for I have literary
tastes; move to a large city and take in its amusements, of which I am fond;
devote myself more to my family, whom I now feel I have rather neglected;

or give more time to certain avocations and interests in which I have
dabbled but have never had time to cultivate save in the crudest way. Or,
finally, I could do a little of all or several of these things in turn. But no
program that I can construct out of such possibilities seems entirely
satisfactory. I surely may indulge myself a little more in many ways but I
really want and ought to do something useful and with a unitary purpose.
Thus, I might have spent much time as Senex quærans institutum vitæ but
for the saving fact that there are certain very specific things which for years
I have longed to do, and indeed have already well begun, and to which, with
this new leisure, I can now devote myself as never before.
As preliminary to even this, it slowly came to me that I must, first of
all, take careful stock of myself and now seek to attain more of the self-
knowledge that Socrates taught the world was the highest, hardest, and last
of all forms of knowledge. I must know, too, just how I stand in with my
present stage of life. Hence I began with a physical inventory and visited
doctors. The oculist found a slight but unsuspected defect in one eye and
improved my sight, which was fairly good before, by better glasses. The
aurist found even the less sensitive ear fairly good. Digestion was found to
be above the average. I had for years been losing two or three pounds a
year, but this rather than the opposite tendency to corpulence was
pronounced good (Corpora sicca durant), and I was told that I might go on
unloading myself of superfluous tissue for fifteen or twenty years before I
became too emaciated to live, which humans, like starving animals, usually
do on losing about one-third of their weight. My heart would probably last
about the same length of time if I did not abuse it, and smoking in
moderation, a great solace, was not forbidden. A little wine, “the milk of old
age,” was not taboo and I was given a prescription to enable me to get it if I
desired, even in these prohibition days. One suggested that I insure my life
heavily and another advised an annuity; but I thought neither of these quite
fair in view of the above findings, for I did not wish to profiteer on my
prospects of life.
This hygienic survey reinforced what I had realized before, namely,
that physicians know very little of old age. Few have specialized in its
distinctive needs, as they have in the diseases of women and children and
the rest. Thus the older a man is, the more he must depend upon his own
hygienic sagacity for health and long life. The lives of nearly all the

centenarians I have been able to find show that they owe their longevity far
more to their own insight than to medical care, and there seems to be a far
greater individual difference of needs than medicine yet recognizes. Of the
philosopher, Kant, it was said that he spent more mentality in keeping his
congenitally feeble body alive and in good trim to the age of eighty than he
expended in all the fourteen closely printed volumes of his epoch-making
Works.
Thus, again, I realized that I was alone, indeed in a new kind of
solitude, and must pursue the rest of my way in life by a more or less
individual research as to how to keep well and at the top of my condition. In
a word, I must henceforth, for the most part, be my own doctor. All of those
I consulted agreed that I must eat moderately, slowly, oftener, less at a time,
sleep regularly, cultivate the open air, exercise till fatigue came and then
promptly stop, be cheerful, and avoid “nerves,” worry, and all excesses. But
with these commonplaces the agreement ceased. One said I needed change,
as if, indeed, I was not getting it with a vengeance. One suggested
Fletcherizing, while another thought this bad for the large intestine, which
needed more coarse material to stimulate its action. One thought there was
great virtue in cold, another in warm baths. Two prescribed a diet, while
another said, “Eat what you like, with discretion.” One suggested thyroid
extract and perhaps Brown-Sequard’s testicular juices, and there seemed to
be a more general agreement that a man is as old, not as his heart and
arteries as was once thought, but as his endocrine glands. One would give
chief attention to the colon and recommended Metchnikoff’s tablets. One
prescribed Sanford Bennett’s exercises which made him an athlete at
seventy-two. Rubbing or self-massage on rising and retiring was
commended. Battle Creek advises bowel movements not only daily but
oftener, while others insist that constipation should and normally does
increase with old age. Pavlovists, especially Sternberg in his writings,
would have us trust appetite implicitly, believing that it always points true
as the needle to the pole to the nutritive needs of both sick and well and that
it gives the sole momentum to all the digestive processes, even down to the
very end of the alimentary canal; while others prescribe everything
chemically, calculating to a nicety the proportions of carbohydrates, fats,
calories, and the rest, with no reference to gustatory inclination.

Perhaps I should try out all these suggestions in turn and seek to find by
experiment which is really best for me. I almost have the will to do so
because I certainly illustrate the old principle that as life advances we love
it not less but more, for the habit of living grows so strong with years that it
is ever harder to break it. All things considered, however, it would rather
seem that the longer we live the harder it is to keep on doing so, and that
with every year of life we must give more attention to regimen if we would
put off the great life-queller, which all the world fears and hates as it does
nothing else, beyond its normal term, which most generally agree is very
largely hereditary. In fact, as Minot shows, all creatures begin to die at the
very moment when they begin to live. All theories of euthanasia ignore the
fact that death is essentially a negation of the will-to-live, so that a
conscious and positive will-to-die is always only an artifact.
So much I gathered from the doctors I saw or read. Their books and
counsels cost me a tidy sum but it was well worth it. I now know myself
better than they, and it is much to realize that henceforth an ever-increasing
attention must be given to body-keeping if one would stay “fit” or even
alive. Now that the average length of human life is increased and there are
more and more old people, a fact that marks the triumph of science and
civilization, there is more need of studying them, just as in recent decades
children have been studied, for medically, at least after the climacteric, they
constitute a class in the community that is somewhat alien, its intrinsic
nature but little known, and the services it was meant to render but little
1
utilized.
As my horizon changed and I became more at home with myself, and
personal problems grew nearer and clearer, I realized that I must make a
new plan of life, in which both tasks and also a program of renunciation
played a very prominent initial part. This began with a literal house-
cleaning. My home, from attic to cellar, and even the large barn were more
or less full of disused articles of every kind—furniture and even wearing
apparel, still serviceable but displaced by better ones, which it was now
plain could never be of use to us but might be so to others. About some of
these so many old associations clustered that it was a pang to part with
them, but it was selfish to keep them longer. And so, by distribution to
persons and institutions, then by sales, and finally by dumpage, they were
rigorously gotten rid of, room by room, and we all felt relieved physically,

mentally, and morally, by this expropriation, even though a few heirlooms
were sacrificed. This process has many analogies with those by which the
body is rid of waste material.
Next came books, of which my purchases, when I was enthusiastic and
had a passion for ownership and completeness in my favorite topics, had
been extravagant for my means and which, by many hundreds of
publisher’s gifts for review in my journals, had overflowed from both study
and library into nearly every room. These, in open shelves for greater
accessibility and laboriously and systematically arranged, could not be
disturbed often or dusted and are a housekeeper’s abomination. I had for
years collected pamphlets and bound volumes on many topics in the vague
hope of some future use, but which I now realize will never be warmed up
again. So, section by section, shelf by shelf, I went over them, reserving all
on topics I might yet study, and after inviting colleagues and the Library to
take freely what they would I shipped the residue in boxes to antiquarian
and second-hand dealers and accepted with equanimity the pittance they
paid. This work done in leisure hours for months, was a wrenching process
because every step in it involved the frustration of activities once thought
possible but which now seemed to be no longer so. Little, thus, remained
outside my own quite definitely narrowed field of work which I hope yet to
do, and only a few gifts and sets, along with texts studied in younger and
those taught in later days in which my descendants may sometime come to
feel an interest, remain. This riddance of the residue of superfluous printed
matter is not unlike anti-fat regimens, which are disagreeable but
strengthening.
Next, I attacked a formidable pile of old lecture notes, beginning with a
few small and faded records of college exercises in bound sheets, including
the Heften of European courses, and finally the far more voluminous
memoranda of my own lectures for nearly two-score years. How crude and
impossible now were these earlier reminders of my professorial activity!
What a prodigious amount of work, time, and even manual labor they
involved! What hardihood of inference and conclusion! What immaturity
and even foolhardiness of judgment on some of the greatest problems of
life! If I wanted to dignify or even glorify my old age at the expense of my
youth, here are abundant data for so doing. But I do not, and so I found
peculiar pleasure in consigning, with my own hands, armfuls of such

manuscript to the flames. How hard I rode my own hobbies! What liberties
I took—and all with perfect innocence of intent—with the ideas of others,
which insinuated themselves unconsciously into all of my mental
complexes! And yet, at the same time, how voraciously I read, how
copiously I quoted, and how radically I changed the form, substance, and
scope of my favorite courses each year, slowly improving them in clarity
and coherence! And how many special themes in my field, once central,
have lapsed to secondary importance or become obsolete! Such breaks with
the past, which psychology regards as analogues of a catharsis that relieves
constipation, have a certain insurance value not only against ultra-
conservatism but against the inveterate tendency of the old to hark back to
past stages of life.
As a part of the process of reorientation I felt impelled, as I think
natural enough for a psychologist, to write my autobiography and get
myself in focus genetically. To this I devoted the first year after my
retirement. It is now complete and laid safely away and may or may not be
published sometime, although certainly not at present. Its preparation
served me well in advancing my understanding of the one I know best of
all, and I would earnestly prescribe such an occupation as one of the most
pleasant and profitable services intelligent old people can render to
themselves and perhaps their posterity and friends, if not to the world at
large. The reading of “lives,” too, is often one of the most absorbing and
sometimes almost exclusive intellectual occupation of the old.
Incidental to this work I unearthed many written data of the past—my
youthful diaries, school exercises, some two feet of letters from my parents,
especially my mother, for more than a quarter of a century after I left home
and before her death; and several hundred large envelopes of carefully filed
correspondence with many friends and strangers on many topics. All these
had to be at least cursorily glanced over. Part of this voluminous material no
one, I am convinced, will ever care to reperuse. My own offspring have no
interest in it, so why not consign it to oblivion now that it has served its
final purpose? There is little of value to the living or of special credit to the
dead in it all; so I conclude there is more of real piety, even to the memory
of my mother, to select a number of the best of her missives which most
clearly show her constant and affectionate solicitude and love, and burn all
the rest. I am sure that both she and my father would heartily commend this

course. So, as I watched them burn in the grate one solitary spring at
evening twilight, I felt that I had completed a filial function of interment of
her remains. No profane ear can now ever hear what she whispered into
mine. She tried to convey everything good in her beautiful soul to me, her
eldest, wanted me to do everything commendable that she could not and
realize all her own thwarted ambitions. I hope that I may yet do something
more worthy of her fondest hopes. If I seem to have cremated her very soul,
or so much of it as she gave me, I feel that I have thus done the last and
most sacred act of service which such a son can render such a mother.
By all this purgation I have, at any rate, saved my offspring from a task
that could not be other than painful and embarrassing to them, and relieved
them from inheriting a burden of impedimenta which they themselves
would not have the hardihood to destroy, at least for years after my demise,
and which could be of no earthly use to them or any one else.
And now it only remained for me to make my last will and testament
and bequeath all that I have left where I hope it may do most good. This
should have been done long ago but I have been withheld from this duty,
partly by preoccupation but far more by the instinctive reluctance all feel to
thus anticipate their own death. A dozen modes of disposing of my modest
estate had occurred to me and there were countless considerations to be
weighed. Some provisions were obvious but more were beset with a
puzzling array of pros and cons. But the time was over-ripe, and so I nerved
myself for this ordeal, feeling sure there would be regrets, revisions, or
perhaps codicils every year I lived. But when it was duly signed and
witnessed there was, on the whole, great relief, as from having
accomplished a long-looming and difficult task.
For myself, I feel thrice fortunate in having really found my goru, the
one thing in which I am up to date and seething with convictions, which I
have never before had the courage to express, and that I can now hope to
devote myself to with all my spirit and understanding and with the abandon
the subject really demands. I will not accept the subtle but persistently
intrusive suggestion that it will do no good or that former colleagues whom
I esteem, and whose judgment I greatly prize, will ignore it because other
old men have written fatuously. I can, at least, speak more honestly than I
have ever dared to do before, and if I am never read or even venture into

print, I shall have the satisfaction of having clarified and unified my own
soul.
But before I can enter fully into the functions or the service age ought
to render and begin the one thing I have always planned for this stage of
life, I would know more about what it really is, find out its status, estimate
its powers, its limitations, its physical and mental regimen; and especially,
if I can, look death, which certainly cannot be very far off, calmly in the
face. It is in this final stage of preparation for what I yet hope to do later
that I invite the reader to accompany me through the following pages in the
fond hope that not only the old may be helped to better realize their estate
and their responsibilities and duties in the world of to-day but that those just
emerging from middle life and for whom the shadows have just begun to
lengthen may be better fitted to meet old age when it overtakes them.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction vii

I. The Youth of Old Age 1
The turn of the tide of life—Relative
amount and importance of work
accomplished before and after forty—The
sexual life at the turn of the tide in man and
woman—Osler’s views and critics (E. G.
Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland, E. S. P. Haynes)
—Illustrations from Tolstoi, Fechner,
Comte, Swedenborg—The typical cases of
Segantini, Lenau, von Kleist, de
Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel, Ruskin, and
Nietsche—Michaëlis’ “dangerous age” in
women—The difficulty of determining this
age—The nature of the changes, conscious
and unconscious, and the lessons that
people in this stage of life should lay to
heart—H. G. Wells and Ross.

II. The History of Old Age 32
The age of plants and animals—The Old
Stone Age—Treatment of old age among
existing savage tribes—The views of
Frazer—The ancient Hebrews and the Old
Testament—The Greeks (including Sparta,
the Homeric Age, the status of the old in
Athens, the views of Plato, Socrates’ talks

with boys, Aristotle)—The Romans—The
Middle Ages—Witchcraft and old women
—Attitude of children toward the old—
Mantegazza’s collection of favorable and
unfavorable views of age—The division of
life into stages—The relation of age groups
to social strata—The religion of different
ages of life—The Vedanta—The Freudian
war between the old and the young—
History of views from Cornaro to our own
time—Bacon—Addison—Burton—Swift.

III. Literature by and on the Aged 100
Harriet E. Paine—Amelia E. Barr—
Mortimer Collins—Col. Nicholas Smith—
Byron C. Utecht—J. L. Smith—Sanford
Bennet—G. E. D. Diamond—Cardinal
Gibbons—John Burroughs—Rollo Ogden
—James L. Ludlow—Brander Matthews—
Ralph Waldo Emerson—Oliver Wendell
Holmes—Senator G. F. Hoar—William
Dean Howells—H. D. Sedgwick—Walt
Mason—E. P. Powell—U. V. Wilson—D.
G. Brinton—N. S. Shaler—Anthony
Trollope—Stephen Paget—Richard le
Gallienne—G. S. Street—C. W. Saleeby—
Bernard Shaw—A few typical poems and
quotations.

IV. Statistics of Old Age and Its Care 154
I. Numbers of old people increasing in all
known lands where data are available—
Actuarial and other mortality tables—
Expectation of life and death-rate at
different ages—Longevity and fecundity—
Death-rate in different occupations—

Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the
Middle Ages—Diversity of statistical
methods and results. II. Growing need of
care for the indigent old—Causes of
improvidence—Ignorance and
misconception of what old age is and
means—Why the old do not know
themselves—Old age pensions in Germany,
Austria, Great Britain and her colonies,
France, Belgium, United States—Industrial
pensions and insurance, beginning with
railroads—Trades unions—Fraternal
organizations—Retiring pensions in the
army and navy—Local and national
insurance—Teachers’ pensions—The
Carnegie Foundation—Criticism of
pension systems—Growing magnitude,
urgency, and diversity of views and
methods—The Life Extension Institute
—“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs—
Should the old organize?

V. Medical Views and Treatment of Old Age 195
The self-knowledge that doctors give—
Insidious approach of many diseases—
Medical views of the old of body and mind
(senile dementia)—Charcot—G. M.
Humphrey—Sir James Crichton-Browne—
H. M. Friedman—H. Gilford—H. Oertel—
A. S. Warthin—W. Spielmeyer—I. L.
Nascher—Sir Dyce Duckworth—Robert
Saundy—Arnold Lorand—T. D. Crothers
—C. G. Stockton—W. G. Thompson—M.
L. Price—G. S. Keith—J. M. Taylor—
C. W. Saleeby—C. A. Ewald—Raymond
Pearl—Protest against the prepotence of
heredity in determining longevity.

VI. The Contributions of Biology and
Physiology 248
Weismann’s immortality of the germ plasm
and his denial of the inheritance of
acquired qualities—The truth and
limitations of his views—The theories of
Hering and Simon—Metchnikoff’s
conception of the disharmonies in man, of
the rôle of intestinal fauna and their
products, of euthanasia, and of the means
and effects of prolonging life—C. S.
Minot’s conception of the progressive
arrest of life from birth on as measured by
declining rate of growth, and his neglect to
consider the dynamic elements—C. M.
Child’s studies of rejuvenation in lower and
higher forms of life in the light of the
problems of senescence—J. Loeb’s studies
of the effects of lower temperature, of
toxins and ferments—The preservation of
cells of somatic tissues potentially
immortal under artificial conditions—
Account of the studies of Carrel, Pozzi, and
others—Investigations upon the effects on
sex qualities and age of the extracts and
transplantations of glands, from Claude
Bernard—Investigations of Eugene
Steinach on the interchange of sex qualities
and rejuvenation by glandular operations in
animals and man—G. F. Lydston’s work—
Serge Voronoff’s experiments and his
exposition of the achievements and hopes
of glandular therapy—Some general
considerations in view of work in this field.

VII. Report on Questionnaire Returns 319

Their value suggestive but only for a class
—(1) Age and effect of the first realization
of the approach of old age—(2) To what do
you ascribe your long life?—(3) How do
you keep well?—(4) Are you troubled by
regrets?—(5) What temptations do you
feel, old or new?—(6) What duties do you
feel you still owe to others or to self?—(7)
Is interest in public affairs for the far future
and past, as compared with what is closer
at hand, greater or less?—(8) In what do
you take your greatest pleasures?—(9) Do
you enjoy the society of children, youth,
adults, those of your own age more or less
than formerly?—(10) Would you live your
life over again?—(11) Did you experience
an “Indian summer” of renewed vigor
before the winter of age began?—(12) Do
you rely more or less upon doctors than
formerly?—(13) Do you get more or less
from the clergy and the church than
formerly?—(14) Do you think more or less
of dying and the hereafter?—A few
individual returns from eminent people.

VIII. Some Conclusions 366
The early decades of age—The deadline of
seventy—The patheticism of the old—The
attitude of physicians toward them—
Fluctuations of youth—Erotic decline—
Alternations in the domain of sleep, food,
mood, irritability, rational self-control, and
sex—The dawn of old age in women—
Dangers of the disparity when December
weds May—Sexual hygiene for the old—
Mental effects of the dulling of sensations

—Lack of mental pabulum—The tedium
vitæ—Changes in the emotional life—Age
not second childhood—Women in the
dangerous age—Need of a new and higher
type of old age—Aristotle’s golden mean
and the magnanimous man—The age of
disillusion—Increased power of synthesis
—Nature’s balance between old and young
—Superior powers of the old in perspective
and larger views—New love of nature and
the country—Their preëminence in
religion, politics, philosophy, morals, and
as judges—Looking within and without—
Merging with the cosmos.

XI. The Psychology of Death 439
The attitude of infancy and youth toward
death as recapitulating that of the race—
Suicide—The death-wish—Necrophilism
—The Black Death—Depopulation by the
next war—The evolutionary nisus and
death as its queller—Death symbolism as
pervasive as that of sex—Flirtations of
youthful minds with the thought of death—
Schopenhauer’s view of death—The
separation of ghosts from the living among
primitive races—The thanatology of the
Egyptians—The journey of the soul—
Ancient cults of death and resurrection in
the religions about the eastern
Mediterranean, based on the death of
vegetation in the fall and its revival in the
spring, as a background of Pauline
Christianity—The fading belief in
immortality and Protestantism which now
at funerals speaks only of peace and rest—
Osler’s five hundred deathbeds—

Influential, plasmal, and personal
immortality and their reciprocal relations—
Moral efficacy of the doctrine of future
rewards and punishments—Belief in a
future life for the individual being
transformed into a belief in the future of the
race on earth and the advent of the
superman—Does man want personal
immortality—Finot’s immortality of the
decomposing body and its resolution into
its elements—The Durkheim school and
the mana doctrine—Schleiermacher—The
Schiller-James view of the brain and
consciousness as repressive of the larger
life of the great Autos—The views of Plato
and Kant—Have God and Nature cheated
and lied to us if the wish to survive is false?
—Noetic and mystic immortality by
partaking of the deathlessness of general
ideas—Views of Howison, Royce, and
others—Is there a true euthanasia or
thanatophilia?—Diminution of the desire
for personal immortality with culture and
age.

SENESCENCE

CHAPTER I

THE YOUTH OF OLD AGE
The turn of the tide of life—Relative amount and importance of
work accomplished before and after forty—The sexual life at the
turn of the tide in man and woman—Osler’s views and critics
(E. G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland, E. S. P. Haynes)—Illustrations
from Tolstoi, Fechner, Comte, Swedenborg—The typical cases
of Segantini, Lenau, von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol,
Scheffel, Ruskin and Nietzsche—Michaëlis’s “dangerous age”
in women—The difficulty in determining this age—The nature
of the changes, conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that
people in this stage of life should lay to heart—H. G. Wells and
Ross.

The easiest division of every whole is into two halves. Thus day and
night are bisected by noon and midnight, the year by both the solstice and
the equinox; the racer turns in the middle of his course; curricula,
apprenticeships, and long tasks have, from immemorial time, celebrated the
completion of their first moiety, and halfway houses divide established
courses of travel. So, too, we speak of middle age and think vaguely of it as
half way between birth and death or between adolescence and senescence.
If we think of life as a binomial curve rising from a base line at birth and
sinking into it at death, midway is the highest point with the longest
ordinate; and as the crest of a wave has its spindrift, so life at this point
often foams, or at least shows emulsive tendencies. We come in sight of the
descent while the ascent behind is still visible. The man of thirty-five hopes
to live the allotted span of seventy and at forty he knows that in another
two-score years his work will cease; and thus some comparison of the past
and future is inevitable. Some begin taking stock of what has been and what

remains to be done, reckoning only from the date of entering upon their
careers and trying thus to judge its future by its past. Thus sooner or later
there comes to all a realization that the tide that “drew us from out the
boundless deep” begins to “turn again home.”
These meridional perturbations usually come earlier in women than in
men, and this has been called their “dangerous age.” Both sexes realize that
they face the bankruptcy of some of their youthful hopes, and certain
temperaments make a desperate, now-or-never effort to realize their
extravagant expectations and are thus led to excesses of many kinds; while
others capitulate to fate, lose heart, and perhaps even lose the will-to-live.
Osler was the evil genius, the croaking Poe raven of this period. If such
pronouncements as his stimulate talent, which is longer lived, they depress
genius, which blossoms earlier. On the height of life we ought to pause,
circumspect, turn from the dead reckonings of the start, and ascend as into
an outlook tower to see, before it is too late, if we need to reorient our
course by the eternal stars. Here we begin the home stretch toward the
finish. Change, or at least thoughts of change, arise even in those most
successful, as biography so abundantly shows, while even partial failure
impels many to seek new environments and perhaps callings and some are
driven to mad new ventures. Most, however, despite a certain perturbation,
go on perhaps a score of years, and instead of anticipating old age wait till it
is upon them and they have to restrict their activities or retire; then only do
they accept the burden of years. The modifications in the vita sexualis
which middle life brings are only now beginning to be understood in their
true significance. Its first flush has come and gone and some settle to the
tranquil fruition of a happy married life, while others stray into secret and
forbidden ways or yield to the excitements of overindulgence just when
Nature begins to suggest more moderation, so that love often grows gross
just when its sublimation should begin to be most active. One close and
experienced observer points out that the forties is the decade of the triangle,
of the paramour, and of divorces for men, and that the preceding decade is
so for women; but of course we have no confirmatory statistics for such a
conclusion save only for divorce. The following epitomes represent the
chief aspects and treatments of this period, although illustrations of its
phenomena might be indefinitely multiplied.

The sensational press has so perverted the statements made by Dr.
William Osler in his farewell address on leaving the Johns Hopkins
University in 1905, and his remarks are so pithy, thinly and ineffectively as
he tried to mask his earnestness with humor, that it seems worth while to
2
quote his words, as follows:

I have two fixed ideas well known to my friends, harmless
obsessions with which I sometimes bore them, but which have a
direct bearing on this important problem. The first is the
comparative uselessness of men above forty years of age. This may
seem shocking, and yet, read aright, the world’s history bears out
the statement. Take the sum of human achievement in action, in
science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above
forty, and, while we should miss great treasures, even priceless
treasures, we should practically be where we are to-day. It is
difficult to name a great and far-reaching conquest of the mind
which has not been given to the world by a man on whose back the
sun was still shining. The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the
world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty years—
these fifteen golden years of plenty, the anabolic or constructive
period, in which there is always a balance in the mental bank and
the credit is still good.
In the science and art of medicine there has not been an advance
of the first rank which has not been initiated by young or
comparatively young men. Vesalius, Harvey, Hunter, Bichat,
Laennec, Virchow, Lister, Koch—the green years were yet on their
heads when their epoch-making studies were made. To modify an
old saying, a man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty,
wise spiritually at fifty—or never. The young men should be
encouraged and afforded every possible chance to show what is in
them. If there is one thing more than another upon which the
professors of the university are to be congratulated, it is this very
sympathy and fellowship with their junior associates, upon whom
really in many departments, in mine certainly, has fallen the brunt of
the work. And herein lies the chief value of the teacher who has
passed his climacteric and is no longer a productive factor; he can

play the man midwife, as Socrates did to Theætetus, and determine
whether the thoughts which the young men are bringing to the light
are false idols or true and noble births.
My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty
years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial,
political, and in professional life if, as a matter of course, men
stopped work at this age. Donne tells us in his “Biathanatos” that by
the laws of certain wise states sexagenarii were precipitated from a
bridge, and in Rome men of that age were not admitted to the
suffrage, and were called depontani because the way to the senate
was per pontem and they from age were not permitted to come
hither. In that charming novel, the “Fixed Period,” Anthony Trollope
discusses the practical advantages in modern life of a return to this
ancient usage, and the plot hinges on the admirable scheme of a
college into which at sixty men retired for a year of contemplation
before a peaceful departure by chloroform. That incalculable
benefits might follow such a scheme is apparent to any one who,
like myself, is nearing the limit, and who has made a careful study
of the calamities which may befall men during the seventh and
eighth decades!
Still more when he contemplates the many evils which they
perpetuate unconsciously and with impunity! As it can be
maintained that all the great advances have come from men under
forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion
of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians—nearly all the great
mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the
bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels, and not a few of the bad
sermons and speeches. It is not to be denied that occasionally there
is a sexagenarian whose mind, as Cicero remarks, stands out of
reach of the body’s decay. Such a one has learned the secret of
Hermippus, that ancient Roman, who, feeling that the silver cord
was loosening, cut himself clear from all companions of his own
age, and betook himself to the company of young men, mingling
with their games and studies, and so lived to the age of 153,
puerorum halitu refocillatus et educatus. And there is truth in the

story, since it is only those who live with the young who maintain a
fresh outlook on the new problems of the world.
The teacher’s life should have three periods—study until
twenty-five, investigation until forty, professional until sixty, at
which age I would have him retired on a double allowance. Whether
Anthony Trollope’s suggestion of a college and chloroform should
be carried out or not, I have become a little dubious, as my own
time is getting so short.

3
E. G. Dexter disputes Osler’s conclusions by referring to such well-
known cases as Gladstone, Bismarck, von Moltke, Rockefeller, Morgan,
etc., and finds that according to the last census there are 4,871,861 persons
over sixty in the United States. He recognizes the fact, however, that many
corporations refuse to add new men to their working force who are beyond
forty years of age. Dexter had previously tabulated the age of the nearly
9,000 persons mentioned in the 1900 edition of Who’s Who and found that
comparatively few who were under forty attained the distinction of being
included in this list. Of 6,983 men the median age was 54, only one in six
being below 40; that is, some 16 per cent were within Osler’s period of
most effective work. But he concludes that in Who’s Who younger men did
not receive the recognition given to their older confrères. This ratio he finds
to be as follows:

20–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69
3.9% 39.5% 36.4% 17.6% 2.4%

Thus the decade from 30 to 39 shows only very slightly greater productivity
than the next one, and less than one-half made good, so far as public
recognition is concerned, before the age of 40. This is irrespective of
vocation.
4
In all the studies of genius it would seem that musicians do their best
work earliest and prodigies are most common in this field. In those callings
that require a long preparation, science promises earliest recognition
because this line of work is entered with better intellectual equipment. Here,

too, belong professors, librarians, and teachers. Next come actors and
authors, in whom ability is partly born and partly made. Compared with
science, inventive genius gains a foothold on the ladder of fame late in life.
The business man and financier, the lawyer, doctor, and minister, must often
enter their profession from the bottom, and almost no great inventor is
below forty. For woman, however, recognition comes earlier, and
attractiveness of person has a greater premium here than with her brother.
Having outlived her youth, however, progress is harder.
5
W. A. Newman Dorland studied the histories of four hundred great
men of modern times and concluded that they refute Osler’s theory, the
large majority of them being still active at sixty, although he distinguishes
between workers and thinkers. He tells us that only that which is fittest
survives and almost seems to imply that man became man when he was
6
able to live and work productively after 40. He considers old age one of
the choicest products of evolution. His painstaking article is divided into
three sections: (1) enumerating the great things done by men after 70; (2) by
those between 60 and 70; (3) by those between 50 and 60. He thinks that if
Osler’s dictum has any validity, it is found among manual laborers. It
doubtless had its influence in the practice of so many industries that employ
no new men above the age of 40.
7
E. S. P. Haynes resents the idea that people should retire from public
affairs at forty, although he recognizes that near this age in both men and
women there is often an impatience with a future that promises to be just
like the past and there is a peculiar liability to amorous, financial, or other
adventures. If people do anything, they are labeled and so get into grooves,
and their friends, if they break out in new lines, as for example, Ruskin did,
are shocked. But the groove is liable to grow narrow, and when this is
realized, abrupt changes may occur. Nature protests against decay and
hence it is that we often see the spectacle of impatient old people who are in
a hurry, due perhaps to a subconscious effort to feel young again. This is
akin to the “dangerous age” in women. Life is not a bed of roses for those
who have succeeded, for it is sometimes as difficult to retain as it is to
achieve success. Very often our ideas, when we are young, are ahead of our
age but the world may catch up with us in middle or later life. Very often,

too, by ostentatiously turning their backs upon some new movement the old
thereby compel the young to take it up in order to deploy themselves.
In this connection one may reflect, with Louise Creighton, that as older
people caused the late war, while the younger fought it, when the latter
came home the places that had to be found for them involved a great deal of
displacement, so that the tension between old and young has been greatly
increased since the close of the war. We also recall the view of George R.
8
Sims, that the effect of the war upon the old was depressing because they
felt they must die when the world was in darkness and without realizing the
prayer of Simeon. The young anticipated the harvests of peace, but for the
old the prospect of dying before this harvest was garnered was often
pathetic.
9
Charles W. St. John résumés the experimental studies of Ranschenburg
and Balint which show that all activities of judgment, association, etc., are
retarded, errors increased, and ideas impoverished in old age. De Fursac
tabs the traits of normal senile dementia as (1) impaired attention and
association; (2) inaccurate perception of the external world, with illusions
and disorientation; (3) disordered memory, retrograde amnesia, and perhaps
pseudo-reminiscence; (4) impoverishment of ideas; (5) loss of judgment;
(6) loss of affectivity, along with morbid irritability; and (7) automatism.
There may be ideas of persecution or delusions of greatness. Youthful items
of experience hitherto only in the fringe of consciousness now press to the
center, and youthful contents are revived. There is a tendency to depart
from inductive procedure toward a priori methods, where feelings and
beliefs are criteria, and especially, as Fechner showed, to introversion.
There is less control and regression first shows itself in the intellect, which
is last to develop.
St. John proceeds to characterize four eminent men who underwent
more or less radical transformations in the early stages or youth of old age,
10
as follows. Tolstoy was a typical convert. He witnessed the horror of his
grandmother’s death, which profoundly affected all his later views. When
he was about twelve, a schoolmate told him that there was no God and that
all thought about Him was an invention; and he accepted this news and
went on in a few years to Nihilism. In later life he asked himself if he
should become “more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, and

Molière, what then?” and he could not answer. The ground crumbled under
him. There was no reason to live. Every day was bringing him nearer to the
precipice and yet he could not stop. He felt he could live no longer and the
idea of suicide as a last resort was always with him and he had to practice
self-deception to escape it. Yet he had a pagan love of life. He found his
status summed up in an Eastern fable of a traveler who is attacked by a wild
beast and attempts to escape by letting himself down into a dried-up well, at
the bottom of which he finds a dragon, and so is forced to cling to a wild
plant that grows on the wall. Suddenly he sees two mice (one black and one
white—day and night) nibbling the plant from which he hangs and in
despair he looks about, still with a faint hope of escape. On the leaves of
this wild plant he sees a few drops of honey and even with fear at his heart
he stretches out his tongue and licks them. Thus the dragon of death
inevitably awaits him, while even the honey he tries to taste no longer
rejoices him for it is not sweet. “I cannot turn my eyes from the mice or the
dragon. Both are no fable.”
Thus the fear of death which had long haunted him now excluded
everything else and he was in despair. He turned to the working people,
whom he had always liked, to study them and found that although they
anticipated death they did not worry about it but had a simple faith that
bridges the gulf between the finite and the infinite, although they held much
he could not accept. Thus for a year while he was considering whether or
not to kill himself, he was haunted by a feeling he describes as searching
after God, not with his reason but with his feelings. Kant and Schopenhauer
said that man could not know Him. Tolstoy at first feared that these
experiences presaged his own mental decline. He had joined the church and
clung to orthodoxy for three years but in the end left and was later
excommunicated. He became a peasant and finally left his pleasant home
for a monastery, and as the church had failed he turned to the Gospels, the
core of which he found in the Sermon on the Mount. Here was the solution
of his problem. If everyone strives for self there is no happiness. Nor is
there any love of family and friends alone, but love must extend to all
mankind and even to being, and this must be all-embracing. No doubt of
immortality can come to any man who renounces his individual happiness.
Instead of God he now worships the world-soul and attains the goal of
perfection he once sought in self-development.

11
Fechner, born in 1801, made professor of physics in 1833, turned to
more psychological studies in 1838. He had visual troubles and could not
work without bandaging his eyes, lived in a blue room, had insomnia, and
seemed about to die. But in 1843 he improved and felt he was called by
God to do extraordinary things, prepared for by suffering. His philosophical
inclinations now came into the foreground. He was on the way to the secret
of the universe. He believed in insight rather than induction, and this was in
the decades when German philosophy was at its lowest ebb. So his works
fell dead. Not only Buchner and Moleschott but Kant belonged to what he
called the “night side,” for the latter’s Ding-an-Sich was a plot to banish
joy. Fechner knew no epistemology and thought we could come into direct
contact with reality itself. Man lives three times: once before birth and in
sleep; second alternating; and finally in death comes to the eternal
awakening. The spirit will then communicate with others without language
and all the dead live in us as Christ did in His followers. The earth will
return its soul to the sun. Visible phantoms may be degenerate souls. In his
Zendavesta (Living Word) he gives us a philosophy that he deems Christian
and that really sums up his final view of things. The childish view is nearest
right and the philosopher only reverts to it. Fechner died November 18,
1887, at the age of eighty-six, and after his crisis was really more poet than
scientist.
Auguste Comte, born 1798, married at the age of twenty-seven and was
divorced at forty-four. He experienced losses by the failure of his publisher
and had his first crisis when he was forty. He met Clotilde de Vaux when he
was forty-seven but she died a year later. He then became the high priest of
humanity, developing his Politique Positive and a new religion. His father, a
government official, had given him an excellent scientific education, but
during his early years his emotional life was entirely undeveloped and this
12
now took the ascendency.
Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688. He had his first vision in
London in 1745 at the age of 57, became a seer and mystic, and changed
from a subjective to an objective type of thought and developed his doctrine
of correspondencies. The change was due to overwork and eye-strain, as
13
was the case with Comte.

14
Giovanni Segantini affords us perhaps the very best picture of a man
who died at the age of forty-three of what might be called meridional
mental fever. His life was a struggle against an obsessive death thought and
a compensatory will-to-live. His first painting, at the age of twelve, was of a
child’s corpse, which he tried to paint back into life. Haunted by the
idealized image of his mother, who died when he was very young, and
which he fancied he at length found in a peasant girl whom he made his
model for years, this life-affirming motif was always in conflict with the
thought of death, which in later years became an obsession. His struggle for
sublimation was typified by his removal from the world and retirement to a
high Alpine village where the mountains, in the ideal of which it was his
final ambition to embody all the excelsior motives of life, so drew him that
he had a passion for exploring their heights and once slept in the snow, to
the permanent impairment of his health. He had several narrow escapes
from death, which afterwards always provoked greater activity. He painted
an upright corpse, the fall of which he thought (with the characteristic
superstition of neurotics) was ominous. Death became, in the end, his muse
as his mother had been in the earlier stages of his development. He seemed
fascinated with the idea of anticipating death in every way, even though this
was a more or less unconscious urge. It was as if he revolted against the
ordinary fate of man to await its gradual approach with the soporific
agencies that old age normally supplies, and was anxious to go forth and
meet it face to face at the very summit of his powers. At times he let down
all precautions and took great risks, so characteristic a result of acute
disappointments or of general disenchantment with life.
He seemed to revel in the stimulus of the hurry-up motive that so often
supervenes, but far more slowly, in those who realize that they have reached
the zenith of their powers. Love of his mother made him an artist and he
early married a wife who was the mother-image, which was never marred
by any childish jealousy of his father, of whom he had known little, but was
sublimated into love of mankind and even of animals. But his later greater
love of death obscured the mother image and even overcame his passion for
home, which he had idealized, and dominated his exquisite feeling for and
worship of nature, which he always regarded as charged with symbolic
meanings.

At a crisis in the early thirties a prevalent depressive mood gave way to
the joy of creation, and his character and the method of his art seemed to
undergo a transformation. His resentment at his own fate seemed to vent
itself in the desire to banish if not, as Abraham thinks, to punish his mother
by representing her in scenes of exquisite suffering; and when at the age of
thirty-six his Alpinism made him at home only with the mountains the
break with his past life became more and more marked. The ordinary
vicissitudes of life were not sufficient and he wished to gamble not with the
mere abatement or reinforcement of life but with life and death themselves.
Even his dreams were haunted by a thanatic mood, and his superstitions
were such that they almost made life itself a hateful dream. He tells us of
fancying himself sitting in a retired nook that was at the same time like a
church, when a strange figure stood before him, a creature of dreadful and
repulsive form, with white gleaming eyes and yellow flesh tone, half cretin
and half death. “I rose, and with impressive mien ordered it away after it
had ogled me sideways. I followed it with my eye into the darkest corner
until it had vanished.” And this vision he thought ominous. When he turned
around he shuddered, for the phantom was again before him. Then he arose
like a fury, cursed and threatened it, and it vanished and did not return, for it
was more obedient than Poe’s Raven. His ambivalent reaction against this
was not only to work harder but to affirm that there was no death and thus
to revive much of the earlier religiosity of his childhood. One of his pictures
was of a dying consumptive which he transformed into one of blooming
life. More and more the death thought mastered his consciousness—almost
as much as it did the soul of the insane painter, Wertz—and provoked him
to greater enthusiasm and ever longer and more arduous programs for his
future life. But from the subconscious he was always hearing more and
more clearly the call of death, for which his deeper nature seems to have
passionately longed, while the opposite will-to-live became more and more
impotent. All his prodigious activity in later life seems to have been thus
really due to a subdominant will to die. When he fell ill for the first time in
his life, “the dark powers of his unconscious nature came in to help the
disease and make the disintegrative process easier and to invite death,” as if
love of it were the consummation of his love of all things that lived, and the
latter would not have been complete without the former.
Another case of a genius who hurried through the table d’hôte Nature
provides and left the table sated to repletion when her regular guests were

15
but half through the course was the German poet, Lenau. Born in 1802, he
studied philosophy, law, and medicine successively, sought contact with
primeval nature in America at thirty, returned to find himself famous, and,
after a period of prolonged chastity, became promptly infected with
syphilis, falling a victim to insanity at forty-two and dying of progressive
paralysis at forty-eight. Syphilis is perhaps the most psychalgic of all
diseases that afflict man, for it not only poisons the arrows of love and
makes its ecstasy exquisite pain but weakens all the phyletic instincts, like
the climacteric, and like it brings hyperindividuation in its train. He knew
both the joys and the pains of life, the depths of misery and the heights of
euphoria. Eros and Thanatos were inseparable in his soul, and both had their
raptures and inspired him by turns. Amorousness brought acute religiosity,
and between his erotic adventures he lapsed far toward the negation of all
faiths and creeds. When not in love his violin was treated as a paramour,
and he forgot it when the tender passion glowed again in his soul. I doubt if
any poet ever had a truer and deeper feeling for nature or was a more
eloquent interpreter of all her moods and aspects. He exhausted both homo-
and heterosexual experiences, remaining through a series of love affairs,
however, true to his Sophie, who was like his mother and with whom his
relations were pure and whose influence was beneficent. Even before his
infection megalomania alternated with misanthropy, and he had all the
fluctuations of mood that are such characteristic stigmata of hysteria. Spells
of lassitude alternated with Berserker energy; masochism with sadism;
excesses, including those of drink, with spells of depression. In his
aggressive moods he stormed up mountains, which to him were symbols of
mental elevation, until he was completely exhausted. Sometimes he fancied
himself a nobleman or even a monarch and always strove to reduce all
about him to servile satellites. The Job-Faust-Manfred motive often took
possession of him, and sometimes he played his violin half the night,
dancing in rapt ecstasy and unable to keep time. In his periods of self-
reproach after orgasms of ecstasy he became ascetic. His poetry and
converse were, especially for such a man, singularly pure. He said he
carried a corpse around within him. Most insanities are only an
exaggeration or breaking out of previous traits, and this was exceptionally
so in his case. At one time he seemed to want to break with all his old and
to find a new set of friends.

In the high temperature at which he lived, with so many impulses that
were either frustrated or crucified, always hot with love or its ambivalent
hate, he died—not like Segantini, because he was hypnotized by death at
the very acme of his power and willed it actively, though unconsciously, as
surely as if he had committed suicide, but he rather turned to it from sheer
repletion of life, most of the experiences of which he had exhausted. It was
as if a congeries of souls took possession of him by turns, so that in middle
life he had himself already played most of the parts in the drama and thus
knew it far more exhaustively than those who lead more unitary lives,
however prolonged they may be. He was by no means theoretically a
miserabilist or even a pessimist but was simply burned out (blasé,
abgelebt). As if to anticipate the Weltschmerz that his diathesis made it
certain would later become acute, his passionate love for nature, deep and
insightful as it was, did not prove an adequate compensation, and we cannot
but wonder whether, if he had lived more normally and without infection to
four-score, his life would not inevitably have ended with the same, though
less acute, general symptoms. Yet even he never cursed the fate that brought
him into life or inveighed against his parentage. His life was like a candle in
the wind blown every way by turns, now and then flaring up and emitting
great light and heat, now almost put out, smoking, sputtering, and
malodorous in a socket like a blue flame just before its final extinction.
The psychograph of the poet Heinrich von Kleist (d. 1811, a.e. 34)
affords another example of a genius who died of premature old age near the
16
period of its dawn or at the critical turn of the tide. In the University his
passion for omniscience impelled him to enroll for so many and diverse
courses that his professors protested. Later he actually tried eight and
attempted to sample other callings. “He would have liked to be everything.”
In the space of fourteen years no less than nine women had engaged his
fancy, although none had made a deep or lasting impression. He had also a
veritable Lust for traveling and after every important event in his life
resorted to this kind of fugue from reality to lose himself in new scenes.
“There is nothing consistent in me save inconsistency.” His demands on his
friends, and also his ambitions, knew no bounds. He would “tear the crown
from Goethe’s brow.” He felt he must storm all heights and do it now or
never.

He, too, was bisexual in his instincts. He glorified purity and sobriety
as over-compensation for his shortcomings in both these respects. Much as
he did, he never could complete the great work he had long planned, and
despair at his impotence to achieve his ambitions made him at last take
flight to insanity as a refuge and finally to joint suicide with a woman. Late
in life he lost the power to distinguish between fact and fancy, so fully had
his writing become a surrogate for life. Wagner said that if life were as full
as we wish it to be, there would be no need of art, and von Kleist’s
biographer seems to doubt whether to call his end a victory or a surrender.
His wooing of death was not, like Segantini’s, a continuation and
consummation of the thanatopsis mood of adolescence but was rather due to
a growing endogenous lethargy and apathy. He lost his appetite for life,
from which he had expected more than it has to give even to the most
favored, and thus at the critical age when men are prone to weigh
themselves in the balance, he found incompleteness and inferiority both
within and without and so threw himself into the arms of the Great Silencer.
Everything conventional had long since palled upon him. “His early
fixation upon an unattainable goal was broken down and he pursued the
unattainable until he fancied he found it in death.” The outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War seemed, for a time, to afford him an outlet for his
pent-up desires without compelling him to resort to illness.
17
In his ground motif De Maupassant belongs to the same category as
Lenau and von Kleist. He inherited neurotic trends from both parents and
died in 1893 at the age of forty-three, having experienced most of the
episodes of life and during his twelve productive years written fourteen
volumes and climbed to the very summit of the French Parnassus. His
morbidity was partly congenital and partly metasyphilitic. Had he lived his
simple life in his Normandy home, instead of coming to Paris, he might
have survived but he fell a victim to narcotics, ether, hashish, morphine,
cocaine, Bacchus, and Venus. Like so many great men afflicted with the
same disease, his symptoms showed many marked departures from its
ordinary course, and before its active stage his divarications in the fields of
various abnormal symptom-groups were many. His passion for the horrible
is perhaps best illustrated in his shuddering “Horla.”
18
Gogol’s life (d. 1852, a.e. 43) was full of contradictory completeness
and incompleteness. He, too, desired not only to touch but to express life at

every point, and his realism was in fact only self-expression. He lived
through life as a fiction and tried to cast this fiction into the mold of
actuality. He was a failure in nearly every department of life he tried and
was a man whose character was made up of samples of every type of
human nature. In him the creative impulse was not a retreat from life but
was an attempt to make a bridge between it and his soul. He was haunted by
a feeling of inferiority which it was the passion of his life to overcome.
When his aggressive feelings were strongest, he produced most, and failed
as actor, teacher, clerk, and succeeded as poet and novelist because thus he
could best wreak his inmost self upon expression. He was finally obsessed
by a religious mania, became a mystic, and sought salvation by fasting and
self-denial. Fear of death was a life-long obsession and he strove to conquer
both love and death together by seeking and defying the latter. He decided
to die by fasting and kneeling before the picture of the Mother of God.
“Groaning and crying out with his last strength, he had dragged himself to
the symbol of the highest feminine completeness, and when he found the
‘Glorious Virgin’ of his dreams his dissolution came.” In his last moment he
seems to have felt that he had overcome both death and woman, but only by
yielding to them, and believed himself to be a martyr. It was the difficulty
he found in bridging the chasm between his solitary, child-like self and the
real world that made him a great creator of fiction, a practical failure, and a
madman.
19
J. V. von Scheffel exhibited a range of moods from humor and jollity
to melancholia, and showed in his poems an entire absence of eroticism
which was more or less compensatory. The bisexual instinct (he not only
looked like a girl but sometimes disguised himself in woman’s attire) was
evoked by an earnest effort to see the world as woman did. He had an
extraordinary variety of morbid attacks, hypochondria, delusions,
headaches, morbid fear of death, anxiety, nightmares, weeping, etc.
Schurmann even goes so far as to think that a cyclothymic diathesis or a
tendency to periodic attacks of various psychic morbidities is characteristic
of genius, which finds occasional relief in attacks of insanity, like Cowper,
Rousseau, Tasso, Hölderlin, and many others; and ascribes this in part to a
hunger for a life larger and fuller than normality or sobriety can afford.
This, however, is forbidden fruit, for nature punishes the enjoyment of it, if
not by premature death at least by premature satiety with life.

John Ruskin’s lifeline had marked nodes, the chief of which may be
characterized as follows. Up to the early forties he had lived and written
under the dominant influence of his father, who held very conservative
views of religion; but the foundations of the son’s faith were shaken and the
tenet “which had held the hopes and beliefs of his youth and early manhood
had proved too narrow. He was stretching forth to a wider and, as he felt, a
nobler conception of life and destiny, but the transition was through much
20
travail of soul.” He wrote, “It is a difficult thing to live without hope of
another world when one has been used to it for forty years. But by how
much the more difficult, by so much it makes one braver and stronger.” And
again, “It may be much nobler to hope for the advance of the human race
only than for one’s own immortality, much less selfish to look upon oneself
merely as a leaf on a tree than as an independent spirit, but it is much less
pleasant.” Cook says that “he had been brought up as a Bible Christian in
the strictest school of literal interpretation but he had also become deeply
versed in some branches of natural science, and the truths of science
seemed inconsistent with a literal belief in the Scriptures.” He had been
much influenced by Spurgeon, whom he knew well in private life, but made
no secret of his adhesion to Colenso’s heresies.
No one understood the inmost causes of his muse as he grew
melancholic. He was exhausted, dyspeptic, wanted to reconstruct society,
had “the soul of a prophet consumed with wrath against a wayward and
perverse generation,” but also the heart of a lover of his fellowmen filled
with pity for the miseries and follies of mankind. His mother recognized his
tendency to misanthropy, and only at forty-two did he break away from
parental discipline. “A new epoch of life began for me in this wise, that my
father and mother could travel with me no more, but Rose [La Touche, the
young girl with whom he was in love and who died when he was in the
early fifties and left him forlorn] in heart was with me always, and all I did
was for her sake.” This was his first “exile.” The clouds that had more than
once lowered over his life settled in old age and he died in 1900 at the age
of eighty-one. During most of the last ten years he presented one of the
saddest of all the spectacles of old age, “dying from the top downward.” He
was apathetic, monosyllabic, could write little, and spoke less; and but for
the kindly ministrations of Mrs. Severn and the thoughtfulness of Kate

Greenaway almost nothing either in Brantwood or the great world without
retained interest for him.
The middle-age crisis in Friedrich Nietzsche’s life began when he left
Bayreuth in August, 1876, after the performance of The Ring of the
Niebelung. He was then thirty-two years of age. Now it was that his
disenchantment with Wagner, whom he had regarded as a superman and
often called Jupiter, “one who might bring the type of man to a higher
21
degree of perfection,” began. He had thought Wagner “near to the divine,”
but he now found much of his music dull and recitative and thought that in
Parsifal he had violated his own atheism as a concession to the public; and
so he “refused to recognize a genius who was not honest with himself.” He
abhorred Wagner’s new “redemption philosophy” but for months and years
could not bring himself to an open break with him and was for a long time
plunged in the depths of gloom. He now became truly lonely and went
through a complete inner revolution. He realized that he must henceforth
stand alone and work out the problem of life by himself. His anxiety as to
how the venerable Wagner would receive his Human, All Too Human was
pathetic. When he found he could not publish it anonymously, he revised
and toned down many of his criticisms; and deep, indeed, was his grief
when, despite the almost fawning letter that accompanied a copy of his
book to Wagner, the latter lacked the greatness of soul to understand his
sincerity and broke with him forever. At the same time he was emancipating
his thought from Schopenhauer, who had hitherto been his sovereign master
in the philosophic field.
Now it was that he almost completely wrecked his life by living
according to the precepts of Cornaro, and his letters show the intense
struggle with which he finally resolved to find his own way through life and
to abandon his soul to self-expression. He finally resigned his chair of
classic literature at Bâle and a little later sorted his manuscripts and
commissioned his sister to burn half of them. This she refused to do, and it
was just these that were the basis of some of the best things he wrote later.
After trying residence in many places and various cures, and experimenting
with many regimens, he finally resolved to become his own doctor, and it
was by his own efforts that he succeeded in prolonging the efficient period
of his life. But he felt he had at last struck the right road in The Dawn of
Day, which marked the opening of his campaign against popular morality.

From this time on, too, he had a deep, new, intense love of nature and was
inspired henceforth by the conviction that he must be the midwife of the
superman in the world. This apostle of a “New Renaissance” was not unlike
his Zarathustra, who retired to the mountains at thirty and at forty came
down to the haunts of men with a new message for them.
The theme of Rostand’s Chanticleer is the disillusion of that gorgeous
barnyard fowl from the fond and at first secret conviction, which he later
confessed to the pheasant hen, that it was his crowing that brought in the
dawn and that if he failed in this function the world would lie in darkness.
The tragedy of the play is the slow conviction that the sun could rise
without him. In Nietzsche we see the exact reverse of this process. His
delusions of greatness grew with years and eventually passed all bounds of
sanity. He became jealous of Jesus and came to believe that he had brought
the world a new dispensation and that his own work would some time be
recognized as the dawn of a new era.
22
Robert Raymond thinks it is pleasant to lie at anchor a while in port
before setting sail for the last long voyage to the unknown. The passage
from late youth to middle age has many of the same traits as growing old.
We suddenly realize, perhaps in a flash, that life is no longer all before us.
When youth begins to die it fights and struggles. The panic is not so much
that we cannot do handsprings, but we have to compromise with our
youthful hopes. We have been out of college perhaps twenty years.
Napoleon lost Waterloo at 45, Dickens had written all his best at 40, and
Pepys finished his diary at 37. We lose the sense of superfluous time and
must hurry. We feel the futility of postponements and accept the philosophy
of the second best as not so bad. We become more tolerant toward others
and perhaps toward ourselves. We must not be too serious or yearn too
much for a lost youth. It is like the first anticipations of fall in the summer.
23
F. von Mueller of Munich says that we can never tell when old age
begins. Involution is closely connected with evolution from the start. The
lymphatics, tonsils, and thymus begin to atrophy as soon as the
development of the sex organs comes. Among English button workers it
was found that young men did most; between the ages of 40 and 45 they did
80 per cent of the work they formerly did; 60 per cent in the fifty-fifth year,
and 40 per cent after sixty-five. The power of observation is so great in

youth that seventy per cent of all our acquisitions are made at this stage.
Originality comes later. Age is more serious. There is less adaptation
because habit is growing rigid. The emotional life stiffens and the
intellectual narrows. There are more doubts. There is a stronger-felt need of
recognition from others that is very deeply experienced in many ways. The
capacity for producing original ideas comes latest of all. It is generally
thought that the highest physical development is before 30. Some
investigators think that physical deterioration begins with the brain but this
is doubtful.
24
Bruce Birch thinks the wreckage of youth spectacular; that of old age
less discernible because more subtle and internal. The old should come to
the fullest possible maturity. Youth must be served. The church focuses on
young men. The old age here chiefly regarded is from forty-five on. Most
lack intelligent encouragement to go on. They are thought too old to need
advice and to only want comfort. Habits are supposed to be formed. The old
are not thought to be heart-searchers.
The fact is, senescence has very new and great temptations, namely, to
go on in the old way of habit and belief. The temptations of the old are
largely of the spirit but sometimes also of the flesh and the devil. It is hard
to keep up the struggle for personal righteousness and there are periods of
storm and stress. The church has not done its duty here. Most think the most
dangerous period is that of wild oats—between 16 and 26—but this writer
says it is between 45 and 65 when there is the most wreckage.
1. There is a tendency to low ideals. Youth tends to lofty ideals and to
realize them, but now hope often fails. With the abbreviation of life there is
loss of initiative, perhaps sickness of hope deferred. Age thinks it has
become all it can hope to be; so enthusiasm wanes and the tedium vitae
makes us feel the game is not worth the candle and we are not willing to
pay the price of sacrifice and struggle to maintain high ideals. So we aim
lower. The excelsior motive is lost. So there is often a degeneration of
moral character. Cheap pleasures satisfy—perhaps even those of the table,
for this is the easiest way of reviving some of the tendencies of former life.
2. Hence lowering and liberalizing of conduct creeds. The frontal lobes
shrink as the period of endeavor wanes. The edge of desire is dulled and so
is the power to distinguish right and wrong, true and false. “Twice a child,

once a man.” The powers of imagination, aggression, and resistant effort
flag, and we are content with the beaten path because the motor areas have
decayed. There is ruttiness, the brain is set for habitual reactions, there are
fixed points of view, the apperceptive mass is allowed to interpret all new
ideas, and these cannot change it. Thus it is hard to adjust to progress. There
is less resistance, self-control, courage for great deeds and high purposes,
less tendency to ask advice of and be influenced by younger men.
Politicians often recognize this in putting forward respectable elderly, pliant
candidates. One is often weak where he thinks himself strong because there
is no fool like an old one. He may yield to selfishness, acquisitiveness,
curiosity, secretiveness, envy, jealousy, avarice, and other primitive traits.
There is too frequent moral collapse here.
3. There is a lessening of emotional intensity or stodginess. The
imitative, religious, adventurous, belligerent, imaginative, initiative traits
are developed early, and the younger man is the greater in the dominion of
the emotions. But later poets turn to prose and others to more didactic
activities. Scientists, philosophers, and statesmen are best when they are
through this period. Disappointed men now become cynical, morose,
petulant, or vicious as the intellect only rules. If the social and gregarious
instinct fails, society may bore, friendships decline, and age may be lonely.
Or, again, it may fall a prey to many dispositional, emotional, and obsessive
feelings which may become insane. The patient may live in a logic-tight
compartment. The obsession may be a hobby or a system of connected
ideas with a strong emotional tone (complex). These are tendencies arising
from instinct. When the social and sane instincts lose in the conflict, interest
in the present may decline to indifference, and the obsessions may focus on
real or fancied errors of the past—duty to a dead child, a business failure,
etc. At any rate, there is a tendency to indulge temperament.
4. Failure in religious teaching. Versus “Be sure your sin will find you
out” all the old realize that they have done much sin that is not found out
and which, if it were exposed, would bring suffering, disgrace, public
execration, and loss of vocation, property and friends. To fear only the
consequences of evil is bad, and since they have escaped they feel a certain
contempt of secular and moral law and take greater risks. The old man
prefers to be respectable and righteous, but he does not care if his

unrighteousness is known or suspected if it is not made too public. Thus the
old dread exposure more than they do sin.
5. The church offers too little to the old but wants to see old age tap
new reservoirs of energy, vigor, joy, and enthusiasm. The best it can offer is
faith in Jesus. Many would say it offers a larger intellectual view.
25
Karin Michaëlis tells her story in the form of letters and a running
journal. A poor girl, she early came to feel that with her beauty she could do
anything and supremely longed for wealth. After just escaping marriage
with a rich old man who educated her, she married a wealthy and most
exemplary husband whom she divorced, after having lived tranquilly with
him for a score of years, with no cause on either side but because she felt a
growing passion for solitude. She retired to a desert island in a spacious
new villa planned by an architect friend eight years younger than herself.
After a year of isolation, slowly realizing that she is in love with the
architect, as she had long been, she offers herself to him on any terms and is
rejected. She then proposes to rejoin her husband but finds him engaged to
a girl of nineteen.
The remarkable merit of this book that made it something of a
sensation through all western Europe ten years ago is the masterly
descriptions of the state of mind of women of a certain type, and perhaps to
some extent of all, at the turn of life. While there is not a phrase in it that
could shock the most fastidious, it is evident throughout that the author’s
soul is permeated with a sex consciousness that finds numberless indirect
expressions and that she knows life and man chiefly from this standpoint,
condones most of woman’s errors, advises her friends to courses that
convention forbids, etc. No one ever began to write such a book, not even
Octave Feuillet in his La Crise. It all reads like a marvelous confession of
things no woman ever said before or could say to a man. She says:

Somebody should found a vast and charitable sisterhood for
women between forty and fifty, a kind of refuge for the victims of
the years of transition, for during that time women would be happier
in voluntary exile or at any rate entirely separated from the other
sex.... We are all more or less mad, even though we struggle to make
others think us sane.

There are moments when I envy every living creature who has
the right to pair—either from hate or from habit. I am alone and shut
out.
Women’s doctors may be as clever and sly as they please but
they will never learn any of the things women confide to each other.
Between the sexes there lies not only a deep, eternal hostility but the
involuntary abyss of a complete lack of reciprocal comprehension.
It would be better for woman if she walked barefoot over red-
hot ploughshares for the pain she would suffer would be slight,
indeed, compared to that which she must feel when, with a smile on
her lips, she leaves her own youth behind and enters the region of
despair we call growing old.
It may safely be said that on the whole surface of the earth not
one man exists who really knows woman. If a woman took infinite
pains to reveal herself to a husband or a lover just as she really is, he
would think she was suffering from some incurable mental disease.
A few of us indicate our true natures in hysterical outbreaks, fits of
bitterness and suspicion, but this involuntary frankness is generally
discounted by some subtle deceit.
If men suspected what took place in a woman’s inner life after
forty, they would avoid us like the plague or knock us in the head
like mad dogs.
Are there honest women? At least we believe there are. It is a
necessary part of our belief. Who does not think well of mother or
sister, but who believes entirely in a mother or sister? Absolutely
and unconditionally? Who has never caught mother or sister in a
falsehood or a subterfuge? Who has not sometimes seen in the heart
of mother or sister, as by a lightning flash, an abyss which the
boundless love cannot bridge over? Who was ever really understood
by mother or sister?
I envy every country wench or servant girl who goes off with
26
her lover while I sit here waiting for old age.

The author has been spoken of as a traitor to her sex, revealing all its
freemasonry. Certainly no female writer ever emancipated herself more
completely from man’s point of view. There is no masculine note here. It
would seem as if she aspired to be a specialist in feminine psychology. M.
Prévost calls it a cinematograph of feminine thought set down without
interposing between the author’s mind and the paper the vision of a man.
No extracts or epitome can do justice to the precision of style, the acuteness
of self-observation, the range of social experience, and the depth of insight
here shown in depicting the psychological processes that attend the
beginnings of old age in women.
It is well at any stage of life, and particularly at its noonday, to pause
and ask ourselves what kind of old people we would like, and also are
likely, to be—two very different questions. In youth we have ideals of and
fit for maturity. Why not do the same when we are mature for the next
stage? Why should not forty plan for eighty (or at least for sixty) just as
intently as twenty does for forty? At forty old age is in its infancy; the fifties
are its boyhood, the sixties its youth, and at seventy it attains its majority.
Woman passes through the same stages as man, only the first comes earlier
and the last later for her. If and so far as Osler is right, it is because man up
to the present has been abnormally precocious, a trait that he inherited from
his shorter-lived precursors and has not yet outgrown, as is the case with
sexual precocity, which brings premature age. Modern man was not meant
to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more and
more so, an afternoon and evening worker. The coming superman will
begin, not end, his real activity with the advent of the fourth decade. Not
only with many personal questions but with most of the harder and more
complex problems that affect humanity we rarely come to anything like a
masterly grip till the shadows begin to slant eastward, and for a season,
which varies greatly with individuals, our powers increase as the shadows
lengthen. Thus as the world grows intricate and the stage of apprenticeship
necessarily lengthens it becomes increasingly necessary to conserve all
those higher powers of man that culminate late, and it is just these that our
civilization, that brings such excessive strains to middle life, now so tends
to dwarf, making old age too often blasé and abgelebt, like the middle age
of those roués who in youth have lived too fast.

27
There are many who now think more or less as does H. G. Wells that
the human race is just at its dangerous age and has, within the last few
years, passed its prime; also that henceforth we must trust less to nature and
place all our hope in and direct all our energy to nurture if the race is to
escape premature decay. There is only too much to indicate that mankind, in
Europe at least if not throughout the world, has reached the “dangerous
age” that marks the dawn of senescence and that, unless we can develop
what Renan calls “a new enthusiasm for humanity,” a new social
consciousness, and a new instinct for service and for posterity, our elaborate
civilization with all its institutions will become a Frankenstein monster
escaping the control of the being that devised and constructed it and will
bring ruin to both him and to itself. Progressive eugenics, radical and
world-wide reëducation, and the development of a richer, riper old age, are
our only sources of hope for we can look to no others to arrest the
degenerative processes of national and individual egoism. At any rate, we
have to face a new problem, namely what is the old age of the world to be
and how can we best prepare for it betimes?
28
As contrasted with Ireland, in which Ross tells us “one-eighth of her
people are more than sixty-five years old,” we have considered ourselves as
par excellence the land of young people and ideas. Our growth has been
phenomenal and began and proceeded most opportunely, so that we profited
to the full by steam, rapid transportation, invention, by our coal, oil, forests,
and virgin soil, and especially by the ideals of liberty that were brought here
by the first waves of immigrants to our shores. These were followed later,
however, by those who had failed in the old world, by inferior and often
Mediterranean stocks imported as tools or coming only in the hope of gain;
but even this tide is now ceasing to flow. We are within measurable distance
of the limits of our natural resources. Although the great war, the most
stupendous, was also the most inconclusive ever fought, and although we
reached our pinnacle in the idealism of Wilson’s first visit to Europe, when
the world came nearer than ever before since early Christianity, the Holy
Roman Empire, and Comenius, to a merger of national sovereignty and a
new world law backed by a new world power, this brief vision of a
federated world has faded and we now realize that if we cannot make a
break with history and leave much of it to the dead past, if we cannot
transcend the boundaries that, especially in Europe, are now far too narrow

for modern conditions, and if we cannot fearlessly enter upon the longer
apprenticeship to life, which is now too short for mastery, we shall drift into
far more disastrous wars that will leave even the victors exhausted, and
mankind will either sink into an impotent senility or into a Tarzan
bestialism, which from the standpoint of Clarence Day (The Simian World)
would seem not impossible.

CHAPTER II

THE HISTORY OF OLD AGE
The age of plants and animals—The Old Stone Age—Treatment of
old age among existing savage tribes—The views of Frazer—
The ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament—The Greeks
(including Sparta, the Homeric Age, the status of the old in
Athens, the views of Plato, Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)
—The Romans—The Middle Ages—Witchcraft and old women
—Attitude of children toward the old—Mantegazza’s collection
of favorable and unfavorable views of age—The division of life
into stages—The relation of age groups to social strata—The
religion of different ages of life—The Vedanta—The Freudian
war between the old and the young—History of views from
Cornaro to our own time—Bacon—Addison—Burton—Swift.

Some plants live only a few hours; others, a few days; and very many
only for a season. But trees are the oldest of all things that live. In the
Canary Islands is an immense dragon tree, forty-five feet in circumference,
which grows very slowly. This was vital enough to continue living fifty
years after a third of it was destroyed. It must have been several thousand
years old, but as its trunk was hollowed there was no way of ascertaining its
age. In the Cape Verde Islands stood a tree thirty feet in diameter which
Adanson estimated to be 5,150 years of age. Some of the old cypresses in
Mexico are thought to be quite as old. The big trees of California are
several thousand years old, the largest of which Sargent estimates to have
lived 5,000 years. We have all seen cross-sections of the trunks of these
monsters of the vegetable world with their concentric rings marked—“this
growth was made during the year the Magna Charta was granted,” “this
when Christ was born,” etc. Many botanists believe that trees of this sort do

not die of old age as such, but of external accidents like lightning, tempests,
etc.
As to animal longevity, no doubt there are real ephemerids. Life can
also be prolonged by desiccation or by freezing. Certain it is that many
species do not live to see their offspring. In many of the lower forms of life
the larval is far longer than the adult stage. The seventeen-year locust, for
example, lives out most of its time underground, the imago form continuing
but little more than a month. Most butterflies are annual, although those that
fail to copulate may hibernate and live through another season, while some
are known to have lived several years. Worker bees do not survive the
29
season but queens live from two to five years. J. H. Gurney thinks the
passerines are the shortest-lived birds, averaging from eight to nine years,
that the lark, canary, bullfinch, gull, may live forty years, the goose fifty,
and the parrot sixty. To the latter bird a mythical longevity is often assigned,
one being said to have spoken a language that had become extinct. As to
animals, domestication prolongs while captivity shortens their normal
length of life. Longevity is often related to fertility. Beasts of prey breed
slowly and live to be old, while the fecund rabbit is short-lived. But for
increased fecundity species subject to high risk would die out. While there
is a certain correlation between size and age, since large animals require
more time to grow, it is extremely limited. Bunge thinks that in mammals
the period the new-born take to double in size is an index of the normal
duration of life; but this, too, has its limitations. Some stress diet as an
essential factor and others think that length of life may be inversely as the
reproductive tax levied upon the system. But of all these questions our
knowledge is still very limited.
When Alexander conquered India, he took one of King Porus’s largest
elephants, Ajax, and labeled it, “Alexander, the son of Jupiter, dedicates this
to the sun.” This elephant is said to have been found 160 years later. This is
the earliest record I find of animal longevity. We have many tables since
Flourens attempted, with great pains, to construct one, and from the latest of
these at hand I select the following of those animals popularly supposed to
be able to attain one hundred years or more: carp, 100 to 150; crocodile,
100; crow, 100; eagle, 100; elephant, 150 to 200; parrot, 100; pike, 100;
raven, 100; swan, 100; tortoise, over 100. In point of fact, as E. Ray
30
Lankester says, we know almost nothing definite of the length of life of

larger animals. Flourens considered that in mammalia we could find a
criterion of the end of the growth period in the union of the epiphyses of the
bones throughout the skeleton, and laid down the law that for both
mammals and man longevity is, on the average, about five times that of this
period of growth. We know far more as to the span of the shorter- than of
the longer-lived members of the brute creation. We also know far more of
domestic animals than of their wild congeners. The former doubtless have
lived longer because better protected. Darwin wrote that he had no
information in regard to the longevity of the nearest wild representatives of
our domestic animals or even of quadrupeds in general, and various experts
whom Lankester addressed upon the subject informed him that almost
nothing was known of reptiles or crustacea, while the ichthyologist,
Gunther, said, “There is scarcely anything known about the age and causes
of death of fishes,” and Jeffreys, a molluscan expert, says the same of them.
Insects, on the other hand, are a remarkable exception. Their life is so short
that it can sometimes be observed almost continuously from ovum to ovum.
There is in general, however, Lankester believes, a much closer relation
between the life span of individuals of the same than between those of
different species, specific longevity meaning the average length of life of
the individual of the species. Of all this we know far more of man than of
any other creature.
If age went with size, the extinct saurians would have attained the
greatest age of all animals, and in fact they seem to have grown all their
lives. However it may have been in past geologic ages, it may yet appear
that man, on the average, lives longer than any brutes. This he should do if
the civilization he has evolved really gives him a more favorable
environment than nature and instinct have provided for him. Species, like
individuals, very probably have a term of life and become extinct with age,
as paleontology shows us not a few have done. But here, too, there is no
sufficient basis of fact at present to warrant the generalizations so often met
with concerning phyletic immortality or senescence. To some aspects of this
theme I shall recur later in this volume.
Of the length of life of the predecessors of modern man we know
almost nothing. In evolving as he did from anthropoid forms, he probably
also considerably increased his span of life. It would seem, too, as if again
in the transition from the unsocial, short, and still somewhat simian

Neanderthal to that of the tall and more gregarious Crô-Magnon type he
must have still further increased his longevity. But through all the
31
paleolithic ages (lasting some 125,000 years as H. F. Osborn calculates )
there are no data either in the skeletal remains or in the implements he used
that shed any clear light upon the subject; and the same is true of the
neolithic cults that flowered in the lake- or pile-dwellings. Bones show
different stages of development, and teeth, always remarkably well
preserved, often show the effects of use; a very few represent children but
not one illustrates extreme old age according to the osseous or dental
criteria of modern times. Hence we may conjecture that the attainment of
great age under the conditions of life then prevailing was very rare. It would
seem also that if life had been long and its experiences well ripened,
preserved, and transmitted (so that each new generation would not merely
repeat the life of that which had preceded it but profit by its lessons),
progress would not have been so very slow, as it was. On the other hand, it
might be urged perhaps with equal force that if, as with lower races now,
most of the people who made prehistory not only matured but grew old
early, and since age always tends to be conservative and unprogressive, it
would make for retardation, even though it came in years that seem
premature to us. Very probably even in these rude stages of life men who
felt their physical powers beginning to abate—at least the more sagacious
of them—had already hit upon some of the many devices by which the
aging have very commonly contrived to maintain their position and even
increase their importance in the community by developing wisdom in
counsel, becoming repertories of tribal tradition and custom, and
representatives of feared supernatural forces or persons, etc. But of all this
paleo-anthropology has, up to date, almost nothing to tell us. Nor do we see
much reason to believe it ever will. All these culture stages of the Old Stone
Age have left us little but material vestiges of its industries—bones, a few
carvings on cave walls or on bones and ivory, and very many chipped flints.
Nothing of wood, skin, fiber or other material for binding, which must have
32
been used, survives. Much as these bones and stones tell us, they have
really done more to increase our curiosity than to satisfy it. We know almost
nothing of how these thousands of generations of men viewed life or nature,
or in what spirit and with what knowledge they met disease, age, and death.

What is called belief in another life is for primitives or children only
inability to grasp completely the very difficult fact of death and to
distinguish it from sleep. The disposition of some of the troglodyte
skeletons suggests that these ancient forbears of our race were unable to
realize that death ends all. Despite the close analogy and even kinship
between human and animal life so deeply felt in early days, it was probably
always somewhat harder for early man to conceive death for himself as
complete cessation than to so conceive it for the higher forms of animal life
with which his own was so intimately associated. Our ignorance of all these
stages of human evolution becomes all the more pathetic as we are now
coming to understand that it was then that all the deeper unconscious and
dispositional strata of Mansoul, which still dominate us far more than we
are even yet aware, were being laid down, and it is upon these traits that the
later and conscious superstructure of our nature has been reared. Only hard
things survive the ravages of time, and psychic traits and trends are the
softest of all soft things, although they are no less persistent by way of
biological and social inheritance than skeletons and flints.
Turning to the lower races of mankind that now survive and are
accessible to study, we find only very few scattered, fragmentary, and often
contradictory data as to old age. Yarrow has made a comprehensive study of
mortuary customs, both of savages and man in the earlier stages of
civilization. Mallory brought together what we know of sign language.
Ploss has given us a compend on the child among primitives and, with
Bartels, on woman. I have tried to compile the customs and ideas of
33
pubescent initiation; while animism, marriage rites, property and
ownership, systems of kinship, mana concepts, hunting and trapping, war
weapons, dances, ideas of disease and the function of the “medicine man,”
dwellings, dress, ornamentation, number systems, language, fire-making,
industries, food, myths, and ceremonies galore, and many other themes
have had comprehensive and comparative treatment. But I am able to find
nothing of the kind (and Professor F. Boas, our most accomplished
American scholar in this field, knows of nothing compendious) on old age
in any language. Anthropology, therefore, has so far produced no
gerontologists. I have looked over many volumes of travel and exploration
among the so-called lower races of mankind, only to find nothing or brief
and more or less incidental mentions of senescence. This neglect is itself

significant of the inconspicuous rôle the old play in rude tribal life and also
of the lack of vital interest in the theme by investigators.
From my own meager and inadequate gleanings in this field the
unfavorable far outweigh the favorable mentions. The Encyclopedia
Britannica tells us that from Herodotus, Strabo, and others we learn of
people like the Scythian Massagetæ, a nomad race northeast of the Caspian
Sea, who killed old people and ate them. For savages the practice of
devouring dead kinsfolk is often regarded as the most respectful method of
disposing of their remains. In a few cases this custom is combined with that
of killing both the old and sick, but it is more often simply a form of burial.
It prevails in many parts of Australia, Melanesia, Africa, South America,
and elsewhere.
34
Reclus tells us that among the various Siberian tribes aged and sickly
people who are useless are asked if they have “had enough of it.” It is a
matter of duty and honor on their part to reply “yes.” Thereupon an oval pit
is roughly excavated in a burial ground and filled with moss. Heavy stones
are rolled near, the extremities of the victim are bound to two horizontal
poles, and on the headstone a reindeer is slaughtered, its blood flowing in
torrents over the moss. The old man stretches himself upon this warm red
couch. In the twinkling of an eye he finds that he is securely bound to the
poles. Then he is asked “Art thou ready?” At this stage of the proceeding it
would be folly to articulate a negative response. Moreover, his friends
would pretend not to hear it. So his moriturus saluto is “Good night,
friends.” They then stop his nostrils with a stupefying substance and open
his carotid and a large vein in his arm, so that he is bled to death in no time.
Among most races, Reclus tells us, children are killed by being exposed;
the old, by being deserted.
In Terra del Fuego, Darwin tells how Jimmy Buttons, a native,
described the slaughter of the aged in winter and famine. Dogs, he said,
catch otters; old women, not. He then proceeded to detail just how they
were killed, imitated and ridiculed their cries and shrieks, told the parts of
their bodies that were best to eat, and said they must generally be killed by
friends and relatives.
Among the Hottentots, when their aged men and women can “no longer
be of any manner of service in anything,” they are conveyed by an ox,

accompanied by most of the inhabitants of the kraal, to a solitary hut at a
considerable distance and, with a small stock of provisions, laid in the
middle of the hut, which is then securely closed. The company returns,
deserting him forever. They think it the most humane thing they can do to
thus hasten the conclusion of life when it has become a burden.
With at least one of the Papuan races in New Guinea, people when old
and useless are put up a tree, around which the tribe sing “The fruit is ripe”
and then shake the branches until the victim falls, tearing him to pieces and
eating him raw. Among the Damaras the sick and aged are often cruelly
treated, forsaken, or burned alive. In some of the East African tribes the
aged and all supposed to be at the point of death are slain and eaten. One
author tells us that among the Fijians the practice of burying alive is “so
common that but few old and decrepit people are to be seen.” In Herbert
Spencer’s anthropological charts we are told that among the Chippewas
“old age is the greatest calamity that can befall a northern Indian for he is
neglected and treated with disrespect.”
35
C. Wissler says, “As to the aged and sick, we have the formal practice
of putting to death among some of the Esquimaux and other races.” On the
other hand, among all hunting people who shift from place to place the
infirm are often of necessity left behind to their fate. Yet the reported
examples of such cruelties can usually be matched by instances of the
opposite tenor. He goes on to say that since the mythologies of various
tribal groups contain rites showing retribution for such cruelties we must
regard them as, on the whole, exceptional.
36
S. K. Hutton says,

I found age a very deceptive thing. “Sixty-two” might be the
answer from a bowed old figure crouching over the stove. I would
have guessed twenty years more than that. The fact is, the Eskimo
wears out fast. After fifty he begins to decline, and few live long
after sixty. I have known a few over seventy, and the people told me
with wonderment about an old woman who lived to be eighty-two
and who worked to the last. But these are great rarities. It must be a
unique thing in one’s lifetime to meet with an Eskimo great-
grandmother. The very old people seem always to be active to the

last. They have an unusual amount of vitality and die in the harness,
dropping out like those too tired to go any further and passing away
without illness or suffering. These are always those who have clung
most closely to their own native foods and customs. Women who
are too old and toothless to chew the boot-leather can still scrape the
seal-skins, perhaps with a skill which the younger women lack; if
they are too blind and feeble to scrape, they can sit behind a wall of
snow upon the sea-ice and jig for the sleepy rock-cod through a
hole.

37
C. A. Scott tells us that in certain south Australian tribes it is taboo to
catch or eat certain animals until a man has reached a prescribed advanced
age, these animals being easiest to catch and the most wholesome and thus
best adapted to old people’s use. One of the chief maxims in Tonga is to
reverence the gods, the chief, and old people. In Java, among the Iroquois,
Dakotas, Comanches, the Hill tribes of India (Santals and Kukis), the
Snakes and Zunis, much respect is shown to the aged.
38
K. Routledge says, “part of the deference paid to advancing years,
whether in men or women, is due to fear. Old age has something uncanny
about it, and old persons could probably ‘make medicine’ or work havoc,
were they so inclined.” One chief said that in councils the old women
would have their way because “it is a great work to have borne a child.” A
young warrior is taught to get out of the road for an old woman. She does
not, however, take part in the sacrifices, although one called herself the wife
of God and seemed to have established a sort of cult. This was because she
was a woman of much character. Here the mothers take full part in
initiations. The dignity and self-reliance of the older women is remarkable.
When a woman is so old that she has no teeth she is said to be “filled with
intelligence” and on her death receives the high honor of burial instead of
being thrown out to the hyenas.
39
A. L. Cureau tells us that the Negro is short-lived and that if some
lucky star enables him to reach forty he becomes a man of importance,
although death does not usually permit him to enjoy this distinction long.
“During more than twenty years I never knew more than four or five who
could have been considered sixty-five or seventy years of age, and even

persons who were from fifty to sixty are very uncommon. At the age of
thirty-five or forty they all exhibit signs of premature decrepitude.” He
thinks the death rate from forty to forty-five very high. Disease among the
Africans is limited to only a few general troubles. Burial is usually by
interment, although in some districts the dead are eaten, while elsewhere
they are thrown into the river or left lying on the ground in some remote
spot. Respect for the chief, however, continues to be observed even after his
death. But customs are growing mild, and “if human sacrifice still takes
place in locations that are most remote from our stations, the fact is kept a
profound secret.”
40
H. A. Junod gives a melancholy picture of old age, especially for the
leading man of the tribe. His wives die, his glory fades, his crown loses its
luster and if it is scratched or broken he cannot repair it, he is forsaken, less
respected, and often only a burden unwillingly supported. “The children
laugh at him. If the cook sends them to their lonely grandfather with his
share of food in the leaky old hut, the young rascals are capable of eating it
on the way, pretending afterwards that they did what they were told.”
When, between two huts, under the shelter of the woods the old man warms
his round-shouldered back in the rays of the sun, lost in some senile dream,
his former friends point to him and say, “It is the bogie man, the ogre.”
Mature people show little more consideration for the old than do the young
ones. Junod knew personally an old man and woman who, when their
children moved to another part of the country, were left under a roof with
no sides, without food, and were almost imbecile. “In times of war old
people die in great numbers. During the movements of panic they are
hidden in the woods, in the swamps or palm trees, while all the able-bodied
population runs away. They are killed by the enemy, who spare no one, or
they die in their hiding places of misery and hunger. Thus the evening of
life is very sad for the poor Thonga.” There are, however, children who to
the end show devotion to their parents. Those old people are most to be
pitied who fall to the charge of remote relatives.
41
A. Hrdlicka says, “The proportion of nonagenarians, and especially
centenarians, among the Indians is far in excess of that among native white
Americans.” As to the source of error, he thinks this is somewhat offset by
the “marked general interest centering about the oldest of every tribe.” He
found twenty-four per million among the Indians as against three per

million among native whites who had reached a hundred, and says, “The
relative excess of aged persons (80 years and above) among the Indians
would signify only that the infirmities and diseases known ordinarily as
those of old age are less grave among them, a conclusion in harmony with
general observation.” Among the fifteen tribes embraced in this very careful
and valuable investigation, Hrdlicka found in the old far less grayness and
baldness and far better teeth than among the whites. They had more
wrinkles but their muscular force was better preserved. Many debilitating
effects among the whites are less so among the Indians. In general there is
some bending and emaciation and the hair grows iron gray or yellowish-
gray, but never white. Nor did he find among those of ninety a single one
who was demented or helpless. The aged were generally more or less
neglected, and had to care for themselves and help the younger. Owing to
the diminution of the alveoli and adipose tissue, “the jaw looks more
prominent, prognathism disappears, and the face looks shorter.” There is an
increase in the nasal index, the nose becomes broader and shorter, the malar
bones more prominent. The eyes lose their luster and generally become
narrowed, with adhesions at the canthi, particularly the external. The
hardening of arteries is certainly not common. Of 716 well preserved males
of 65, only 4 per cent showed baldness; and among 377 women there was
but one slightly bald, the baldness being about equally common on vertex
and forehead.
In W. I. Thomas’s Source Book for Social Origins containing articles by
various authors, we are told that among some of the Australian tribes old
age is a very prominent factor in preëminence. After they have become
feeble the old may have great authority, somewhat in proportion to what
they know of ancient lore, magic, medicine, and especially if they are totem
heads. Their authority is not patriarchal, and yet among the Yakuts, whether
they are rich or poor, good or bad, the old are sometimes beaten by their
children, especially if feeble-minded. On the other hand, a weak man of
seventy may beat his forty-year-old son who is strong and rich but in awe of
his parent because he has so much to inherit from him. The transfer of
authority and property to the son often comes very late. The greatest
number of suicides is among the old people. A man who beat his mother
said, “Let her cry and go hungry. She made me cry more than once and beat
me for trifles,” etc.

In this volume we are told, too, that even the Fuegians, who in times of
scarcity kill and eat their old women for food, are generally affectionate,
and until the whites interfered with their social order the old often had
considerable authority. They sometimes prepare programs for ceremonials,
which are very strictly observed by a hundred younger men. In some
Australian tribes, too, a man’s authority generally increases with age; and
this is true, though less frequently, of women. The old enforce the strictest
marriage rules and have much influence over the thoughts and feelings of
the tribes. The old men often sit in a circle and speak on public matters, one
after another, the young men standing outside in silence. A few old men
may retire to discuss secret matters of importance. Offenders are often
brought before them for trial and sentence. The old men of a tribe often
band themselves together and by working on the superstitions of the tribe
secure for themselves not only comfort but unbounded influence. In the
famous Duk-Duk ceremonial they alone were in the secret, and all others
were impressed with the supernatural character of the actors in these rites.
42
Ploss and Bartels amplify the great changes senescence brings to
women. Age not only obliterates race but sex. It often makes the most
beautiful into the most ugly, for handsome old women among primitives are
unknown. Children dread them. They often become careless of looks, the
hand is claw-like, etc. A widespread German superstition is that if an old
woman crosses the path of a hunter he will get nothing. They are ominous
for marriages and some neurotics cannot look at them. They are sometimes
said to have seven lives. Hans Sachs in poetry and Cranach in painting, in
describing the fountains of youth, represent chiefly old women entering on
the one side with every sign of decrepitude and coming out on the other
beautiful, with wonderful toilets, and sometimes immediately engaging in
orgies. Old women in early times sometimes had a guild, devised means of
conjuration, made pacts or leagues with the devil, presided over the
Walpurgis festivals, conjured with magic words, had evil eyes, knew
strange brews, sometimes committed all kinds of lasciviousness with devils,
might transform themselves into shapes as attractive as Circe for Ulysses or
Medea for Jason, or take the more ominous forms of Hecate and Lamea.
These maleficent creatures often allied themselves with black cats, serpents,
owls, bats, had their salves and witch sabbaths, etc.

Frazer approaches this subject from a different angle. In the second
chapter of his volume entitled The Dying God he tells us that in Fiji self-
immolation is by no means rare, and the Fijians believe that as they leave
this life they will remain ever after. This is a powerful motive to escape
from decrepitude or from a crippled condition by voluntary death. “The
custom of voluntary suicide on the part of the old men, which is among
their most extraordinary usages, is connected with their superstitions
regarding a future life.” To this must be added the contempt that attaches to
physical weakness among a nation of warriors, and the wrongs and insults
that await those who are no longer able to protect themselves. So when a
man feels age creeping on, so that he can no longer fully discharge the
duties or enjoy the pleasures of life, he calls his relations, tells them he is
worn out and useless, that they are ashamed of him, and he is determined to
be buried. So on an appointed day they meet and bury him alive. In the New
Hebrides the aged were buried alive at their own request. “It was considered
a disgrace to a family of an old chief if he was not buried alive.” A Jewish
tribe of Abyssinia never let a person die a natural death, for if any of their
relatives was near expiring the priest of the tribe was called to cut his throat.
If this ceremony was omitted, they believed the departed soul had not
entered the mansions of the blessed. Heraclitus thought that the souls of
those who die in battle are purer than those who die of disease. In a South
American tribe, when a man is at the point of death his nearest relatives
break his spine with an axe, for to die a natural death is the greatest
misfortune. In Paraguay, when a man grows weary of life, a feast is made,
with revelry and dancing, and the man is gummed and feathered with the
plumage of many birds and a huge jar is fixed in the ground, the mouth of
which is closed over him with baked clay. Thus he goes to his doom “more
joyful and gladsome than to his first nuptials.”
With a tribe in northeastern Asia, when a man feels his last hour has
come, he must either kill himself or be killed by a friend. In another tribe he
requests his son or some near relative to dispose of him, choosing the
manner of death he prefers. So his friends and neighbors assemble and he is
stabbed, strangled, or otherwise slain. Elsewhere, if a man dies a natural
death, his corpse must be wounded, so that he may seem to be received with
the same honors in the next world as if he had died in battle, as Odin
wanted for his disciples. The Wends once killed their aged parents and other
kinsfolk and boiled and ate their bodies, and the old folk “preferred to die

thus rather than drag out a weary life of poverty and decrepitude.” Kings
are killed when their strength fails. The people of Congo believed that if
their pontiff died a natural death, the earth would perish, since he sustained
it by his power and merit, and that everything would be annihilated. So his
successor entered his house and slew him with a rope or club. “The king
must not be allowed to become ill or senile lest with his diminishing vigor
the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot
in the field, and man, stricken with disease, should die.” So the king who
showed signs of illness or failing strength was put to death.

One of the fatal symptoms of decay was taken to be incapacity
to satisfy the sexual passion of his wives, of whom he has very
many distributed in a large number of huts at Fashoda. When this
ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives reported it to the
chiefs, who were popularly said to have intimated to the king his
doom by spreading a white cloth over his face and knees as he lay
slumbering in the heat of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon
followed the sentence of death. A hut was especially built for the
occasion, the king was led to it and laid down with his head resting
on the lap of a nubile virgin, the door of the hut was then walled up,
and the couple were left without food, fire, or water, to die of
hunger and suffocation.

This custom persisted till five generations ago.
Seligmann shows that the Shilluk king was “liable to be killed with due
ceremony at the first symptoms of incipient decay.” But even while he was
yet in the prime of health and strength he might be attacked at any time by a
rival and have to defend his crown in a combat to death. According to the
common Shilluk tradition, any son of a king had a right thus to fight the
king in possession, and if he succeeded in killing him he reigned in his
stead. As every king had a large harem and many sons, the number of
possible candidates for the throne at any time may well have been not
inconsiderable, and the reigning monarch must have carried his life in his
hand. But the attack on him could only take place by night with any
prospect of success. Then, according to custom, his guards had to be
dismissed; so the hours of darkness were of special peril. It was a point of

honor for the king not to call his herdsmen to his assistance. The age at
which the king was killed would seem to have been commonly between
forty and fifty. The Zulus put a king to death as soon as he began to have
wrinkles and gray hair. Elsewhere kings were often killed at the end of a
fixed term, perhaps because it was thought unsafe to wait for the slightest
symptom of decay.
A unique and transformed survival of many such customs, according to
Frazer, lingered in the vale of Nemi, idealized in Turner’s picture. He tells
us how in ancient times and long persisting there, like a primeval rock
jutting out of a well shaven lawn, the priest-king watched all night with
drawn sword. He was a murderer and would himself sooner or later be slain
by his successor, for this was the rule of the sanctuary. The candidate for the
priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having
slain him he retained office until he himself was slain by one stronger or
craftier. Although he held the title of king, no crowned head was ever
uneasier. The least relaxation of vigilance put him in jeopardy. This rule had
no parallel in historic antiquity but we must go farther back. Recent studies
show the essential similarity with which, with many superficial differences,
the human mind elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Hence we must
study outcrops of the same institution elsewhere, and Frazer tells us that the
object of his book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable
explanation of the priesthood of Nemi. Once, only a runaway slave could
break off the mistletoe from the oak, and success in this enabled him to
fight the priest in single combat; if he won he would become King of the
Woods.
There are many unique features in the attitude of the Jewish mind
toward old age. In Genesis 5:3 et seq. the ages of the antediluvian patriarchs
are given. Adam lived 930 years; Seth, 912; Enos, 905; Cainan, 970;
Mahalaleel, 895; Jared, 962; Enoch, 365; Methuselah, 969; Lamech, 777.
All but four of them “begat” between 65 and 90—Adam at 130, Methuselah
at 187, Jared at 182, Noah at 500. By nearly all modern scholars these great
ages have been regarded as mythical, but so scientific and modern a student
43
as T. E. Young, who is very skeptical about all later records of great
longevity, devotes a long chapter to these records, which he is almost
inclined to credit. He goes to original sources, gives various hypotheses,
epitomizes diverse writers on the subject, and finally raises the question

whether or not in ancient days atmospheric conditions, food, and a different
and more uniform climate might not have caused an unprecedented
prolongation of human life. He does not, of course, credit the ancient
literature of India, where holy men are said to have lived eighty thousand
years and where in the most flourishing period of Indian antiquity the term
of one hundred thousand was regarded as the average length of the life of
saints. He fully recognizes, too, the influence of mystic numbers here,
which persisted until the age of the higher criticism, and is incredulous
about most of the modern records of centenarians. His point of view is that
man has now passed his acme and that a slow decline of the human race,
which will end in its extinction, has already begun, masked as it is by
modern hygiene, which prolongs life beyond the average term it would
otherwise have reached. Thus human vitality as measured by length of life
44
is slowly but irresistibly waning.
The correspondence between organism and environment, which makes
life perfect, was probably once better than now. Bacteriology is a factor
never to be forgotten and there may be a new acidity of juices. Perhaps the
energy of the sun is decreasing and also the productivity of the earth.
Indeed, it is very probable that the solar system has attained its maturity or
midway stage. From such data Young concludes, “The average intellectual
condition of the present period, I should be inclined to surmise, exhibits no
sign whatever of an ampler development.” Knowledge has become
mechanical and has lost its capacity as the instrument of self-cultivation.
The highest faculties are decaying from cessation of activity and coherent
function. Man has reached his limit. The utilities of civilization are also
hindrances, so that the forces of evolution have spent their power.
The Hebrew conception of Yahveh generally made him old, the ancient
of days without beginning or end; and the art of early Christendom where
God the Father appears, usually represents Him as venerable with age, this
trait being probably accentuated by contrast with His son, Jesus, who died
in the prime of life. The ancient Hebrews had great respect for age, and
many Biblical heroes from Abraham to Moses and some of the prophets
were old in years and wisdom. The exhortation was to rise up before the
hoary head and honor the face of the old man, and this has its nursery echo
in the story of Elisha (II, Kings, 2:23–24) whom little children came out of
the city and mocked, saying “Go up, thou bald-head.” He “turned back and

cursed them in the name of the Lord, and there came forth two she-bears
out of the wood and tare forty and two children of them.” No passage in all
45
the literature of the world has had such influence as Psalms 90:10. It is
pathetic to see how incessantly this passage is quoted in the literature on old
age and how not only among the Jews but perhaps quite as much, if not
more, among the Christians, bibliolatry has made it accepted almost as a
decree of fate.
Next most influential is the pessimistic view of senescence represented
46
in Ecclesiastes, 12:1–8. We quote Professor Paul Haupt’s version, with his
explanations in parentheses:

Remember thy well (the wife and mother of thy children) in the
days of thy vigor, ere there come the days of evil, and the years
draw nigh in which thou wilt say I have no pleasure. Ere is darkened
the sun (sunshine of childhood), and the light of the day, and the
moon (more tempered light of boyhood and early manhood), and the
stars (the sporadic moments of happiness in mature age), and the
clouds return after the rain (for the old, clouds and rainy days
increase); when the keepers of the house (hands) tremble, and the
men of power (the bones, especially the backbone) bend
themselves; the grinding maids (teeth) cease and the ladies that look
out through the lattices (eyes) are darkened; the doors are shut
toward the street (secretion and excretion cease); he riseth at the
voice of the birds (awakens too early), and all the daughters of song
are brought low (grows deaf), he is afraid of that which is high, and
fears are in the way (avoids climbing and high places); the almond
tree blossometh (he grows gray), the locust crawleth along with
difficulty, the caper-berry breaketh up (the soul is freed), the silver
(spinal) cord is snapped asunder, the golden bowl (brain) crushed in,
the bucket at the well smashed (heart grows weak), and the wheel
breaketh down at the pit (machinery runs down). Man is going to his
eternal house (the grave), and the mourners go about in the street.
Vanity of vanities (all is transitory), saith Ecclesiastes, all is vanity,
and all that is coming is vanity.

47
L. Löw collects from the Scripture and post-Biblical Talmud, German
and other literature, instances of rejuvenescence in the old which ancient
Hebrew writers seem to have stressed. We all know that sight sometimes
comes back, perhaps to a marked degree, but Löw quotes cases where
wrinkles vanished, the hair was restored to its youthful shade and increased
in quantity, while teeth, after years of decay, have sometimes grown from
new roots—occasionally more than once. In many cases sex potency has
been restored as well as muscular strength, freshness of complexion, and,
more rarely, hearing. Myths, of course, of many races detail cases where
magic sleep lasting many, perhaps a hundred, years has converted age into
youth, and in Semitic folklore this is often connected with the passage,
“The righteous shall renew their strength like the eagle.” The Hebrews were
perhaps even more fond than other people of dividing life into periods,
usually in conformity to the magic numbers 3, 4, 7, etc. The comparison of
age with the four seasons was very common, and here we may perhaps
mention Lotze’s effort to harmonize the life span with the four
temperaments. For him, childhood is sanguine on account of the ease of
excitation, the keenness of response to sensation, the ready passage of
impulse to action, and the fluctuations of mood. Youth he calls melancholic
and emotionally characterized by Stimmungen. It judges the items of
experience by their effect upon feeling and upon self, and oscillates readily
and widely from pleasure to pain. Mature manhood is choleric, practical,
executive, with definiteness of aim and fulfillment of ideas and even
phantasies but with less excitability of emotion; while old age is
phlegmatic, seeks repose, and has been taught by experience to abate the
life of affectivity and take the attitude of laissez faire.
In the modern Jewish family the authority of and respect for the father
is great, more among the orthodox and conservative than the liberal and
reformed wing of Judaism. The grandfather and -mother are always
provided for, although their authority and influence are generally greatly
diminished.
Perhaps mention should here be made of the very interesting medieval
legend of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, although it is of Christian origin.
This cobbler, past whose shop Jesus bore the Cross on the way to Calvary,
reproached Him, and Jesus, turning, sentenced him to “tarry till I come,”
which meant that his punishment was to remain alive on earth until the

second coming of the Messiah. In some of the many forms of this tradition
he is represented at the time as being of about Jesus’ age and every time he
reached a hundred as being set back again to this stage of life; while in
others he is described with ever increasing symptoms of age, and in Doré’s
illustrations he is depicted as wandering the earth, appearing here and there
and, when recognized, generally mysteriously vanishing, ever seeking
death, visiting graveyards and regions smitten with plague and famine,
rushing into the mêlée of battles, etc.—but all in vain. He longs with an
ever increasing passion to pay the debt of nature but is unable to do so and
must rove the earth until the Judgment Day, when he hopes his penalty may
48
be remitted and that he may keep some “rendezvous with Death.”
In ancient Greece we may begin with Sparta and its very unique
gerousia, the council of twenty-eight old men who must be over sixty, when
the duty to bear arms ceased and when by the original law of Sparta men
were put to death. This council of old men at the height of its power is
sometimes compared with that of the boulé in Athens but was even greater,
for although it held its mandate from the people and its members were
annually elected, they could depose the five ephors and the kings and even
49
cause them to be put to death. J. P. Mahaffy condemns the parochial
politics of Sparta, where ignorant old men watched over and secured the
closest adhesion of the state to the system of a semifabulous legislator, and
compares the rigidity of the Spartan system, not based on written laws, with
the effects of excessive reverence of ancestors in China in retarding
50
progress. He thinks that here we have “one of the most signal instances in
history of the vast mischief done by the government of old men. All the
leading patriots, nay all the leading politicians, were past their prime. There
was not a single young man of ability taking part in public affairs.” This, he
thinks, was more or less true of Athens in the early days, and he goes on to
say that if any young orator tried to advance new ideas, the old masters,
who had the ear of the assembly, were out upon him as a hireling and traitor
so that he had to retire from the agora into private life, and some were thus
driven into exile. He even holds that the sudden growth of the philosophic
schools a little later was due to the activities that but for this diversion
would have been directed to politics.

But in Greece at its best opposite influences were at work and generally
predominated. In the Homeric age “the king or chief, as soon as his bodily
vigor passed away, was apparently pushed aside by younger and stronger
men. He might either maintain himself by extraordinary usefulness, like
Nestor, or be supported by his children, if they chanced to be affectionate
51
and dutiful; but except in these cases his lot was sad indeed.” Achilles
laments that nearby chiefs are ill-treating the aged Peleus, and we see
Laertes, the father of Ulysses, exiled to a barren farm in the country and
spending the later years of his life in poverty and hardship. Hence when we
see princes who had sons that might return any day to avenge them treated
in such a way, we must infer that unprotected old age commanded very
little veneration among the Homeric Greeks, so that worn-out men received
scant consideration. Among friends and neighbors in peace and in good
humor they were treated with consideration, but with the first clash of
interests all this vanished. Interference of the gods to protect their weakness
was no longer believed in. Thus the exact prescription of the conduct of the
young toward the elders in Sparta was an exception, and their treatment of
old age as illustrated by the well-worn story of an old man coming into the
theater at Athens and looking in vain for a seat until he came near the
Spartan embassy, which at once rose and made room for him, was
suggestive. It was well added that while the Athenians applauded this act it
is doubtful if they imitated it. Probably the disparagement of old age
prompted Athenian gentlemen to resort to every means to prolong their
youth. Zeus came to rule the turbulent and self-willed lesser gods on
Olympus, who were perpetually trying to evade and thwart him, by
occasionally terrifying them, and he seemed to be able to count on no
higher principle of loyalty.
The Greeks loved wealth because it gave pleasure, and perhaps in this
fact we have one key to another horror that old age had for them.
Mimnermus tells us to enjoy the delights of love, for “when old age with its
pains comes upon us it mars even the fair, wretched cares besiege the mind;
nor do we delight in beholding the rays of the sun but are hateful to boys
and despised among women, so sore a burden have the gods made old age.”
“When youth has fled, short-lived as a dream, forthwith this burdensome
and hideous old age looms over us hateful and dishonored, which changes
the fashion of man’s countenance, marring his sight and his mind with its

mist.” Pindar asks why those who must of necessity meet the fate of death
should desire “to sit in obscurity vainly brooding through a forgotten old
age without sharing a single blessing.” He and Aeschylus take a somewhat
less unfavorable view of age, although even Pindar calls it “detested.”
Sophocles is the only dramatist who, at least in one passage, welcomes its
approach, although there are nowhere bitterer words concerning it than
those of the chorus of Œdipus at Coloneus, “That is the final lot of man,
even old age, hateful, impotent, unsociable, friendless, wherein all evil of
evil dwells.” Thus, in general, Greek writers take a very gloomy view of it,
never calling it beautiful, peaceful, or mellow, but rather dismal and
oppressive. The best they say of it is that it brings wisdom.
52
R. W. Livingstone says:

When youth wore away, he [the Greek] felt that what made life
most worth living was gone. In part perhaps it was that old age had
terrors for the Greeks which we do not feel. They were without
eyeglasses, ear-trumpets, bath-chairs, and an elaborate system of
apéritifs, which modern science has devised to assist our declining
years. Yet even with these consolations it may be doubted whether
the Greek would have faced old age with pleasure. At least to judge
from Greek literature, he lamented its minor discomforts less than
the loss of youth’s intense capacity for action and enjoyment. People
who prize beauty and health so highly can hardly think otherwise
when age comes.

Again, old men in Greece had to contend with the younger generation
upon even terms and without the large allowance conceded them by modern
sentiment and good manners. At Athens legal proceedings of children to
secure the property of their parents were very common—and that, too,
without medical evidence of incapacity. Aristophanes complains of the
treatment of older men by the newer generation and in his Wasps makes an
old man say that his only chance of respect or even safety is to retain the
power of acting as a juryman, so exacting homage from the accused and
supporting himself by his pay without depending on his children. When he
comes home with his fee they are glad to see him. Indeed, thus he might
support a second wife and younger children and not be dependent for his

daily bread upon his son’s steward. In the tragedies the old kings are
represented as acquiescing, though not without complaint, in the weakness
of their position and submitting to insults from foes and rivals. There seems
no such thing as patient submission for an aged sovereign. Nor did his own
excellence nor the score of former battles secure for him the allegiance of
his people when his vigor had passed. This was all because in spite of the
modicum of respect that all must yield to old age at its best, the violent
nature of the Periclean politics and the warlike temper of early days made
vigor in their leaders a necessity. The nation was strong, always seeking to
advance and enlarge, and its maxim seemed to be that of Hesiod, “Work for
youth; counsel for maturity; prayers for old age.” The Greeks, realizing the
danger of relying too much upon experience as the source of wisdom, saw
that when the maturity of age is passed and the power of decision begins to
wane, trusting to the leadership of the old may be dangerous. By a law often
relied on, old men could be brought into court by their children and be
found incapable of managing their property, which was then transferred to
their heirs; and this helps to explain why sometimes old people, beginning
to feel their uselessness, committed suicide rather than become an
encumbrance.
53
Plato makes one of his characters say:

I and a few other people of my own age are in the habit of
frequently meeting together. On these occasions most of us give
way to lamentations and regret the pleasures of youth, and call up
the memory of love affairs, drinking parties, and similar
proceedings. They are grievously discontented at the loss of what
they consider great privileges and describe themselves as having
lived well in those days whereas now they can hardly be said to live
at all. Some also complain of the manner in which their relations
insult their infirmities or make this a ground for reproaching old age
with the many miseries it occasions them.

Plato did not himself agree with this view but thought the cause of this
discontent lay not in age itself but in character. Still the humanist view of
life does tend to some such position, and the Greeks really felt that it was
better to be the humblest citizen of Athens than to rule in Hades.

Two unique characters stand out with great clearness and significance.
The first is that of the Homeric Nestor, who had lived through three
generations of men and in whom Anthon says Homer intended to exemplify
the greatest perfection of which human nature is capable. His wisdom was
great, as was his age, and both grew together. In his earlier years he had
been as great in war as he became in counsel later. Very different is the
figure of Tithonus, whom Tennyson has made the theme of one of his oft-
quoted poems. He was a mortal, the son of a king, but Aurora became so
enamored of him that she besought Zeus to confer upon him the gift of
immortality. The ruler of Olympus granted her prayer and Tithonus became
exempt from death. But the goddess had forgotten to crave youth along with
immortality and accordingly, after his children had been born, old age
slowly began to mar the visage and form of her lover and spouse. When she
saw him thus declining she still remained true to him, kept him “in her
palace, on the eastern margin of the Ocean stream, ‘giving him ambrosial
food and fair garments.’ But when he was no longer able to move his limbs
she deemed it the wisest course to shut him up in his chamber, whence his
feeble voice was incessantly heard. Later poets say that out of compassion
she turned him into a cicada.”
It is gratifying to turn from the depressing attitude toward old age that
was characteristic of the Hellenic mind as a whole, because it came nearer
than any other to being the embodiment of eternal youth, and to glance at
the unique and, we must believe on the whole, very wholesome and
suggestive relation that so often subsisted between men, not to be sure very
old (unless in the case of Socrates) but aging and young men and even boys.
It was assumed that every well-born and -bred young male must have
an older man as his mentor and to be without one was, to some degree,
regarded as discreditable. Thus juniors sometimes came to vie with each
other in their efforts to win the regard of their seniors, especially if they
were prominent; while the latter, in turn, felt that it was a part of their duty
to the community and to the state to respond to such advances, even to
make them. These friendships between ephebics and sages were, at their
best, highly advantageous to both. The man embodied the boy’s ideal at that
stage of life when he realized that all excellencies were not embodied in his
father and when home relations were merging into those of citizenship. To
win the personal attention and interest of a great man who would

occasionally exercise the function of teacher, foster parent, guardian,
godfather, adviser, or patron, brought not only advantage but distinction if
the youth was noble and beautiful. On the other hand, Plato thought no man
would wish to do or say a discreditable thing in the presence of a youth who
admired him but would wish to be a pattern or inspirer of virtue. He seems
to have been the first to realize that there is really nothing in the world quite
so worthy of love, reverence, and service, as ingenuous youth fired with the
right ambitions and smitten with a passion to both know and be the best
possible. The period between the dawn of sex and complete nubility has
always been the chief opportunity of the true teacher or initiator of its
apprentice into life.
Here we must recall the very pregnant sense in which, as I have tried in
my Adolescence to set forth at greater length, education in its various
implications began in the initiations of youth by their elders into the
pubertal stage of life and slowly extended upward toward the university,
and downward toward the kindergarten, as civilization advanced. The world
has always felt that these pre-marital years, when the young have such
peculiar needs and are subjected to so many dangers, are the great
opportunity for the transmission of knowledge and influence from the older
to the younger generation.
Thus while Socrates loved to mingle with men of all classes and ages,
his most congenial companions were those of a younger generation. With
the gracious boy, Charmides, “beautiful in mind and body, a charming
combination of moral dignity and artless sprightliness,” he discussed
temperance in the presence of his guardian, Critias. With Theætetus, “the
younger Socrates,” like his master more beautiful in mind than in body, he
conversed about the nature of knowledge, in the presence of his tutor. With
the fair and noble young Lysis, invoked to do so by his lover, Hypothales,
he discourses on the right words or acts best calculated to ingratiate himself
with his ward, and the theme is friendship. In the presence and with the
coöperation of four youths he discusses courage with General Laches, and
to young Clineas and his adviser he narrates his amusing encounter with
Euthydemus and his brother, the bumptious young Sophists, the “eristic
sluggers.” He explains the true nature of his own art to Ion, the Homeric
rhapsodist. In the Meno he brings out the essential points of the forty-
54
seventh proposition of Euclid from the mind of an ignorant slave boy.

This relation of old and younger men was thought to keep youth
plastic, docile, and receptive, if not a trifle feminine. Plato would have these
pairs of friends fight side by side to inspire each other with courage. But
this relation, as we all know, had its dangers and often lapsed to
homosexuality and inversion. In the Symposium, Alcibiades, that most
beautiful and alluring of male coquettes, describes Socrates as a paragon of
chastity because he remained cold and unmoved by all the seductive
blandishments he could bring to bear upon him. This vice, now so fully
explored by Krafft-Ebing, Tarnowski, Moll, Ellis, and Freud and his
disciples, is favored by war, the seclusion of women as in Turkey, and even
by female virtue; but the Platonic view was that true love was a wisdom or
philosophy, although possibly they did not realize that even the custom of
the Sophists, who first took pay for teaching—a practice they thought
profanation—was nevertheless a step toward the reform of degraded boy
love.
The chief function of wise and older men toward their juniors, they
thought, was to prevent the premature hardening of opinions into
convictions and to keep their minds open and growing. As we now often
say that the chief function of religion and sex is to keep each other pure, so
they thought that wisdom culminated in eros, which in turn found its
highest deployment in the love of knowledge, which Aristotle later
described as the theoretic life, the attainment of which he deemed the
supreme felicity of man. From all this it follows that those who achieve
complete ideal senescence are those who have entirely sublimated eroticism
into the passion for truth and pursue it with the same ardor that in their
prime attracted them to the most beautiful of the other sex; and that their
chief function to the next generation is to lay in it the foundations for the
same gradual transfer and transformation of it as old age advances.
55
Aristotle’s physical theory of old age is that heat is lost by gradual
dissipation, very little remaining in old age—a flickering flame that a slight
disturbance could put out. The lung hardens by gradual evaporation of the
fluid and so is unable to perform its office of heat regulation. He assumes
that heat is gradually developed in the heart. The amount produced is
always somewhat less than that which is given off and the deficiency has to
be made good out of the stock with which the organism started originally,
that is, from the innate heat in which the soul was incorporate. This

eventually is so reduced by constant draughts made upon it that it is
insufficient to support the soul. The natural span of life, he says, differs
greatly in length in different species, due to material constitution and the
degree of harmony with the environment. But still, as a general rule, big
plants and animals live longer than smaller ones; sanguineous or vertebrates
longer than invertebrates; the more perfect longer than the less perfect; and
long gestation generally goes with long duration. Thus bulk, degree of
organization, period of gestation, are correlated. Great size goes with high
organization.
56
In his Rhetoric, as is well known, Aristotle gives old age an
unfavorable aspect. He says in substance that the old have lived many years
and been often the victims of deception, and since vice is the rule rather
than the exception in human affairs, they are never positive about anything.
They “suppose” and add “perhaps” or “possibly,” always expressing
themselves in doubt and never positively. They are uncharitable and ever
ready to put the worst construction upon everything. They are suspicious of
evil, not trusting, because of their experience of human weakness. Hence
they have no strong loves or hates but go according to the precept of bias.
Their love is such as may one day become hate and their hatred such as may
one day become love. The temper of mind is neither grand nor generous—
not the former because they have been too much humiliated and have no
desire to go according to anything but mere appearances, and not the latter
because property is a necessity of life and they have learned the difficulty of
acquiring it and the facility with which it may be lost. They are cowards and
perpetual alarmists, exactly contrary to the young; not fervent, but cold.
They are never so fond of life as on their last day. Again, it is the absent
which is the object of all desire, and what they most lack they most want.
They are selfish and inclined to expediency rather than honor; the former
having to do with the individual and the latter being absolute. They are apt
to be shameless rather than the contrary and are prone to disregard
appearances. They are dependent for most things. They live in memory
rather than by hope, for the remainder of their life is short while the past is
long, and this explains their garrulity. Their fits of passion though violent
are feeble. Their sensual desires have either died or become feeble but they
are regulated chiefly by self-interest. Hence they are capable of self-control,
because desires have abated and self-interest is their leading passion.

Calculation has a character that regulates their lives, for while calculation is
directed to expediency, morality is directed to virtue as its end. Their
offenses are those of petty meanness rather than of insolence. They are
compassionate like the young, but the latter are so from humanity while the
old suppose all manner of sufferings at their door. When the orator
57
addresses them he should bear these traits in mind. Elsewhere he says a
happy old age is one that approaches gradually and without pain and is
dependent upon physical excellence and on fortune, although there is such a
thing as a long life even without health and strength.
Thus, on the whole, the Greeks took a very somber view of old age.
They prized youth as perhaps no other race has ever done and loved to
heighten their appreciation of it by contrasting it with life in its “sere and
yellow leaf.” Pindar says in substance that darkness, old age, and death
never seemed so black as by contrast with the glories of the great festivals
and games which every few years brought together all those who loved
either gold or glory. Socrates, who refused to flee from his fate and calmly
drank hemlock at the age of seventy, and Plato, who lived to be an
octogenarian, must, on the whole, be regarded as exceptions, and
conceptions of a future life were never clear and strong enough to be of
much avail against the pessimism that in bright Hellas clouded the closing
scenes of life’s drama.
When we turn to Rome, we have, on the whole, a more favorable view.
Even in the early stages of Roman life, family and parental authority were
well developed and in Roman law the patria potestas gave the head of the
family great dignity and power. This term designates the aggregate of those
peculiar powers and rights that, by the civil law of Rome, belonged to the
head of a family in respect to his wife, children (natural or adopted) and
more remote descendants who sprang from him through males only.
Anciently it was of very extensive scope, embracing even the power of life
and death; but this was greatly curtailed until finally it meant but little more
than a right of the paterfamilias to hold his own property or the acquisitions
58
of one under his power.
The Roman Senate was, as the etymology of the word suggests, a body
of old men; and as the Romans had an unprecedented genius for social and
political organization, the wisdom necessary for exercising successfully

administrative functions, which age alone can give, had greater scope. In
this respect the Catholic Church later and its canon law were profoundly
influenced by and, indeed, as Zeller has shown in his remarkable essay on
the subject, derived most of its prominent features directly from the
political organization of ancient Rome, also giving great authority to
presbyters, elders, and affording exceptional scope to the organizing ability
that comes to its flower in later life. Jesus was young and Keim believes
that all His disciples were even younger. Those who created ecclesiastical
institutions, however, were far older.
59
In Cicero’s De Senectute we have a remarkably representative
statement put into the mouth of the old man, Cato, as to how aging Romans
regarded their estate, and I think the chief impression in reading this
remarkable document is the vast fund of instances of signal achievements of
old men that are here brought together. This will be apparent from the
following brief résumé.
Cato in his old age is approached by youths who want to know what he
can tell them about life. He commends their interest in age and tells them he
has himself just begun to learn Greek, on which he spent much time in later
years. After the first few pages the treatise becomes almost entirely a
monologue of Cato. Every state is irksome to those who have no support
within and do not see that they owe happiness to themselves. We must not
say old age creeps on after manhood, manhood after youth, youth after
childhood, etc. Each age has its own interests—spring for blossoms, autumn
for fruit. The wise submit and do not, like the giants, war against the gods.
There are very many instances of those who outlived enjoyment and found
themselves forsaken, but of more who won notable renown and respect.
Perhaps the greatest merit of this book is the instances of noble old age that
abound.
Many are great owing to the reputation of their country and would be
small in other lands. To the very poor old age can never be very attractive.
Think on your good deeds. When Marcus died, Cato long knew no other
man to improve by. The four evils charged to old age are: (1) it disables
from business, (2) it makes the body infirm, (3) it robs of pleasure, (4) it is
near death. He takes these up in detail. The downfall of great states is
“generally owing to the giddy administration of inexperienced young men”;

and, on the contrary, tottering states have been saved by the old. The young
are all ignorant orators. Memory fails in age only if not exercised, and this
is true of all abilities. Sophocles wrote his Œdipus to defy those who called
him a dotard. Democritus, Plato, Socrates, Zeno, and Cleanthes are cited.
Many old men cannot submit to idleness but grow old learning something
new every day, like Solon. Although the voice may be low, it may have
more command. We should no more repine when middle life leaves us than
we do when childhood departs. The adult does not mourn that he is no
longer a boy. All must prepare themselves against old age and mitigate its
natural infirmities.
The stage delights in weak, dissolute old fellows worthy of contempt
and ridicule. Age must support its proper rights and dignities and not give
them weakly away. We must recall at night all we have said or done during
the day. As to the third, old age being incapable of pleasure, the great curse
is indulgence of passion, for which men have betrayed their country.
Governments have been ruined by treachery, for lust may prompt to any
villainy. Reason is the best gift of heaven, but the highest rapture of feeling
makes reflection impossible. Cato then describes with much detail the
charm of country life—Cincinnatus, etc. We might well wish our enemies
were guided by pleasure only for then we could master them more easily.
The old man is dead to certain enjoyments. He does not so much prize the
convivium for food as for talk. We must not choose only companions of our
own age for there will be few of these left. A talk should turn to the subjects
proposed by the master of the feast, the cups be cooling. He says “I thank
the gods I am got rid of that tyranny” (venery). He does not want or even
wish it in any form.
Far above the delights of literature or philosophy are the charms of
country life, and he describes at length the various methods of vine culture,
fertilization, improving barren soil, irrigation, orchards, cattle, bees,
gardens, flowers, tree planting, etc. The farmer can say, like the ancient
Semites when offered gold, that they wanted none for it was more glorious
to command those who valued it than to possess it. Then follow many
instances of old people who have retired to the country and perhaps even
have been called from their farms to great tasks of state. He advises reading
Xenophon. An old age thus spent is the happiest period if attended with
honor and respect. Old men are miserable if they demand the defense of

oratory. In the college of augurs old men have great dignity. Some wines
sour with age but others grow better and richer. A gravity with some
severity is allowed, but never ill nature. Covetousness is most absurd
because what is left of life needs little.
The young should be trained to envisage death. Youth in its greatest
vigor is subjected to more diseases than old age. If men too young governed
the state, all government would fall. The old have already attained what the
young only hope for, namely, long years. No actor can play more than one
rôle at once. It takes more water to put out a hot fire than a spent one. The
young are more prone to die by violence, the old by over-ripeness. The old
can oppose tyrants because these can only kill; and their life, being shorter,
is worth far less. The young and old should meditate on death till it
becomes familiar and this only makes the mind free and easy. Many a
soldier has rushed into the mêlée, with no result, when he knew he would
be cut to pieces, and Marcus Atilius Regulus went back to his enemies for
certain torture and death because he had promised. There is a certain satiety
of each stage of life, and always one is fading as another warms up.
Perhaps, Cato concludes, our minds are an efflux of some universal
mind, and there may be an argument for preëxistence. We have not only
interest in, but a kind of right to, posterity. The wisest accept death most
easily, although it is by no means clear whether we are dissolved or there is
a personal continuation.
Roman authors quote “many cases of great longevity,” and
Onomocritus, an Athenian, tells us that certain men of Greece, and even
entire families, enjoyed perpetual youth for centuries. Old Papalius was
believed to have lived 500 years and a Portugee, Faria, 300. Pliny tells us of
a king who died in his eighty-second year. Strabo says that in the Punjab
people lived over 200 years. Epaminondas had seen three centuries pass.
Pliny tells us that when, in the reign of Vespasian, statistics of all
centenarians between the Apennines and the Po were collected, there were
more than a hundred and seventy of them out of a population of three
million, six of whom lived over 150 years. According to Lucian, Tiresias
lived 600 years on account of the purity of his life, and the inhabitants of
Mount Ethos had the faculty of living a century and a half. He tells us of an
Indian race, the Seres who, because of temperate life and very scanty food,
lived 300 years, while Pliny tells of an Illyrian who lived 500 and the king

of Cyprus who outlived 160 years. Litorius of Aetolia was happiest among
mortals for he had attained 200 years. Apolonius, the grammarian, outdoes
all others and tells of people who lived thousands of years.
Of the condition and status of old people all through the Christian
centuries down to the age of authentic statistics we know very little.
Roger Bacon tells us of a remarkable man who appeared in Europe in
1245 and in whom everyone was interested. He claimed that he had
attended the Council of Paris in a.d. 362 and also the baptism of Clovis.
Bacon’s skepticism reduced the claim of this unknown man to 300 years. In
1613 was published at Turin the life of a man who is said to have lived
nearly 400 years, enjoying full use of all his faculties; and in the
seventeenth century a Scotchman, MacCrane, lived 200 years and talked of
the Wars of the Roses. So the lives of the saints are rich in old people—St.
Simeon is said to have lived 107 years; St. Narcissus, 165; St. Anthony,
105; the hermit, Paul, 113; while the monks of Mount Ethos often reached
the age of 150, as did the first bishop of Ethiopia. Although there are, of
course, no vital statistics, there are many reasons to believe that the average
length of human life was shorter and that old people in general, although, of
course, not without remarkable exceptions, enjoyed little respect.
Descriptions of them sometimes appear in miracle plays, more commonly
in the form of caricatures, as is often the case on the modern stage, where
the personification of old people is often a specialty. There are dotards and
fatuities galore and the more dignified figures like King Lear or even
Shylock are represented as morally perverse or mentally unsound.
Here should be mentioned the remarkable theory of witchcraft
60 61
elaborated by Karl Pearson. W. Notestein tells us that by accounting as
carefully as the insufficient evidence permits it would seem that “about six
times as many women were indicted as men,” and also that there were
“twice as many married women as spinsters,” which is less in accord with
tradition. From his account, as well as from the old chapter of C. Mackay
on the “Witch Mania” (in his Popular Delusions) and also from an
62
interesting study by G. L. Kittredge, it would seem that the first
accusations of witchcraft were made against old, middle-aged, and young
women almost indiscriminately, while in a later stage of the delusion

attention focused on old women, influenced by folklore, which tends to
make them hags.
Pearson’s theory, developed with great ingenuity, is that witchcraft is a
revival of a very old and widespread matriarchate wherein woman not only
ruled but society was everywhere permeated by her genius, and paternity
was unknown. The key to this older civilization was the development of
woman’s intuitive faculty under the stress of child-bearing and -rearing. The
mother-age in its diverse forms has been a stage of social growth for
probably all branches of the human race. With its mother-right customs it
made a social organization in which there was more unity of interest,
fellowship, partnership in property and sex than we find in the larger social
units of to-day. Hence feminists may well look back to this as a golden age,
despite the fact that it was in many respects cruel and licentious. It shows
that those who talk of absolute good and bad and an unchanging moral code
may help to police but can never reform society.
Pearson proceeds to argue that certain forms of medieval witchcraft are
fossils of the old mother-age and more or less perverted rites and customs
of a prehistoric civilization, and even holds that the confessions wrung from
poor old women by torture have a real scientific value for the historian of a
far earlier stage of life. Primitive woman, thus, once had a status far higher
and very different from anything she has since enjoyed. Man as husband
and father had no place but came later. Aging women in the matriarchate
were depositaries of tribal lore and family custom, and the “wise one,”
“sibyl,” or “witch” passed all this along, as she did her herb-lore. She
domesticated the small animals—goat, goose, cat, hen; devised the distaff,
spindle, pitchfork, broom (but not the spear, axe, or hammer); and presided
over rites in which there were symbols of agricultural and animal fertility
and abundant traces of licentiousness and impurity in the sacred dances and
ceremonies. “Witch” means “wiseacre,” “one who knows,” and some were
good and some bad dames or beldames. The former brought good luck; the
latter, famine, plague, etc. All witches have weather wisdom, and a
descendant of the Vola or Sibyl is, in the Edda, seated in the midst of the
assembly of the gods and could produce thunder, hail, and rain. Tacitus tells
us of men who took the part of priestesses, probably in female attire.
Kirmes is a festival lasting several days, primarily for dedicating a church,
although it has many features of the celebration of a goddess, who in

Christian demonology was first converted into the devil’s mother or
grandmother and invested with most of the functions of old witches. These,
in the witches’ sabbath, came more to devolve upon her son. In Swabia the
witch stone is an old altar and the ceremonies about it suggest marriage.
The devil is a professional sweetheart; his mother, a person of great
importance, was supposed once to have built a palace on the Danube, to
hunt with black dogs, and to be related to Frau Holda. She watered the
meadows in “Twelfth Night” and punished idle spinsters. The devil’s
mother is only a degraded form of the goddess of fertility and domestic
activity and her worship was once associated not only with licentiousness
but with human sacrifice. It was these women who were primarily in league
with the devil and once a year must dance all night. The hag is the woman
of the woods who knows and collects herbs, especially those that relieve the
labors of childbirth. The priestess of the old civilization became a medicine
woman and midwife, the goddess of fertility being killed in the autumn that
she may be rejuvenated in the spring. Thus the witch is a relic of the
priestess or goddess of fertility, and the hostility they sometimes exhibit for
marriage was because at this stage it was not monogamic but group
marriage.
Thus Pearson thinks that Walpurgis customs bring out most of the weak
and strong points of ancient woman’s civilization, fossils of which lurk
under all the folklore of witchcraft. Here we find the rudiments of medicine,
domestication of small animals, cultivation of vegetables, domestic and
household arts, the pitchfork—which was once the fire-rake—etc. All of
these are woman’s inventions and were necessary for the higher discoveries.
Although he did not invent them, man later made woman use them. The
primitive savage knows nothing of agriculture, spinning, and herbs, but his
wife does. It is not he but she who made these symbols of a female deity.
The fertility, resource, and inventiveness of woman arose from the struggle
she had to make for the preservation of herself and her child. Man was
quickened by warfare of tribe against tribe, but that came later. The first
struggle was for food and shelter. Thus the father-age rests on a degenerate
form of an older group and is not the pure outcome of male domination. He
thus believes in a direct line of descent from the old salacious worship of
the mother-goddess and the extravagances of witchcraft, and he finds
survivals of this even in the licensed vice of to-day. Thus this early
civilization of woman handed down a mass of useful customs and

knowledge, so that she was the bearer of a civilization that man has not yet
entirely attained. If many things in her life are vestiges of the mother age,
many in his represent a still lower stratum and the drudgery of the peasant
woman in many parts of Europe represents the extreme of the reaction
brought about by male dominance.
Otis T. Mason and A. F. Chamberlain have stressed the significance of
woman’s work in the early stages of the development of the human race,
and if it be true that in witchcraft we have a recrudescence of the reactions
of man to this preëminence of the other sex, in which woman in her least
attractive form—all shriveled, toothless, and as a vicious trouble-maker—is
caricatured in the long war of sex against sex, we certainly have here
considerable confirmation of some of the views now represented by John
63
M. Tyler that prehistoric woman led mankind in the early stages of its
upward march toward civilization. In the eternal struggle of old people to
maintain their power against the oncoming generations which would
submerge or sweep them away, witchcraft on this view represents the very
latest stage of a long and losing struggle of old women for place and
influence who in the last resort did not scruple, handicapped though they
were by ugliness, neglect, and contempt, to cling to the least and last
remnants of their ancient prerogatives.
The attitude of children toward old people is interesting and significant,
but it is very difficult to distinguish between their own indigenous and
intrinsic feelings and the conventionalities of respect and even the outer
forms of convention that society has imposed upon them. Many children
live with their grandparents and the attitude of the latter toward the former
makes, of course, a great difference. Both, especially grandmothers, are
prone to be over-indulgent and often allow children greater liberties than
the mother would—under the influence, doubtless, of the very strong
instinct to win their good-will. But it is very doubtful if the average child
loves the grandmother as much as it is loved by her.
64
Colin Scott obtained 226 reminiscent answers from adults on the
question of how as children they felt toward old people and found little
difference in the sexes in this respect. No less than eighty per cent
expressed negative or pessimistic views; that is, they disliked old people
because they could not run and play; because they were sometimes cross,

solemn, stupid, conceited; perhaps were thought to envy the young or
interfere with childish pleasures, etc.; while not a few expressed points of
aversion to wrinkles, unsteady gait, untidiness in dress and habits
(particularly of eating), slowness, uncertain voice, loss of teeth, bad
pronunciation, etc. Only twenty per cent took a favorable view of old
people, regarding them as wise, not only about the weather but about other
things; as free to do what they wished; having great power as storytellers;
constantly doing little acts of kindness and sometimes interceding with
parents in their behalf. For the majority of young children the pleasures of
life seem to be essentially over at forty and they look upon people of that
age as already moribund. Very often children are overcome by a sudden
sense of pathos that old people are facing death, the process of which with
lowered vitality seems to them to have already begun. To some, the very
aged, even conventionally loved, are inwardly repulsive because their
weakness and appearance already begin to seem a little corpse-like; while a
few, on the other hand, are animated by the motive to make old people
happy because their life seems to them so short or because little things
please them so much. It would almost seem from such data as though the
modern child was not sufficiently accustomed to grandparents to have fully
adjusted to them; and, as everyone knows, there is a very strong and
instinctive tendency in children to jeer at and perhaps attempt ludicrous
imitations of old age. At any rate, we have here two tendencies evidently in
greater or less conflict with each other.
65
Mantegazza collected very many views from literature concerning
old age and death and grouped them in two classes, favorable and
unfavorable. The majority of his quotations stigmatize it as repulsive,
crumpled in skin and form, perhaps tearful, squinting, with mottled skin,
loose, distorted teeth, emaciation sometimes suggesting a skeleton, hardness
of hearing, croaking voice, knotted veins, hemorrhoids, tending to drift into
an apologetic attitude for living like a beggar asking alms or craving pity,
with no strong desires, etc., so that even those who love old people in the
bottom of their hearts often do not want them around. These quotations
stress the garrulousness, untidiness in table manners, carelessness in dress
or toilet, moodiness, exacting nature, and disparagement of present times in
always lauding the past. “Old age is pitiable because although life is not
attractive, death is dreaded.” People sometimes “seem to themselves and to

others to live on because the gods do not love them.” Life is often described
as a “long sorrow, the last scene of which is always death.” “There are only
three events—to be born, live, and die. A man does not feel it when he is
born but through life he suffers and death is painful, and then he is
forgotten.” “Every tick of the clock brings us nearer to death.” “We part
from life as from the house of a host and not from our own home.” “One
after another our organs refuse their service and collapse.” “All that lives
must die, and all that grows must grow old.” “Death begins in the cradle.”
“The harbor of all things good or bad is death.” “The elements are in
constant conflict with man, slowly demolishing everything he does and in
the end annihilating him.”
On the other hand, some, like the Stoics, have not only affected to
accept death with perfect equanimity but call it the highest good that God
has given men. The Epicurean said death was no evil because as long as we
live it is not present and when it is present we are not there. Pliny said the
gods have given us nothing more to be desired than brevity of life. Others
say that the old may have weak bodies but normally have good will and this
compensates. Others stress the dignity of age or its steadfastness, its
fondness for children and the young. Sometimes the old become epicures in
eating and connoisseurs in drinking. Some commend as a laudable ambition
the desire of the old to live as long, as well, and as fully as possible. Others
think the love of beauty, especially in nature, is greater; still others find a
new love of order, better knowledge of self, both physical and mental. He
suggests that old age should be almost a profession, as we have to fit to new
conditions. It is possible then to take larger views, and he says that of the
three attitudes toward death, (1) not to think of it at all, the recourse of the
common and the weak, (2) belief in immortality, a very pleasing and
comforting delusion, and (3) to face and get familiar with it, the last is by
far the highest and hardest. Thus the old must realize that they are as brittle
and fragile as glass, cannot do what they once could, become ill from
slighter causes and recover more slowly, must especially guard against
colds, fatigue, change of habit, and must be always on their guard not to
accept others’ precepts about keeping themselves in the top of their
condition but work out those best for themselves.
In all ages since civilization began we have frequent outcrops of the
tendency to divide human life into stages, many or few, more or less sharply

marked off one from the other. L. Löw has given us a comprehensive
survey of this subject. There has never been, however, any general
agreement as to these age demarcations save two, namely, the beginning
and the end of sex life, which divides life into three stages. Child life, as we
all know, has lately been divided into various epochs—the nursling; the pre-
school age; the quadrennium from eight to twelve; puberty; the age of
attaining majority; nubility; the acme of physical ability (for example, for
athletes circa thirty); the beginning of the decline of life, most often placed
between forty and fifty, a stage that has many marked features of its own;
the development of the senium, marked by impotence, with occasional
subdivisions of this stage, as, for example in Shakespeare:

The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Our educational curricula are still far more logical in the sequence of
their subject matter and their method than they are genetic whereas they
should be essentially the latter, as will be the case when the paidocentric
viewpoint has become paramount, as it should, over the scholiocentric. We
have made much progress since Herbart in determining true culture stages,
and while there are very many exceptions to the law that in general the
individual recapitulates the stages of the race, this great principle has far
wider scope than we have yet recognized. Again, we have made great
progress along another line, namely, in distinguishing physiological and
especially psychological from chronological age, but here we have little
consensus of either method or result beyond the early teens. Yet no observer
of life can fail to doubt that there is the same and perhaps even, on the
whole, greater average diversity among individuals in mental age as they

advance along the scale of years. Some minds are young and growing at
seventy while others seem to cross some invisible deadline at forty. But of
all this we have no settled criteria and the age of customary or enforced
retirement is arbitrary, though very diversely fixed by various industrial
concerns, pension systems, etc., without regard to mental age or youth. In
fact, the world has so far attempted almost nothing that could be called a
curriculum for the later years of life—physical, intellectual, moral, social,
or even hygienic or religious, after the very variable period when the prime
of life is reached and passed. Happily, however, we do have both vestiges
and modern recrudescences of such a view in the field of religion, as may
be briefly illustrated in the following paragraphs.
66
Many have held with DuBuy, that different religions best fitted
different ages. He believes that Confucianism, with its stress on respect for
parents and ancestors and on the cultivation of practical virtues, best fits the
nature and needs of young children; that Mohammedanism, with its
passionate monotheism, has a certain affinity for the next stage of life;
Christianity is best from adolescence on to the age when the marriage
relation is at its apex; Buddhism comes next; and Brahmanism is for old
age.
67
Max Müller says that in very ancient India it was recognized “that the
religion of a man cannot and ought not to be the same as that of a child, and
that the religious ideas of an old man must differ from those of an active
man in the world. It is useless to attempt to deny such facts,” and we are
reminded that we all have to struggle and have to pass through many stages
of clearing up childish conceptions in this field. Most cultivated men come
out of these struggles with certain rather firm convictions, but these later
may be found to need revision.

But when the evening of life draws near and softens the light
and shade of conflicting opinion, when to agree with the spirit of
truth within becomes far dearer than to agree with a majority of the
world without, the old questions appeal once more like long
forgotten friends. The old man learns to bear with those from whom
formerly he differed, and while he is willing to part with all that is
non-essential—and most religious differences seem to arise from

non-essentials—he clings all the more firmly to the few strong and
solid planks that are left to carry him into the harbor no longer very
distant from his sight. It is hardly creditable how all other religions
have overlooked these simple facts, how they have tried to force on
the old and wise the food that was meant for babes, and how they
have thereby alienated and lost their best and strongest friends. It is
therefore a lesson all the more worth learning from history that one
religion at least, and one of the most ancient and powerful and most
widely spread religions, has recognized this fact without the
slightest hesitation.

According to the ancient canons of the Brahmanic faith, each man must
pass through several stages. The youth is sent to the house of a teacher or
Guru, whom he must obey and serve implicitly in every way and who
teaches what is necessary for life, especially the Veda and his religious
duties. He is a mere passive recipient, learner, and believer. At the next
stage the man is married and must perform all the duties prescribed for the
householder. But during both these periods no doubt is ever heard as to the
truth of religion or the authority of laws and rites. But when the hair turns
white and there are grandchildren, “a new life opens during which the father
of the family may leave his home and village and retire into the forest with
or without his wife. During that period he is absolved from the necessity of
performing any sacrifices, although he may or must undergo certain self-
denials or penances, some of them extremely painful. He is then allowed to
meditate with proper freedom on the great problems of life and death, and
for that purpose is expected to study the Upanishads,” to learn the doctrines
in which all sacrificial duties are rejected, and the very gods to whom the
ancient prayers of the Veda were addressed are put aside to make room for
the one supreme impersonal being called Brahm. These mahatmas, like
some medieval hermit-saints commemorated in the voluminous hagiology
of the Bollandist Fathers, were reputed to have often attained very great age
and wisdom and to be sought out in their retreats to solve great problems by
men still in active life. The bodies of a few of them were fabled to have
undergone a subtle process of transubstantiation and thus to have achieved a
true mundane immortality.

Thus the religion of childhood and manhood for the venerable sage is
transmuted into philosophy or meditation on the most general problems and
the very nature of not only life but being itself, that Plato described as the
cult of death. The old man, thus, in the classic days of ancient India directed
his thoughts toward absorption. His religion was pantheism, and the theme
of his contemplation was the source of all things and their return to this
source as their goal. Perhaps we might now say that according to this view,
if evolution is the inspiration of the intellect in its youth and its prime,
involution was its muse in the stages of decline as it awaited resumption
into the One-and-All. Modern pragmatists, like the best of the ancient
Sophists, hold that the truth that best fits and expresses Me is and must be
held with the completest conviction, and the genetic idea is that different
philosophies and different faiths fit and express not only different
temperaments but different stages of life, and that, therefore, creeds can
never be fixed and stationary but must be constantly transformed. There is
no absolute or final form of truth for all save in the dominion of pure
mathematical and physical science, and it is one of the most tragic aspects
of our modern culture that we so often find mature and even aging men and
women arrested in infantile or juvenile stages of their development in
regard to the larger problems of life, for where and just in proportion as the
latter is intense there is incessant change. Christianity is the best of all
religions through the entire stage of the vita sexualis from its inception to its
decline. Its essence is the sublimation of love. It is the religion of
personalization culminating in the faith in another individual life. It is not
the religion for old men, and the revival of its attitudes, which we often see
in them, is a phenomenon of arrest or reversion and not one of the advance
that senescence should mark if the last stage of life is to have its complete
unfoldment.
Some writers believe that age differences constitute one of the
important bases, if not the chief one, in the primitive segmentation of
society into layers. It is a common observation that the young tend to be
progressive and radical, and the old, conservative, intent that no good thing
of the past be lost. Indeed, this is often called the most natural and
wholesome basis of division into parties, religious as well as political. In a
sense there is eternal war between the old and young, as illustrated, for
example, by Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The young are always inclined
to brush aside their elders and are psychologically incapable of taking their

point of view. So in many a mixed assemblage we have a clash of
68
temperaments that divides fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. In
some Australian tribes there is an absolute dominance of the elders, and
among some American Indians of the plain there is incessant antagonism
between the young braves eager to distinguish themselves in raids against
hostile tribes and the older chiefs seeking to prevent a hazardous war. F.
69
Schurtz thinks this antagonism between the older and younger generation,
which separates parents from children, forms the germ of classifications of
age and is the oldest type of associated groups. Lowie, however, does not
think that the kind of age groupings found in such cultures have a purer
natural basis but rather that they represent a blending of psychological and
conventional factors. It is very hard to transcend the intuitions of one’s
years. Where these segmentations occur they may or may not be fully
organized, but they generally go back to a more primitive social division
into boys, bachelors, and married men, very common among savages. More
elaborated age distinctions probably arose a little later.
70
R. S. Bourne also realizes that there is always a half-conscious war
going on between the old and the young and believes this is a wholesome
challenge that both should recognize to justify themselves. Older men
should not be led captive by the younger and should neither over-emphasize
nor waive their own cherished convictions, which are the best results of age
and experience. To-day the older generation is more inclined to stress duty
and service and to hark back to Victorian ideals. Perhaps in general they
tend a little to over-individuation but they should choose the golden mean
between insisting upon their own point of view and complete capitulation to
youth.
Indeed, we may go much further and say that just as, despite the love of
man and woman, there has always been a war of sex against sex, so despite
the love of parents and children, there is also eternal war between the old
and young. The small boy loves, reveres, and obeys his father but often
oscillates to the opposite state of fear and even hate under the law of the so-
called ambivalence of feeling. Each age tends to assert itself and to resent
the undue influence of another age. Youth pushes on and up and seeks to
make itself effective and to escape or resist control by elders. This is very
fully brought out in the recent literature of psychoanalysis. In primitive

society the boy soon transfers this attitude toward his parents to the chief of
the tribe, and then perhaps to a supreme being, for all gods are made in the
father image. Indeed, we are now told that the primal, generic sin in its
extreme form is patricide, and one of the deepest fears is directed against
authority. The pre-Abrahamic sheik was his own priest and king and that of
his tribe. There was no law save his will. Enlarged, perfected, and projected
into the sky, the patronymic sire became a deity. Part of the ancient
reverence for fathers accumulated from generation to generation was thus
transcendentalized into deities and part of it developed in the mundane
sphere as reverence for rulers, heroes, the great dead, or perhaps into the
worship of ancestors. But one very essential part of it survives in adult life
in the attitude toward authority, every instrument and bearer of which is
thus generically a father-surrogate. Thus older people feel toward their
deities much as younger children do toward earthly parents and the greater
men in their environment. There is always a measure of love and dread
merging into each other. Ancient tribes that Robertson Smith and Frazer
describe, after selecting and feeding fat their rulers for a time, ascribing to
them divine prerogatives, giving them extraordinary freedom in certain
respects while restricting them by severe taboos and in other ways, finally
slew them ritually as sacrifices offered with piacular rites. All this illustrates
the same dual trend of affectivity within and so does the fate of every deity
who is slain, perhaps with every indignity and torture, and afterwards
resurrected, transfigured, and glorified.
All government in a sense, too, springs from paternalism, and so does
all human power, dignity, and prerogatives, so that the French revolutionist
and even Nihilist, who is chronically and constitutionally against all the
powers that be and who feels that every command or prohibition is a
challenge to defy or violate it, only illustrates the extreme of revolt now
71
sometimes designated as kurophobia.
Of course rebellion against tyranny is commendable. Many fathers are
bad and this cumulative fact has greatly intensified the instinct of rebellion.
In an extreme form this may be expressed in negativism or anti-
suggestibility, but sooner or later there is a revolt of all sons against all
sires. This, too, acts as a challenge to originality and gives its élan to the
passion for boundless freedom, which may even degenerate into forms of
affectation and a passion for over-individuality. Thus next to hostile nature

herself, fathers and what they symbolize have been the objects of man’s
chief opposition in the world’s history. The very words “obey” and
“conform” hardly exist in the vocabulary of some recusants. The devil, too,
always denies and defies and all through the history of religions has been
the typical rebel. The kurophobe is the evil genius of republics and
democracies. He prates of rights and has little or nothing to say of duties
and on this view he is the product of all the bad fathers in his pedigree.
In many patriarchal and tribal societies the father or chief monopolized
the women, whom the sons dared not approach. Hence we are told that they
were compelled to seek mates outside, whence exogeny arose. Freudians
hold that the son’s rancor against the father is rooted in this inhibition of the
mating instinct. This doubtless did contribute very much to intensify it as
the boy grew to man’s estate but it is going too far to say that in the very
intricate grammar of revolt, no less complex than Newman long ago
showed the grammar of assent to be, other factors did not come in and that
there no other social inhibitions of the will-to-live than those of the will to
propagate. This rivalry and antagonism, which is probably more deep and
multiform than we have yet realized, is seen at every age from early
childhood—in the hostility of Freshman and Sophomore, those under and
over age for citizenship or for war, in struggles of men in the meridian of
life to depose or supplant those a little older, in the countless devices of
those who are aging to maintain their power and influence, which perhaps
never in history had such an efficient bulwark as when they became secure
in the right of testamentary bequest of their property as they wished—and is
only mitigated in the case of the very old because they are few and feeble
and have already in many ways been superseded and relegated to
inefficiency.
Metchnikoff in his essay on Old Age tells us that at Vate the “old men
have at least this consolation—that during the funeral ceremonies it is
customary to attach to their arms a pig which may be eaten during the feast
given in honor of the departure of the soul for the other world.” After citing
other similar cases, he tells us that civilized people are not unlike savages
for although they do not kill superannuated members of the community they
often make their lives very unhappy, the old often being considered as a
heavy charge, which causes great impatience at the delay of death. This is
expressed in the Italian proverb that old women have seven lives and the

Burgomasks think that old women have seven souls, besides an eighth soul,
quite small, and half a soul besides; while the Lithuanians complain that an
old woman is so tenacious of life that she can not be even ground in a mill.
He cites the protest of Paris medical students against the decision of the
state superseding the law prescribing a limit of age for the professors,
saying, “We do not want dotards.” A convict in the Saghalien Islands
condemned for the assassination of several old men said, “What is the use
of making such a fuss about them? They are already old and would die
anyway in a few years.” In Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment one
student declared in a group of his mates that he would kill and rob the
cursed old woman without the slightest remorse, and continues, “On the one
side we have a stupid, unfeeling old woman, of no account, wicked and
sick, whom no one would miss—on the contrary, who is an injury to
everyone and does not herself know why she keeps on living and who
perhaps will be good and dead to-morrow; while, on the other hand, there
are fresh young lives wasting for nothing at all, without being helped by
anyone, that can be numbered by thousands.” Old men, too, often commit
suicide. Prussian statistics show that people between 50 and 80 commit
suicide about twice as often as those between 20 and 50, and the same is
true of Denmark. “The young and strong adults furnished, therefore, 36½
per cent of the suicides, while the number furnished by the aged amounted
to 63½ per cent.” Metchnikoff finds that “the desire to live, instead of
diminishing tends, on the contrary, to increase with age.” “The old Fuegian
women, aware that they are destined to be eaten, flee into the mountains,
whither they are pursued by the men and carried back home where they
must submit to death.” “The philosopher in me does not believe in death; it
is the old man who has not the courage to face the inevitable.” And so it is
that old professors rarely wish to abandon their chairs. Nor do they even
always renounce the tender passion, a fact illustrated by Goethe, who at the
age of 74 fell in love with a girl of 17, proposed marriage to her, and failing
in the project wrote his pathetic Elegy of Marienbad, in which he said “For
me the universe is lost; I am lost to myself. The gods, whose favorite I
lately was, have tried me,” etc. The weakening of his powers in the latter
part of Faust and at the end of Wilhelm Meister was abundantly shown.
72
We resume our historical notes with Luigi Cornaro (1464–1566), a
wealthy Venetian nobleman, who, as a result of a wild and intemperate life,

found himself at forty broken in health and facing death and so radically
changed not only his mode of life but his residence and devoted himself,
after this crisis, with the “most incessant attention” to the securing of
perfect health, studying every item of diet and regimen for its effects upon
him. At eighty-three, after more than forty years of perfect health and
undisturbed tranquillity, he wrote his La Vita Sobria, an essay that was later
followed by three others, one written at eighty-six, another at ninety-one,
the last at ninety-five; the four completing a most instructive life history
and one which the most earnest desire and hope of his life was that others
might know and follow. He believed that the kind of life most people lead is
utterly worthless and emphasized the great value of the later years of life as
compared with the earlier ones. His message to the world has been a classic.
He hoped that he had made the moderate life so attractive that the attitude
of the world toward old age and death would be changed.
In his first discourse he gives many details of how he conceived life in
the simple way nature intended it and how we must learn to be content with
a little and experience all the joys that come from self-control. When the
passions are subdued, man can give himself up wholly to reason. His
physicians told him that he must partake of no food save that prescribed for
invalids but he found that he must carefully study each article of diet and
decide for himself because no general prescriptions avail. By dint of long
observations upon himself he started with the belief that “whatever tastes
good will nourish and strengthen” and learned that “not to satiate oneself
with food is the science of health.” He guarded particularly against great
heat, cold, and fatigue; allowed nothing to interfere with his rest and sleep,
would never stay in an ill-ventilated room, and avoided excessive exposure
to wind and sun. At the age of seventy he was severely injured by a carriage
accident so that all his friends expected his death and the physicians
suggested either bleeding or purging as forlorn hopes. He refused both and
trusted to the recuperative effects of his well regulated life. He recovered
completely as he, indeed, fully expected to do, although it was thought by
his friends to be miraculous. Later, yielding reluctantly to the urgency of
physicians and friends, he increased his daily intake of food so that instead
of twelve ounces, including bread, the yolk of an egg, a little meat and
soup, he now took fourteen ounces; and instead of fourteen ounces of wine,
as before, he raised his ration to sixteen ounces. Under this increased diet he

grew seriously ill (at seventy-eight). But on returning to his old dietary he
recovered.
Hence, he concludes that “a man cannot be a perfect physician of
anyone except of himself alone” and that by dint of experimenting he may
“acquire a perfect knowledge of his own condition and of his most hidden
qualities and find out what food and what drink and what quantities of each
would agree with his stomach.” “Various experiments are absolutely
necessary, for there is not so great a variety of features as there is diversity
of temperaments and stomachs among men.” He found he could not drink
wine over a year old, and that pepper injured but cinnamon helped him,
something which no physician could have anticipated. He shows the fallacy
of the notion that such a life leaves nothing to fall back upon in time of
sickness by saying that such sickness would thus be avoided and that his
dietary is sufficient so that in sickness, when all tend to eat less, he has still
a sufficient margin, although probably the quantity or quality of food that
suits him, he admits, might not suit others. The objection that many who
lead irregular lives live to be old he refutes by saying that some have
exceptional vitality but that all can prolong life by his method. He tells us
that he rides without assistance, climbs hills, is never perturbed in soul, is
occupied during the entire day, changes his residence in warm weather to
the country which he thinks important, enjoys the society of able,
cultivated, and active-minded men, and all his senses have remained
perfect.
He tells us that he improved upon Sophocles, who wrote a tragedy at
seventy-three, for he has written a comedy; of his seven grandchildren, all
offspring of one pair; how he enjoys singing (probably religious
incantations), and how much his voice has improved; that he would not be
willing to exchange “either my life or my great age for that of any young
man,” etc. He praises his heart, memory, senses, brain, and is certain that he
will die, when the time comes, without pain or illness and hopes to enjoy
the other world beyond.
In his later discourses he tells us that although naturally of a very
choleric disposition he entirely subdued it. He corrects the notion that the
old must eat much to keep their bodies warm; says as old age is a disease
we must eat less, as we do when ill; refutes the maxim “a short life and a
merry one” and the fallacy that one cannot much prolong or shorten life by

regimen; tells us exactly what foods he prefers—soup, eggs, mutton, fowl,
fish, etc. At ninety-one he says, “The more my years multiply, the more my
strength also increases,” and he preaches an earthly paradise after the age of
eighty; while at ninety-five he writes that all his faculties “are in a condition
as perfect as ever they were; my mind is more than ever keen and clear, my
judgment sound, my memory tenacious, my heart full of life,” and his voice
so strong that he has to sing aloud his morning and evening prayers. He
enjoys two lives at the same time, one earthly and the other heavenly by
anticipation.
As Cornaro advanced in years he grew very proud of his age, and his
four discourses give us the impression that regimen and hygiene were his
true religion, although he was very pious according to the standards of his
age. His diet, the houses he built to live in for each season, his charities, the
public works he instituted, and even the friends he cultivated, like
everything else he said and did, were determined largely by what he thought
were their effects upon his physical and mental health. No young man or
young woman was ever prouder of his youth than he of his age. He gloried
in it as manhood and womanhood do in their prime, and no evangelist was
more intent on convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment
than he was in exhorting men to change their mode of life to make it more
sane, temperate, and abstemious—and that in a day and land when gluttony
and riotous living were rife. For him a feast, rich repast, or a formal dinner
was suicidal; and so were late hours, irregularities, excitement, and every
form and degree of excess. So superior is senescence to all the other stages
of life that he believed men should be dominated from the first by the desire
to attain it as the supreme mundane felicity, because no one can be truly
happy but the old. His mission was evidently to be the apostle of
senescence.
True, he repeats himself, is often very platitudinous, no doubt, like
most old men, greatly overestimates his powers, and if a poor and ignorant
man would have been, very likely, a tedious old dotard. But as it is, his
treatment of the problem of life is of great and lasting significance.
73
Lord Bacon was evidently influenced by Cornaro, as he in turn was
by the abstemious practices of monks and ascetics. Among the very
practical suggestions of his paper we strike many quotations that have

become familiar to all—Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark,
and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other;
since life is short and art is long, our chiefest aim should be to perfect the
arts, and the greatest of them all is that of long life. Diet receives chief
consideration. Bacon seems almost to believe that the ancients acquired a
mode of putting off old age to a degree that has now become a lost art
“through man’s negligence.” He stresses the power of the “spirits” and its
waxing green again as the most ready and compendious way to long life but
tells us that it may be in excess or in defect as, indeed, may every other
activity; while the middle or moderate way is always to be sought. He
discourses on the necessity of sufficient but not too much exercise, which
must never be taken if the stomach is either too full or too empty. “Many
dishes have caused many diseases,” and many medicines have caused few
cures. “Emaciating diseases, afterwards well cured, have advanced many in
the way of long life for they yield new juice, the old being consumed, and
to recover from a sickness is to renew youth. Therefore, it were good to
make some artificial diseases, which is done by strict and emaciating diets.”
Sleep is an aid to nourishment and it is especially important that in
sleeping the body always be warm. Sleep is nothing but the reception and
retirement of the living spirit into itself. We must also be cheerful in relation
to both sleep and eating and he has many admonitions upon the advantages
of pure air, the right affection, hope not too often frustrated, and especially
a sense of progress, for most who live long have felt themselves advancing.
Old men should dwell upon their childhood and youth, for this means
rejuvenation. Hence association of the old with others whom they knew
when young is most helpful. Habits, customs, and even diet, must be
changed, but not too often or too much. One must constantly observe and
study the effect upon himself of all the items of regimen. Grief, depression,
excessive fear, lack of patience, are passions that feed upon and age the
body. Each must acquire a wisdom “beyond the rules of physic; a man’s
own observation, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the
best physic to preserve health, and with regard to many things he must
wisely and rightly decide whether or not they are good or bad for him, and
that independently of all precepts and advice.”
Thus in his quaint style, and for reasons most of which science of to-
day would utterly discard, he had the sagacity to reach many of the

conclusions that are quite abreast of and in conformity with the most
practical results of modern hygiene.
74
Addison, avowedly more or less inspired by Cornaro, after
condemning the prevailing gluttony says, “For my part, when I behold a
fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I see gouts and
dyspepsias, fevers and lethargies, and other distempers lying in ambuscade
among the dishes.” He delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every
animal but man keeps to one dish—herbs are the food of this species, fish
of that, and flesh of the third. Man alone falls upon everything that comes in
his way. “Not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or
mushroom escapes him.” Hence he advises that we make our whole repast
out of one dish and that we avoid all artificial provocatives, which create
false appetites. He advises, too, that since this rule is so hard, “every man
should have his days of abstinence according as his constitution will permit.
These are great reliefs to nature as they qualify her for struggling with
hunger and thirst and give her an opportunity of extricating herself from her
oppressions. Besides that, abstinence will oftentimes kill a sickness in
embryo and destroy the first seeds of an indisposition.” He then quotes the
temperateness of Socrates, which enabled him to survive the great plague.
He finds that many ancient sages and later philosophers developed a
regimen so unique that “one would think the life of a philosopher and the
life of a man were of two different dates.”
75
Robert Burton thinks old age inherently melancholy, for “being cold
and dry and of the same quality as melancholy it must needs come in.” It is
full of ache, sorrow, grief, and most other faults, and these traits are most
developed in old women and best illustrated by witches. The children of old
men are rarely of good temperament and are especially liable to depression.
He expatiates most fully upon the tragedy of old men and young wives, and
gives many long incidents of jealousy and unfaithfulness of women who,
although carefully guarded, have made old husbands cuckold. This is often
worse in dotards, who become effeminate, cannot endure absence from their
wives, etc. On this theme he elaborates for many pages, with scores of
incidents from literature and history.
76
Jonathan Swift describes the Struldbruggs or immortals whom he met
in a far country. They were distinguished by being born with a red circle

over the left eye, which changed in color and grew in size with age. These
beings, he thought, must be a great blessing, and he described to those who
had first told him of them what he would do were it his great good fortune
to be born a Struldbrugg. First of all, he would amass wealth so that in two
hundred years he would be the richest man in the realm. Next he would
apply himself to learning, which in the course of time would make him
wisest of all men. Then he would note all events and become a living
treasury of knowledge and the oracle of the nation. He would be able to
warn rising generations against all impending evils and thus prevent
degeneration.
Having heard his ideals, he was told that in fact the state of these
immortals was very different; indeed, so pitiful was it that their example
mitigated the universal desire to live, so that death was no longer the
greatest evil but, on the contrary, undue prolongation of life was a far
greater one. The Struldbruggs acted like mortals till about thirty, then grew
melancholy until four-score, when they had “not only the follies and
infirmities of other old men but had many more which arose from the
dreadful prospects of never dying.” “They were not only opinionative,
peevish, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship and dead to all
natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren.” “Envy
and impotent desires are their prevailing passion, but the objects against
which their envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger
sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former they find
themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure, and whenever they see a
funeral they lament and repine that others are gone to a harbor of rest to
which they themselves can never hope to arrive.” “They have no
remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth
and middle age and even that is very imperfect, and for the truth or
particulars of any fact it is safer to depend on the common traditions than
upon their best recollections.” “The less miserable among them appear to be
those who turn to dotage and entirely lose their memories; they meet with
more pity and assistance because they lack many bad qualities which
abound in others.” If they marry one of their own kind, the marriage is
dissolved as soon as the younger comes to be four-score, for they “should
not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife.”

“As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years they are
looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates,
only a small pittance being reserved for their support, and the poor ones are
maintained at the public charge. After that period they are held incapable of
any employment of trust or privilege, cannot purchase land or take leases;
neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause either civil or
criminal.” “At ninety they lose their teeth and hair, they have at that age no
distinction of taste but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or
appetite.” In talking, they forget the common appellation of things and the
names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relatives.
“For the same reason they can never amuse themselves with reading
because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a
sentence to the end. The language of the country, too, is slowly undergoing
a change so that the Struldbruggs of one age do not understand those of
another but live like foreigners in their own country.” They are despised and
hated by all sorts of people. When one of them is born it is reckoned
ominous and the birth is recorded very particularly, but in general the record
is lost after a thousand years. “They were the most mortifying sight I ever
beheld, and the women were more horrible than the men. Besides the usual
deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness in
proportion to their number of years.”
Thus from what the author saw and heard, his keen appetite for
perpetuity of life was much abated and he realized that there was no form of
death to which he would not run with pleasure in order to escape such a life.
He concludes that it is fortunate that his desire of taking specimens of these
people to his own country was forbidden by law, and reflects that their
maintenance might prove a grievous public charge, for since “avarice is the
necessary consequent of old age, these immortals would, in time, become
proprietors of the whole nation and engross the civil power, which a want of
abilities to manage must end in the ruin of the public.”

CHAPTER III

LITERATURE BY AND ON THE AGED
Harriet E. Paine—Amelia E. Barr—Mortimer Collins—Col.
Nicholas Smith—Byron C. Utecht—J. L. Smith—Sanford
Bennett—G. E. D. Diamond—Cardinal Gibbons—John
Burroughs—Rollo Ogden—James L. Ludlow—Brander
Matthews—Ralph Waldo Emerson—Oliver Wendell Holmes—
Senator G. F. Hoar—William Dean Howells—H. D. Sedgwick
—Walt Mason—E. P. Powell—U. V. Wilson—D. G. Brinton—
N. S. Shaler—Anthony Trollope—Stephen Paget—Richard le
Gallienne—G. S. Street—C. W. Saleeby—Bernard Shaw—A
few typical poems and quotations.

As a psychologist I am convinced that the psychic states of old people
have great significance. Senescence, like adolescence, has its own feelings,
thoughts, and wills, as well as its own physiology, and their regimen is
important, as well as that of the body. Individual differences here are
probably greater than in youth. I wanted to realize as fully as was
practicable how it seems to be old. Accordingly I looked over such
literature, both poetry and prose, as I found within reach, written by aging
people describing their own stage of life, and by selection, quotation, and
résumé have sought, in this chapter, to let each of them speak for him- or
herself.
Some find a veritable charm in watching every phase of the sunset of
their own life and feel even in the prospect of death a certain mental
exaltation. More are sadly patient and accept some gospel of reconciliation
to fate. Some distinctly refuse to think on or even to recognize the ebb of
the tide. A few find consolation in beautifying age with tropes and similes
that divert or distract from the grim realization of its advance. But perhaps

the most striking fact is that so many not only deliberately turn from the
supports offered to declining years by the Church but have more or less
abandoned faith in physicians, for age is a disease that their ministrations
may mitigate but can never cure. Men of science find least solace in
religion, to which women are much more prone to turn than men. In most,
love is more or less sublimated into philanthropy and very often into a new
and higher love of nature in all her aspects. All, with hardly an exception,
pay far more attention to health and body-keeping than ever before and
many evolve an almost fetishistic faith in the efficacy of some item of food
or regimen to which they ascribe peculiar virtue. They want to prolong life
and well-being to their utmost goal for, with all the handicaps of age, life is
still too sweet to leave voluntarily.
Many old people fortify themselves against the depressions and
remissions of old age by familiarizing their minds with quotations from the
Scriptures, hymnology, poetry, and general literature. We have a good
77
illustration of this in Margaret E. White’s volume. It consists mainly of
selections, determined of course by the author’s point of view—that of a
liberal religionist—which has given her, and is well calculated to give
others with her point of view, mental satisfaction. She wants to have
“prisms in her window” to fill the room with rainbows. As the shadows
lengthen she believes the climacteric should supervene without any break at
all with the prime of life, although there are really two curves that run a
very different course, one of physical strength and another of experience.
When one stands on the summit of his years, he is buoyed up by great plans
for life; but when he retires, there is nothing ahead save death and this
involves a great and often critical change. The successful life is one that
solves the problems that meet it here without patheticism and without self-
delusion.
The author’s anthology of quotations and her own reflections are not a
cry in the dark but, on the whole, strike a note of courage and her book is of
psychological value because it gives us a good idea of how many authors
have thought and felt. Most want to be quiet and at home. They console
themselves with intimations of a lofty and spiritual, if remote, idealism.
Perhaps of all the young people we knew not one will accompany the late
survivors. Old age is a benefaction because service to it ennobles all who
render it. When wrinkles come in the mind, one sings, the old is ever old;

another, it is ever young. One conceives it as the portal to a higher life,
while for another it is solely reversionary.
78
Harriet E. Paine, a retired maiden teacher, had grown deaf and her
sight was dim at sixty, when this book was written. Her attitude is one of
the very best illustrations of the consolations that are open to those in whom
old age is like a summer night, who can maintain their optimism when the
senses cut us off from the external world and we have to “economize the
falling river” and take in sail. The author has much to say of old people with
defective senses and thinks deafness particularly irritating both to the
individual and to those about, especially if, as in her case, there is also
weakness and diffidence. These impel one to take refuge in the “Great
Comrade.” Like so many others, she finds great satisfaction in the familiar
cases of great things done by old people and thinks that “the higher powers
of the mind go on ripening to the last,” instancing the remarkable fight
made for life by Pope Leo XIII when he was ninety-four, the chief items in
whose enlightened policy were inaugurated after he was seventy. Samuel
Whittemore, at eighty, killed three British soldiers on April 19, 1775, and
then was himself shot, bayoneted, and beaten seemingly to death but had
vitality enough to live on to the age of ninety-eight. Sophocles wrote his
Œdipus at ninety; Mrs. Gilbert acted till over seventy; Mrs. Livermore,
Julia Ward Howe, and others furnish examples that hearten her, etc. When
the hair grows white it is possible, especially for women, to do many things
impossible before.
Being herself in straitened circumstances, she is interested in, for
example, the provisions of the New Zealand Parliament in 1898 granting a
pension of eighteen pounds per annum to all people over sixty-five of good
moral character who had resided in the country twenty-five years and
whose income did not exceed thirty-four pounds; and also in Edward
Everett Hale’s plea for a limited old-age pension bill, whereby a man
paying a poll tax for twenty-five years and not convicted of crime should be
given a pension of two dollars a week, the state to set aside a part of the poll
tax for this purpose. He claimed that the savings to poorhouses would offset
the expenditure. But still this author realizes that the old can be happy in
comparative poverty if they strive to make their corner of the world
brighter. At no time of life are the advantages of culture and experience
more precious. She thinks the relations between old and young, so hard to

adjust, need special attention. The two can live together only by sacrifices
on both sides and this can never be successful unless each is able to take the
other’s point of view. She rather surprisingly concedes that with true insight
the young have more sympathy with the old than the latter, by memory, can
have with the young, perhaps because bodily vigor increases love. She
would mitigate the stage of criticizing mothers, through which she thinks all
girls tend to pass, for old age gives a wisdom that is far harder to acquire
and more precious than knowledge.
The very old are very different from the old; for example, an old lady
of eighty-nine called on one of ninety-eight and felt rejuvenated. Very few
do, when they are old, what they have planned for their old age. The
weapon against loneliness is work. “When the world is cold to you, go build
fires to warm up.” We strive to renew the emotions but find it very hard to
do so and feel burned to the socket. In answering the question how far we
should let the dead past bury its dead, she deplores the fact that young
persons, especially young women, often give to their elders, particularly
mothers or fathers, a devotion that involves a complete sacrifice of their
own lives and thinks that to accept this is the acme of selfishness in the old.
Old age is especially hard, she thinks, for those who have enjoyed the
senses most.
79
Amelia E. Barr says that on March 29, 1911, she awoke early to see
her eightieth birthday come in. “I wish to master in these years the fine art
of dying well, which is quite as great a lesson as the fine art of living well,
about which everyone is so busy.” A good old age is a neighbor to a blessed
eternity. An English physician said, “If you wish to have a vigorous old age,
go into the darkness and silence ten hours out of every twenty-four, for in
darkness we were formed.” “Never allow anyone to impose their pleasures
upon you; if you have any rights, it is to choose the way you will spend
your time.” “On the margin gray, twixt night and day,” the author finds
special comfort in the lines

There is no death.
What seems so is transition.
This life or mortal breath is but the suburb of the life elysian
Whose portal we call death.

It is a sin, she says, to become so mentally active that we are unable to keep
quiet and go to sleep. The Greeks knew little of insomnia and the English
have been great sleepers and dreamers, holding perhaps with Wordsworth
that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” etc.
This author is an astrologist and tells us that nine insane rulers were
born when Mercury or the moon, or both, were affected by Mars, Saturn, or
Uranus, and five people of genius were ruled by the same planets and
became insane. She really mourns less for what age takes away than what it
leaves behind.
The tone of her work differs radically from that of Miss Paine. The
latter seeks and finds compensations so satisfactory to herself that she
ventures into print with them, apparently for the first time, hoping that she
may thereby help others to live out their old age better; while the former
indulges her literary instincts to produce another book and is far more
inspired by the muse of Death than that of Life. The kismet motive, which
is expressed in her recourse to astral fatalism, manifests not a pis aller
resource first found when she was old but one that had long been with her,
and it is an interesting recrudescence of the same psychological motivations
that in the East made fatalism and among Calvinists made the doctrine of
divine decrees and foreordination so attractive.
At the age of eighty-three she worked six hours a day instead of nine as
formerly, avoided routine, tried to give her mind new thoughts, and thought
this mental diet kept her strong. She took two cups of coffee in the morning
and more at night, persisted in lying abed ten hours although she slept but
seven, eschewed all preserved fruits, etc. She had a constant sense of the
Divine and her whole standpoint is very different from that, for example, of
Burroughs.
80
Mortimer Collins looks back on a prolonged life with calm
philosophic poise and concludes that length of life is wholly dependent
upon ideas. The theory of Asgill that it is cowardly of man to die appeals to
him. Sylvester calculated the lives of nine mathemeticians with an average
age of 79, but Collins finds nine literary men whose average age was 85,
and so concludes that “imagination beats calculation.” We are islands in an
infinite sea; only the instant is ours. The soul makes the body. He holds that
in England there is no mode of life healthy enough to secure longevity,

either in the city or country, while London is a slow poison. He wants a
Utopia, but without religion. He would have a journal kept in every locality
noting length or brevity of life, with the causes thereof, as a kind of vade
Mecum for the inhabitants. All should live in the open, with plenty of water
and hills, enough sleep and good food. Marriage should be congenial and
love a liberal education; in short, marriage should be completion. Parents
early spoil their children and later fear them. Politics should be eschewed
for it shows only the worst side of human nature. We should have books
telling us how to enjoy summers, the secret of which even the English
gentleman has not yet found. Literature, especially the classics, helps to
longevity, and in old age people should do that which they most love, that is
most natural and that gives greatest freedom to the play instinct—not that
which pays best. Gardening takes us into partnership with God and he
prescribes country walks with the sun and the sea. The country gentleman
should live an almost Homeric life. The large number of octogenarians in
Westmoreland, the lake region of Wordsworth, which has often been
noticed, is very significant. The laziest man usually lives longest, but lazing
is an art.
The style of this author is in places almost lapidary, his views are
quaint and abrupt and the reader is impressed with the idea that he is
supremely satisfied with old age as he has found it. His radicalism is good-
natured and his love of paradox suggests an affectation of originality that
does not, however, much impair his fundamental sincerity. He illustrates a
type of precocious maturity that finds pleasure in ideas not very well
matured.
81
Colonel Nicholas Smith is a homely philosopher of old age who has
brought together a vast body of items to hearten the old and to support the
thesis that all can greatly prolong their lives if they will. He thinks that as
years advance the average brain does more work, and the body less. With
remarkable industry he has gathered records of scores and hundreds of old
people living, or recently dead, who have maintained their vigor and
remained “invincible children,” who never became wholly sophisticated but
still dream, wonder, and believe. He almost seems to agree with Emerson
that a man is not worth very much until he is sixty.

Most of his book consists of brief records of men who maintained their
activity to a great age. Many of these are familiar enough but we sample a
few. Mommsen, for example, frail and small, lost his library by fire when
he was sixty, a calamity that all thought would end his career. But he did
much of his best work later, toiling on his History of Rome nearly to his
death in his eighty-sixth year. George Ives, when his friends congratulated
him on attaining his hundredth year, was found at work in the field and said
that even if he knew he were to die the next day he should “carry on” as if
he were immortal. Mrs. H. W. Truex on her 96th birthday in 1904 finished a
quilt of nine hundred and seventy-five pieces and during the previous year
had completed six such. Sir Joseph Hooker, the botanist, worked almost up
to his death at 87, holding that rich natures develop slowly. Carlyle
published the last volume of his Frederick the Great at the age of 69;
Darwin, his Descent of Man at 62; Longfellow wrote his Morituri
Salutamus for the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation; W. C. Bryant
published his translation of the Odyssey at the age of 76; O. W. Holmes
wrote his “Guardian Angel” at 70 and “Antipathy” at 76, while the “Iron
Gate” was for a breakfast given in honor of his seventieth birthday; George
Bancroft at 82 published his History of the Foundations of the Constitution
of the United States; Frances Trollope, failing in business at the age of
nearly 50 and a stranger in this country, turned to a literary career, and
between the ages of 52 and 83 wrote upwards of a hundred volumes, mostly
novels of society; Humboldt, at the age of 74, began his Cosmos, the fourth
and last volume of which was issued the year before his death, in 1858, at
the age of ninety; Cervantes published the last part of his Don Quixote at
78; Goethe wrote till he was 80 and finished the second part of Faust only
shortly before his death; Victor Hugo wrote his Annals of a Terrible Year at
70, and his Ninety-Three, which some regard as his best story, at the age of
72; Mary Sommerville kept up her scientific activities and at 92 said she
could still read books on the higher algebra four to five hours in the
forenoon; Weir Mitchell wrote his Hugh Wynne at 66 and Constance
Trescot, a very remarkable psychological study of a woman, when he was
76. A deposed minister began the study of medicine at 72 and practiced for
several years, dying in the harness. A. J. Huntington was acting professor of
classics till he was 82. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney published her twenty-seventh
volume at the age of 80, etc.

There are two views of age. One is Hogarth’s picture—a shattered
bottle, cracked bell, unstrung bow, signpost of a tavern called the “World’s
End,” shipwreck, Phoebus’s horses dead in the clouds, the moon in her last
quarter, the world on fire. It only remained to add to this the picture of a
painter’s palette broken. This was his last work and he died at 67. Over
against this we might place E. E. Hale, who late in life said his prospects
cast no shadow and became very anxious to see the curtain rise. When he
was 80 he published his Memoirs of a Hundred Years and at 82 was
chaplain of the United States Senate. Gladstone locked every affair of state
out of his bedroom and said that when we sleep we must pay attention to it,
for a workless is a worthless life.
This author agrees with J. H. Canfield, who protested that the old
should stay in the harness and not step out to give the young men a chance,
for they never had a better chance than to work with their elders, as colts
are best broken in with old horses. As we grow old we see that nothing,
after all, matters as much as we had thought. Smith finds comfort in the fact
that, according to the census of 1900, one in every two hundred becomes an
octogenarian and that out of a population of 36,800,000 there were 176,571
reputed to be 80 years of age or over.
He finally gives us his own empirical observations about foods and
concludes that three-fourths of all the poor health in the country is due to
dietary errors or to “carrion and cathartics.” The old should eat no meat,
take no drink with meals, avoid starch, recognize the error in the belief that
they need stimulants, and should not try to be fat but realize that
progressive emaciation is normal. Appetite should be our guide although we
should eat only about half what we want. He, too, praises laziness as a
concomitant of longevity and recognizes a vast difference in dietary needs.
He would never use laxatives but depends upon two glasses of water half an
hour before breakfast and two in the afternoon, and would never mix
cooked vegetables nor fruit.
The popularity and wide sale of this book must have been extremely
gratifying to the author as not only showing wide and deep interest in the
subject but as also supplying, by copious data and illustrations, the kind of
encouragement the old often sorely need. The author makes no pretenses of
being scientific and accepts cases of reputed great age with no critical
scruples.

82
Byron C. Utecht thinks the day is dawning when one hundred and
fifty years will be the usual span of life. He gives many statistics to show
that the average age is slowly increasing, particularly in Switzerland, where
in the sixteenth century it was 21.2 years whereas in the nineteenth it was
39.7. He quotes Finkenberg of Bonn, who concludes that “the average
length of life in Europe in the sixteenth century was 18 years and now it is
40,” the average in India being now about 23.6 years as against 19, two
hundred years ago. These figures, it should be noted, however, are little
more than conjectural.
Utecht, like Colonel Smith, has collected data about many people who
have reached the age of 100, some of whom he photographs. He believes
man not only lives longer but is more vital than formerly. He seems to
accept without proof that a Montana Indian lived to be 134; an Oregon
woman, 120; and a Mrs. Kilcrease of Texas, 136. He tells us of one
Arkansas woman who reached 112 years, keeping a large garden almost to
the end of her life, who at the above age walked six miles and back to see
her great-great-granddaughter married. She claimed her age was due to
clean, honest living, plenty of work, a desire to help, keeping busy, and
caring for others. A. Goodwin of Alabama (106) walks five miles a day and
works several hours in his garden. He eats what he likes, reads without
glasses, and is the head of one of the largest families in the country, their
reunions being attended by more than eight hundred persons. He had been a
hunter and still uses his rifle and ascribes his longevity to interest in out-of-
door sports as a young man. He has been so busy he can hardly realize he is
old, wants fifty years more of life if possible and feels that he is going to
have it. He has been temperate, sleeps much and regularly, and has a horror
of worry. Mrs. Mary Harrison of Michigan celebrated her hundredth
anniversary and did not seem as tired as any of her two hundred guests. She
had been a humorist and would never look on the dark side of things. An
Ohio lady of 91 who has been devoted to a motorcycle cannot bring herself
to give up her joyrides, although she now has a young man to guide the
wheel. She has always lived in the country and worked hard and ascribes
her longevity chiefly to her rides.
Utecht has collected perhaps two-score more instances of people well
over ninety and concludes that all of them were, in their prime, more or less
athletic—at least none were weaklings. He thinks the longest-lived people

are average men and women who have a good hygienic sense. None were
intemperate, few were highly educated, and most were inured to hardships
and even drudgery in youth, so that the study of all their lives practically
tells the same story of simple life in the free air, with enough but not too
much work and with exemption, for the most part, from worry.
It would be interesting to know if a more critical study of the actual age
of many of these and other quoted centenarians would substantiate their
claims. No such investigation, however, has ever been made into the many
cases reported by this and the preceding author.
I append a few special records that seem peculiarly challenging. The
83
first is that of James L. Smith, a veteran of the Civil War. Twenty years
ago he weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, was warned against
excitement, and his friends and physician were horrified when he proceeded
to run his flesh off. It was a great effort for so heavy a man but in six
months he had reduced his weight to one hundred and ninety and was
running more than six miles a day, his daily work being the directing of two
hundred district messengers. Yielding to the protests of his friends he
ceased his exercise, because he was told that he could not punish his heart
and lungs thus and not suffer and was liable to drop dead. Growing fleshy
again, with increased shortness of breath, he began to run again daily,
reducing his weight once more to a hundred and sixty and developing a
physique and complexion like that of a far younger man. At seventy he ran
never less than five and often ten miles a day, holding that senility is a
disease of the mind and that youth and its vigor can be maintained if one
only believes in himself. He has raced in many parts of the country and has
a standing offer to run any ten survivors of the Civil War in relays of one to
a mile, he himself running the whole ten. His offer used to be accepted; it is
so no longer. The day he was seventy he “covered a half mile faster than a
roller-skating champion,” and at seventy-three ran half a mile in 2 minutes
and 44 seconds. On a dirt road he has run ten miles in 1 hour, 13 minutes,
and 48 seconds, exactly the same time in which he ran the same distance in
the Grand Army marathon at Los Angeles six years before, and says that he
finished in fine condition.
Still more interesting, although perhaps not more authentic, is the
84
autobiographic record of Sanford Bennett. At the age of fifty he was

broken in health and had to give up his position because of a feeble heart
and dyspeptic stomach. After trying various cures he, like Smith, developed
one of his own, consisting chiefly of very manifold exercises taken, for the
most part, in a recumbent position to lessen the arterial strain upon his weak
heart, and with little and finally no apparatus. By persistent adherence to
this regimen the circulatory and digestive functions were slowly
recuperated and his muscles underwent remarkable development in bulk
and power. Many photographs of himself, with only a breech-waist, show
him to have acquired a symmetry and fulness of physical development of
which any young athlete might well be proud. Under self-massage wrinkles
of face and neck disappeared, the growth of the hair on his head was
somewhat increased, and its grayness was more or less modified. His spirits
and the courage with which he faced life and reëntered business showed a
rejuvenation of mind and feelings no less remarkable than that of the body.
By more or less systematic methods he strengthened his eyes; improved the
condition of his liver and kidneys; freshened the skin; greatly bettered the
varicosities (photographed) of the veins of his legs; and materially
improved the action of his heart, all the while recognizing the influences of
the unconscious mind upon his physical condition. He has entirely
overcome his tendency to adiposity, strengthened his voice, increased the
girth of his chest and his respiratory capacity, etc.
It is impossible to con this book and its untouched photographs without
the conviction, which has been strengthened by my own correspondence
with the author, that he has undergone a remarkable physical
transformation. We have already enough such instances to suggest that
senescence normally releases in healthy natures new motivations for the
conservation of health and that if these are given their due expression and if
all aging men and women came to realize that as the decline of life sets in
they must be, more and more, not only their own hygienists but their own
physicians, far more might be accomplished in many if not most cases than
the world at present suspects.
85
This suggests the lesson that Charles Francis has drawn from his life,
namely, that exercise is the chief cause of his vigor at seventy. His life in
connection with his vocation as a printer has been extremely active and
arduous and he ascribes his present condition to athletics and his
exceptional fondness for dancing. He insists that next to this comes the

avoidance of worry and thinks that every normal old man develops a more
or less full creed of hygienic Do’s and Don’ts. Charles Cliff thinks the way
to eighty is to work hard in youth and then gradually take it easy.
Many modern writers, like Cicero’s Cato, ascribe great efficacy to the
accumulated examples of old men who have achieved exceptional success
late in life, not only in business, arts, and letters but in the greatest art of all,
that of conserving health and youth. We can easily conceive of a new
temple of fame to immortalize those who have mastered the art of deferring
senility and death.
86
Captain G. E. D. Diamond claimed to be 103 and in his book tells us
how he lived—no sweets, meats, stimulants, tobacco, tea, or coffee; had
never married; found a panacea in olive oil taken internally and with which
he once or twice daily rubbed his body; found great virtue in a cup of hot
water at breakfast, grapefruit at luncheon, bread buttered with olive oil;
used milk, and fish. He discants at length upon the kinds, purity, and mode
of application of his panacea and is a polemic vegetarian.
87
The late Cardinal Gibbons thinks no one ever died of hard work and
says that he almost never had an idle moment. He forced himself to lie in
bed at least eight hours and did not worry if he did not fall asleep. The
foundations of health are laid in youth and he laid the greatest stress upon
plenty of regular exercise suitable to one’s age, moderation in eating and
drinking, plenty of sleep, an occupation, and avoidance of worry.
88
John Burroughs said, in 1919, that he was better than thirty years
before. Old age is no bugaboo but is a question of cutting out things, as he
did with tea, coffee, eggs, raw apples, pastry, new bread, and alcohol, never
having used tobacco. He was better by leaps and bounds when he omitted
eggs, a suggestion he derived from Professor Chittenden. Malnutrition is
the door through which most of our enemies enter. He retired at nine, rose
at six in the winter and with the sun in summer, walked three hours in the
forenoon, read from seven to nine in the evening, was much out-of-doors,
and thought he wrote more and better in the last three than in any other
three years of his life. And yet he did not come of a long-lived ancestry.
89
Rollo Ogden thinks that in the first call the old man meets to take
himself out of the way there is generally more pity than anger but he is too

proud to accept pity. Nobody is so impetuous as an old man in a hurry. Vain
longings for the sensations of youth make life after forty often a dangerous
age, as physicians know. He believes there are many intellectual hazards
and thinks it a delusion of the old that the young are different from those
they knew in their youth. In judging the rising generation we oldsters must,
at any rate, admit that they did well in the war. The old must make a serious
effort to penetrate the secret of youth; they must put no end of questions to
it even though they are not able to find answers to them. There must be a
reorganization of life and a reorientation; and also, what is perhaps often
harder, a new subordination. The old are, on the whole, more curious about
the young than afraid of them.
Another suggestion arises from an autobiographic volume of a retired
90
clergyman, which is dedicated to his grandchildren. The book is unique in
that it gives few details of his life but stresses certain strong impressions
derived from early boyhood, school days, his first experience with death,
gropings to solve the problems of life and of the choice of a vocation, etc.
He confines himself, for the most part, to experiences that made the deepest
and most lasting impression upon him, the mysteries that have haunted his
soul, self-criticisms, the rest and other cures he has tried, friendships made,
and the great causes he has espoused. On laying aside his ministerial duties
he realized that we must not retire within ourselves but draw closer to
kindred humanity, and felt at liberty to enjoy literature, art, nature, and
travel, realizing that there were many powers that had not been vented in
his vocation. He found himself taking sober and broader second thoughts of
even religion, here discovering a new sense of freedom, as he believes
retired lawyers do in reflecting on the differences between their own sense
of absolute right and duty to their clients. He was glad, he says, that he
could “now break with some of my past notions, go squarely back on some
former, cocksure declarations,” and he realized that “I did not know a lot of
things I once thought I knew.” There is a wonderful exhilaration in standing
at the opening of views from which one has been previously barred by
constitutional preoccupation and engagements. He realizes that “courtesy to
the cloth leads most men to treat ministers as they would treat women—the
seamy side of life is not shown them.” It is easy, as one grows old, to retain
abstract knowledge and the ripe fruits of philosophy, history, and even
science; and age, too, has its recreations.

Perhaps the chief suggestion of this book is that every intelligent man,
as he reaches the stage of senescence, should thus pass his life in review
and try to draw its lessons, not only for his own greater mental poise and
unity but for the benefit of his immediate descendants, for whom such a
record must be invaluable. Thus the writing of an autobiography will
sometime become a fit hygienic prescription for a rounded-out old age.
91
Brander Matthews says that when a man is in sight of Pier No. 70, as
Mark Twain called it, he should take down sail and examine his log-book.
He must not feel that young people are wanting to brush him aside but
should realize that he can help them. He gives a very full account of his
own experiences as a magazine writer and deplores the fact that many of
our twentieth-century editors are newspaper men, whereas formerly they
were literary men. The most serious lesson he draws from his own
experience is that young writers should take only subjects in which they are
profoundly interested and “not take down the shutters before they have
anything to put in the shop windows.” He rejoices that he has never
accepted a dictated subject but has always labored in fields attractive to him
and so, in short, followed an inner calling.
92
Ralph Waldo Emerson says the dim senses, memory, voice, etc., are
only masks that old age wears. There are young heads on old shoulders and
young hearts. The essence of age is intellect. “He that can discriminate is
the father of his father” and Merlin as a baby found in a basket by the
riverside talks wisely of all things. Is it because we find ourselves reflected
in the eyes of young people that we feel old? “The surest poison is time.”
Age is comely in coach, chairs of state, courts, and historical societies, but
not on Broadway. We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else
to count. One says a man is not worth anything until he is sixty. “In all
governments the councils of power were held by the old—patricians or
patres; senate or senes; seigneurs or seniors; the gerousia, the state of
Sparta, the presbytery of the church, and the like, are all represented by old
men.” Almost all good workers live long. The blind old Dandolo, elected
Doge at 84, storming Constantinople at 94, and afterward recalled again
victorious, was elected at the age of 96 to the throne of the empire, which
he declined, and died Doge at 97. Newton made important discoveries for
every one of his 85 years. Washington, the perfect citizen; Wellington, the

perfect soldier; Goethe, the all-knowing poet; Humboldt, the encyclopedia
of science—all were old.
“All men carry seeds of all distempers through life latent and die
without developing them.” But if we are enfeebled by any cause some of
these sleeping seeds start and open. At fifty we lose headache and with
every year liability to certain forms of disease declines. Now one success
more or less signifies nothing because reputation is made. Success signifies
much to a client but nothing to the old lawyer. Again, another felicity of old
age is that it has found expression. Things that seethe in us have been born,
so that the throes and tempests subside. “One by one, day by day, he learns
to cast his wishes into facts.” We set our house in order, classify, finish what
is begun, close up gaps, make our wills, clear our titles, and reconcile
enemies. Thus there is a proportion between the designs of man and the
length of his life. In February, 1825, Emerson called on John Adams, who
was nearly 90, just as his son had been elected President at the age of 58,
nearly the same as that of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.
93
Oliver Wendell Holmes discourses in his clever, self-conscious, and
desultory way upon old age, concerning which he says many smart, studied,
and even quotable things that add, however, no new standpoint or idea. He
personifies old age, for example, as first calling on the professor and
leaving his card, that is, a mark between the eyebrows; calling again more
urgently; and at last, when he is not let in, breaking in at the front door. He
seems to feel that death is a sort of disgrace and ignominy and compares the
child shedding his milk teeth with the old man shedding his permanent
ones. He would divide life into fifteen stages, each of which has its youth
and old age. As we enter each stage we do so with the same ingenuous
simplicity. Nature gets us out of youth into manhood as old sea captains
used to shanghai sailors. Habits mark old age but we should begin new
things and even take up new studies. He gives an imaginary newspaper
report of the address of Cato on Old Age, and several times lapses into
poetry. He feels that he has less time for anything he wants to do, realizes
neglected and postponed privileges, tells of the great charm he feels in
rowing on the Charles, and gives us all the data for estimating that he is
very proficient in the exercise. He praises walking but says saddle leather is
preferable, though more costly. He is very grateful that he does not need
eyeglasses.

In Over the Teacups he says that at sixty we come within the range of
the rifle pits and describes the nine survivors of his class, which graduated
fifty-nine members. But here he is most impressed with the amazing
progress he has seen—the friction match, the railroad, ocean steamer,
photography, spectroscope, telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthesia,
electric illumination, bicycle, etc., telling us that all his boyish shooting was
done with a flintlock and all his voyaging on a sailing packet. He has a
tingling sense of progress that amounts to a kind of pity for his own youth;
and although he cannot conceive how it is possible, he has a faint hope that
progress may go on at the same rate. The thing to be avoided is automatism,
which is habit gone to seed. We must be sure and take in sail betimes. In
deciding between duties and the desire to rest, many have actually
welcomed the decay of powers in order that they might rest. He bitterly
condemns conservative religious dogmas, which have done so much to
disorganize our thinking powers, and recognizes the happy tendency to
soften and then throw off creeds as one grows old as if in order to return to
the source of life as ignorant and helpless as we came from it. He ends with
a meager array of facts to indicate that poets are not short-lived and that
although their powers may wane, some of the best poems have come from
people of advanced age.
94
The late Senator G. F. Hoar thinks young people contemplate old age
and death from a distance, as Milton’s “Hymn on Morning” was written at
midnight. “I would indite something concerning the solar system—Betty,
bring the candles.” Old age is a matter of temperament and not of years. In
some, old age is congenital. Lowell says, “From the womb he emerged
gravely, a little old man.” John Quincy Adams fought the House of
Representatives at 83; Josiah Quincy attacked the “Know-Nothings” at 85
—said the bats were leading the eagles. He broke his hip at 92 and when Dr.
Ellis called, he was so charmed that he forgot to ask him how he was and
went back to do so. Quincy said, “Damn the leg.” Gladstone, aged 83, faced
a hostile government, House of Lords, press, aristocracy, university, and
perhaps a hostile queen, and said, “I represent the youth and hope of
England. The solution of these questions of the future belongs aright to us
who are of the future and not to you who are of the past.” There are certain
functions especially assigned to age, for example, the magistrate passes
upon things after the controversy is over. Senators by law must be at least

thirty but the average age of them is nearly sixty. Methuselah’s days must
have been stupid. Age should cultivate unripe fruit. The greatest penalty of
growing old is losing the friends of youth, dying in the death of others. But
a large capacity for friendship atones. General Sherman’s friendship was
like being admitted to an order of nobility or knighted. His circle of friends
grew throughout the country although no one was more choice in his
selection or more outspoken in his opinions. Of old, age was marked by
splendor in dress and punctilious stateliness in manner, and art often thus
represents it.
Each generation, as it passes, gets from its successor much more
criticism than sympathy; the heir is not on good terms with the king.
“Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” No English monarch ever
built a tomb for his predecessor. We should thank God that Abraham, Isaac,
and David are well dead.
It is young men who deal most courageously with the doctrine of
immortality; old men have made no contribution to it. They are silent or do
not wish to be suspected of cant or hypocrisy, or perhaps fear striking their
heads against a stone wall. If there is no immortality it is the great souls
who will be most disappointed and the world will be “only the receptacle of
a compost heap of the carcasses of an extinct humanity.” A cruel Highland
chief shut his rebellious nephew in a dungeon, fed him on salt meat, then let
down a cup which on opening contained no water, and left him to die of
thirst. The Divine treats us this way if there is no future. Old men develop
individuality. They reason less and less about the future and trust reason
less. But “beside the silent sea I wait the muffled oar,” assured that “no
harm from Him can come to me on ocean or on shore.”
95
W. D. Howells said at eighty that he was less afraid of dying than
when he was young. Virtues may become faults, for example, thrift may
make a miser, his love of gold being more tangible than of greenbacks. It is,
indeed, a shame to die rich. We are often young in spots, for example, on a
spring morning. Slight acclivities seem to grow up into hills. After too long
sitting, for example, in the theater, we realize that we have over-rested. The
golden age, he thinks, is between fifty and sixty. Those who have made
themselves wanted are still so. Our utmost effort is less. We are not dull, as
the young think us because we seem so to them. A reader has exhausted

most of the best literature and yet of rereading old books and reading new
ones we never tire and have our favorite passages. We should interest
ourselves in public questions. It hurts to be always told how young we look.
We forget names we were most familiar with and recall them by their uses
or perhaps by their foreign equivalents. He thinks old women, however, do
not forget words. Tolstoi said that memory is hell and a future state that
recalls all would be a bore. Titian outlived 99 and painted to the end. His
masterpiece, the bronze doors of the sacristy at St. Mark’s, was done when
he was 85. When tired he withdrew to a dark, warm place. John Bigelow in
the nineties gave a charming lecture on Dumas. Versus the solitude of old
age, the young do often seem dull. We do not help other old men enough.
Woman’s sympathy goes far to bridge this interval. Some grieve that they
cannot help with their own self-support. Howells says he is a great dreamer
and forgets where he puts things, for example, his spectacles.
96
H. D. Sedgwick thinks Harvard seniors more disposed to answer
questions than to ask them. Youth may be worth living, but is old age so?
Young men know nothing of youth; they cannot realize it objectively, for
they despise it and want to hurry on. The “kid” would be a Freshman. He
feels at first just outside the door of something delectable. The boy does not
enjoy himself so much as the old man looking on “for such is the kingdom
of Heaven.” The young are individualists absorbed in self. They form
cliques excluding hoi polloi. They over-praise their own college, but their
ego is always the center. It is really the spectator in the theater that gets the
most out of it. Youth is exclusive in its foolish divisions. The old do not
dwell on differences but common qualities. The old man finds no solace in
isolation but in community. He loves humanity; seeks a refuge for self;
passes lightly over differences of speech, clothes, and customs. Perhaps this
is due to the slow approach of night, which makes all draw together for the
warmth of friendship. The old man snuggles to the breast of humanity and
is less prone to lose himself in random interests. If he cannot get about in
space, he turns to the essential truth of the universe. The gods do not know
the words “great” or “small.” The old see wonders in the iris. Youth seeks
the top of the mountains because it cannot see the wonders in what is
common and what is right about. The old are more religious and less subject
to emotional crises. They do not see God in the fire or smoke but can see
Him in the commonplace, and find beauty in cloud, flower, and tree; while

youth is too busy with its own emotions and their tyranny. The records of
earth tell of bestial cruelty. The globe is cooling and youth resists it like
Prometheus. To youth the energy of the world is inexplicable. All is the
product of brute force. Out of the dust came the eye and the brain and the
mind, and all the turmoil is like labor-pangs to produce love, beauty, and
happiness. Everything is full of aspiration. Out of the universe will come
God, who is slowly evolving from the material without. If the matter of life
has produced the passions of humanity, it is charged with potential divinity.
97
Walt Mason says that until his system falls apart he will stay on deck,
with his coat-tails in the air, refusing to be relieved, even though he may
require overhauling every few days. When he was young he was careless in
dress, but as he grew older he became very fastidious and was inclined to
turn a new leaf in dress every day and give the best imitation possible of a
young man. But we who were born during the Van Buren period cannot
look like little Lord Fauntleroys. He studied old men and found that one did
not believe in adding machines while most hated innovations in general. An
old man who criticises anything present is always very unpopular and when
he praises it, the attitude of everyone changes toward him. The young hate
ancient history and want to lay it away in moth-balls. Eternal vigilance is
the price of eternal youth.
Edison at the age of seventy-two said he worked eighteen hours a day
and that it was hard for him to take a week-end off. When Colonel Death
comes around the corner and says “Time’s up,” Mason says he wants him to
find him in a hand-to-hand conflict with his trusty lyre. Every town has a
coterie of “old boys” who are against everything; they write letters to the
press, etc. Now, idleness is the worst thing for an old man and for his
disposition. If he retires at 50 kindly, he will grow impossible by 70. The
old are always blaming and brooding over the final showdown. It is always
possible that the next cold or bit of rheumatism may break down the
carburetor, but why worry?
98
E. P. Powell, a Florida clergyman, cannot conceive old age for young
Sidis and others like him. Charity should not help people to get rid of work
but conceive a haven of rest. A workman damns epitaphs readable a few
years hence. Humanity must not be loaded with a mass of pensions. Old age
must not be a luxury. Good sleep should renew the world. Rev. Tinker

improved sweet corn, Rev. Goodrich, potatoes. Worry is one road to the
cemetery and idleness is another. The working problem is more important
than that of diet. The author writes his sermons lying on the floor and
spinning a top. A Florida June morning, he says, is far better than a month
in Paradise. He does not care for heaven because he is more interested in
the divine earth. The family should include four generations. We should all
strive for perpetual youth. “Few children but better,” should be our motto.
Premature old age is reprehensible. The world is full of half dead men. We
shall never abolish death. Present society is death-hastening and life-
wasting. Fisher would prolong by (1) eugenics, (2) personal hygiene, (3)
public, (4) what might be called domestic hygiene.
99
U. V. Wilson says that the seasons or nature were never so pleasant.
He has the leisure that he toiled for all his life. Every year seems shorter
(being now only one-seventy-third of all) so that he feels he is approaching
the infinite point of view. Religionists tell us that it is hard for the Lord to
save an old man but now that the days and years shrink we approach
eternity. Seventy-three is the age of his physical being but he is really
centuries older. His circle of friends is narrow but closer. He had a fad for
hunting and fishing and photography and his sense of youth remains
forever. He dreads decrepitude and helplessness and hates to see his body
tumble down, like a man in a dungeon seeing the world only through a very
small window. Second childhood suggests that if the eye fails, there are
glorious things beyond it can see; that if the ear fails, there are inner
harmonies. He feels like a youth shut up in an old body. Infirmities are
forerunners of immortal health. So he does not fear death because it only
removes barriers between him and the fullness of life.
100
D. G. Brinton says “that old age is synonymous with wisdom is a
comical deception which the graybeards have palmed off on the world
because by law and custom they hold most of the property and want most of
the power as well.” “As we grow old, we cease to obey our finer instincts”
(Thoreau). “The experience of youth serves but to lead old age astray, and
this is nowhere so plain as when an old man pretends a zest for the
pleasures of the young. No fool like an old fool.” “Every age has pleasures
sufficient which are appropriate to it, and these alone should be sought
after.” If youth respects the laws of nature, old age is very tolerable. It
brings many compensations for losses, and although not likely to be so

happy as the best of middle life, it should be and often is superior in this
respect to youth. “Probably it would generally be so were we more willing
to learn the lessons appropriate to it.”
One writer says no man can be happy till he is past sixty, and another,
“He who teaches the old is like one who writes on blotted paper.” A long
life is the desire of all, and old age, which all abhor, is the hope of all. “It
alone justifies a man to himself and before others.” “The sage is he whose
life is a consistent whole and who carries out in his age the plans which he
made in youth.” “The Jews of Frankfurt average ten years more of life than
the non-Jewish citizens because they avoid unsanitary avocations and
observe wiser rules of diet.” At seventy-five exposure to cold is thirty-two
times more dangerous than it is at thirty years of age. “The sorrows of age
are usually the returns of the investments of youth, these proving of that
sort which levy assessments instead of paying dividends. A short life and a
merry one is the maxim of many a youngster. The hidden falsehood at the
core of this philosophy is the belief that happiness belongs to youth alone.”
“The admiration of the early periods of life is one of a common class of
illusions.” “He who would work securely for his own welfare will not be
led astray by the belief that any one period of life contains solely or in any
large measure the enjoyments of life as a whole. He will, therefore, not eat
to-day the bread of to-morrow. He will guard the fires of youth that he may
not in age have to sit by the cold ashes of exhausted pleasures.” The price of
so doing is premature senility, loss of zest in life due to the early exhaustion
of irrational enjoyments. “The only malady which all covet is the only one
which is absolutely fatal, old age.” No passion is so weak but that a little
pressed, it will master the fear of death. “He who is haunted by the dread of
dying makes himself miserable for fear he cannot make himself miserable
longer.”
Few modern writers have written more sagely on old age than N. S.
101
Shaler, late professor of geology at Harvard. He attaches great
importance to the interval between the end of the reproductive period and
death, which in lower creatures is very brief if it exists at all. In
domesticated animals there is hardly any normal old age and they do not
seem to know a climacteric. There is a great variation among different races
in this period of senescence, which is so peculiar to man. This interval is
very brief among savages. But with the beginning of speech all the relations

of the individual to his group change. If old animals live on, they do so to
themselves and not for the benefit of their kind. But in man the old
individual becomes a storehouse of acquired or traditional knowledge, and
wisdom has, for the first time, a distinct value in organic association. It was
in this way that the reproductive period was shortened, or perhaps we had
better say that life was prolonged beyond it. In civilized society the old are
still members of the species, not aliens or enemies. When a people begins to
have a literature or a religion and a large body of mores as social
inheritance develops, the value of old age increases.
The old have to maintain a more dignified demeanor. They are
readapted and can go on with life as before, especially as they now have
eyes and teeth preserved. The best attitude toward the old is one that assures
a broader view of life and better sense of values and marks the modern
passage from the earlier division of men into ranks and occupations, in
which women, youth, and old men were once separated from the active and
militant class. Thus the position of the aged is now bettered by keeping in
close relation with their fellows.
The growth of wealth has helped democratic individualization and thus
helped old age. “The presence of three or four generations in the social
edifice gives to it far more value than is afforded by one or two.” They
“unite the life of the community and bridge the gap between successive
generations.” “As the body of the tradition which makes the spirit of a
people becomes the greater, it is the more difficult to effect the transmission
of it from stage to stage in the succession.” Despite the volume of printed
matter, including history, there is a spirit of society that cannot be preserved
in books. Who can doubt that if veterans of our Civil War had been more
numerous and influential, we should have plunged into the late war with
Spain. There would have been more men who really remembered what war
meant and its lessons, for the new generation lacked the true sense of what
conflict was and went about it light-heartedly. So the need of strict military
discipline generally has to be relearned with each war. The same is true of
hygienic policies in the army. There are, thus, many political, social, and
even business follies that would have been avoided had the wisdom and
experience that only old age can bring been more dominant. Thus we could
make our historic records not only more effective and more complete in
regard to its matter but also more perfect as regards the lessons it conveys.

History is often written by men who are separated from the times they
chronicle and the best way to bridge the gulf is to keep in touch as long as
possible with the generation that was making history.
But the endeavor to retain the aged is not merely an effort to preserve
the lives of the old but part of the problem of avoiding premature death for
everyone. Thus since man came there seems to be a sudden loss of
longevity if we measure it solely in terms of the period of growth. If this
really has occurred, it may be that the term is less fixed than we should
expect it to be if the institution were of more recent date.
102
Anthony Trollope tells us of a small republic, Britannula, situated
somewhere in the South Pacific and which had freed itself from England,
that had been induced by its leader, Mr. Neverbend, who was deeply
impressed with the sufferings and dangers of old age, to pass a law that at a
fixed period, which after much discussion was fixed at 67½ years of age,
everyone in the colony should be taken with great honor to a college
beautifully situated five miles from the capital city and there spend a final
year, at the end of which he was to suffer euthanasia at the hand of the chief
by being placed under an opiate and bled to death. Details are given of the
many discussions that led up to this legislation, with the justifications for it
and descriptions of the college. When the law was passed, there was no one
in the community of great age. Deposition or relegation to the college was
to be a matter of much pomp and dignity, with bells, banquets, and
processions, and life within the walls was to be made attractive by every
means.
The first to reach the required age, Crasweller, ten years the senior of
the founder, was a man of immense vitality and wealth, the most efficient
proprietor of a very large estate, and when the day of his deposition drew
near he dismayed the founder by insisting that he was a year younger,
although all knew his age, which was to be tatooed upon the skin of
everyone. Meanwhile, an interesting love episode is described between his
daughter and the son of the founder. There was much bitterness and
recrimination and it is realized that it will never do to compel the
withdrawal by force of the first victim, who was to set a high example to all
others; and so finally the year falsely claimed is allowed to pass and then
Crasweller is taken in state to the college itself, which another citizen was

growing weary of tending because it was untenanted. There were many
criticisms of its new and unfinished state and of the proximity of the
cremation furnaces, which were said even to smell of the bodies of the
animals that had been consumed in them.
Meanwhile, as the others were drawing near to their term, support of
the plan passed over into covert and then overt opposition, and just as the
first victim with his escort entered, an English man-of-war appeared—in
response, it afterwards became known, to a petition of the citizens to stop
such a proceeding, which thus cost the colony its independence. Thus
Crasweller was freed and Neverbend, the founder, retired to England, where
his musings at last convinced him that the world was not yet quite ready for
his great reform. It might work if and when men were philosophers but it
would doubtless have to be postponed at least during the lives of his
grandchildren, and perhaps indefinitely. Thus the women, who had always
opposed it, and the populace, who welcomed it when they were young but
condemned it as they grew old, had their will and its realization is yet to
come. The reasons that led to the scheme were that the misery, uselessness,
troublesomeness, and often obstructiveness of old age still remain and are
ever increasing in force, so that something like this must surely sometime
be.
103
Stephen Paget gives us an excellent description of what he thinks a
typical state of mind of old age, but which I deem an excellent illustration
of senile degeneracy. The old man, he says, wonders at his own existence, is
bewildered at the feel of the pen in his hand, at the taste of his food; that he
is alive when so many millions are dead or unborn; at a funeral is fascinated
by someone’s whisper or the contour of a face or some other irrelevancy; is
smitten with momentary surprise that he is or that it is it; finds an
apocalypse on looking in the glass; is oppressed by a sense of mystery that
is very far from philosophic contemplation; and realizes that when others
observe him thus, they reflect that there is no speculation—“No speculation
in those eyes that thou dost glare with”; finds himself growing out “of the
world, of life, of time”; feels it not unreasonable to consider the one, the all,
the infinite, if his mind drifts that way. His mind wanders while he wonders
whether heaven lies about him in his second infancy. Perhaps it all brings
the kind of smile we call wistful. He may go crazy over a human eyebrow
or a breath of air; common things seem novel; the dull things fascinate. One

enjoys a vagabond ease on the street; is irked at fine manners; is fond of
news. The old problems of politics and religion lose their charm and in
place of pure art we turn to that of the street. He says we old are thus a
sentimental lot and for the sake of economy live on our emotions, which
cost nothing. This point of view he deems more or less philosophic, etc.
This state of mind the psychologist would call dissociative, if not
dissolutive. It is the dementia præcox of old age and can mean nothing but
disintegration and befuddlement. True, childhood is often lost in wonder at
items of experience that later are synthesized into wholes and become
commonplaces. But this goes with a keen rapport with the environment,
which the senses are developing, while this author’s musings reveal a
falsetto last look before we are melted or diffused into the cosmos. Such
reveries are letting go, not taking hold of life. They are the decadence of the
philosophic spirit and belie the normal tendency of old age, which is to knit
up experiences into synthetic wholes, to draw the moral of life, and to give
integrity to the soul.
Thus Mr. Paget seems to be the victim of a kind of senile Narcissism,
revering its chief traits in his symptoms, yielding himself with a kind of
masochistic pleasure to any chance impressions that present themselves. He
has ceased to strive and to will, and there is no justification of his point of
view, that his state is akin to that of certain transcendentalists who have
fallen into deep puzzlements over what Bronson Alcott called “the
whichness of the what.”
Old age is neither helped nor understood by the cheap and chipper
paradoxes about it of those who tell the old that they are not so save in
years and that these do not count, or who affect to marvel at the passion to
104
look and seem young. One writer even tells us that the old are beautiful
and thinks it is a perverse precept of social condition to think of
chronological age at all. “We should say eighty years young;” “properly
speaking there is no old age,” etc. All this is really the state of mind of a
mental healer who does not wish old age, disease, or death, and so denies
their existence and turns his back upon reality. It is the state of mind
mythically ascribed to an ostrich, although the best observers deny that it
ever buries its head in the sand from fear of danger. Such cajolery of the old
is like baby-talk to children, which only infantilism or advanced second

childhood relishes. It suggests infirmary wards and is itself a product of the
type of psychic invalidism and valetudinarianism that is interesting to the
psychologist because the appetite for it suggests the dreamy state of mind in
which delusions become factual if they embody our desires. The old should
be beyond attitudinizing or affecting a youth that is gone, for this is to live a
lie, which is dangerous not only to their serenity, for old age should be the
age of truth, but to health and even life.
105
G. S. Street refutes the statement that of late, especially since the
war, there is a great and growing gap between the young and the old, who
speak a different language mutually unintelligible; that the old can no
longer understand the young; etc. This has found frequent expression in
recent literature. The rising generation is said to have its own interests,
ideas, and even language, to have broken away from the old, and even to
have developed a new poetry and art. A generation ago there was such a
gap. The grown-ups were Olympians and there was little attempt of either
young or old to understand each other. There was little friendship between
dons and students but we have now a popular cult not only of childhood but
of adolescence. It is said that psychoanalysis is becoming a cult of the
young generation but Freud himself was not born yesterday. A very few
soldiers have complained bitterly of the selfishness and stupidity of their
elders who sent them into the trenches, safely staying at home themselves.
There are, of course, aging politicians and diplomats who are little in touch
with the future as represented by the sentiments and aspirations of the
young.
But, on the whole, the war has brought old and young nearer together.
The old have given up their foolish airs of superiority and the young have
been matured by their experience. To be sure, these oldsters often criticise
the young generation, that it is aggressive and free of speech or conduct;
and there are young people who, under the illusion of new ideas, are
aggressive. But such a gulf as has existed between the old and the young
has always been mainly the fault of the old, and the qualities of the young
give them less excuse for this attitude than they ever had before. Perhaps
the world is a little too much in the hands of people who are a little too old,
but this is being rapidly remedied.

106
C. W. Saleeby, M.D., says that young children never worry and
youth does so almost entirely for the future, while the worries of old age are
chiefly retrospective and may take the form of regrets. If young people feel
these, it is only for a brief space, for they are resilient and soon react. In
middle life the struggle for existence is keener and the “might-have-beens”
cannot always be dismissed, although those in good health can usually soon
surmount them. But this is more difficult in old age unless, indeed, it is “a
lusty winter, frosty but kindly.” Wordsworth describes old age as it should
be in this respect in “The Happy Warrior”:

Who not content that former worth stand fast
Looks forward persevering to the last,
From well to better daily self-surpassed.
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
Forever and to noble deeds give birth
Or he must fail, to sleep without his fame
And leave a dead, unprofitable name—
Finds comfort in himself and in his cause
And while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
His breath of confidence in heaven’s applause.
This is the Happy Warrior, this is he
That every man in arms should wish to be

* * * * *
A being breathing thoughtful breath
A traveler between life and death,
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, forethought, strength, and skill.

There is a vast difference between old age as commonly seen and as it
should be. The average type of humanity is undergoing a change.
Civilization means city-fication and this involves a state of mind very
different from that of the rustic. Worry has become the disease of the age as
it was not formerly when man’s vegetative nature was stronger. It is a

maladie des beaux esprits. We are no longer content to eat, sleep, and sit in
the sun. The old always and greatly need grandchildren and it was never so
hard to provide occupation for them, for their temptation now is to become
self-centered, which is perhaps most common in women. It takes a different
form in men superannuated by some automatic rule. Pitiful is the state of
those who withdraw from occupations that have required and developed
great mental activity.
The young, on the other hand, are less tolerant than formerly of the
foibles and frailties of age. We live at such a high speed that it seems slow,
if not stupid, and lack of sympathy adds to its burdens. The very idea of the
family is declining and there is little left of the old sentiment for the
patriarch, so that “the faster we move, the wider must become the gap
between the young and those who, like the aged, have ceased to move.”
Indeed, old age “is probably less tolerated and less tolerable to-day than
ever in the past,” for the old were never so out of it. It might be expected, as
death draws near, that religious anxieties would increase, but the contrary is
true. Youth was never so unable to apply the principle Tout comprendre
c’est tout pardonner or to make allowances. So it is the young who worry
most about religious matters. “Absence of occupation is not rest. The mind
that’s vacant is a mind distrest.”
If the man who has lived solely for sport is ill prepared to meet old age,
he who has lived solely for business is still less so. He has had no time to
cultivate his more human tastes but has developed his potentialities in only
one direction and when superannuation comes his soul is bankrupt. He
generally now has money as well as time to spend and so devotes himself to
increasing his material comforts in a way that beckons death, because high
living is no substitute for high thinking. He should discover the least
atrophied of his powers and devote himself to their eleventh-hour
development. The man of the modern nervous type should lay up treasure
that age cannot corrupt. Herbert Spencer said the purpose of education was
to prepare for complete living.
One of the most beautiful and normal attributes of old age is interest in
the young, without which age is lonely and life becomes, as the preacher
said, “vanity of vanities.” “If old people are confined to the company of
other old people, they hasten each other’s downward course.” There was
“even a certain psychological truth symbolized in the old idea that the

company of a young girl was the best means for the rejuvenescence of an
old man.” “Never was the tendency to abandon old age to its own devices
so strong as it is to-day.” Spencer thought the care of the aged by their
dependents was the fit complement for the care that in earlier years had
been devoted to them and regarded the imperfection of this return the great
defect of our practical morals. Indeed, the author doubts “whether the aged
were ever so much to be pitied as they are to-day.” The psychological needs
of old age are greater than ever.
107
In his Health, Strength, and Happiness, he gives an earnest, practical
caution for all, but especially for the aged, to eat less; and particularly so in
warm weather. “We dig our graves with our teeth.” Fat is hardly a part of
the body at all. Flesh is really muscle, so that the fat man should be said to
be losing flesh. “The whole secret of prolonging one’s life consists in doing
nothing to shorten it.” The writer profoundly believes in government by the
elderly in years and thinks that the really greatest works in many of the
most difficult fields have been done by them. He stresses the fact that there
is a certain kind of wisdom that nothing but age can bring. He sees the chief
cause of senile degeneration in the hardening of the arteries, due to the
necessity of disposing of superfluous fat. A man is really as old as his mind
and he doubts whether we are producing more really living elderly men and
women than did the ancient world. He is bitter in his condemnation of the
common phrase, “Too old at forty.”
108
Bernard Shaw thinks mankind is headed straight for the City of
Destruction and can be saved not by eugenics or by a new and better
education, as H. G. Wells opines, but by prolonging human life to circa
three hundred years. If the length of life were reduced to one-half or one-
quarter of what it now is we may assume that our culture and institutions
would decline because children could not direct them. It is exactly the
equivalent of this that has actually happened, only instead of life being
shortened to half or a quarter of its span the problems of life have doubled
or quadrupled in magnitude and difficulty so that present-day man is not
grown up to them. Trained only to run a motor truck, he is now since the
war called on to be an air pilot, and this requires a long and arduous training
with a great deal of preliminary selection or weeding out. Thus man must
now simply either live a great deal longer or the race will go under.

This can be done and Shaw tells us how. It is simply by wishing and
willing it intensely enough and for generations. Lamarck, the first creative
evolutionist, devoted his life to the “fundamental proposition that living
organisms changed because they wanted to.” They wanted to see and so
evolved eyes; to move about and so grew organs of locomotion; the
forbears of the giraffe wanted to browse on taller and taller tree-tops and so
grew long necks, etc. All this was done by the same phyletic impulsion as
now impels us to talk, swim, skate, ride a wheel, etc. We strive at it long
and persistently and by and by, presto! the power comes from within
because we will it, and it is never lost. In this same way man can and will
acquire the power of living several times longer than he does now. As he
does so he will put away his present occupations and interests, sports,
amusements, party politics, religious dogmas, ceremonies, and indeed most
of the things that now interest the populace, and come out into a new
adulthood with vastly enhanced powers and a far wider horizon. Those who
do this first will become pilots of mankind, which at present seems doomed
for want of more wisdom and better leaders. Darwin and especially the
Neo-Darwinians who believe in “circumstantial evolution” launched the
world on a career of egoism in morals and mechanism in life that has
brought it to its present pass and made it forget that all true evolution is
from within, vitalistic, and voluntaristic.
Shaw’s drama opens in Eden, where Adam, oppressed by the
conviction that he must live forever, first faces the fact of death in finding
the putrefying body of a fawn. The gorgeously hooded serpent explains to
Eve how she is to renew life by offspring from her body, and because of this
she and Adam are assured that they need live only a thousand years. In the
next scene Cain the Killer justifies his vocation.
In the second part, which opens in our day, two brothers, one a
liberalized clerical and the other a biologist, agree that life is too short to be
taken seriously and that neither of them is within a hundred and fifty years
of the experience and wisdom they have been sincerely pretending to. To be
a good clergyman or biologist requires several centuries. Man now dies
before he knows what life or what science is. Indeed, life is now so short
that it is hardly worth while to do anything well. Then a past and present
prime minister, obviously caricatures of the two most famous men who
have lately filled that position in England, enter and try—each according to

his method and hobbies—to interest the brothers in one popular cause after
another, but in vain; and are finally plainly told that they have not lived
long enough to outgrow personal and local prejudices or to see things in
their true perspective. The statesmen, failing to find campaign material
serviceable for the next election in this new Gospel of the Brothers
Barnabas, then ask for a prescription that will prolong their lives and,
failing to obtain either, cease to be interested. It does not seem practical to
found a Longevity Party and it might be dangerous to let everyone live as
long as he wanted to. The statesmen are finally told that as they are
incompetent to do God’s work He will produce some better beings who can.
In Part III, a.d. 2170, The thing Happens. An archbishop, now 283
years old, is convinced that “mankind can live any length of time it knows
to be absolutely necessary to save civilization from extinction.” Such
lengthening may now happen to anyone and when he is convinced that he is
one of these elect everything changes. A well preserved lady who appeared
in a former part as a parlormaid but who is now 224 years old enters and
discourses sapiently on the traits of the short-livers and complains that there
are so few grown-ups. “What is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult
race.” Her own serious life began at 120.
In Part IV we are transferred to the year a.d. 3000. An Elderly
Gentleman, attired in very pronounced fashions that have not changed from
our day, comes from Bagdad, now the British capital—London being only a
park and cities being for the most part abolished. He is an amateur student
of history and comes to revisit the home of his remote ancestors but finds it
now tenanted only by long-livers who regard him as a child and chaperone
and instruct him as such. At first he loquaciously vents his own opinions on
a great variety of subjects with the utmost confidence but finally, under the
tutelage of a Primary and a Secondary, and at last from contact with an
awful Tertiary (for thus those in the first, second, and third century of their
lives are known and labeled) he loses confidence, becomes more and more
depressed at finding so many things he cannot understand, and has a serious
attack of the “discouragement” that is generally the doom of all short-livers
who visit these parts. In the end the aged Briton is so confounded by the
wisdom that he cannot comprehend that life loses all its attractions and he
finally dies of exhaustion at the feet of the Oracle. Napoleon also swaggers

and boasts upon the stage, but his ideals, too, are shown to be only
characteristic of the short-livers and he is completely subjected.
Part V of this Pentateuch is dated a.d. 31,920. Children are now born
from eggs, clamoring to get out when about as mature as our youth are at
seventeen, so that there are no children in our sense. They are grown-ups,
according to our standard, at three or four. Art and science, after incredible
labors, are at last able to produce two homunculi, a male and a female. They
represent the consummation of circumstantial or mechanical evolution.
They appear, talk, will, feel, apparently not as the reflex mechanisms and
automata they are but as completely human. They have, however, almost
incredible powers of destruction which they turn first against their own
fabricator. So dangerous are they that they have to be destroyed because not
truly human since they lack the creative urge from within.
This amazingly bold projection of Shaw’s imagination into the void is
elaborately wrought out and needs very careful reading to be rightly
appraised. Almost every reader will agree that he goes much too far in
disparaging about all that modern man has done or cared for so far in the
world as childish doll-play. This is its pessimism. Its optimism, which lies
in the hope of vastly increased longevity and wisdom, will be thought to
compensate, or to fail to do so, according to the temperament of the reader.
The new dispensation, which is to come when man has grown up, for in the
last part it is seen that he may live even 700 or 800 years, will be ushered in
by those individuals who are most perfectly convinced of the desperate state
into which man has now fallen but nevertheless profoundly believe both
that he is worth saving and that he can be saved. George Eliot’s way of
prolonging life by giving to moments the significance of days will not do
because great events often have no power to speed up but must evolve very
slowly. The best type of old age as we know it is still too puerile to expect
very much from.
Shaw’s conceptions of the old are neither attractive nor constructive but
priggish because presuming on their years to demand respect for a wisdom
that is nowhere in evidence. There is almost no suggestion that they have
done anything to improve the material or psychic conditions of human life.
No great inventions are suggested unless telephonic communication by
tuning forks. These Ancients seem to derive their greatest pleasure from
disparagement of their own youth and, what is far worse, of youth in

general. The long-livers are cynical, addicted to sneering, rebuke, criticise,
and do not inspire, construct, achieve, or even teach; in fact they only make
the gestures and show the affectations of sagehood. They are divided in
their counsels whether to exterminate the short-livers or to leave them to
natural selection. Thus they are a class apart and we have almost no hint as
to the stages by which they evolved. Now we are told that they are
“elected” to longevity or achieve it as “sports,” while in the Preface it is
insisted that it comes by a long series of persistent efforts.
On the whole, happy as was his choice of scene, fascinating as are
these almost actionless conversations, the whole thing is a jeu d’esprit, with
no message of practical import to our age or to the aged unless it be to
slightly encourage the hope in the latter that by willing to do so more and
more intensely they may add somewhat to their length of years. Shaw’s
Ancients are simply a board of censors to carry out his own whims and who
have grown arrogant as their powers increased. Altogether they are so
unlovely that the reader would hesitate whether he would prefer to be a
bloodless Ancient or to take his chance of being exterminated by them as a
short-liver. The two Ancients in the fifth book of the Pentateuch, 700 and
800 years old respectively, are chilly, loveless, almost clotheless, sleepless,
hairless creatures, happy in enjoying a wisdom of the nature of which we
are given very few hints. They teach that all works of art from rag dolls to
statues, and even to homunculi, are needless, and the intimation is that they
are well on the way to becoming independent of the body, which they have
subjected and which has lost all its attractions. We are not even told how the
gigantic eggs from which the race is born at adolescence are produced. The
final verdict of Lilith, the androgynous mother of our first parents in Eden,
is that in giving Eve curiosity, which was still impelling the race to conquer
matter and then resolve itself back into bodiless vortexes and energies, she
had made no mistake for the Ancients are ever gaining in wisdom to
comprehend the universe and, despite the slow decay of their bodies, are
likely to attain the goal of achieving real but immaterial truth, beauty, and
goodness all in one, so that she need not exterminate man and produce in
his place a new and higher race of beings. Thus Shaw’s Ancients are the
direct antithetes of Nietzsche’s supermen.
The poets of all times and climes have had something to say of old age,
and vastly more of death. The latter has always been one of the chief

themes of Christian hymnology and both its gruesome horrors and its
consolations have found expression in countless tropes—sleep, harvest,
crossing the river, and many others that are fairly burned into the
consciousness of all who have come into contact with the church. Hymns
have given the Western world ideas of death that the scientific descriptions
of it show to be utterly false to fact, for the dying almost never face death
consciously, so that its terrors are generally quite unknown to those who
meet it; while the cajolements that the Great Enemy has really been
conquered in his stronghold and the supreme fear of the world banished,
109
which, as I have elsewhere shown, came to its most ecstatic affirmation
at Pentecost, are no less fallacious. Thus along with its anodyne Christianity
has invested death with a new horror of hell unknown to the pagan world.
Moreover, it has always been taught as something exogenous or as a graft
upon a more primitive stock and it is the latter that the psychologist chiefly
seeks to know. Thus, excluding the more artificial reactions that have come
to it from this source, I have reduced my first numerous selections to a very
few that express the natural spontaneous repercussion of the three chief
attitudes of mind regarding it.
The first is the death thought that always and everywhere tends to find
its first expression in ingenuous youth and this has never been more fully
110
and normally portrayed than in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” which is familiar
even to school children and which was written by the author in his ripe
adolescence. This might have been composed in ancient pagan Hellas or
even by a Buddhist as well as by a Christian, so generic and germane is it to
111
human nature as it evolves. Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” while it
shows vestiges of the same youthful aperçus that lingered into the author’s
maturer years, is far more specific, more funereal, and really the farewell
address of a dying soul to survivors. The euthanasia motive is far less
pronounced in it.
The second attitude is illustrated by Matthew Arnold and by the
lugubrious phase of Walt Whitman, both written after decrepitude had
begun. Poems written in this spirit arouse the question whether old age is
intrinsically pessimistic or perhaps even pathological. Should senescents
express or repress the inexorable and progressive limitations and
weaknesses senescence brings in its train, or strive to ignore if they cannot

be oblivious to them? Are not such abandonments to pathos, in their deeper
psychological motivation, a cry for pity, to which strong souls feel it
unworthy to appeal? Are they perhaps atavistic vestiges or echoes of a time
when the old were more cruelly treated? Why spend time and energy in
mourning for what old age takes away rather than in finding “joy in what
remains behind” and which no other stage of life can give? Hysterical
symptoms are often only an appeal for sympathy by those who crave,
perhaps subconsciously, more attention and service, which only selfishness
would think lacking. Psychopaths and paranoiacs have often made literary
capital of their aberrations, as have adolescents out of the ferments peculiar
to their age. All this has its place but should, in my opinion, always be
known as what it is, namely, abnormal and aberrant and thus belonging
entirely to science and not to literary art.
The third or reminiscent type expresses the inveterate instinct of the old
to look back upon life, to illumine and interpret its memories by such
philosophy as experience brings, in some measure, to all who can reflect. It
is a happy circumstance that senile amnesia always begins with the loss of
recent recollections, while those of early life are only later and very rarely
effaced. This resource is always open to the aged, who can relive the most
interesting stages of their early and adult lives, unify them, and draw the
moral of them as a whole. The world owes much and, as it grows old, will
owe ever more to the autobiographic impulse of those who achieve normal
senectitude.
The following is Matthew Arnold’s “Growing Old”:

What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
—Yes, but not this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more loosely strung?

Yes, this, and more; but not
Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dream’d ’twould be!
’Tis not to have our life
Mellow’d and soften’d as with sunset-glow,
A golden day’s decline.

’Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirr’d;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past.
The years that are no more.

It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young;
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite

p , q
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost,
Which blamed the living man.
112
From Walt Whitman I quote the following four extracts:

Thanks in Old Age

Thanks in old age—thanks ere I go,
For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air—for life, mere life,
For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear—you, father
—you, brothers, sisters, friends,)
For all my days—not those of peace alone—the days of war the same,
For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands,
For shelter, wine and meat—for sweet appreciation.

A Carol Closing Sixty-nine

Of me myself—the jocund heart yet beating in my breast,
The body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed—the strange inertia falling pall-
like round me,
The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct,
The undiminish’d faith—the groups of loving friends.

Queries to my Seventieth Year

Approaching, nearing, curious,
Thou dim, uncertain spectre—bringest thou life or death?
Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?
Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?
Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,
Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack’d voice harping, screeching?

As I Sit Writing Here

As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,
Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities,
Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui,
May filter in my daily songs.

113
Longfellow strikes a less pessimistic note:

Morituri Salutamus

Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at 80; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Œdipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse
From his compeers
When each had numbered more than four-score years.
And Theophrastus at four-score and ten
Had but begun his characters of men.
Chaucer at Wadstock, with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote The Canterbury Tales.
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
Completed Faust when eighty years were past.
These are, indeed, exceptions, but they show
How far the gulf stream of our youth may flow
Into the Arctic regions of our lives
Where little else but life itself survives.

* * * * *
Whatever poet, orator, or sage
May say of it, old age is still old age.
It is the waning, not the crescent, moon,
The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon.
It is not strength but weakness, not desire
But its surcease, not the fierce heat of fire,
The burning and consuming element,
But that of ashes and of embers spent.
In which some living sparks we still discern,
Enough to warm but not enough to burn.
What, then, shall we sit idly down and say
The night hath come; it is no longer day?
The night hath not come; we are not quite
Cut off from labor by the failing light.
Something remains for us to do or dare,
Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.
Not Œdipus Colonus, or Greek Ode,

Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode
Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn.
But other something would we but begin,
For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars invisible by day.
I also append the following quotations:

At sixty-two life is begun,
At seventy-three begins once more;
Fly swifter as thou near’st the sun
And brighter shine at eighty-four.
At ninety-five
Shouldst thou arrive
Still wait on God and work and thrive.

It has been sung by ancient sages
That love of life increases with years
So much that in our later stages,
When bones grow sharp and sickness rages
The greatest love of life appears.

Hard choice for man to die or else to be
That tottering, wretched, wrinkled thing you see,
Age then we all prefer; for age we pray;
And travel on to life’s last lingering day,
Then sinking slowly down from worse to worse,
Find Heaven’s extorted boon our greatest curse.

Many a man passes his youth in preparing misery for his age,
and his age in repairing the misconduct of his youth.
It is easy to die but difficult to die at the right time.
The danger of shipwreck is less in mid-ocean than near to
shore.

Time wears out masks; the old show what they are.
The misfortunes of life are that we are born young and become
old.

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made!
What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me.
Browning: Rabbi Ben Ezra.

What is age but youth’s full bloom
And retiring, more transcendent youth?

Old men must die or the world would grow mouldy, would
only breed the past again.—Tennyson: Becket.

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.—
Disraeli: Coningsby.

See how the world its veterans rewards!
A youth of frolics, an old age of cards.
Pope: Moral Essays.

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age,
that age appears to be best in four things—old wood best to burn,
old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.—
Bacon: Apothegms.

Dr. Clara Barrus, who for many years has labored in the closest
personal contact with John Burroughs, has kindly sent me, along with much
other information, the notes he made during the last months of his life for

an article that he never lived to complete on Old Age. The quotations and
aperçus that he collected and that most impressed him were such as the
following:

As men grow old they grow more foolish and more wise.
Young saint, old devil; young devil, old saint.
A man at sixteen will prove a child at sixty.
When men grow virtuous in their old age they only make a
sacrifice to God of the devil’s leavings.
Nobody loves life like an old man.
An old young man will make a young old man.
Old age is a tyrant who forbids men, under pain of death, the
pleasures of youth.
Reckless youth makes rueful age.
Young men think old men fools and old men know young men
to be so.
The evening of life brings with it its lamps.
A youthful age is desirable but aged youth is troublesome and
grievous.
To me the worst thing about old age is that one has outlived all
his old friends. The past becomes a cemetery.
It is characteristic of old age to reverse its opinions and its likes
and dislikes. But it does not reverse them; it revises them. If its
years have been well spent it has reached a higher position from
which to overlook Life; it commands a wider view.
Old Age may reason well but old age does not remember well.
The power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness
in the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we
octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not
grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder. We only
need to focus upon you a little more completely.

I probably make more strenuous demands upon him who
aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than ever
before that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make
poetry any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive
makes honey. The quality of the man makes all the difference in the
world. A great nature can describe birds and flowers and clouds and
sunsets and spring and autumn greatly.
We in our generation have become so familiar with a universe
so much larger than that known to the Ancients that we naturally
wonder how the wise men of Greece and Rome and of Judea could
have had or seem to have had so little curiosity about the earth upon
which they lived and of which they were so ignorant.
Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It
is certainly true that in age we do find our tongues if we have any.
They are unloosened, and when the young or middle-aged sit silent
the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of
pleasures is gone and another takes its place.
The old man reasons well, the judgment is clear, the mind
active, the conscience alert, the interest in life unabated. It is the
memory that plays the old man tricks.
Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar
all his life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the
belt slipped and the wheel did not go around. Then the next moment
away it goes again. Or shall we call it a kind of mental anesthetic or
paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about
Georgetown, S. A. I repeated the name over to myself a few times.
Have I not known such a place some time, in my life. Where is it?
“Georgetown.” “Georgetown.” The name seems like a dream. Then
I thought of Washington, the Capitol, and the city above it, but had
to ask a friend if its name was Georgetown. Then suddenly as if
some chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it
came! Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in
doubt about it; I had lived in Washington for ten years.

CHAPTER IV

STATISTICS OF OLD AGE AND ITS CARE
I—Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands where data
are available—Actuarial and other mortality tables—
Expectation of life and death-rate at different ages—Longevity
and fecundity—Death-rate in different occupations—Irving
Fisher’s ideas on longevity—The population problem—
Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the Middle Ages—Diversity
of statistical methods and results.
II—Growing need of care for the indigent old—Causes of
improvidence—Ignorance and misconception of what old age is
and means—Why the old do not know themselves—Old age
pensions in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and her colonies,
France, Belgium, United States—Industrial pensions and
insurance, beginning with railroads—Trades unions—Fraternal
organizations—Retiring pensions in the army and navy—Local
and national insurance—Teachers’ pensions—The Carnegie
Foundation—Criticism of pension systems—Growing
magnitude, urgency, and diversity of views and methods—The
Life Extension Institute—“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs
—Should the old organize?

Before discussing the nature and functions of old age, which chiefly
concern us in this volume, we must in a brief, summary way answer two
preliminary questions: (1) how many old people are there in the registration
areas of the world to-day as compared to earlier times and to the total
population; and (2) what is done for them publicly and privately. Each of
these topics has a copious literature and experts of its own. On the first or
statistical problem there is still great diversity of methods and results, which

I simply present and make no attempt to harmonize, for this would be
premature. As to the second point, of care, I have also attempted only a
bird’s-eye view and avoided details.

I

The population between the ages of 65 and 74 in various countries
114
(1900) is as follows: United Kingdom—1,418,000 (including England,
Ireland, Scotland, Wales, of which England and Wales have 1,076,000;
Scotland, 151,000; Ireland, 191,000); Germany—2,003,000; Prussia—
1,185,000; France—2,246,000; Italy—1,435,000; United States—
2,186,000.
The percentage of the population 65 and upwards in various countries
is: United Kingdom—5 per cent (in England, Wales, and Scotland the
percentage is 5 per cent, and in Ireland 6 per cent); Germany—5 per cent;
France—8 per cent; Italy—6 per cent; United States—4 per cent.
115
Allyn A. Young gives a table bringing out the following facts, taking
the population of continental United States in 1900 as 75,994,575 as a
basis:

Population
Age
Native White Foreign White Colored Total
70 123,818 66,941 18,213 208,972
75 79,214 40,886 10,061 130,161
80 42,095 19,559 6,995 68,649
85 17,271 7,059 2,854 27,184
90 4,551 1,796 1,190 7,539
95 833 430 766 2,029
99 195 168 255 618

116
Solomon S. Huebner says a mortality table is a picture of a
generation of individuals passing through time. He takes a group of them
and traces their history year by year until all have died. The American
Experience tables, almost exclusively used for computation by the old
insurance companies, contain the following and are based on 100,000
individuals:

American Experience Table of Mortality
Number Number
Living at Dying
Age Beginning of during
Designated Designated
Year Year
70 38,569 2,391
71 36,178 2,448
72 33,730 2,487
73 31,243 2,505
74 28,738 2,501
75 26,237 2,476
76 23,761 2,431
77 21,330 2,369
78 18,961 2,291
79 16,670 2,196
80 14,474 2,091
81 12,383 1,964
82 10,419 1,816
83 8,603 1,648
84 6,955 1,470
85 5,485 1,292
86 4,193 1,114
87 3,079 933
88 2,146 744
89 1,402 555
90 847 385

91 462 246
92 216 137
93 79 58
94 21 18
95 3 3

In a table headed “Actuaries’ or Combined Experience Table of
117
Mortality” we have the following, taking 100,000 persons of ten years of
age as the basis:

Probable Number Expectation
Age
of Persons Living of Life
70 35,837 8.54
75 24,100 6.48
80 13,290 4.78
85 5,417 3.36
90 1,319 2.11
95 89 1.12
99 1 .50

118
In a very valuable state report collating data from many sources for
convenient use by the legislature it appears that the total number of persons
65 or over in Massachusetts by the census of April 1, 1915, was 189,047. It
is generally supposed that during recent years the ratio of the aged to the
total population has increased, but the tables show that in Massachusetts
this did not hold true for the forty years ending in 1915. Mortality rates in
most localities have fallen, but improved conditions of life have not affected
the ratio of the aged to the total. Still, the duration of life has continuously
increased, owing to medical and sanitary science and improved standards of
living; and while the younger element of the population has been chiefly
affected, the span of life of the aged has also been somewhat prolonged.
Hence if this tendency continues the need of pensioning would increase.

119
A. Newsholme presents a table giving the annual death rate, per
million persons living, from a few prominent diseases, showing that there is
a falling off in the death rate from old age. The author adds: “If this were a
real falling off, it would not be an indisputable advantage as most people
would prefer to die of old age. The decline under this head, however, is
chiefly due to an improved specification of the causes of which the old die.”
He gives copious statistics on the causes of death. He also gives an
interesting table (p. 237) on the basis of 100,000 of each sex, showing
graphically the steady decline in death liability and that the percentage of
death is least at 12 and the early teens and soon after begins slightly to
increase, falling somewhat more rapidly after 40 and then becoming a little
less rapid after 70; while at 90, only 2,000 of the original 100,000 remain
alive.
Director Sam L. Rogers of the Bureau of the Census published tables of
120
vitality statistics to show expectation of life at all ages for the population
of New England, New York, New Jersey, Indiana, Michigan, and the
District of Columbia (these being the mortality death registration states) on
the basis of the population in 1910 and the mortality for three years. They
are like life tables of insurance companies with the exception that they are
based on the whole population. According to these tables the average
expectation of life for males at birth is 49.9 years; for females, 52.2.
Expectation of white males reaches its maximum at the age of 2 (57.7
years). At the age of 12, it is 59.2 years; at 25, 39.4; at 40, 28.3; at 50, 21.2;
at 60, 14.6; at 70, 9.1; at 80, 5.2 years. During the first month of life the
death rate of native white boys is nearly 28 per cent higher than that for
girls. The twelfth year seems to be the healthiest for the native whites and
thereafter there is continuous increase in the death rate. Expectation of life
is not the same as saying that a man has an even chance of living that
number of years, because expectation represents the average remaining
length of life at any given age in a stationary population. A native white
male child at birth has one chance in two of reaching sixty. At the end of his
first year he has more than an even chance of reaching sixty-four. At forty-
two he has an even chance of attaining seventy. At all ages women live
longer than men and expectation in the country at all ages is distinctly
greater than in the city.

121
R. Henderson’s work sets forth the theoretical relations with
reference to the duration of human life, describing those mortality tables
that have had the greatest influence on the development of the science of
life contingency and its applications in this country. The author establishes a
connection between mortality tables and mortality statistics and tells how to
interpret the latter. The methods of constructing mortality tables from
census and death returns and from insurance experience are then taken up.
The writer deals only with life contingencies and not at all with monetary
applications and gives us a new table. “The present value of a sum of
money payable at death cannot be properly calculated in assuming it to be
payable at the end of a definite period equal to the expectation of life.” Nor
can the present value of a life annuity be calculated by assuming it to be
certainly payable for that period.
122
W. S. Rankin tells how he applies vital statistics to sick towns or
cities in a way to first restore consciousness by telling them just where they
stand relatively with regard to death rates and second to bring about
reforms. He has various charts and diagrams. The opinion of prominent
people in every community is, in general, that their health conditions are
good, but when asked what the death rate is they can give no answer. One
community compelled a railroad to build and maintain an expensive
overhead bridge at a cost of $1,500 a year to prevent one death and the
aldermen appropriated only $150 to prevent fifty deaths. The first thing in
treating sick social organisms is to restore consciousness.
123
Alexander Graham Bell in the study of a family which is almost
classic found that the average duration of life was 34.6 years; 35.2 per cent
of these persons died before they were 20 years of age, and 7.3 per cent
lived to be 80 or older. A second danger period was found in adolescence,
ending at 23. Both sexes showed an increase of deaths during adolescence.
More females than males lived to be 95. But the fathers, on the average,
lived longer than the mothers and the children born between four and eight
years after the marriage of their parents lived longer than those born later.
Those who live to be old come from long-lived parents. The long-lived
seem to inherit disease-resisting qualities and also are more fecund than the
124
short-lived. He says that in this family mothers who lived to extreme old
age had, on the average, larger families than those who died earlier in life,

for example, those who died before forty had, on the average, only three to
four children apiece. The long-lived proportion is practically doubled when
one parent lives to be old and quadrupled when both parents do so. The
people who lived to be old represented the disease-resistant strain of their
generation and on account of their superior fecundity this quality is
distributed largely throughout the population. “A very large proportion of
each generation is sprung from a very small proportion of the preceding
generation; namely, from the people who lived to old age. The members of
the short-lived group come from the short-lived parents. The children of the
long-lived parents are on the average stronger, more vigorous, and longer-
lived than the children of others, and there were more of them per family.”
125
Scott Nearing says that the years from 45 to 60 or 65 should be the
most valuable ones from the social point of view. He reminds us that if the
average length of life were doubled the population would in a generation
double without any increase in the birth rate. The average length of life in
the leading countries of the world varies much. In Sweden, for males it is
53.9; France, 45.7; England and Wales, 44.1; Massachusetts, 44.1; India,
23.0. Men born in America of native white parents live on the average only
31 years; those born of foreign white parents, 29.1 years. Men in the
modern cities die when they are one score and ten. There is a great
difference in occupations: for shoemakers the death rate per thousand is 8.7;
farmers, 11.02; tailors, 13.65; cigar and tobacco makers, 21.67; servants,
21.78; and laborers, 22.3. Such figures suggest the dangerous occupations.
As to the length of the working life, from 15 to 65, out of every one
thousand males living at the age of 15, 440 will survive to the age of 65,
while the rest will have fallen out for some cause. So society has lost more
than half its working force at the end of the working period. In the 16th
century the average length of life he estimates at 21.2 years; in the 17th,
25.7; in the 18th, 33.6; and in the 19th, nearly 40 years. Finkenberg thinks
that in the 16th century it was between 18 and 20 years; at the close of the
18th, over 30; while to-day it is from 38 to 40. We have no data for the
United States as a whole that are of any value. Among males in England the
average length of life is increasing at the rate of 14 years per century;
France, 10; Denmark, 25; Massachusetts, 14. Although these figures are
only approximations, Nearing thinks life is probably twice as long as it was
a few centuries ago.

126
Irving Fisher says in Europe the span of life is double that in India.
The death rate in Dublin is twice that of Amsterdam and three times that of
rural Michigan. Life is probably twice as long as it was three or four
centuries ago and is increasing more rapidly now than ever. The rate of
progress is very variable in different countries, the maximum being in
Prussia. Improvement is most in females and the rate of increase is
accelerated perhaps four years a century on the whole, although during the
last three-quarters of the nineteenth century Fisher thinks it has increased
nine years. At least fourteen years could be added to human life by
eliminating preventable diseases, which would be the equivalent of
reducing the death rate about 23 per cent. In a table he shows that seven of
the ninety causes of death are responsible for over one-half of the
shortening of life. He gives us a diagram that shows where the saving of life
has been and might be greatest. The area between the curves shows that
from 1855 to 1897, 550,000 years were saved for a supposed group of
100,000 persons, or 5.5 years per person. The addition of 12.8 years to the
lifetime of each of 100,000 persons might be divided into three groups,
namely, that of preparation, the working period, and the decline. The chief
cause of prolongation is found in new hygienic ideals.
Metchnikoff thought that the lengthening of human life would at once
decrease the burden on the productive period, which is some 55 per cent of
the total years lived—assuming the working period to be from 17 to 60—
and that the latter limit would shift forward. As life becomes complex and
as knowledge increases the period of preparation should be prolonged. Men
should graduate later. Life should be lived on a larger scale, with more
utilization of accumulated experience and less disastrous immaturity. Now
we have to force young men into positions prematurely because of their
vitality. Metchnikoff says “Old age, at present practically a useless burden
on the community, will become a period of work valuable to it.” Human life
will become much longer and the par value of old people will become much
more important than it is to-day.
Willcox thinks the death rate in the United States is at least eighteen per
thousand. Moreover, we have some three million persons always on the sick
list, more among the old than the young since morbidity increases in age.
But at least one-third are in the working period. The loss by consumptives
alone is figured at sixty million dollars. Now, it costs no more to raise a

man capable of living eighty years than it does to grow one who has the
capacity of living only forty. Health means increased vitality and makes
life, in Mallock’s phrase, better worth the living, for health is the first
wealth. We can do much to raise American vitality.
127
Fisher adds that in the United States the general death rate has
steadily fallen for several decades, as is common in all civilized countries.
Many think this means a gain in national vitality. This may be true for the
younger age but the “gain has served to mask a loss of vitality at the older
age periods. This latter phenomenon, a rising mortality in elderly life, is
something almost peculiar to the United States.” In other lands this fall in
death rate has been due not solely to the reduction of mortality in infancy
and adult life, for most countries have improved their mortality at every age
period. Probably this is due to “some unknown biologic influence or to the
amalgamation of the various races that constitute our population. It must be
ascribed in a broad sense to lack of adaptation to our rapidly developing
civilization.” The American decreases in younger ages are not as great as in
England and Wales and they change into increase at about the age of forty-
five and continue to increase thereafter, while in England and Wales the
decline occurs at all ages. In 1900 or thereabouts the death rates in the
middle ages of life were heavier in the United States than in Prussia,
France, Italy, and Sweden. Since then death rates in the United States at
these ages have grown even greater.
128
Better hygienic methods, according to Fisher, started with Pasteur,
who said it was within the power of man to rid himself of every parasitic
disease. Hygienists have followed this clue. The Roosevelt Conservation
Committee in its report on national vitality and the summary of European
life tables show that human life lengthened during the 17th and 18th
centuries at the rate of only 4 years per century, while during the first three-
quarters of the 19th it lengthened almost twice as fast and since that four
times as fast, or about 17 years per century. If we could continue to increase
life seventeen years a century, the world would soon be peopled with
Methuselahs. We are witnessing a race between two tendencies, the
reduction of the acute infections, such as typhoid, and an increase of the
chronic or degenerative diseases, such as sclerosis, Bright’s disease, etc.
The degenerative tendency appears more in evidence here than elsewhere.
In Sweden the expectation of life increases at all ages. Even the

nonagenarians have more years to live than did those of former days in the
United States. We are freer from germs than our ancestors but our vital
organs wear out sooner. And this degeneration of our bodies follows that of
our habits. In England, where these diseases are not increasing, individual
exercise out of doors probably has something to do with it. In Sweden
individual hygiene is better cultivated than anywhere else in the world. It is
the only land where public health includes private habits and touches the
life of the people, especially through the school. The best statistics show
that a large number of our young men and women suffer from diseases of
heart, kidneys, lungs, and circulation, with impairment enough to consult a
physician, that is, over half of our young men and women in active work
and presumably selected for their work as fit, are found, although unaware
of the fact themselves, to be in need of medical attention; while 37 per cent
are on the road to impairment because of the use of too much alcohol,
tobacco, etc. Now, a stitch in time saves nine. Thus the lesson to all of us is
obvious.
129
I. M. Rubinow says the problem of poverty among the old is
connected with inability to find work because productive power has waned
forever. American experience in tables of mortality shows that of 100
persons at the age of 20, 53 will reach 65; 12, 70; at which time the average
expectation of life will be 8½ years. If we take 100 people at the age of 30,
53 will live to 65; 48 to 70. But this table was compiled half a century ago,
although it is still used—to the great profit of insurance companies as
expectation has greatly increased. Ten to fifteen years of life over sixty-five
are assured to more than half all wage workers. In 1880 the percentage of
persons 65 or over was 3.5; in 1890, 3.9; in 1900, 4.2; in 1910, 4.3. The
number over 65 per 1000/15 increased from 54 to 60 in 1890, and to 63 in
1910. Employed males over 65 per 1000/15 constituted 50 in 1890; and in
1900, 47. Thus the production of old men is increased while the proportion
of old men is declining. In 1880, of all old men over 65 years of age, 73.8
per cent were gainfully employed; in 1900, only 68.4 per cent. The total
number of men over 65 in 1900 was 1,555,000. Thus economic progress in
ten years meant an additional hundred thousand thrown out of employment.
In agriculture, 6.1 per cent of the men employed are over 65; in the
professions, 5.5 per cent; but in manufacture and mechanics, only 3.5 per
cent; and in trade and transportation, 3 per cent. Thus old men are either

thrown out or shifted to unskilled occupations. What does the “iron law” of
the increase of old age dependency under a system of wage labor mean? It
is wrong to seek the cause in exceptional misfortune or in psychological or
ethical feeling. The author of “Old Age Dependencies in the United States”
says after sixty men become dependent by easy stages—property, friends,
relatives, and ambition go and only a few years of life remain, with death
final. The wage-earner is swept from the class of hopeful, independent
citizens into that of the helpless poor.
As to the population problem, Raymond Pearl has studied the ratio
between births and deaths in France, Prussia, Bavaria, and England and
130
Wales from 1913 to 1920 and finds that, in general, the birth ratios rose
during the war—in England to the 100 per cent mark—and that
immediately after the war was over the death-birth ratio began to drop
rapidly in all countries. Vienna suffered perhaps more than any other city
but made the best recovery, showing how promptly the growth of
population tends to regulate itself back toward the normal after even so
great a disturbance. Thus the war, which was the greatest depopulator since
the epidemic of the Middle Ages, caused “only a momentary hesitation in
the steady onward march of population growth.” If we take any given land
area of fixed limits, there must necessarily be an upper limit to the number
of people it can support, but this limit will be approached asymtotically and
the most rapid rise will be midway between the upper and lower limit,
namely, at that point where half the possible resources of subsistence have
been drawn upon and utilized. The statistician must approach this problem
as the astronomer does in calculating the complete orbit of a comet, that is,
he must construct his curve from a limited number of specific data. If we
study the curve of growth of population in this country, we find that we
have long since passed the most rapid rate of increase. If we compare this
with that of France, which is an old country and much nearer the upper limit
than ours, which started near the lower asymtote only a century and a half
ago; or compare it with that of Serbia, which is intermediate, all the
statistics available conform with singular accuracy to the theoretic curve.
Professor Pearl concludes that this country has passed the point of most
rapid increase, that this rate began to decline about April 1, 1914, when our
population was 98,637,000, and that our upper limit will be reached about
the year 2100, when the population will be 197,274,000 or nearly double

what it is now, with about 66 persons per square mile. Our population will
be then far less dense than in many other countries, but the latter are not
self-supporting. He even estimates how many calories, vegetable and
animal, each individual will require daily and compares this with the
agricultural possibilities of the future. Such considerations lead him to
stress the importance of birth control. This had long been practiced in
France before the war, where the birth- and death-rate nearly balanced, so
that industrial development simply raised the standard of living. Germany,
on the other hand, encouraged the increase of her population by every
means and her scheme was, when the pressure became too great, to
facilitate the overflow of her surplus population elsewhere. “A stationary
population where birth-rate and death-rate are made to balance is
necessarily a population with a relative excess of persons in the higher age
groups, not of much use as fighters, and a relative deficiency of persons in
the lower age groups where the best fighters are. On the contrary, a people
with a high birth-rate has a population with an excess of persons in the
younger age groups.”
In his discussion of life tables Pearl starts with that of Glover based on
the registration area of the United States in 1910. If we assume an original
hundred thousand starting together at birth we note that at the beginning of
the second year of life only 88,538 survive. In the next year 2446 drop out;
the year following, 1062. At forty about 30,000 have passed away and the
line descends with increasing rapidity until about eighty, when it drops
more slowly till soon after the century mark all the original hundred
thousand have passed away. Expectation of life is the mean or average
number of persons surviving at a stated age. Pearl’s diagrams show that the
expectation of life of those born in Breslau in the seventeenth century was
very much lower than that of an individual born in the United States in
1910, the difference amounting to 18 years. At the age of ten it has sunk to
12; at twenty, to 10 years; at fifty, to 4. But the individual of eighty in
Breslau in the seventeenth century could expect to live longer than the
individual of the same age now in the United States. The same result is
found if we compare United States tables now with those of England in the
middle of the eighteenth century, where expectation was also less before
and greater after eighty. Pearson’s study of Egyptian mummy cases two
thousand years old shows that expectation there was far lower yet through
all the early stages of life, although after seventy those who survived had a

greatly increased expectation. Thus either man to-day is constitutionally
fitter to survive or else he has made himself better conditions up to about
the seventh decade. The reason why expectation increased after that period
is because conditions were so unfavorable that all but the very most rugged
succumbed earlier in life and the proportion of those who reached advanced
age was far less than now. In Rome, during the first three or four centuries
of the Christian era, the expectation was less yet until nearly sixty, after
which it rose, and it is significant that expectation of life was far less under
the conditions then prevailing for women than for men at all ages of life,
which is the reverse of conditions now prevailing. In the Roman provinces,
however, expectation was greater than in the Eternal City. In the Roman-
African population, although there was greater mortality to about forty,
expectation of life was superior after that age in the early part of the
Christian era to what it now is.
In considering life tables that give the number of deaths occurring at
each age, which give an S-shaped curve falling very rapidly before the end
of the second year and reaching its highest subsequent point at seventy, Karl
Pearson finds in this S-shaped curve five components which he typifies as
five Deaths shooting with different weapons and with differing precision as
the procession of human beings crosses the Bridge of Life. The first Death
is a marksman of deadly aim and unremitting diligence who kills before as
well as after birth. The second, who aims at childhood, has a very
concentrated fire. The third, who shoots at youth, has not a very deadly or
accurate weapon but one rather to be compared with a bow and arrow. The
fire of the fourth marksman is slow, scattered, and not very destructive, as if
from an old-fashioned blunderbus. The last Death plies the rifle, which
none escape. Pearl justly criticises this conception because “no analysis of
the deaths into natural divisions by causes or otherwise has yet been made
such that the totals in the various groups would conform to these frequency
curves.” Thus he holds that Pearson’s concept of the five deaths does not
represent any biological reality but only demonstrates, as any other equally
successful curve would do, that deaths do not occur chaotically but instead
“in a regular manner capable of representation by mathematical function in
respect of age.”

II

Let us glance briefly at the public and private provisions in different
lands for the care of the aged, another large topic with a literature of its
own. Here, too, we find great diversity of method and theory which it
would be premature to attempt to harmonize. Indeed, so limited is our
present knowledge of old age that the available data here also open rather
than close most of the great questions about it, although we do seem to be at
the beginning of a new era regarding this stage of life. If on the one hand,
the length of life is increasing, as we have seen, on the other the intensity of
modern life and industry is steadily reducing the age of maximal efficiency
so that we feel the handicap of years earlier in life than formerly. The
pressure of the advancing upon the retiring generation is ever-growing and
if the manual laborer lives longer, he feels the impairment of age sooner. In
fact, society is coming to a clearer realization, on the one hand, that youth
must be served and conserved and, on the other, is just beginning to see that
the same is true of old age.
Not only is the average length of human life increasing as civilization
advances but so is the relative and absolute number of old people. Although
under the harder conditions that once prevailed those who reached
advanced years did so by inherent energy of constitution as the choicest
products of natural selection (even though relatively fewer in numbers), it is
fortunate that those who now attain 60, 70, 80, etc., are on the average far
more comfortable, as well as more numerous than ever before. Not only is
eyesight conserved, loss of teeth made good, and many of the ailments of
the aged mitigated by modern medicine and hygiene, but by homes,
pensions, etc., their lot is made far easier.
Youth tends to live in and for the present and middle life is too
absorbing; while the decrepitude of old age seems so remote and its
attainment so uncertain that the masses of mankind are still far too
improvident of the future. It is somewhat as if our race had developed in
tropical abundance where there was little need of providing food, clothing,
and shelter, and had not adjusted even to a more northern climate, still less
to the complexities of modern civilization and least of all to the increased
chance of attaining old age with its infirmities. Still, great progress has been
made in foresight and futures play an ever greater rôle in human

calculations. The impulse to accumulate possessions itself always has a
protensive factor and we cannot amass property without thinking of its
safety and its use, and so we lay by, insure and bequeath.
Nevertheless, under the conditions of life in the modern city, and
especially since the Industrial Revolution and the employment of masses of
women and men at wages that always tend to gravitate toward a minimum,
it is impossible for many to save and also to rear families, while
intemperance and vice always furnish their quota to the classes that outlive
their serviceable years in dire poverty and, as old age advances, become
increasingly dependent not only for subsistence but also for personal care.
There are still a few students of the social and economic questions here
involved who urge that all the aged, even the latter group, should, if
possible, be cared for in their own homes by their children and
grandchildren and that to remove them to institutions, public or private, not
only robs them of interest in life but weakens filial piety and is detrimental
to the interests of the family and to the instincts upon which it rests. They
urge that all children owe to all parents this return for the care that was
bestowed on them during their early, helpless years and that such
ministrations are essential for a true and complete home, etc. But even if we
grant all this, there still remain the childless old and poor who are alone in
the world. There are also the vicious, toward whom their children, with too
much reason, feel that they owe nothing, that their own very existence was
due to the accidents of passion, and that they were not only unwelcome
guests but were made the victims of cruelty, want, etc. Then there are the
sick who cannot be properly cared for at home and each additional mouth
always means less food for all the rest.
The old most of all need personal provision and suffer most from mass
treatment, for they are not a class but are hyperindividualized. Not only do
some become old while they are yet young in years, and vice versa, but
there is the greatest diversity in food, regimen, and in most bodily and
psychic needs. To say nothing of disposition, diathesis, or temperament, the
old often develop what seem to others senseless idiosyncrasies that are
really expressive of essential traits and require not only kindly
consideration but careful study. It is hard for them, most of all for old
women, to be deprived of contact with the young and to be confined to
intercourse with only those of their own generation. It is also hard on them

to be denied the privilege of privacy at will, of having certain things all
their own, with a secure place accessible to them alone in which to keep
them. For myself I am convinced that the so-called moroseness of old age is
largely due to the inconsiderate treatment it receives. Its real instinct is to
serve no less than to conserve. Even in the best appointed homes for the
aged that I have visited the great need seems to me to be occupation with
things felt to be useful and individual exemptions from rigid rules
mechanically enforced for all. All have their own tastes, aptitudes, habits, as
well as mementos and keepsakes, which should always be respected, and
every possible facility should be given not only for visits and
correspondence but for current reading in order to maintain a larger surface
of contact with the world without. The old thus constitute, in a sense, a
privileged and even a new “leisure class,” which Veblen omitted to
characterize. The very fact that they have survived means that they have
borne the burden and heat of life’s trying day better than those who have
died. In a large over-all sense, thus, they survived because they were the
fittest and even though they may have wrought solely with an eye to their
own personal benefit they have, nevertheless, helped on the world’s work.
Our streets, buildings, machines, farms, mines, goods, produce, means of
transportation—all these are, in a sense, the bequest of vanished and retiring
to future generations, and even whatever stamina their children have is
more or less due to their virtue, while their very longevity is perhaps the
best of all they have transmitted to their offspring for, as A. G. Bell has
shown, fecundity and long life go together.
Again, as the young and middle-aged most often show the energy that
impels to migrations, it is often inferred that newly settled lands contain the
lowest percentages of old people. This, however, seems to be true only for a
very limited period and indeed the reverse may soon come to be the case,
for the very vigor that impels the emigrant is a trait of those who will also
live long; whence it often comes that after a few decades new territories
have relatively more aged people than are found in older communities from
which the more viable have emigrated and the less viable been eliminated
by death. This is, on the whole, fortunate, because the wisdom that only
years bring acts like a balance wheel to regulate the impulsions of youth,
which always need to be more or less controlled. Thus, in our Western
communities we often observe, along with the most advanced ultra-modern
steps in material progress and the newest political devices, a certain

conservatism in social mores, creeds, etc., which show not only a stagnation
but a regression of culture that is typical of progressive senescence and its
psychic retardation.
We do little to fit for old age and so come to it unprepared and
uninformed. The senses fail, but usually so gradually that we rarely realize
the full extent of our loss; at any rate, we have time to become adjusted and
perhaps reconciled to it. The muscles very gradually atrophy, so that all
efferent energy declines and we can do ever less. Indeed, in a new and quite
scientific fashion we can speak of old age as the “great fatigue,” for Hodge,
Dolley, and Richardson and Orr have shown that the changes in brain cells
are almost identical in both. Loss of memory for recent events disorients the
old from their environment. They forget names and their vocabulary
contracts as the brain shrinks. The mental pace slows down. Their feelings
and emotions are less intense, while control over them is often diminished.
The friends of their youth are dead; their authority is gone; they are not
consulted where once they had everything to say. And so they come at last
by slow degrees to realize that they belong to a generation that is passed
and the little world about them of which they were once so vital a part is
neglecting if not actually crowding them aside. If they come to see that
things go on very well without them, both they and their environment are
fortunate; but alas! for both if they gravitate toward the conviction that as
they withdraw all goes wrong.
Nearly every civilized country to-day makes some provision for the
aged poor. While they are often cared for along with the infirm and sick in
hospitals, or with paupers in poor- and workhouses, or allowed to beg on
the street, etc., there are now many charitable funds and pensions, public
and private, provided especially for the aged. Most funds for all the
dependent classes can also be used for their benefit at home or in
institutions; and social and philanthropic work, where it exists, is always
ready to consider helpless age, which has its own appeal to sympathy and
benevolence. The number of such cases is almost everywhere increasing
and so are the provisions for them. As charity has always been praised as a
virtue, it is now becoming also a science, and the peculiar nature and needs
of old age are being better understood, although there is yet very much to be
done in studying this stage of life which has in the past been so neglected
and misunderstood. We are now far more ignorant of senescence than of

adolescence, childhood, or middle age, but it is quite as unique, on the
whole, and more apart than any of these other periods. There is a sense, too,
in which those in each stage of life know least of it. The child knows little
of childhood, which had to be discovered in this “century of the child.” The
second childhood of old age often knows itself only little better. The child
cannot, the old will not, realize their age for what it is and what it means.
Our conspectus is as follows:
The first German Old Age and Invalidity Insurance Law dates from
1889 and has been modified since by various supplementary acts so that it
is now very comprehensive. These acts were due to the social democratic
agitation that prompted Bismarck to set a backfire and thus allay the
discontent of the working classes. Old-age insurance has been obligatory
since 1889 upon practically all laborers and officials paid under $500 a year
and the right to insure voluntarily is extended to others. The employer is
held responsible for the insurance of everyone and deducts the workman’s
share of the premium from his wages. In 1910 some 14,000,000 out of a
population of 60,000,000 were thus insured. The obligation to insure begins
with the 17th year and a percentage of the wages must be paid for 1200
weeks. The Empire and the employer also contribute—the former a fixed
annual sum of $11.90. There are five wage classes and a special postal
service with insurance stamps. It is, however, impossible to obtain from
German reports much data for old age alone, which is almost always
classed with invalidity and often with accident, sickness, etc. As in every
country, there was at first much discussion whether such social insurance
should be compulsory or voluntary, contributory or non-contributory,
universal or partial, etc., and different countries and agencies have decided
these questions differently.
Austria since 1906 had a limited system of old age insurance for certain
salaried employees of the middle class. But a sweeping change in the bill in
1908 was intended to include nearly 10,000,000 of the population. Old-age
pensions could be paid at 65 to those insured for a period of thirty years.
The scheme was worked out in very great detail but, as in other German
lands, was a distinctly political measure provoked in Austria by the
Socialists, who, as elsewhere, at first hesitated to adopt a measure that gave
the Government, to which they had been opposed, the prestige of having
realized so many of their own ideas by these measures. The movement soon

won many supporters, however, from their ranks. As a political coup it was
a great success and most Socialists could find no alternative but to accept it,
at least in principle, although criticism of the small and inadequate funds
received by the pensioners is common.
131
H. J. Hoare best describes the British Old Age Pension Acts 1908–
1911, the scheme of which is as follows: Both sexes, married or single, over
70, of British nationality, who for 12 years out of the last 20 were residents,
and whose yearly income does not exceed 31 pounds and 10 shillings, are
eligible for pensions. They make no contributions, the money coming from
the state. The scheme is worked jointly by the Civil Service and local
authorities; and only inmates of workhouses, asylums, inebriates’ homes,
prisons, and those who have habitually failed to work are disqualified. The
pension cannot be charged or assigned and if the pensioner is bankrupt, the
pension cannot pass to a trustee or creditor. The receipt of such a pension
deprives of no franchise or privilege and subjects to no disability, as is the
case with those who accept the poor rates. In 1913, 363,811 men and
604,110 women were pensioners, 62.5 per cent of all being women. Where
the yearly means of the pensioner does not exceed 21 pounds, he or she
receives 5 shillings a week; if between 21 and 23 pounds 12s. 6d., 4
shillings a week; and so on through 6 classes, those whose income is
between 28 pounds 7s. 6d. and 31 pounds 11s. receiving one shilling a
week. As a matter of fact, however, 94 per cent of the pensions are at the
full rate. The expense of administering this system is less than half of one
per cent of the total amount of pensions.
132
In 1920, 920,198 old men and women received pensions. The chief
grievances the old find against this system are: (1) that it does not begin at
65; and especially (2) that it is so little, for, of course, no one can begin to
exist to-day on 5s. a week. Both these limitations cause very acute
complaint among the beneficiaries themselves.
Practically every other European country has adopted some form of old
133
age relief. Denmark in 1891 put in operation a scheme of outdoor relief
for the deserving aged poor. This, too, was done as a political move to
reconcile radicals and liberals. Its pensionable age of 60 years is, I believe,
the lowest anywhere found. The amount of the dotation is not fixed; local

authorities decide it in each individual case. It must be, however, “sufficient
for support.” Communes and the state bear the expense equally.
Belgium’s Old Age Pension Act of 1900 is a comprehensive scheme of
assisted insurance and non-contributory pensions. It aims, first, to
encourage workers to save; and, second, to help the aged by special grants.
It has its own superannuation fund bank. Annuities rarely exceed $72 and
are payable at 65. The pensions are graded according to the age of the
insured, and at last accounts nearly a million, or one-eighth of the
population, benefited.
France has a voluntary, contributory old-age insurance system
administered through a national bank with a state guarantee, which goes
back to 1850 but has been much perfected by subsequent legislation. It
differs only in detail from the Belgian scheme. The amount of the insurance
is not less than $12 or more than $48 a year and may be given in money,
hospital service, or provisions. The permissible pension age in France is
now 65.
Since 1898 Italy has had a system of voluntary, contributory insurance,
subsidized by the state, which provides annuities after the age of 60 if the
recipient has paid his dues for 25 years.
The chief British colonies have adopted very wise and comprehensive
systems of old age pensions. New Zealand provides a maximum pension of
$130 a year in monthly installments to those of 65 who are “of good moral
character and have led a sober, reputable life.” Each pension is only granted
for a year but is renewable upon request.
The Australian colonies, one after another, enacted old-age pension
laws near the close of the first decade of the present century. These grants
are made “as a right and not as a charity,” and the commissioner determines
the amount of the pension within limits according to what he deems the
needs of each case. A special investigation is made for each applicant.
The Canadian system (1908) differs widely from that of Australia. Its
preamble states that it is to promote thrift and to encourage individual
provisions for old age. The Minister of the Interior may contract with any
Canadian for the sale of an annuity, between the limits of $50 and $600,
although none can be payable under the age of 55. If the purchaser of an

annuity dies before it becomes payable, all of it with compound interest is
returned to his heirs. As this system is voluntary, very vigorous efforts were
made by organizers and lecturers to bring it to the attention of, and make it
attractive to, the people, and these thrift campaigns have been highly
educative.
134
Francis A. Carman tells us that the Canadian scheme, like most
others, was to alleviate the universal dread of the poorhouse. It was adopted
to circumvent the growing demand for the support of old age by the
Government. Its unique features are: no forfeiture in case payments are
interrupted or ceased, and the annuities cannot be mortgaged, seized for
debt, or anticipated. Admirable as is the scheme, there have been less than
two thousand to enjoy its full benefits. It has not reached the day laborer
but, for the most part, only clerks and teachers.
The United States is the only nation that has no retiring system or
provision for old age, even for its employees, save for soldiers and for
judges of the Supreme Court, who may retire after ten years of service or on
having attained the age of 75 on full salaries. Military pensions go back
nearly to the Revolutionary War. There has been much legislation since. In
1908 there were no less than 951,687 pensioners who received more than
$153,000,000, the survivors of the Civil War constituting 65 per cent of all.
There are also retirement pensions for officers and enlisted men in the
regular Army. Officers at the age of 64 must be retired, with no option, on
three-fourths pay.
No American state has established any system of old age pensions,
although many Southern states provide for Confederate veterans; but many
states or cities have provided for firemen, policemen, teachers, and certain
other public employees.
135
Mabel L. Nassau personally studied the history of one hundred poor
old people in the very heart of New York city and observed them as a
neighborhood study, dividing her cases into those wholly or partly self-
supporting, and wholly or partly dependent upon their families or upon
charity. She stresses the fact so abundantly illustrated that it was impossible
for most of these destitute individuals to put by money for their old age.
The lives of most of them had been spent in the direst poverty, with low
wages, almost no industrial training, long intervals of non-employment,

illness often due to malnutrition, not to mention the really not very common
effects of drink and vice. They often have little experience in buying and
have all their lives been cheated and imposed on. Very many have the finest
sensibilities, although this is often not suspected because they lack
education to express their feelings. In this stratum of society, although the
young are often underfed and the middle aged overworked, the old have the
hardest time. The burden of the aged falls hardest upon the children, who
must get a work certificate as soon as possible to help feed their
grandparents. The old generally have a horror of going to an institution; and
many of these are so managed as to justify this dread, separating married
couples, imposing senseless rules, providing poor food and perhaps no
recreation, and greatly restricting liberties, so that life is hopelessly
monotonous, with no incentive for personal effort. The inmates generally
have no private place, even a locked drawer, to keep personal effects, so
that they can really own nothing. Mills’ hotels seem nearer the ideal. Many
systems to help the old involve conditions that amount to dominating their
lives. Old age is really a risk to which all are liable and self-respect and
thrift require us to give more attention to it. It should be no more of a
disgrace to accept a pension for old age than for service in war. State aid
assumes that the old have added to the health and power of the state by their
work, and recognizes this.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad established the first pension system
in this industry in 1884 and in the last two decades many corporations,
mercantile houses, banks, etc., have established such systems. The above
Massachusetts Report supplies many details of fifty of these systems. In the
modern business world the problem of dealing with aged employees is
increasingly difficult. The use of machinery, specialization, and the modern
efficiency ideals have made it increasingly hard for the old to keep the pace
and the universal demand now is for younger men, so that many firms
actually refuse new men over thirty-five. Men wear out fast. To carry the
incapacitated on their payroll is not only not economic but discouraging to
the working force and it is not humane to turn them adrift. The general
scheme adopted in view of these facts is either voluntary or compulsory
retirement at a certain age, with weekly or monthly allowances, the amount
of which depends upon the length of service and the wage, the expense of
the system being borne by the employer with help from the employee. The
economic motives, of course, have been more potent than the humanitarian.

It has been good business policy, for it not only prevents the waste of using
worn-out men but it stimulates loyalty on the part of the working force.
Voluntary retirement is generally at 60 and compulsory at 70, but this varies
greatly, as does the time of service upon which aid is conditioned, which is
usually from 10 to 30 years. Often the allowance is one per cent of the
average wage during the last 10 years; for example, an employee who has
worked 40 years at an average wage of $50 a month would receive $20. The
system is generally administered by a board composed of both employers
and employees. Some firms expressly repudiate all contractual rights.
Inquiry was made in Massachusetts of over a thousand employers but
only three hundred and sixty-two replies were received; and of these only
four had regular systems of retirement pensions, although often special
grants were made. This was a very delicate inquiry and the excuses for the
absence of any pension system usually were that the business was itself too
insecure or that the working force was too unstable and transitory.
Many fraternal organizations have old-age benefits. But the early
history of this movement is strewn with financial wrecks, because the rates
were too low and philanthropic impulses outweighed scientific methods.
Very few of these organizations had anything that can be called old-age
pensions or benefits, although some of them are now coming to do so.
A few trade unions have superannuation features, particularly the
International Typographical Union and the Amalgamated Societies of
Engineers, also carpenters and joiners. But here, again, benefits are small.
Industrial insurance is really life insurance for small amounts and is
designed for wage earners, with premiums payable weekly, collected from
homes by agents, and the premiums graded in multiples of five cents. This
method really began in London in 1854 and despite initial errors the
movement has grown rapidly, so that there are now many millions of
industrial policies in force in that country. But only very recently have they
attempted specific insurance against old age. Here the premiums usually
cease at 65 and the annuity is rarely over $100.
The Krupp Company at Essen had, before the war, one of the most
elaborate systems of age insurance, conducted solely for the benefit of the
employees and to which the Company contributed largely. The scheme is
complex and was often interpellated in the Reichstag, especially on the

point of forfeiture of payments of members who leave the firm. Each
workman pays 2½ per cent, which is deducted from his wages. The system
is chiefly for those who do not earn over 2000 marks a year. Retirement is
permissible after 20 years of service or on reaching the age of 65. After 20
years the workman receives 40 per cent of his earnings, increasing yearly
by 1½ per cent up to a maximum, after 44 years, of 75 per cent. If he dies,
his widow receives half his pension, and each child 10 per cent. If the
mother dies, each child receives 15 per cent. The total membership varies
from 30,000 to 40,000, and the average pension is 683 marks. A number of
other large German industrial concerns have adopted certain features of this
scheme.
Most of the Friendly Societies of Great Britain make provision for old
age insurance but only to a limited extent, insuring at the same time against
sickness, unemployment, providing death benefits, etc. The germ of all such
work is found in the medieval trade guilds, and the necessity of it was
immensely enhanced by the development of the factory system and what is
called the Industrial Revolution.
After 20 years of discussion, the Sterling-Lehlbach Act, passed by
Congress and which went into effect in August, 1920, provides federal
civil-service pensions for all classes of employees upon retirement. It is
contributory and compulsory, requiring each to contribute 2½ per cent of
their salaries. The minimum age of retirement is 65; all must retire at 70;
and 15 years of service are required for eligibility to an allowance, the
annuity running from a minimum of $180 after 15 years of service to a
maximum of $720 after 30 years. The scheme takes no account of the
amount of salary at the time of retirement and certainly $720 is no
inducement to a man receiving $2000 to resign.
In recent years there has been a growing conviction not only that the
salaries of teachers must be increased, “but some kind of retiring allowance
provided for all public school teachers, if teaching is to become a
136
profession.” These are provided by nearly every country of Western
Europe; and in 1916, 32 states in this country had made some provision for
the retirement of teachers, most of them contributory systems where
teachers insured themselves against disability.

137
Our country, however, is still far behind others in this respect. The
first city-school system to provide retirement funds was in Chicago in 1893,
followed two years later by a New Jersey mutual-benefit plan, and there are
now eight or nine types of state, county, and city pension systems in the
country. The peculiar difficulty here is found in the fact that one-fourth of
our 720,000 school teachers leave teaching every year, making the average
term of service four years and causing 185,000 new inexperienced teachers
to begin each year. Thus few expect to benefit from such a system and so
long as it is voluntary it is utterly inadequate. “While pensions and tenure
help to secure and hold good teachers, they also make it possible to free
schools with social justice and dignity from superannuated and
incapacitated teachers. This is almost as great a benefit as the others to the
schools, the children, and society.”
138
There are two volumes which, as Professor H. S. Pritchett well says
in an able article on pension literature (Fifteenth Annual Report of the
Carnegie Foundation, 1920) “mark the close of one period in the history of
pensions and the beginning of a new scientific one.” The most difficult
question is the method of calculating the amount of superannuation
benefits. If the basis is the flat rate, this is simple; but if it is the average of
the salary given during the last five or ten years, or during the whole period
of service, the difficulty in determining the amount of actual contributions
to yield the prospective benefit becomes very great. Teachers’ salaries are,
especially now, very unstable. A pension system based on anticipated pay
leaves too much in suspense. It is difficult to provide pensions on a
subsistence basis, which also bears some relation to final salary. If the
pension is too high, there is temptation to retire too early; if it is too low, to
retire too late. Ultimately, too, teachers must be able to migrate without loss
or change of status and this would involve reciprocity between different
cities and even states. In New York, before the new system went into effect
in 1921, there were 2,000 different rates; and in Pennsylvania, 86. The new
system of New York, which developed because the old one had settled into
bankruptcy, although optional for teachers appointed before 1921 is
compulsory for those appointed after and the pension is to consist of half
the average salary during the last five years; the payment is not to exceed
$800 and this will be paid after 25 years of service. The old view which
held that the very word “pension” suggested a cripple and real manhood

would compel everyone to lay by for old age, and which flattered those who
entered their profession in youth with the hope that in old age they “might
be permitted to sun themselves on the veranda of a state poorhouse,” has
entirely passed away. But pensions are no longer considered as a form of
charity or a form of paternalism, or even as a reward for service. They only
demand of the teacher the same thrift as do savings and their proper
function is to secure efficiency of service and they should be regarded “as a
condition of service just the same as a salary.” Most of even the best recent
systems, like that of the District of Columbia and the Y. M. C. A. officers’
pension plan, which is just about to go into operation, are a compromise
between the old and the new ideas. The same is true of civil-service
pensions in New York state and city.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1920
had a total fund of $24,628,000 and its retirement allowances for that year
were $875,514.04, with allowances then in force to 555 individuals, or an
average to each of $1,568.77. The fund was originally administered solely
in the form of gifts but the unexpected number of applicants made it
necessary to gradually change to a contractual plan involving very moderate
contributions from the institutions benefited, which now include those of
Canada as well as of this country. It is one of the most wise and beneficent
gifts of the great philanthropist who founded it and its influence in giving
permanence in the sense of security to active professors still efficient, and
relieving institutions of those past their usefulness to make way for younger
men, is unquestionably for good.
The President of the Foundation has grappled with the whole subject of
industrial pensions. It was at first planned that the same principles should be
applied here as those in the more stabilized professions but this is
impossible because of the labor turnover each year, which amounts to 100
to 200 per cent of their employees in some industrial establishments. It is
one of the functions of the pension system to reduce the turnover and to
secure continuity of service and avoid migrations. Many systems do not
provide for the return of the employee’s contributions in the cases of
withdrawal or dismissal, or for the use of such contributions for other
purposes, so that the fund accumulated would soon, in some cases, run into
millions. It does not follow, however, that the opposite tendencies now
manifest to seek a solution of the problem in a non-contributory scheme are

sound, for this would still encounter the opposition of labor unions, who see
in all such schemes a return to feudalism or an attempt to make labor stick
to its job by the use of vague promises, to the fulfillment of which the
employee himself contributes in the long run in the form of depressed
wages. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, however, seems to have
found a way out and has proposed to “write annuity contracts maturing at
the age of 65 under which the pension is purchased each year in small units
representing either flat rate or a percentage of salary. The employer, the
employee, or both, make a contribution each year toward the pension to fall
due on the retirement of the employee,” who receives a bond each year that
assures him a pension when he retires, each bond being complete in itself.
This scheme costs little to administer and it meets the objection against a
non-contributory system, that although pensions defer pay only the
employee who survives in the same service until retirement receives the
benefit promised, by the provision that this bond is given each year and
becomes his property, to be realized at a fixed age in later years.
139
Frederick L. Hoffmann gives us one of the sanest and most
compendious summaries of the negative views on this whole subject.
Present systems have not eliminated poorhouses or the pauper’s grave. Of
the 1,981,208 individuals in the United States over 70, according to the
census of 1898, a great majority would welcome a pension; and of all
legislation this is most irreversible. On the contrary, old beneficiaries
constantly agitate for more. State pension systems, too, do not materially
reduce the cost of charitable relief, whether indoor or outdoor. Only in a last
resort should the state attempt to do what can be done by private institutions
or by private individual foresight and nothing should discourage voluntary
thrift of any kind. Where pensions have caused the removal of beneficiaries
from asylums or almshouses, the results have generally been unfavorable.
Pensions are chiefly of benefit to those not within the scope of poor law
administration or private charitable aid. It is just this class which pensions
would help that is now most efficient in helping themselves. If the family is
at all kept up to its ideal, the young will help the old as they have been
helped by them. This is not charity but mutual aid based upon mutual
obligation for service rendered and there can be no substitute for this. It is
this class that forms the backbone of a nation and which, by even moderate
foresight, could provide for a modest support in their old age. The billions

of dollars that they have invested in savings banks and in insurance
institutions of various kinds show that they are not unmindful of the future.
Legislation is needed to stamp out fraudulent enterprises designed to attract
small savings on the plea of large returns; therefore, security should be the
first consideration in such investments. The prevailing wages should make
it possible for the masses of wage earners to provide the support necessary
for their old age, at their own cost and in their own way, if they are given
sufficient intelligence and motive and could feel sufficient security. To take
an example, 5 per cent of a wage of $900 per annum, or $45, commencing
with the age of 30 and continuing to 65, would produce an annuity of $450.
Of course, the earlier in life the periodical payment begins, the smaller
would be the annual amount required to be paid. The fact is that parents
who have done well by their children seldom come to grief in their old age,
except by special misfortune. Nothing must be done to weaken the virtues
here involved. The view that old-age pensions should be given as a right
and not as an act of charity is one-sided, because wage workers have not
spent their lives in behalf of the state but have sought to aid themselves in
140
their own way and sold their services to the highest bidder.
141
L. W. Squier tells us that of the 18,000,000 wage earners in the
United States, about 1,250,000 reach the age of 65 in want and are not
sufficiently supported by public or private charities which, in round
numbers, cost the country $250,000,000. Of the 2,000,000 non-fatal
accidents Hoffmann estimates per year, the old, to be sure, have somewhat
less than their share. The United States Bureau of Labor lately estimated
that $220,000,000 per annum is the average the laborer has to pay for
medicines alone, not including doctors’ bills, and about 79 per cent of those
in almshouses are either physically or mentally defective. Our total pension
outlay for the War of the Revolution, that of 1812, the Indian wars,
Mexican, Civil, and Spanish, in regular establishments and unclassified, he
estimates at $4,230,381,730. Despite the world unrest there are probably
ever increasing numbers who look forward to a quiet old age, and we must
depend more and more upon inculcating thrift wherever possible and
encourage all to earn more than a living wage.
Present-day man, at his best, is certainly far below the standard, for
nowhere among wild animals do we find so many with defective teeth,
vision, tonsils, bowels, flat foot, etc., and the rejection of nearly one-third of

the drafted men for physical unfitness was a most significant fact. The
trouble is men will not take pains to prolong life and still shrink from
medical examinations at all ages. Some tell us that old people do so most of
all, fearing to know the truth about their condition.
This very cursory sketch must suffice to show the increasing interest in
and the growing magnitude of the economic problem of old age. But before
closing this chapter let us glance at the efforts of the new Life Extension
Institute to prolong life and increase efficiency. It is said to be “five per cent
philanthropy,” and all those whose lives are insured are to make a definite
effort to avoid sickness and defer death. Members are inspected gratis and
all others can be for a moderate fee. A regular system of examination for
repairs is provided for, just as all manufacturers do for their machines, with
a written report to the person’s family physician. At the start the Postal Life
Insurance Company turned over to the new organization its well established
system of examinations for policy-holders and the Metropolitan Life made
an agreement for periodic examinations. The company’s conservation
policy leads an impaired man to consult a physician before it is too late, and
this, we are told, has reduced the death rate among those examined. They
plan to extend this over the whole country. Two-thirds of the profits beyond
5 per cent are to go toward increasing the further usefulness of the
Institution. Judge W. H. Taft is chairman of the Board of Directors while
142
Irving Fisher is chairman of the Committee of One Hundred on Hygiene.
In the Nation of January 8, 1914, commenting on the hygienic
reference board of the Life Extension Institute the writer tells us that they
will even tackle such problems as ventilation, how to clothe and feed the
body, etc. Some have advocated compulsory annual examinations for all.
This the Nation condemns. There is the danger of false diagnosis as to
degree or kind of defect. An ailing man might be injured by knowing the
seriousness of his trouble. It might detract from the joy of life and to
compel it would be an undue invasion of liberty, for it is not like
vaccination and similar measures necessary for all.
What the old need is an occasional examination of sight and hearing, of
respiratory, circulatory, digestive, and perhaps sexual system, each by an
expert, with hygienic and therapeutic suggestions based upon these results.

This the Life Extension Institute does not attempt to furnish and it is
perhaps too much to expect yet.
A few other voluntary organizations for the benefit of the old should be
mentioned here.
The “Borrowed Time Club” of Oak Park, Illinois, dates from the year
1900 but was reorganized in 1911, and in 1920 had 294 names on its roster.
It admits only those of seventy years of age or more and has clubrooms of
its own in which it holds weekly meetings. One of its most impressive
customs is an annual meeting devoted to the memory of the brethren who
have died during the year, with a service at which a floral tribute is laid
upon each vacant chair placed in a line on the platform by younger
members of the families of the deceased. Political and religious questions
are barred. There are no fees but a voluntary offering once a month, and any
citizen of whatever creed or race, whether rich or poor, is eligible. Fraternal
sympathy and companionship are fostered. There is music and a prayer at
most of the meetings, illness of members is reported on, current events
discussed, and a program usually provided. “The main purpose of the
organization is to bring happiness to others.” There are perhaps a hundred
and fifty associate members. This club has several branches, and others of
similar name and character have been established in other cities.
To the writer, the name of the club seems unfortunate in assuming the
Biblical limitation of life at three-score-and-ten, as if we were incurring
indebtedness and living on by the special indulgence of Father Time if we
surpass that age. Why are we debtors after more than before this age, when
the fact is we are living on capital accumulated or inherited and in no sense
on credit? The religious features that seem to characterize every program
are well and no one could have anything but commendation for the interest
displayed in sick members or in the annual tributes to the dead. But the
thanatic outlook from the “west window” should not predominate and the
discussion of current events and interest in vital problems should be kept
most lively to offset the attitude of patheticism to which the old are only too
prone.
The Sunset Club, at present largely composed of women over sixty, has
little organization although it has many branches in various parts of the
country. Its purpose is not only to have old people help and be helped by

others to useful occupations but to supply reading matter, chaperones, etc.
Anyone can start a club anywhere, intellectuals can get together, the rich
can help those in need, those with unoccupied time can help those who need
sympathy and companionship, those with happy homes may occasionally
open them to the homeless, or they can simply form good cheer circles.
There are no dues but volunteer funds have sufficed for this “silver-haired
sisterhood,” which has often provided friends for the friendless and
employment for the unoccupied. Many women of the more or less leisured
class have thus found spheres of usefulness which they preferred to bridge,
gossip, “kettledrum or kaffee-klatsch.” Some branches of the club have an
exchange where members can send things that they make for sale. Young
couples, especially brides, are often aided in starting homes.
In Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland, is a beautiful public park with an
avenue of old trees under which the old men of the district who were come
to the resting time of life used to foregather “for a crack and a smoke.”
Then a kind man, remembering the frequent rainy days there were,
presented them with an old railway carriage as a shelter where this group
could meet in shower or shine. Later the park was extended and a public-
spirited man erected a pretty little dwelling for the club, red tiled, with a
veranda all around. Here are games and books and here the club meets at
will. Provision has also been made for a yearly summer holiday for the
members.
Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, boasts an octogenarian society, the last
annual meeting of which on September 29, 1921, witnessed a gathering of
twenty-one members.
A sagacious and venerable correspondent has suggested to the writer
that the time is ripe for some kind of a senescent league of national
dimensions which should, of course, establish relations with all existing
associations of the old but should slowly develop a somewhat elaborate
organization of its own, with committees on finance, on the literature of
senescence, including its psychology, physiology and hygiene, etc. If such
an organization under any name were founded, it should certainly have an
organ or journal of its own that should be the medium of correspondence,
keeping its members informed to date upon all matters of interest or profit
to them, perhaps keeping tab on instances of extreme longevity or unusual
conservation of energy, with possibly a junior department eventually for

youngsters of fifty. It should concern itself with the phenomena connected
with the turning of the tide of life, which so often occurs even in the fourth
decade. It would be interesting to know how such an organization would
appeal to intelligent old men and women. That it might do great good is
hardly to be doubted.

CHAPTER V

MEDICAL VIEWS AND TREATMENT OF OLD
AGE
The self-knowledge that doctors give—Insidious approach of many
diseases—Medical views of the old age of body and mind (senile
dementia)—Charcot—G. M. Humphry—Sir James Crichton-
Browne—H. M. Friedman—H. Gilford—H. Oertel—A. S. Warthin
—W. Spielmeyer—I. L. Nascher—Sir Dyce Duckworth—Robert
Saundby—Arnold Lorand—T. D. Crothers—C. G. Stockton—
W. G. Thompson—M. L. Price—G. S. Keith—J. M. Taylor—C. W.
Saleeby—C. A. Ewald—Raymond Pearl—Protest against the
prepotence of heredity in determining longevity.

By an instinct that is very deep and strong most old people shrink from
realizing just what their stage of life is and means, although most are ready
enough to discuss such symptoms as are forced upon their consciousness.
Disguise it as we will, old age is now only too commonly a hateful and even
ghastly thing. Even those most garrulous and pessimistic about their infirmities
are often prone to an almost fetishistic focalization upon certain symptom-
groups of their own to the neglect of others by the same mechanism by which
general anxiety may come to a head on a single phobia, which is thus
exaggerated, because all the affectivity of their more general state finds an
outcrop in some special fear. This mechanism is the same, too, as that by
which love may find a vent for itself in some amatory fetish. Few, indeed, are
the old men, and perhaps fewer still the old women, who do not seek to seem
to others younger than their real physiological age, and all even to their
innermost selves are prone to dwell more on what the great deprivator leaves
behind than on what he has taken away. Childhood and youth long forward,
old age longs backward.

Wishing to really know myself as old, I subjected myself upon my
retirement to the examination and tests of some half dozen medical experts for
eyes, ears, heart, lungs, digestive tract, kidneys, and even sex, but was
surprised to find how hard it was to do so. A strong minority of my impulses
preferred the ignorance that is often bliss. There are no mental tests of
generally recognized validity above the teens, so that we have no criteria for
determining psychological age for even the elderly, while psychoanalysts
refuse on the express authority of Freud to take on patients over forty. When it
was well over I was glad, for most organs and functions were found to be in
fair condition, although one was in need of some special care. I realized anew,
however, that there are no gerontologists, as there are experts for women,
children, etc., and that barring acute attacks I must henceforth, for the most
part, be my own physician and that I must give far more attention than ever
before to keeping well and in condition. Body-keeping for the old is a very
personal and pressing problem requiring much time and attention, and the
methods that are successful differ so widely that the diet and regimen good for
one might be dangerous, if not fatal, for another. But my chief interest for
months centered in rather voracious medical and psychiatric literature upon
senility and its disorders till my friends thought me in danger of growing
morbid and predicted and feared hypochondria. Gruesome and depressing as it
all was, it had nevertheless a certain grim fascination to know what a cohort of
disorders encamp about and prey upon the aged, any group of which is liable
to assail and perhaps take the citadel of life by storm. Evasion of these enemies
gives a new sense of heroism.
Rheumatism, lumbago, varicose veins, calcified arteries, compensated for
by enlargement of the heart, its valvular leaks and weakness, high abnormal
blood pressure, adiposity or progressive emaciation, shaking palsy, cramps,
bronchitis, asthma, shortness of breath, gout, stone, Bright’s disease, diabetes,
constipation, piles, hernia, prostate troubles, tuberculosis, cancer, dyspepsias,
flatulence, nausea, vertigo, flaccid and atrophied pudenda, feeble voice,
defective sleep, failing eyesight and hearing, weakness of muscles, gaps in
dentition, rather more hygienic than the complete edentate state; and beyond
all these and many more the certain prospect of death just ahead or around the
corner, liable to come from many of these causes or from any one of them
already so well advanced that to know is no longer to prevent it—these are the
things the old face if they have the courage not to flee from real facts. One or
more of these maladies is sure to strangle, starve, bleed, poison, or paralyze us
suddenly or slowly, and that ere long. Some of us will die from the top down

with dementia more or less developed, while for others some vegetative organ
will collapse and drag down with it all the rest of our powers, which might
otherwise go on for a decade or two. These are the things that often make the
old pessimistic. They are the secrets of age that must be kept from the young
lest they interfere with their joy of life and which religion and philosophy have
done their best from the beginning of history to mitigate. Thus the soul of the
old, when it confronts the sternest of all facts at close quarters, grows more and
more prone to seek diversion than consolation, for the former in fact is the
chief resource of senescence although, as I shall indicate later, modern science
is slowly evolving a third and better one.
Meanwhile, since medicine is far from having yet developed any
systematic or coherent gerontology, although it has marshaled many facts and
given us many hints toward such a science, it has seemed to me that in the
present state of knowledge I can serve the reader better by epitomizing,
without any attempt at systematization that would be certainly premature, the
aperçus and the standpoints of those who seem to me in recent years to have
written more wisely than others upon this theme, as follows.
The only attempt at a history of what medicine has done for old age that I
143
can find is in an old book by Charcot in which he attempts to list and
characterize the far too few studies of any importance made upon the subject
up to that date. He urges that medical science should give far more attention to
it.
144
Dr. G. M. Humphry gives us a memorable study of five hundred old
people of over eighty years of age, including an equal number of males and
females. He stresses the fact that the descending changes of development are
just as orderly as its earlier ascending phases and that civilization enables us to
see far more of the natural processes of senescence than was possible when the
conditions of life were ruder, for we can now promote the powers of self-
maintenance to a degree impossible before. “The chief requisite for longevity
must clearly be the inherent or inborn quality of endurance, of steady,
persistent, nutritive force, which includes recuperative power and resistance to
disturbing agencies and a good degree of balance between the several organs.”
That is, each must be sound in itself and have due relation to the strength of
other organs. “If the heart and digestive system are disproportionately strong,
they will overload and oppress the other organs, one of which will give way.”

His findings indicate that both men and women of average size and stature
live longer than those much larger or smaller. He thinks, too, that there must be
some trait associated with the development of the tubercle bacillus, “which is
not only not incompatible with longevity but is not infrequently associated
with it”; and this condition he found in eighty-two of the cases he studied.
Most of them belonged to long-lived families, had enjoyed good health,
appetite, and digestion, had taken little medicine, eaten little meat, been only
very slightly addicted to alcohol, had been good sleepers, and rarely suffered
from long or exhausting diseases. Most had been much out-of-doors. The
average number of teeth in all these subjects was six for men and three for
women, and only fifty-seven were entirely without them. The upper or alveolar
part of the jaw tended to be absorbed and only the later, firmer growth of the
lower part of it to be retained. In primitive man probably loss of teeth would
materially shorten life. The skull, which generally becomes lighter, may also
sometimes become heavier and increase inwardly as the brain shrinks. The rate
of the heart varies very little as age advances. From eighty to ninety years he
found it averaged 73–74 beats per minute in men and 78–79 in women.
Respiration was 19–20 times per minute and, like the heart, was very slightly
accelerated, although the respiratory change might be due to the prevalence of
bronchitis in old people.
He found little tendency to senile dementia and many of even the very
aged had their mental faculties intact and took a keen interest in passing
events, possessed clear judgment, and were full of thought for the present and
future welfare of others. “It is no less satisfactory to find that the active, even
severe and long-continued intellectual activity of the matured brain seems in
no way to impair its enduring qualities, and that good, earnest, useful
employment of the body and mind are not only compatible with but even
conducive to longevity.”
Of 157 of the males who replied, only six had ever had diseases of the
prostate or bladder, so that in general he thinks that “the aged body does not
seem to be, on the whole, prone to disease.” Few of his returns indicate the
presence of any special malady. “We know that even cancers, when they attack
old people, often make slow progress in them and sometimes fail to make way
at all, remaining stationary or even withering, and the susceptibility to
contagious disease appears to decrease from infancy to old age. Quite as
remarkable is the fact that recovery from wounds, fractures, or operations,
seems to be quite as rapid, and sometimes more so than in middle age. Indeed,
wounds in the old heal very quickly provided they do not slough, indicating

two opposite tendencies.” He also finds evidence of greater vital energy in
parts nearest to those diseased provided they are able to live at all, as if nature
had recuperative processes of stimulating parts adjacent to lesions. He
chronicled few more surprising results than the infrequency of sclerosis.

* * * * *
145
Sir James Crichton-Browne’s long article is a classic and is based on
very comprehensive statistical and other studies. He tells physicians that it
should be their great aim to grow old themselves and to be the cause of old age
in others. The marked increase in the duration of life in recent decades has
been almost entirely confined to its early stages. After 45 the decline in the
death rate has been insignificant; and after 65, as we have elsewhere seen, it
has actually increased. Thus the proportion of men ripened by experience has
in fact declined. What carries off the old? Not fever, smallpox, or phthisis
chiefly, as was once the case, but the following in order of frequency: cancer,
heart diseases, nervous troubles, and kidney complaints, and these are all
degenerative diseases due not so much to intemperance as to the new strains of
modern life, which are less felt in the country and less by women.
Society needs to have life lengthened instead of abbreviated at its extreme
end but men and women to-day are growing old before their time. We often
have deaths reported to be from old age between 45 and 55. Indeed, atrophy
and debility often come prematurely. The long-sightedness of old age seems to
begin earlier than it used to do and the increased number of those who wear
glasses cannot be entirely explained by better diagnosis. It is quite clear that
those who live in hot climates show these optical symptoms of old age earlier
than Europeans. The teeth, too, are certainly degenerating earlier than
formerly, and early baldness is probably increasing still more. Senile insanity
or atrophy of the brain is certainly more common and appears earlier. It
abounds in our metropolitan asylums where human wreckage accumulates.
Very many enter the outer circles of melancholia without proceeding to
dementia and still fewer proceed to suicide, the rate of which is also rapidly
increasing after 45. Touches of this kind of depression are very often felt at the
turning point of life or soon after, perhaps at the first discovery of gray hairs,
and many are tormented in private and perhaps in the silent watches of the
night by the realization that youth is leaving them. Such, however, is the law of
nature, for even the stars and planets grow old, as we know by their spectra.
The voice is not normally shrill or quavering but may be very strong unless the

crop of wild oats, which always ripens in later years, is too rank. Conscience
may awaken near the turn, especially if too many dregs have accumulated in
the cup of life or the machinery has been overstrained. The fact is, the
infirmities often attached to age may, each of them, in single cases be absent,
so that typical old age is rare, and any one of them is far less prevalent than is
generally supposed.
Our life is made up of a series of evolutions of a group of different
functions that develop serially, beginning at different age epochs, reaching
their maximum vigor, and then declining. The hyaline cartilage dies of old age
when bone is formed of it, as the milk teeth do. The thymus gland has
completed its growth at the third year and slowly atrophies with every sign of
age. The nervous system has the most sustained evolution. The infant, child,
youth, are learning higher coördinations, and the psycho-motor system is not
completely evolved till the end of the teens. The hand and arm centers
continue their development and do not attain their perfection before thirty. The
writer studied workmen in various factories and found that in many cases
proficiency in manipulation grew for a decade and then became stationary at
thirty, beyond which it could never be increased, and later declined. This
decline took place sooner in highly specialized than it did in more general
movements. In some artists, however, manual skill may increase to a great age.
In the brain centers that preside over language there is continuous
development, so that it has been carefully estimated that our powers of
expression culminate between 45 and 55. Demosthenes’ De Corona, his
masterpiece, was delivered at the age of 52; Burke’s impeachment of Hastings,
when he was 58; and many authors have thought their vocabulary and
command of language at its best during this decade. After this, faint symptoms
of aphasia and amnesia begin to show themselves. But it is in the frontal lobes,
in which it is now believed that the powers of attention, reason and judgment
are located, that the acme of development comes still later, perhaps in the
decade ending at the age of 65. Indeed, Moebius and others have shown that
the cortical layers believed to be most closely associated with mentation are
still developing as late as the age of sixty-three. Bacon produced the first two
books of the Novum Organum at 59; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was
produced when he was 57; Harvey’s great work on the circulation, when he
was 72, etc. It is certain that long after memory of names and physical vigor
have begun to abate, the power of comparison, inference, and above all a
moral sense, which is perhaps the finest and latest of all our powers, comes to
full maturity.

The ideal of a greater old age is not an idle dream and Browne insists that
physicians should strive themselves to live to be 100 and to make their patients
do so. The best antiseptic against senile decay is, he thinks, active interest in
human affairs. This, at any rate, should be our working hypothesis. A man of
80 should realize that he has one-fifth of his life before him. He tells us of a
man of 84 who attempted suicide because he could no longer support his
parents, and of another of 102 who had undergone a successful operation for
cancer of the lip without anæsthetics. Of course, senile involution, when cell
growth is more than counterbalanced by cell decay, is the natural pathway to
death, and a man ultimately dies of it when there is no question of disease. But
the brain, like the lens of the eye, may become flatter and more longsighted,
focusing better on objects far than those that are near. There is no short cut to
longevity. Its achievement must be the work of a lifetime. Sympathy, which
goes far deeper than courteous manners, is fundamental for the successful
treatment of old age.
146
H. M. Friedman begins his comprehensive treatise with biological and
embryological considerations, and here perhaps he makes his most original
suggestions. The higher the plane of the animal, the more marked is cell
differentiation or specialization and this affects most cells. Once a degree of
differentiation is observed, no backward step to a previous state of
generalization, regeneration, or rejuvenation is possible. The higher the ascent
of the cell in the plane of differentiation, the lower is its power of rejuvenation.
Connective tissue, muscle fiber, and cylindrical cells are the least differentiated
and therefore have the greatest power of regeneration. Nerve cells have the
least because their work is of a high order and they are most specialized. Nerve
fibers are mere conductors and they and epithelial cells have probably the
greatest power of regeneration.
Again, the more differentiated the cell, the more rapid is its development,
early decline, and death. Precocity even of the separate cell purports early
maturity. “So senescence is an increased differentiation of the protoplasm,
while rejuvenation is an increase of the nuclear elements at the expense of the
protoplasm.” The increase of nuclear material allows fission and the formation
of new cells. Thus the degree of differentiation is greatest as fission or mytosis
is least. The power of regeneration is in direct proportion to the power of cell
fission. Thus “the greater the cell differentiation, the smaller the mytotic
index.” With maturity the decrease of the mytotic index, or the number of
tissues into the composition of which the cell can enter, becomes restricted.

The cells in the original germinal layer have before them the possibility of
entering into the structure of any tissue, but as cells differentiate the germinal
layers take on a more structural character and leave the field to the entrance of
cells into different tissue formations more restricted, since during development
the number of tissues yet unformed or undifferentiated becomes less and less
and once a cell has assumed a personality it must continue to follow it up and
cannot diverge from it. This is the law of genetic restriction. The younger the
cells, the greater their multiplying power and the greater the tissue possibilities
they can choose. Hence morbid tumors are formed from young cells of higher
mytotic index whose genetic restriction has not progressed far enough to
inhibit range and rapidity of growth. Before genetic restriction young cells
may become one tissue or another. Injuries causing cell degeneration of the
young cells are often, therefore, the seats of morbid growths. The young or
undifferentiated cells forming malignant amorphous tumors and growing in
tissues alien to them develop rapidly, probably because they are deprived of
the “social” restriction to overgrowth that they would have in their own cell
society. Thus the presence of young cells in out-of-the-way places or where
older and more differentiated cells would be expected should excite suspicion.
“Young cells, like young children, are safest among their own.”
Generally a cell in an organism lives long enough to reproduce its kind;
else the species would die and death does occur in many lower organisms
immediately after ovulation. The young thus grow rapidly, while old age is the
period of slowest growth; and indeed the rate of growth depends upon the
degree of senescence. The tendency to senescence is at its maximum in the
very young and the rate of senescence diminishes with age.
As to the cause of senility, physiologically it is desiccation. At birth there
is most fluid and gaseous material, but organization demands solidarity. Lactic
acid may retard the growth of intestinal flora and the up-keep of the intestinal
toilet by larvage. Intoxication of some kind is a factor in many of the changes
accompanying senility. Lorand thought age was chiefly due to atrophy and
degenerative tissue by failure of the function of the ductless glands, especially
the thyroid. The myxedematous look and are old. Thus the limit of life is a
matter of excretion. The special organs of elimination cannot act to their full
capacity or to that of vital necessity because of the replacement in senility of
parenchyma by fibrous or fatty tissue. The retained waste products increase the
sclerotic changes and produce a vicious circle—irritation, intoxication, and
atheroma. The degeneration of the first stage produces insufficiency of the
organs of elimination and the degeneration of all organs.

As to physical manifestations, there is atrophy of the higher and more
specialized cells and they are replaced by hypertrophied connective tissue. The
heart is enlarged but this is compensatory for the stiffening and narrowing of
the lumen of the great vessels near it and so the blood pressure is increased.
The changes in bone, ligament, and tendons are extreme, with increased
enervation throughout the body and perhaps senile marasmus, which may
bring extreme emaciation or osteomalacia and even bone deformity. This may
affect nervous and mental elements, like senile asystole and changes in the
blood. The temperature, however, is not affected.
As to mental manifestations, this author says they are extremely variable,
insidious, and have a very wide latitude. The vitality of the mind should be far
greater than that of the body. Old age dulls conscience, may bring vanity and
new ambitions, petulance, irritability, misanthropy, and slows down activity.
But the best average barometer of mental failure is memory, the loss of which
comes as an advance guard of many symptoms. The old have no faith in the
young, for example, Virchow and Agassiz would not accept evolution. There is
a universal tendency to overeat, although we should “descend out of life as we
ascended into it, even as to the child’s diet.” The first sign that food must be
reduced is increased blood pressure. If only lower ideals were exercised in
early life, the reversion is ominous. Age is never chronological except in the
legal sense. It is often called a vascular problem. The old have immunity from
certain diseases such as eruptive fevers, typhoid, phthisis, and old tissues do
not seem to be good media for these disease agencies, but age is very prone to
pneumonic infections and erysipelas.
As to premature senility, in general its symptoms are identical with those
of mature senility. The old are particularly prone to flush under very slight
emotional strain and cannot throw off care or control patience. As to the causes
of premature senility, abuse rather than use is the key. There is an unhealthy
tendency to force decline by overtaxing the body and the nerves. It is those
who do this who take the pace that kills, taxing themselves beyond their
capacities. Alcohol and syphilis are specific forerunners of arteriosclerosis but
overeating is worse than alcohol, especially of meat. “Most people eat about
twice as much as they need, and the high cost of living is the high cost of
overeating.” The dietitian’s table of food values should always be consulted
but there has to be wide latitude for individual adjustments. Modern efficiency
ideals bring high pressure. Change is the greatest regulator. We now relegate
older men to innocuous desuetude to give the younger a chance to forge ahead.

As to the proper sphere of the aged, there have been opposite views.
Perhaps there are no more than five hundred really great men in history who
were clearly above mediocrity. Galton thinks 70 per cent of their work was
completed before 45, and 80 per cent before 50. Dorland analyzed four
hundred celebrities and concluded the average age of the commencement of
their activities was 24 years—in musicians perhaps as early as 17 and
scientists at 32. Science is hard and requires a large fund of experience and
knowledge. The greatest average for activity in all endeavors together is about
40. To enjoy life after 40 one must have attained some degree of success, for
the saddest thing is to reflect on many years of effort and no accomplishment.
As to medico-legal aspects, eccentricities may prevent the aged testator
from being allowed the right of testament, but in general the mental symptoms
of advanced senility differ from senile dementia only in degree.
As to the future of old age, those who are not senile have a distinct place
as counsellors. They should excel in strength of reason, cool judgment, and
breadth of view. One may be past the age of discretion before one is old in
years. The conservative tendencies of this period are valuable as checks to the
exuberant impulses of youth. The dependent aged are a burden and their
support is often a handicap. With modern progress the number who fail to keep
pace increases with the speed of advance and this has to be complemented by
the fact that the old are increasing in numbers. With few exceptions man lives
longest of any animal. Everything does grow old except vanity and the more
perfect the organization the earlier the aging and the sooner the end, for it is
the perfect more surely than the good that die young. Every stage of life is
marked by a limit, but this limit varies greatly. “Every man past forty is a fool,
physician, or a divine, and most people practically throw away their lives.”
The lower the scale of education, the greater the hazard of life. Longevity
among pure muscle workers is rare. We know little of the influence of race, but
we know that women, lean people, the married, the religious, on the whole,
live longest. Haeckel believed in “medical selection” and pointed to the fact
that some have greater power to resist disease. Is this desirable for the integrity
of the race? “Death is a process, not an event.” Man does begin to die early in
life. The bicycle rider has to keep going to keep erect, and so the old must keep
working. The first vacation is often fatal.
147
Hastings Gilford regards the development of the human body as a
whole, or of any portion of the body, as describing a curve that ascends from
the time of the union of the two genetic elements to a maximum at which there

is the greatest development of specialization in function and the least in the
general characters, such as those of multiplication. The curve then begins to
descend, with a gradual and progressive loss of differentiation in form and
function and an increasing tendency of certain cells to multiply. Decay of
certain cells during advancing age leads to their becoming bodies foreign to
their host, and this, in turn, calls forth the phagocytes which, walling off the
foreign body, become themselves transformed into fibrotic tissue. The three
characters of old age are decay, fibrosis, and proliferation of non-specialized
cells. As the more specialized cells retrogress, with the loss of specialization
they take on an increased tendency to multiplication. “Reversion ... is the
keynote of the proliferation in old age wherever it occurs.”
Granting the foregoing statements regarding the anatomy and biology of
old age to be true, Gilford even believes that we can explain cancer in terms of
senility. He says: “Thus the typical cancer is made up of a collection of cells
native to the part, but of more embryonic type, and these cells are surrounded
by collections of round indifferent cells derived from fibrous tissue and from
other low class structures, such as endothelium and leucocytes.” The fibrous
tissue, moreover, is often increased, as it is in the senile organ. These changes
may be interpreted as follows. Certain somatic cells become aged while the
tissues around them are still in a state of comparative youth. They express their
senility by returning to a more embryonic form, and as they do so they
increase in number, the faculty of multiplication being one of the
manifestations of regression. But as this qualitative change takes place they
become alien to their surroundings and, as foreigners or rebels, stimulate into
action the mechanism of phagocytosis. Not only is there an incursion of
lymphocytes into the parts but the connective tissue and endothelial cells in
their vicinity revert to their embryonic state and begin the work of
phagocytosis. But as a fact they have to deal with neither the effete products of
molecular degeneration nor with an inert foreign body, for though virtually
strangers cancer cells are by no means inactive. Hence the attack is abortive,
except in so far as the phagocytes, by forming new fibrous tissue, tend
mechanically to limit the proliferation of the cancer cells. For in the meantime
the fixed connective tissue cells are themselves rapidly proliferating, with the
result that when they cease their activity and return to their resting stage,
groups of cancer cells are cut off by intersecting bundles of fibrous tissue,
while the whole mass is surrounded by an incomplete capsule of the same
structure. This tends to limit the encroachment of the growing cancer, and were
it not for the lymph spaces or capillaries, which are the gaps through which the

growing cells escape, no doubt the limitation and strangulation of cancers
would occur far more often than they do.
It will be noticed that the more nearly the cells of a cancer approach the
embryonic state the more rapid will be the growth, and the less opportunity for
fibrosis the more malignant the cancer. Gilford maintains for this unique
theory that it is satisfactory, based as it is, upon facts reasonably interpreted,
and that it covers all of the ground.
148
Horst Oertel holds that the origin of cancer in the liver is a
transformation of multiple groups of its cells and that there was a direct change
of atrophic, degenerative, existing liver cells into cancer cells while they were
still in perfect continuity with each other. In this degeneration of normal to
cancer cells the former lose their typical protoplasm, the nucleus grows small
and its chromatin structure faint, till little of it remains, with only a faint rim of
surrounding protoplasm. At this point some of these cells show a very striking
change in rapid, irregular production of rich chromatin arranged in a less
structural definition and leading to marked enlargement of them. There is a
first destructive stage with extensive loss and granular degeneration of
protoplasm. In the second, incipient regeneration shows and the nucleus is
markedly enlarged, with irregular production of small chromatin granules;
while in the third stage, the carcinomatous, we have a new type of cell
following new laws and breaking with the former physiological arrangement
and structure. The new functional type involves rapid independent growth with
a distinct disregard of original source and surroundings and with progressive
loss of continuity and power to secrete bile.
Thus he, too, holds that cancer seems an embryonic reversal and involves
no specific changes but is a phenomenon of senescence, a degeneration of cells
with an unequal decline in cell functions. Thus races of cells develop that lack
the differentiation of undegenerated cells but are still endowed with vegetative
and reproductive properties. His idea that the degeneration and injury to cells
could be responsible for growth, was severely criticised. It was said that any
change that meant injury could never be progressive but would lead to
diminution of functions. But the author still holds that injury may produce
growth of all kinds of tumors, for example, in the pancreas, growth and cell
division is dependent upon the release of certain inhibitory influences that
exist in the normal well-balanced cells. This upset may be caused by certain
liquid solvents but the idea of formative stimuli on the whole seems to hold;
namely, cancer cells arise out of degenerative and atrophic changes, so that

injury, degeneration, and growth do not exclude each other but stand in genetic
relation.
That organs that have reached full maturity and differentiation are stable
and fixed in cell type and organization is false. Our organs are constantly in
active regression, degeneration, and progression, and it is difficult to separate
pathological from physiological changes. The pancreas is particularly in
constant regression and progression. Thus it is peculiarly unstable and the limit
of normality in its variations cannot be determined. Senescence is
accompanied by multiple degenerative changes in many other organs and
tissues, and associated with these are various benign and malignant tumors that
seem to result from degenerative changes. Thus Oertel’s idea of endless
proliferation as a result of differentiation is not an idle speculation but rests
upon an anatomical and experimental basis.
149
A. S. Warthin says that syphilitic cases are generally regarded as cured
if the Wassermann reaction is negative but there are very many cases that this
escapes. It is commoner than is supposed, the usual estimates being that from 5
per cent to 15 per cent of deaths are due to it, but this writer for America and
Osler for Great Britain, place it at 30 per cent. “Syphilis is the leading
infection and the chief cause of death, particularly in males between 40 and 60,
and in the great majority of cases its symptoms are myocardial, vascular, renal,
or hepatic, and this is often not recognized as a remote result.” The author has
never seen a marked case of syphilis cured. Most die as a result of mild
inflammatory processes of the viscera and blood vessels rather than from
paresis or tabes. It is progressive and marks the individual as damaged goods.
Even immunity is bought at a price. All the organs must be examined before it
is pronounced certainly absent. It is a spirochete-carrier. It tends to become
mild but at any time the partnership between the spirochete and the body may
be disturbed and the tissues susceptible to the violence of the spirochete may
be increased so that the disease again appears above the clinical horizon.
Chronic myocarditis is the most common form of death.
150
W. Spielmeyer says that in the last decade the clinicians and
pathological anatomists have discussed old age more than in preceding
decades. We know that organs are used up and that their substance is not fully
replaced. The functionally exciting parenchyma is injured by its own function
and in this metabolism the quality and sometimes the volume of the organ is
reduced. Thus old age is a function of the work of the organism and it seems to
be an intrinsic quality of cells to use themselves up. Many do not regard age as

a normal physiological process but with Metchnikoff think it is due to
injurious substances, that is, endogenous toxins that are more important than
the exogenous factors, so that blood vessels, glands, and muscle and ganglia
cells degenerate. But the cortical cells, as the most sensitive of the organism,
are more often injured. Metchnikoff thinks that the higher elements of the
tissues are in conflict with the lower and are overcome by them, the
phagocytes being left masters of the field.
Few, however, hold this view. Ribbert, Naunyn, Hansemann, and
Nothnagel think that outer and inner injuries should have precedence in
accounting for old age. But without these coöperative factors there is a
physiological determinant of the organism and its parts to be used up and they
become senile and lapse by physiological processes, while Naunyn thinks that
it is perhaps a general law that every organ fulfills its functional task only by
impairment of its complete organic integrity. This using up of an organism by
its own work occurs first in the brain and the central nervous system. There is
a general decline in weight, even in the fourth or third decennium, which is
accelerated in the seventies and may reach one hundred grams (Naunyn) and,
in pathological states, still more. It is, therefore, of great interest for the
relation of function and the use-up of organs that brain atrophy is not usually
uniform or diffuse but that there is often a difference between the right and left
hemispheres in the diminution of their volume. The left hemisphere is more
used and usually more atrophied than the right. The left convolutions,
therefore, suffer most reduction.
Among the earliest and most uniform changes due to age is the regressive
transformation of the blood vessels as in sclerosis. As the central tissues suffer
from a using up of their nervous substance, the central vessels are soon
involved. Till lately we have assumed that these disease processes in senium
were a result and expression of the primary affections of the blood vessels in
these organs. But it now appears that as in other organs, for example, the
kidneys, grave age changes can occur while blood vessels are intact. So in the
central organ grave independent age changes can occur without being caused
by the blood vessels. To be sure, they often concur for the simple reason that
the nervous system, like that of the vessels, is found affected oftenest and
earliest in old age. But the assumption of a dependence of central nervous
degeneration was an erroneous conclusion from the observation that by these
frequent degenerative processes in the walls of the vessels there were, at the
same time, phenomena of using up of nerve substance. “The changes of both

organs can, despite their frequent combination, be the independent expression
of age and quite independent one from the other.”
Every study of the psychosis of regression and age must start from this
fact and we must seek to distinguish the forms of weakness of old age due to
central tissues from those that have their cause in the primary weakness of the
blood vessels. For sclerotic senile dementia anatomy has already more or less
basis. For the various forms of brain sclerosis it is now possible to propose an
anatomical diagnosis, although it is impossible to have a very definite clinical
picture of what takes place.
Outside these two chief groups of organically conditioned psychosis and
degeneration there are many processes not yet certainly determined
anatomically. These belong neither to sclerotic brain disease nor to proper
senile dementia. They differ also in their general aspects from the average case
of the imbecility of old age, and if they are classified with it, this rests only on
superficial grounds and it is the problem of pathological anatomy to help clear
up this clinical-psychological question. It is a little here as with innate and
childish mental weakness, which we anatomically distinguish as idiocy and
imbecility with partial success, just as we are trying to distinguish the
psychosis of old age to make it conform to anatomical principles.
With the great recent progress of anatomy we are just at the beginning
here, the chief result so far being the possibility of distinguishing senile
involution and its morbid traits with a view to eventually being able to make
an anatomical differential diagnosis, such as we must do to really get at the
root of the problem of senile dementia. From this point of view other processes
can readily be derived, and some of them histologically, like regression. The
anatomical investigation stands in temporal relations with the idea of senile
dementia and it must be defined or widened enough to do this. Perhaps we
shall be able to have a good anatomical picture of senile dementia beginning
with the fifth and sixth decennium and even to explain atypical forms and
show their relation with the central system.
Here, then, the author, starting from an anatomical basis, begins with a
study of forms that are atypical in localization, intensity, or temporal onset.
Then he can discuss the mental diseases that are based on sclerosis. So he first
discusses briefly those psychoses that rest upon clearly recognizable but not
yet very distinctly determined brain troubles that deviate from the ordinary
senile processes and those, which so far as we can now see, are really sclerotic.
Then the long series of psychoses, the anatomical substratum of which we do

not yet know, and the functional processes of this age can be discussed. In
doing this, more than in the case of many organic processes, we shall find a
great difficulty in proving for such diseases their specific senile or climacteric
character. We shall constantly face the objection that we have here to do only
with mental diseases that usually come in other ages and only have peculiar
traits on account of the age of the patient, as is the case with many depressive
and paranoiac symptom-complexes of regression that resemble those of age.
Thus the distinction of regressive psychoses from senile changes, this
author thinks, cannot be carried through by grouping them in the decennia in
which they arise. It would be better to distinguish them as progressive and
incurable, or otherwise, but this could be done only with further distinction of
our anatomical and clinical data and we shall perhaps still lack that for a long
time.
When, therefore, in these regressions we start from anatomy and the
psychoses connected with it at this age of life, we may seem to overestimate
the achievements of histology. We at any rate do not underestimate our
ignorance here. But with the great confusion of opinions based on clinical
observations we believe we are justified in this point of departure. Ultimately
anatomy will very likely be our guide in all clinical work as well as in the field
of psychiatry, physiology, and psychology. We shall doubtless also learn very
much more about the localization in which the degenerative processes of age
begin.
Senile Dementia.—Textbooks and articles on old age generally state that
the changes in psychic personality that occur are identical with normal ones,
only in intensified degree. The traits most commonly specified are: limitation
of the circle of ideas, qualitative and quantitative loss of elasticity,
pauperization of interests, dwelling on gemütlicher activity, lapses in attention,
Ziehen’s “egocentric narrowing of the life of feeling,” perhaps
hypochondriacal symptoms, mistrust, inflexibility, lowered power of activity,
and resistance against everything that is new. Works in general pathology, like
Hübner, Ranschenburg, Balint, and Lieske deal with these in more detail.
In general, there is a sinking of psychic activity and change of character
which suggest physiological involution, and these occur—in some, earlier, and
in some later. If we compare these psychic traits it would seem that there is
only a quantitative difference between normal old age and senile dementia, the
latter having only gone farther or faster. The decision of this question is for
pathological anatomy and here Spielmeyer’s studies coincide with those of

Simchowicz. The older an individual is, the less sharply either clinically or
anatomically can it be decided whether it is normal or senile dementia. There
are the same changes in the nerve cells, neuroglia, the myelin sheaths, and the
mesoderm tissues; also in the blood vessels the changes are identical, the
difference being only in degree. Fatty degenerations of the ganglion cells also
occur in both. Sclerotic changes of elements are general. The neuroglia cells
with normal seniles have lipoidal material in abundance, and the gliafibers,
especially in their upper surfaces in the cortex, are increased. The walls of the
blood vessels have undergone the same regressive changes and acquired the
same fatty material by infiltration, and even the so-called senile plaques are
found. Thus in general there is the same using up of the central organs. We are,
thus, not yet in a position to determine from the brain alone, if we know
nothing of the individual, whether he was a senile dement or a very old man.
The older a man is, the more we find the Redlich-Fischer plaques. Thus the
senile dement shows neither anatomically nor clinically any essential
differences from those found in the normal senium.
151
I. L. Nascher thinks that too little study has been given to the physical
changes in involution and still less to the mental. Occasionally the approach of
senile dementia gives rise to forensic questions. There is a general neglect of
the subject of geriatrics. This author thinks the brain reaches its limit of
physical development at about 30, but Bunsen and Mommsen both did much
of their best work after their brain had grown quite atrophied, so that quality
comes in. The integrity of these cells depends upon nutrition. We have few
blood examinations of the aged and these do not show any marked clinical or
microscopic differences between maturity and senility, while the process of
senile involution rests apparently on defective nutrition of cell tissues. Those
who do good work in age generally focus into one channel and their
degeneration is shown in other fields. We usually do not think of our somatic
state until some discomfort compels us to do so. One may have lessened
interest in former hobbies or events of the day; but if impairment of reason
keeps pace with that of memory, he will not know that his powers are failing.
He then begins to think of his body and its preservation as more important than
wealth or fame, wants to live, and gives more attention to prolonging life.
There is often a change of temperament into egoism, perverseness,
peevishness, loss of ambition, religiosity, inability to bear slight discomforts
and depression. The child thinks little of the future, while in maturity hope
tends to paint a future haloed by happiness and in senility the future is death,

notwithstanding what all philosophers, poets, and preachers say. Our mental
attitude is simply a resignation to the inevitable. One patient had a daughter
devoted to him whose absence for a moment he could not bear, and once this
so angered him that his total attitude toward her changed to one of dislike and
suspicion. In another case a woman of seventy-six underwent a complete
change of character. Arrogance gave way to humility; in contrast to her former
independence, she now craved sympathy. Then later she changed again and
made extraordinary demands upon her children, wanted the latest styles in
everything, etc. In another case memory, reason, and will grew weak in an old
manufacturer. He lost his way on the street, a child could divert him from his
purpose, and he clung to a notebook by day and night till complete dementia
came. Another man who was noted for carrying through everything he
planned, even breaking up partnerships, when old became not only susceptible
to advice but could be easily turned from his purpose.
Thus senile mentality shows temperamental changes. There is
introspection, with natural fears and unnatural phobias, hope for strength and
vitality or even for beauty, and often overweaning biophilism. Action is slow;
fatigue, quick. The mind may be often trivial on all other matters but yet sound
in the center of interest. Personal attainments and achievements are often
magnified, and complaints are exaggerated as calls for sympathy. Moral
deterioration may be first. Lapses are condoned that were once condemned.
The old man may slowly come to take interest in what is low and vulgar. This
moral decadence is entirely apart from the pathological condition in which the
cœundi potentia is lost while the desire remains, and the recrudescence of
desire may occur in the senile climacteric but is a forerunner of senile
dementia.
The æsthetic sense causes the old often to neglect cleanliness in person
and clothes, to be untidy in their room, expectorate, scratch in public, make
disagreeable sounds, and disregard proprieties generally. Women show these
traits, but in less degree, and depression is less pronounced. There is no sudden
realizing of aging and fear of death is more often overcome by religion.
Sometimes the intellectual faculties deteriorate more rapidly, but moral and
æsthetic impulses change less. Sometimes old women take greater care of their
appearance and seem to be vain and to fight old age. Men occasionally at a
great age take a new interest in their appearance, dyeing their hair and
becoming dandified, which may show recrudescence of sex.

After the climacteric depression may pass to apathy. Death is less fearful
as the mind weakens; there is less concern for the future and life is more in the
present. Even early recollections grow dim, although such cases may be roused
momentarily. There may be marked preference for association with children.
There may also be childish acts and garrulity. The family history given the
physician by an elderly patient is often unreliable. Insignificant symptoms are
magnified; so are former attainments. Old patients often claim they possessed
wonderful constitutions, perhaps that they were never ill, despite indubitable
marks of disease.
In homes for the aged there is much suggestion. If one scratches, the rest
do, without pruritus, so that to isolate the author of this contagion cures it. The
same is true of groaning and grunts and even tremor may be acquired by
association. In one case, cutting off food stimulated to overcome tremor. Pain,
cough, and stiffness are magnified for sympathy. The fear of pain of an
operation may cause the denial or hiding of symptoms, although weakened
mentality makes sense impression less acute, either from peripheral or central
causes, so that it is hard to tell whether this is due to local anæsthesia or
weakened mentality. Tests used for malingerers may be necessary to determine
sensitiveness and other symptoms or even harshness and threats may bring out
the truth. Though cruel, these are sometimes necessary for correct diagnosis.
Friends often observe changes sooner than the immediate family but the
latter must corroborate the statements. The physician should determine if an
oikiomania exists and so must be alone with the patient, as he will not
encourage such an attitude in the presence of the object of his hatred. If the
physician tries to reason him out of his delusion, he thinks he is in league with
the hated person and therefore hates him more. If the physician has incurred
the patient’s dislike, he should leave him for a few days so that he may forget.
Sometimes the dislike of seeing the doctor grows from day to day. One had a
suspicion that the doctor was in league with a daughter, and so put him out. A
few days later the doctor was called for, and only when the wife told the
patient why he would not come did he remember his suspicions and thereafter
refuse to see him. In one case, having incurred an old woman’s displeasure by
excusing her son, whom she feared, the doctor left and was soon called again,
all being forgotten. The person hated should stay away and the dislike may
pass, especially in the case of a physician who has been necessary to the
patient.

The great factor is the senile’s sense of dependence on others. The old man
does not realize that one more mouth means less food for the children or that
his carelessness makes work or his peculiarities alienate sympathy and
affection. Perhaps he feels he is a burden and his death would be a relief to
those for whom he provided in earlier years. So delusions of persecution may
arise.
What can we do? Symptoms are often bettered at an asylum. Phobias
vanish and so do fears for the immediate future. All energies may be guided to
one channel and the person may be made useful and his fear of being useless
thus cured. The old are thus often anxious to do little services to show they are
not worthless and little tasks can occupy them without strain. A patient
pensioned after sixty-five years of work could get no other employment, felt
useless, instead of being cheery became depressed, and was cured by being re-
employed. The influence of young people keeps up interest in life—especially
marriage with a young person, the development of a hobby, collecting
anything, such as stamps, coins, books; witnessing new sights, but not fairs,
where numbers confuse.
Drugs give temporary relief. Small doses of morphine give exhilaration
and arouse the imagination, but its effects soon wear off. “Phosphorus in
solution is the most effective drug for prolonged use.” It is a mental and
nervous stimulant and aphrodisiac, increasing mental power and producing a
sense of well-being. One-fiftieth-grain doses several times a day, stopping just
as soon as the intellect begins to brighten, are often beneficent. This can be
kept up for years. Perhaps amorphous phosphorus may be used.

* * * * *
152
Sir Dyce Duckworth asks: Why are some remarkably young for their
age and others old? It cannot all be explained by anything in the individual life
or habits. Perhaps it is in part because the ancestors lived a hard life. We want
the degree of inherent vitality proper to each individual patient. This would be
as important for prognosis in pneumonia as are the hæmic leucocytes. Arterial
hardening may be local only, for example, radial. There are two kinds of
arterial degeneration, namely, the brittle and the tough, the former more liable
to cause hemorrhages and fatty degeneration.
Very important is the discovery that the rigidity of calcified arteries is
greatly increased immediately after death. The lime is present before, as

disclosed by the X-rays, but it is like wet or unset mortar and only sets after
death under the influence of carbon dioxide and the rapidly diminishing
alkalinity of the blood. The so-called air in the arteries after death is chiefly
carbon dioxide and this explains why such arteries do not rupture so frequently
as we might expect. Premature death of parts of the body is constantly
occurring, for example, baldness, teeth. One may be vulnerable to one and
another to another type of injury or bacilli. Syphilis is mainly a conjoined trait
or infection and greatly predisposes to tubercle. Indeed, a syphilitic patient
may be regarded as a prematurely aged one in spite of a good constitution,
because there is always the possibility of sequels or parasyphilis, general
paralysis, etc.
Among the early mental signs of interstitial nephritis is an explosive
temper. Fits of hilarity and weeping may alternate (first pointed out by Clifford
Allbutt). The costal cartilages ossify generally before the sixth decade and this
is often premature. A hobby may no longer avail to preserve mental activity,
and “the golf ball to-day is not seldom one of the beneficent agencies for this
purpose.” Cirrhosis of the liver is longer averted in the patrician than in the
plebeian because the laborer becomes senile sooner than others owing to his
life of strain in all weathers. In arthritis, the nodosity of joints, especially in the
fingers, in the form of Heberden’s nodes, is thought by some an indication of
longevity. They are often found in those who have few classical symptoms of
gout and few reach eighty or ninety without these trophic changes.
Dupuytren’s contractures and the camptodactylia of Landouzy, or incurved
little finger, are among indications of a gouty habit and are not truly rheumatic
lesions. Indolence of the bladder does not imply prostatic symptoms. Very
common are widespread catarrhal disturbances, as for example, tussis senilis,
with much flux of mucus, often rich in sodium chloride. Fits of sneezing, also
of hiccough and even gaping, are frequent.
The main treatment for early senility is physiological righteousness (Sir A.
Clark). We must especially know the degree of vigor, of vitality, and specific
habit of body. We must pay attention to the degree of blood pressure and early
indications of renal inadequacy, orthostatic albuminuria, the tendency to
epistaxis, and maintain as our keynote moderation in all things. The best idea
is that of universal service which would bring all the world together on a high
plane. The author refers with a good deal of skepticism to Metchnikoff’s
Bulgarian bacillus but mentions Saundby’s book with great praise.

153
Robert Saundby, M.D., has given us what is, to date, the best handbook,
both for practitioners and for old people who are intelligently interested in
conserving their life and strength, on the common infirmities and care of the
aged, exclusive, for the most part, of nervous and psychic symptoms. He first
describes normal old age, then its diseases in successive chapters—diathetic
infections, and those of the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and genito-urinal
systems. Perhaps most practical are the dietaries he gives for different stages of
old age and different diatheses. He commands a wide knowledge of
Continental literature on the subjects he treats. He has a just sense of the
dangers of stressing specifics from, for example, Pythagoras, who thought
there was a special virtue for longevity in honey; Bacon, in sweating; Harvey,
in avoiding acids; down to Blanchard, in sal volatile; blood drinking cures,
olive oil, licorice, etc. He believes that Metchnikoff’s panacea and the undue
stress laid by Lorand on thyroid therapy have not escaped the dangers of undue
focalization. He allows a very wide latitude not only in regimen and exercise
but food, condiments, and even stimulants, for the aged.
No one can read his account of the changes that take place in each part and
organ of the body as they are successively described and the very different
treatments that each needs as it goes wrong, without a sense of the fatality with
which these vast cohorts of life-quelling symptoms advance and, in view of the
many strategies the lethal processes make use of to undermine the fortress of
life, without experiencing a profound sense of the hopelessness of watching
out in so many directions and realizing that, as differentiation proceeds in the
different organs, any regimen helpful to one would almost certainly be harmful
to others.
154
Arnold Lorand, an Australian physician, bases his work on the principle
that man does not die but kills himself. He does not philosophize but tells us
that while it is impossible to create a young man out of an old one, it is quite
within the bounds of possibility to prolong our youthfulness by ten or twenty
years. In other words, we need no longer grow old at forty or fifty. We may
live on to the age of 90 or 100 years instead of dying at 60 or 70. Old age is
just as amenable to treatment as chronic diseases. He has great faith in the
present possibilities and still larger hopes for the future of serum therapy, for to
him life is most of all connected with the glands. He discourses upon the
hygiene of throat, lungs, heart, kidney, liver, stomach, bowels, reproductive
organs, and the rest with a bewildering volume of details but good perspective,
and the reader is again disheartened to find that the treatment prescribed for

one organ is deleterious to another. Indeed, Lorand’s somewhat encyclopedic
and undigested data, despite the common sense and practical spirit in which
they are presented, bear, on the whole, less upon old age itself than upon
general hygiene at all stages of life, so that his title is to that extent a
misnomer.
He sums up his practical conclusions in the form of twelve
commandments, which are, briefly, to keep in the open and take plenty of
exercise; eat according to rule; bathe and move the bowels daily; wear porous
underclothes; early to bed and rise; sleep where it is dark and quiet; rest one
day each week; avoid emotional strain; get married; be temperate in the use of
alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee; and avoid over-eating and -heating.

* * * * *
155
T. D. Crothers, M.D., thinks we have not sufficiently considered the
abilities of old age from a medico-legal standpoint. He also thinks that if we do
not live to be 100 something is wrong with us or our ancestors. We all carry a
large reserve that many die without drawing upon, and this reserve is
especially available in old age (he develops this point psychologically). Many
old people with melancholia, hallucinations, and the characteristic physical
defects of old age have, nevertheless, a higher kind of sanity to which their
juniors do an injustice by the tests they propose. They are quite capable of
making wills and otherwise deciding the large questions that come before them
and often do so from a broader point of view than younger men. It is possible,
then, to rise to a higher level, to a kind of graduate school of life, to use the
unused, etc. Again, the varied experiences of long life give mobility of mood
up and down what Adler calls the life line, so that the old have a larger
assortment of viewpoints and even moods, to say nothing of greater ups and
downs in horizon and standpoint generally.

* * * * *
156
C. G. Stockton, M.D., suggests family records and pride to avoid
mixing good stock with that which decays early. He recognizes the great
contributions of the dentist and oculist, deplores the neglect of old age, and
insists that the aged do respond to treatment very readily. He also deplores the
attitude of many physicians who discourage resolute methods of curing defects

and warding off evils because the patient is old. He stresses the value of
emunctory procedures both within and without.

* * * * *
157
Dr. W. G. Thompson deplores the fact that physicians have given so
little attention to old age and that the medical literature upon the subject is so
meager. The very old have survived all corroborative evidence as to their age,
their failing memories confuse tradition and fact, and they come very often to
take pride in their age and so add to it. The author’s study is based on the
census statistics of 1910, which record, from 90–94 years, 6,175 deaths; from
95–99, 1,427; 100 years and over, 372. The respiratory diseases as a group
took first rank as the cause of death; organic heart disease, apoplexy, and
Bright’s disease occurring in frequency in the order mentioned. Among
diseases of the digestive system enteritis outranked all others.
As age advances and its activities and diversions become less and less,
locomotion is reduced, along with acuteness of sight and hearing, and the
pleasures of the table remain the only gratification of a monotonous existence.
Very many accustom themselves to the habitual use of laxatives to counteract
the effects of overeating, and often we have obstructions, especially of the
rectum or colon, that may become fatal. This, however, is more often seen in
those who eat too little and become perhaps atrophic and marasmic. These
people become careless of matters of the toilet and obstructions often cause
death. Apoplexy is relatively rare among centenarians and carcinoma also
declines as a cause of death after the ninetieth year. Indeed, the disease that
does not develop until after the ninetieth year can scarcely be due to hereditary
factors and the infrequency of cancer in the later stages of life emphasizes the
constitutional resistance to extraneous influences that the majority of
centenarians possess in a high degree. Acute and very quick or fatal
pneumonia is not infrequent.
One very peculiar difficulty in treating old patients is their prejudice and
obstinacy in matters of diet and hygiene; because they have lived so long they
naturally think they know better than anyone else what is good for them and,
with a certain irritability, resist interference. As a rule, they are relatively very
susceptible to the action of drugs and two-thirds of the ordinary dosage for
adults generally suffices. Very often the very aged suffer from the neglect of
personal cleanliness. There are many diseases common from the sixth to the
ninth decades of life that are very rare later, for example, tuberculosis. Suicide

is very rare, the census of 1910 recording only one of a centenarian and nine
among nonagenarians. The latter generally have a long-lived ancestry and
many families are remarkable for this trait. But this is by no means essential.
The aged often exhibit no predominant symptom of any one disease to which
their death is attributable, and hence “senility” is so often given as the cause of
death. Tranquillity, moderation, and regularity seem to be the chief factors in
securing a long life and a peaceful death.

* * * * *
158
M. L. Price, M.D., attacks Metchnikoff’s theory of old age by assuming
that in addition to all toxins and inflammations there is always an old-age
exhaustion of a vital principle that he calls bioplasmine, that may, to be sure,
be mainly caused by Metchnikoff’s agencies but is equally affected by effort,
exposure, growth, and reproduction. He sagely predicts that the solution of the
problem of old age, which he thinks is the central theme of all medicine in the
sense in which he conceives it, because every disease brings senile phenomena
to some part of the organism or to the whole of it, will be solved by
biochemistry, although he admits that it may take many generations of
investigation to achieve this final solution.

* * * * *
159
George S. Keith, M.D., after a long life of practice, has grown
suspicious of current methods. “I purge, I puke, I sweat ’em; and if they die I
let ’em.” As to foods, he believes that the old should only eat when they are far
hungrier than they usually are and leave off eating when they now habitually
begin a meal. Appetite, which seems to give momentum to all the assimilative
processes, is never utilized to its full extent. Sick animals often go off alone
and succeed in recovering and he believes humans have the same instinct. He
is, therefore, bitterly opposed to forced feeding, even for the insane, save under
very exceptional conditions. The sick should generally be allowed to eat
whatever they wish, perhaps in moderation, or to go entirely without food.
Probably primitive man and all animals had to undergo occasional long fasts
and this serves to tone up not only the nerves but the entire digestive system.
Instinct is a far truer guide than doctors who interfere with it think. Once the
fevered patient who reveled in dreams of cold was kept warm; now we know
better.

This author has, thus, an almost implicit trust in the cravings and dislikes
of the sick and would indulge them almost to the limit, as the German
hygienist, Sternberg, would do to a perhaps even greater degree. He is also a
great believer in rubbing and massage. Hot water plays an important rôle, too,
while he attaches very special value to licorice. Doctors are often too anxious
to save patients from all pain, perhaps by the use of means that entail worse
consequences. Pain has its place in nature and the doctor should also try to
have the patient apply the cure of patience. Pain is nature’s cry for help, to
which she often responds as she does not to other stimuli; and benign as is the
rôle of anæsthesia, it should not blind us to the tonic effects pain often
exercises. So sleeplessness may not be an unmixed evil in certain cases and
sleep artificially induced is usually of poorer and less restorative quality. He
has found fixating, spontaneous retinal phosphenes a good soporific method.
He believes that very many diseases would cure themselves if the patient could
be induced to simply rest and starve. Although he is not a homeopathist, he
nevertheless believes that dosages of medicine are far too large. He insists that
old and experienced physicians ought to, and that the best do, learn a great deal
from experience in keeping themselves well, and that every physician should
accumulate thus a store of knowledge based on self-observation, and may well,
with profit, always be mildly experimenting upon himself. As age advances he
would regulate diet and treatment largely to the avoidance of accumulation of
uric acid in the system. He found great reinforcement for himself in making a
breakfast of coffee only, etc.

* * * * *
160
J. Madison Taylor notes the paucity of literature on this subject that he
found in trying to read up on it and thinks it warrants far more attention. The
foundations for longevity are laid in the first few months of life and bottle-fed
babies are shorter-lived and much less likely to reach old age. Those who
spend their infancy and childhood, too, in large centers are less long-lived than
those brought up in the country. A serene mental view and capacity for
deliberate enjoyment of whatever betides he places first of all and advises self-
education in serenity. The less we eat and the less variety, the longer we live,
and on this the author lays great stress. We must put aside, as we advance,
some articles of diet of which we are fond.
He believes dentists have greatly interfered with longevity because man
was meant to be more or less toothless and thus to be reduced in old age to

childish diet and fluids, while the dentists enable us to eat anything we ever
did, which is against Nature. He speaks of fads and their dangers, for example,
one old lady thought she prolonged her life by eating a great deal of salt. The
indolence and indifference of age is a great difficulty. If one persists in trying
to keep up indefinitely, the results are often amazing. Medical aid should be
sought more constantly for lesser ills. Man is like an old horse—if he once gets
thoroughly out of condition it is hard to bring him back. G. M. Gould has
believed that unfit glasses have shortened the lives of many eminent men. But
open air is a sine qua non always.
Tessier gives a clinical picture of approaching death—(1) heart and blood
vessels, (2) lungs, (3) kidneys, (4) digestive organs, (5) the brain. Most agree
that the heart plays the chief rôle in ending life and many used to think that
nearly all old-age diseases were from arterial hardening. But this was doubtless
much exaggerated. Old age is a progressive diminution of all functional
activities. All clinicians recognize diatheses or a tendency toward disease and
we can detect them in their incipiency now far more than formerly. Age
diathesis means a lessened coefficient of resistance, quick exhaustion, and
weak repair. The author devotes great attention to obesity, which shortens life,
and he advocates various exercises of the extensor muscles, deep breathing,
and thinks much can be done to tone up and increase the activity of the heart.
He thinks the effects of the menopause have been rather overestimated.
Exhaustion, especially induced by emotions, fatigue, anger, grief, and fear,
weaken the protective powers of the mysterious agents of immunity. The mind
is very liable to become fixed upon some ailment and hyper-conscious,
particularly near the menopause, and this is due to failure of the organism to
offer the same degree of resistance to toxins and to a general lessening of
functional activity.
He thinks we can postpone old age by the following agencies. We should
develop, not discourage, bodily exercise for without it there is a slow
retrogressive change. The more nearly the diet is reduced to bread, milk and
fruit, the longer the person will live and enjoy good health. Some can go for
long intervals without feeding though more thrive on small quantities taken
frequently. He condemns all purgatives and would regulate by salads, nuts,
fruit, and thinks the best drink is buttermilk, which has salutary effects on both
bowels and kidneys. Next comes koumyss. Fluids are best taken in abundance,
but if the heart is weak they should be avoided before exercise, for this
increases the cardiac strain. If the skin is dry, he advocates dry rubs rather than

cold baths and olive oil occasionally, of which he says it is amazing how much
the skin will absorb. He speaks emphatically of the dangers of chills and of the
trend of all tissues to harden, stiffen, or lose their elasticity. Tissues about the
neck are particularly prone to lose vigor. Regulated movements of the neck
and upper truncal muscles often improve hearing, vision, cerebration, and
sleep, and the same is true of friction. Most digestive disturbances, even those
of early middle life, are due to relaxation of the supporting tissues of the great
organs in the abdomen. This dilation is found in at least 60 per cent of adults,
and it produces a long train of alterations. The kidneys are supported mainly
by their blood vessels, so that if they sag their circulation is impaired, and this
kind of ptosis is very common. Hence faulty attitudes are very important for all
visceral ptoses, while he finds much to commend in the use of abdominal
corsets, even for fleshy men. Elasticity of the ribs should receive attention and
the author prides himself on exercises that increase the elasticity of the basal
tissues which sclerosis is prone to assail. The capacities of individuals for
exercise in the open air can generally lessen the need of medical supervision.
With old people, the extensors should receive more, and the flexors, less
attention and there should be sufficient stretching, torsion, etc.
As to the senile heart, it is generally assumed that the old should do no
more than they are inclined to do and perhaps even lead a vegetable existence.
But he believes that disinclination to movement means and makes under-
oxidization and causes decay and he is severe on what he calls senile laziness.
The healthier and happier old people are, the more active they become. The
life of a hothouse plant is bad. Humphry found in most old people he
examined little or no change in the arterial system. Allbutt says there are many
old people in whom there is no arteriosclerosis. One common phenomenon of
old age is the loss of vascular tone and defective lymph circulation. The bones
lose weight and size and the walls of the shaft grow thin from within,
especially toward the end of the bones and most near the head of the femur.
Trunecek of Prague emitted the thesis that certain salts can be introduced into
the blood current that aid in dissolving the calcium phosphate found in the
structure of sclerosed arteries. So he injected hypodermically a strong solution
of sodium phosphate and magnesium phosphate, which are normally found in
the blood serum but only in minute quantities. Others have introduced this by
both bowel and mouth. Anything that aids oxidation of tissues helps.
161
In another article Taylor says almost nothing that is new although there
is much that would be practical to aging people. The machinery has become a

little worn and weaker in spots but the bare surfaces have been abraded to meet
each other so that there is less friction and racking of the joints. The body cells
are less irritable. Degenerative diseases are very insidious. They increase in the
following order—liver, digestion, apoplexy, nerves, heart, kidneys. One’s
enjoyment of food is greater perhaps than discriminative. Many reminders of
age are overcome by warming up. Skin emanations may be offensive. Traits of
a mature mind are poise, deliberation, economy and the largest output of
judgment, like the Roman senators or seniors. Irritability is common. Youth
wants to know; age wants to be.

* * * * *
162
C. A. Ewald, one of the most eminent of German professors of biology,
gives us one of the most condensed statements on the subject of old age. He
begins by contrasting the intense life of Berlin, where the lecture was given,
with the fact that all paths lead to the door of death, which is nearest in war.
The antique conception of death was youth with a reversed torch; the
medieval, a skeletal mower taking pleasure in his work. The martyr’s love of
death and even the passion for Nirvana are probably more or less pathological.
If we assume 15,000 million people on the earth and a death rate of 30 million
per year, we should have 81,192 deaths daily; 3,425, hourly; and 57 every
minute. The baobab tree of Cape Verde shows a life of 5,000 years. Some have
ascribed 500 to the swan. But nearly all data of great age are discredited. Even
that of Parr (152), who married with potence at 120, and all the rest, are
doubted. But the length of life is increasing. In Sweden, of every 100 children
of five at the beginning of the last century, 27 reached 70; at the end of the
century, 48 did so. In Bavaria the number increased from 25 to 40; in
Germany, in the last twenty years, it increased from 30 to 39, so that we all
have a better chance of living long than we would have had if we had been
born a hundred years earlier. The average length of life in 1870 in Germany
was 37 years and has now increased to 42½. In France and England it is 46 and
in Norway and Sweden, 52. Cures of tuberculosis in the last twenty years have
reduced the percentage of its victims from 31 to 17 per 10,000, and
vaccination has reduced the death per million from smallpox to 5; while in
Russia, where it is not compulsory, it is 520. A priori, death does not seem
necessary and yet for even protozoa division often involves something like a
very rudimentary corpse so that investigators like Götte, Hertwig, and Verworn
accept the tenet of Weismann, with some slight reservation, if the corpse is to
be taken as the criterion of death.

Bees and the stork and other birds of passage kill or neglect their old,
while in ancient German myth old men often slew themselves for the good of
the community. Certain species eat their young rather than die themselves and
even this is for the interest of the species. A certain wasp lays its eggs in the
female plant and its young, when covered with its pollen, fly to a male plant to
fertilize it, although this means their death. Thus death is a normative factor of
development and to this extent Weismann is correct. Life has three periods. In
the first there is an excess of energy and growth; then comes middle age with
an equilibrium, while in old age the relation of these energies is reversed, so
that the first and third stages contradict each other. But everywhere life is
dependent on nutrition and all death, in whatever form, is due to its lack. So
we have a kind of biological circulation and a kilogram of body substance
evolves a different sum of total energy in each of these periods of life. The
author gives us an interesting cut of the contraction of the vertebrae and their
padding, which often in the old means ankylosis in the lower part of the spinal
column.
He dissents from the Conklin theory of the abatement of metabolism as a
cause of old age because he thinks this activity has a wide range of play at all
stages of life, monthly and even daily. Nor does he accept without
modification the Schilddrüse (thyroid) theory, although admitting that the
endocrine glands play a very important function. Nor does he accept Von
Hansemann’s view of altruistic nutritive disturbance, namely, that single cell
groups are more or less reciprocally dependent upon others for their activity so
that they in a sense work for each other. The physiological (that is, without
outer stimulation) collapse of groups of cells is especially connected with the
generative cells and their departure reacts upon the nutrition of the whole body
and in a sense weakens it (the atrophy of age). The loss of the generative cells
is physiological because they, in departing from the body, represent the growth
of a new organism. Hansemann gives countless examples but they affect only
the fact and not the kind or method of growing old, which is a progressive
process, and we still are unable to answer the question why the generative cells
in the ordinary process of life are so soon destroyed or why so few of them are
devoted to this purpose.
The author sees much truth in Minot’s differentiation or cytomorphosis of
cells, according to which differentiation, which causes growth, is also the
cause of death. Minot himself says that the biologist can no more grasp the
essence of death than he can that of life. Science does not know the difference
between these two despite the impulsions of our causal instinct. Horsley thinks

the condition for a green old age is the conservation of a sound thyroid. With
its activity is, of course, connected that of other glands.
He says it might be assumed in a period during which a whole generation
dies that the whole mass of putrefaction would cause infection. But in a half-
dozen German cities very carefully investigated along this line it was found
that those who lived in or near cemeteries were as long-lived as others and
even those who drink water that is fed by drainage from well appointed
graveyards are not infected; on the contrary, in several places this water is
purer than elsewhere. There is only one exhumation in Germany for criminal
purposes out of 600,000 corpses, but poison that might be detected by
exhumation cannot, of course, be traced after cremation.
Instead of the remorse, anxiety for friends, dread and pain, the author, who
says he has seen “many, many hundreds of deaths,” never saw one that was not
unconscious. There are often, perhaps even for days, physical signs of great
suffering but this is never felt; and the author advocates special death rooms in
hospitals because it is so hard for onlookers that it is inhuman to allow patients
to die in a ward with only a screen in front of the bed. The review of life by
drowning people is a myth. It is the duty of the doctor to mitigate closing pains
by morphia and other means, provided these do not shorten but rather tend, as
they should, to somewhat prolong life. Even in death by fire and torture the
last stages are painless.
The Kamerlengo strikes the Pope on the forehead three times with a silver
hammer and calls his name and, if he does not answer, says, “The Pope is
really dead.” This is because hearing is supposed to be the last sense to die.
But often after death the muscles contract spontaneously, even enough to move
the body and this has made survivors believe their friends were alive. The
muscles respond to electrical stimuli for hours. The pupil of beheaded people
contracts to light. In Charlotte Corday’s head the eyes opened. Dr. Rousseau
saw a case in which the heart occasionally beat twenty-nine hours after
decapitation. Generally death proceeds from the heart and its last beat marks
the entrance of death. Respiration, too, or the last breath is often the mark of
death because the carbon dioxide is not removed; hence we say life is in the
blood. Everyone at times wonders not only when he will die but how. And it is
hard to live so as to avoid pathological death.
A French nobleman, François de Civille, in the time of Karl IX, appended
to his monument the inscription: “Thrice dead, thrice buried, and by the grace
of God, thrice revived.” The riddle meant that he woke first from his mother’s

body at birth and twice in war was thought dead and placed among the dead.
But the absence of personal consciousness is very unreliable because after long
periods of lethargy many have rather suddenly revived. There never was a
doctor present at an exhumation of a living man. Being buried alive is really a
ghost that has no justification in civilized lands. This has nothing to do, of
course, with simulation. Karl V simulated death in order to enjoy the spectacle
of his funeral, as Juliet allowed herself to be buried. By contraction of the
muscles of the neck and deep respiration the heart can be checked and the
physiologist, Weber, nearly lost his life thus. Dr. Gosch tells of a Colonel
Townsend who in the presence of Prof. Cheyne stopped his heart and
breathing, the latter tested by a mirror, for half an hour until they were all
convinced he was dead. But then he gradually came to, though he died eight
hours later.
Herter and Rovighi tested lactic acid and its effects on fermentation of the
large intestine and found negative results, so that we do not have an arcanum
against death or old age in this sense, although insufficient excretion of toxins
has much to do with it.
In his illuminating articles Professor Raymond Pearl, after showing the
novelty of natural death and how even somatic cells now seem possibly
immortal if separated from the metazoan body and that heredity is a prime
determinant of the length of the span of life, says we must know more of the
vagaries of germ plasm before society should assume to control it, although
such control sooner or later will be necessary. The death rates for the four
diseases that public health and sanitary activities have been most successful in
treating, namely, (1) tuberculosis of the lungs, (2) typhoid fever, (3) diphtheria
and croup, (4) dysentery, have been materially reduced in the last nineteen
years. But if we compare four other causes of death, (1) bronchitis, (2)
paralysis, (3) purulent infection and septicemia, (4) softening of the brain, on
which health and sanitation have had little effect, it is found that the rate of
mortality from these troubles has declined just as much, and probably a little
more, in the same period of time, although the numbers in the latter group are
far less. “Hence the declining death rate in and of itself does not mark the
successful result of human effort.”
Recognizing the fact that the essential cells in our body are inherently
capable under proper conditions of living indefinitely, the problem that
confronts us is whether environment or heredity has most to do in determining
163
the actual length of life. Pearl concludes that the death rate of the earliest

period of life is selective, eliminating the weak and leaving the strong, and that
inheritance is “one of the strongest elements, if not indeed the dominating
factor, in determining the duration of life of human beings.”
The duration of life in animals also depends on the total amount of
metabolic activity or work and it has been proven that rats, at least, live longer
under conditions so controlled that their activity is lessened, so that the greater
the total work done or total energy output, the shorter is the duration of life and
vice versa, work accelerating the aging process somewhat as rise of
temperature does. Pearl says: “The manner in which the environmental forces
(of sublethal intensity of course) chiefly act in determining the duration of life
appears to be chiefly by changing the rate of metabolism in the individual.
Furthermore, one would suggest, on this view, that what heredity does in
relation to duration of life is chiefly to determine within fairly narrow limits
the total energy output which the individual exhibits in its lifetime.” The
duration of life of an animal stands in inverse relation to the total amount of its
metabolic activity or, put in other words, to the work in the sense of theoretical
mechanics that it as a machine does during its life. Or, to put it in another way,
if the total activity of a unit of time is increased by some means other than
increased temperature, the same result appears as if the increased activity is
caused by increased temperature. Pearl thinks that Steinach’s experiments on
the sexual glands, whatever their results for rejuvenation, do not prove “any
really significant lengthening of the life span.” Nor does he think that
Robertson’s experiments with tethelin from the pituitary gland, whatever its
effects upon growth, show that it materially increases the length of life to a
degree that has much significance statistically, so that inheritance remains a
prime determinant of longevity.
We are all born in one way but die in many. By international agreement a
mortality code has been developed with fourteen general classes comprising
180 distinct units. Pearl would supplement this very unsatisfactory
classification by the following: (1) circulatory system and blood-forming
organs, (2) respiratory system, (3) primary and secondary sex organs, (4)
kidney and related excretory organs, (5) skeletal and muscular system, (6)
alimentary tract and associate organs concerned with metabolism, (7) nervous
system and sense organs, (8) skin, (9) endocrinal system, (10) all other causes.
This would show organological breakdown rather than pathological causation.
The breakdown of the respiratory system is the chief cause of death, and next
comes that of the alimentary tract; these together constitute half the deaths
biologically classifiable. Next come troubles with the blood and circulation.

We may conceive these as three successive defense lines, and it is against the
first two of these that better health and hygiene have been chiefly directed,
having been most successful with the respiratory system. Child-welfare, both
pre- and post-natal, is by all odds the most hopeful direction of public-health
activities. Pearl’s very important studies here confirm the conclusions others
have reached, that early pubertal years show the lowest mortality rate, and he
traces in detail for each age of life the mortality curves for each of the chief
groups of disease.
Very interesting are his conclusions touching the embryological basis of
mortality in which he attempts to trace the causes of death back to the three
primitive tissue elements, concluding that about 57 per cent of biologically
classifiable deaths result from the breakdown or failure to function of organs
arising from the endoderm, 8 to 13 per cent from those that spring from the
ectoderm, while the remaining 30 to 35 per cent are of mesodermic origin. The
ectoderm has been most widely differentiated from its primitive condition, as
best illustrated by the central nervous system, the endoderm least
differentiated, while the mesoderm is intermediate in this respect. Now,
degrees of differentiation imply adaptation to the environment and the
endoderm, which is least differentiated, is least able to meet vicissitudes.
“Evolutionally speaking, it is a very old-fashioned and out-of-date ancestral
relic which causes man an infinity of troubles. Practically all public-health
activities have been directed toward overcoming the difficulties which arise
because man carries about this antediluvian sort of endoderm.” Prior to the age
of sixty the breakdown of organs of endodermic origin causes most deaths;
next come breakdowns with organs of mesodermic origin, and lastly those of
ectodermic origin. The rate for all these germ layers is relatively high in
infancy, dropping to a low point in early youth. In infancy the chief mortality
is due to endodermic defect; from about the age of 12 on, to faults of
ectodermic, and after about 22 to those of mesodermic origin. The death-rate
curve rises at a practically constant rate to extreme old age. From about 60 to
the end of life deaths from the breakdown of organs of mesodermic origin
lead. The heart generally outwears the lungs and the brain outwears both
because evolution is a purely mechanical process instead of being an
intelligent one. “It is conceivable that an omnipotent person could have made a
much better machine as a whole than the human body which evolution has
produced. He would presumably have made an endoderm with as good
resisting and wearing qualities as a mesoderm or ectoderm. Evolution by the
haphazard process of trial and error which we call natural selection makes each

part only just good enough to get by.” All this, the author believes, only
strengthens the evidence that the most important part in longevity is played by
innate constitutional biological factors.
This view so commonly held, that heredity is the chief factor in longevity
is doubtless correct in general. But it is fatalistic and directly tends to lessen
the confidence of hygienists and physicians in the efficacy of all their methods
of prolonging life in the aged. There is, we think, good reason to believe that
there is a great and now rapidly growing number of exceptions to this so-called
law, cases in which by conformity to right rules of living, age has been
increased many years beyond that which our forbears attained. Indeed, the
very fact of the gradual prolongation of life shows that the hereditary
predisposition to die at a certain age can be, to a great extent, overcome. The
psychological effect of this dogma of the prepotence of heredity in determining
the length of life is itself not only depressing but may readily become, as
psychologists can best understand, a dangerous lethal agent with the old and
cause those who have reached the span of years at which their forbears died to
succumb to their troubles with less resistance. Indeed, it is one of the chief
purposes of this volume to show that the old-age problem is not merely
economic, philanthropic, social, or even medical, but also, when all is said and
done, perhaps chiefly psychological and that the future welfare of the race
depends upon the development of an old age due not chiefly to heredity but to
better knowledge and control of the conditions of this state of life.
Senescence is, in no small degree, a state of mind as well as a state of
body, and the study of it as such has been so far strangely neglected but is now
in order. Even doctors who have told us most about it have made few intensive
investigations of its nature and there are very few gerontologists; while the
alienists who have described the senile psyche have done so only in general
terms that add but little to what is obvious to common experience and
observation. None have sought to ascertain empirically from intelligent old
people capable of telling how they think and feel about their stage in life, or to
determine how far their attitude toward it was indigenous and how far it was
really due to the acceptance of current traditions that have come down to us
from a remote past and that no longer fit present conditions. How this old
tradition still influences even physicians may best be shown by a few instances
that have come under my own observation. A friend of 73 fell sick of
pneumonia which soon involved both lungs. The excellent family doctor had
him removed to a hospital where expert care could be added to his own. Soon
all hope of his recovery was abandoned and for a week friends who called or

telephoned were told that nothing more could be done and the end was certain
and might be expected any time. “He is 73, you know,” the doctor said. To-day
he is well and daily active in the very large concern he created. The father of
an intimate friend at the age of 69 fell ill from a complication of disorders the
family doctor diagnosed as old age and telegraphed his son to hasten home
from a distant city if he would see him alive. Upon his arrival, on the morning
of the 70th birthday, he found him half comatose and convinced that this day
would be his last; but he was cheered up, diverted, partook of a stimulated
eggnog, his first food for two days; and when he awoke just past midnight and
realized that he had entered upon another decade, revived, made a slow but
surprising recovery, and enjoyed not only a comfortable but a very active life
for nine years. He could not, however, quite bring his mind to enter the ninth
decennium. Strangely enough, my friend’s mother, whom I had also known all
my life, two years later passed through almost the same experience. He was
called to her deathbed, reaching her three days after all hope had been
abandoned. But she recovered and was nearly as well as before, and lived
seven years. A friend of mine retired from a college chair at 74 and was told
that he was worn out, had several grave symptoms, and must drop work and go
South. “You should be satisfied,” his physician told him, “with four years
beyond the allotted three score and ten.” But he had unfinished tasks, believed
them to be life-preservers, and now at 82 is still engaged upon them. A
vigorous old lady of 87 has thrice been given up by her physician within the
decade. Are doctors a little falsetto in their treatment of the aged?
Seventy is, on the whole, the most dangerous milestone and the morning
of that birthday is probably the saddest of all that those who attain it have
known or will ever know. It brings a new consciousness that now indeed we
are old; and if we still carry on as before, we are at least under the suspicion of
affecting a vigor that we really lack and are liable to lapse to an apologetic
state of mind because we do not step aside and give our place to our juniors
who often feel that they have a right to it, even though they try not to show or
even confess it to themselves. If we make partial withdrawal we find
insistencies, conscious and unconscious, in those who supersede us that we
might as well make it complete and the sense of being superfluous and no
longer needed is bitter. Complete retirement from all our life work, whatever it
is, may make us feel that we are already dead so far as our further usefulness is
concerned. Yet at no stage of life do we want more to be of service than when
we are deprived of our most wonted opportunities to be so. We do not take
with entire kindness and resignation to being set off as a class apart.

CHAPTER VI

THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF BIOLOGY AND
PHYSIOLOGY
Weismann’s immortality of the germ plasm and his denial of the
inheritance of acquired qualities—The truth and limitations of his
views—The theories of Hering and Simon—Metchnikoff’s
conception of the disharmonies in man, of the rôle of intestinal
flora and their products, of euthanasia, and of the means and effects
of prolonging life—C. S. Minot’s conception of the progressive
arrest of life from birth on as measured by declining rate of growth
and his neglect to consider the dynamic elements—C. M. Child’s
studies of rejuvenation in lower and higher forms of life in the light
of the problems of senescence—J. Loeb’s studies of the effects of
lower temperatures, of toxins, and ferments—The preservation of
cells of somatic tissues potentially immortal under artificial
conditions—Account of the studies of Carrel, Pozzi, and others—
Investigations upon the effects on sex qualities and age of the
extracts and transplantations of glands, from Claude Bernard—
Investigations of Eugene Steinach on the interchange of sex
qualities and rejuvenation by glandular operations in animals and
man—G. F. Lydston’s work—Serge Voronoff’s experiments and
his exposition of the achievements and hopes of glandular therapy
—Some general considerations in view of work in this field.

Next to Darwin, though by a wide interval, August Weismann (d. 1914,
a.e. 80) has most influenced general biological thought. His failing eyesight at
middle age caused him to abandon the microscope for biological thinking, a
field where there was a great need of synthesis and expert theory and in which
he developed great power and influence. His hierarchy of metamicroscopic
vital units, his dogma of the non-inheritance of acquired qualities in

confutation of the prevailing Lamarckianism, and his demonstration of the
continuity of the germ plasm have been theses of great interest and centers of
very active discussion, even outside the special field of zoölogy, although in
the latter doctrine, which chiefly concerns this discussion, he was in a sense
anticipated by Owen, Jäger, Nussbaum, and especially by Sir Francis Galton,
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as he later found. He first set forth the now generally accepted view that
most of the primitive unicellular organisms do not die and also sought to
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explain how death first entered the world. He says:

We cannot speak of natural death among unicellular animals, for
their growth has no termination which is comparable with death. The
origin of new individuals is not connected with the death of the old;
but increase by division takes place in such a way that the two parts
into which an organism separates are exactly equivalent, one to the
other, and neither of them is older nor younger than the other. In this
way countless numbers of individuals arise, each of which is as old as
the species itself, while each possesses the capability of living on
indefinitely by means of division.

Each of these one-celled individuals thus lives on and grows, till its
surface, through which all nutritive substance is absorbed and which increases
at a less rapid rate than its cubic content, becomes relatively too small, so that
the creature can no longer be nourished through it and the mature cell faces the
alternative either to die or divide into two halves; and, accepting the latter,
becomes, by division, two smaller daughter cells that, as the food-absorbing
surface becomes now relatively greater, are rejuvenated, although their
combined substance is exactly the same as that of the mother cell of which
they are simply bifurcations. As, thus, the substance of the parent cells all goes
over into the offspring resulting from the fission, nothing is lost in the process,
not even an envelope or membrane, as Götte, Weismann’s chief earlier critic,
thought was the case in encystment. Thus there is no vestige or rudiment of a
corpse. Nothing is sloughed off. It is in this sense that such creatures are
immortal. They have gone on growing and dividing thus ever since life began
and will continue to do so until it ceases. Thus there is a direct continuity from
first to last that is unbroken by anything that can be called death. If once and
so long as these single-celled creatures were the only or highest forms of life,

death or anything like it was unknown. In all this process, of course, nothing
like conjugation, mating, or fertilization occurs.
That this is not mere theory the experiments and observations of many
subsequent investigators, especially Woodruff and his pupils, have shown. In
thirteen and a half years he found paramecia had divided some 8,500 times,
and the process is still going on as actively as at first. Of these results
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Raymond Pearl says, “If in 8,500 generations—a duration of healthy
reproductive existence which, if the generations were of the same length as in
man, would represent roughly a quarter of a million years in absolute time—
natural death has not occurred, we may, with reasonable assurance, conclude
that the animal is immortal.” Thus it is that larger, older cells are constantly
being regenerated by spontaneous division and natural death does not occur
among most protozoa.
They simply grow and divide in an ever alternating rhythm and this was
the fundamental cadence in the song of life. If the large or mature stage is, in
any sense, a prelude of old age, division in the same way represents
rejuvenation. The latter is thus almost, although perhaps not quite, as
primordial as the phase of growth itself, and among the most ancient and
persistent of all the heritages that higher forms of life received from the lower
is this power to grow young. Thus the systole and diastole of the heart of the
Zoölogos began. The monad becomes a duad; the individual, a dividual, almost
as inevitably as the former grows; and the processional through this tiny life
cycle contains in it the promise and potency of countless other processes that
developed from it later. Thus even a colony of the far more complex coral
polyps may develop perhaps for thousands of years from a single individual.
Now, while protozoa may occasionally conjugate and thus prelude a
higher form of reproduction and while the simpler metazoa may propagate by
fission or budding, reminiscent of the older way, the general mode of
propagation among many-celled organisms follows what seems at first a very
different law. In these forms a sperm cell or spermatozoön must penetrate a
germ cell or an ovum and then the zygote, or fertilized egg, immediately
begins to reorganize itself from within and to divide into two, four, eight cells,
etc.; and these divisions produce cells not all exactly like the mother cell but
differentiation begins. In some species, as early as the first few divisions
certain cells are set apart as germ cells, devoted exclusively to the purpose of
reproduction. From these ova and spermatozoa arise. While others, far more in
number and aggregate bulk and increasingly so as we ascend the scale of life,

become more and more specialized for the production of different organs,
structures, and tissues. These gradually lose the power to produce entire
individuals. It is these that produce, and their descendants that constitute, all
the rest of the body, or soma, and so are called the somatic cells. It is these and
their progeny only that die while the germ cells, a very minute portion of the
entire body in the higher forms of life, still continue, like the protozoa, to
divide and grow in sæcula sæculorum, and it is they that, in a mundane sense,
are immortal. Of course very few of the circa four hundred ova produced
during the sex life of an average human female and vastly less of the three
hundred and forty billions of spermatozoa, according to Lote’s estimate,
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produced by the average male become mature individuals. Most of them
perish by the way and all those in the body at its death perish, of course, with
it. But sex cells, or rather the germ plasm, even in the highest animals,
including man, which attain their goal and produce mature individuals of a
new generation, continuing to follow the old formula of eternal growth and
division though vastly slower, remain still deathless.
Thus life is a really unbroken continuum from its beginning to its end and
we are all connected, as it were, by direct physical participation with the life of
our progenitors. Each individual produces a few germ cells that reach the goal
of maturity and many somatic cells doomed to death; and in the next
generation each repeats the same process. Some flagellate spores, for example,
when they divide, lose only the flagellum, which each new individual has to
reproduce for itself and this is the rudiment of the corpse that in the higher
forms of life becomes indefinitely more bulky and complex; while underneath
all this increasing punctuation by death, as it developed, the old plasmal
immortality still persists. On the other hand, all forms of fission and agamic
budding, so common a method of reproduction in plants and often found in
simpler forms of multicellular animal life, such as sponges and coelenterates,
are reminiscent of the protozoan fashion.
Thus we see that death came into the world not by reason of sin, as
theology teaches, but because of differentiation. As cells acquired the power to
produce more and more specialized organs and functions they lost the power to
reproduce the entire body and they lost it progressively—almost in exact
proportion as their power of multiplication became specific. Thus, as we
should expect, we find in the early stages of this differentiation cells that can
be influenced toward the old general or the new and more specific powers of
reproduction. Yet back of all the fact remains that life itself is essentially