III
He is not the racial type because so many of us begin to die almost as soon as we have begun to live. Our very fear of the death-principle admits it into our consciousness. Admitted into our consciousness it starts its work of killing us. It wrinkles the face, it turns the hair grey, it enfeebles the limbs, it stupefies the brain. One of its most deadly weapons is fatigue, or the simulation of fatigue. The tired business man, who rules American life, is oftener than not a dead business man. If he looked ahead he would see what we idiomatically know as his "finish." He is not only dying but he infuses death into manners, literature, and art, since he so largely sets the standard which becomes the rule.
War on the death-principle should be, it seems to me, one of the aims to which the individual gives his strength; and once more he can do it on his own account.
In the first place, he can watch himself, that he does not mentally begin to grow old. To begin mentally to grow old is to begin mentally to die. He must think of himself as an expanding being, not as a contracting one. He must keep in sympathetic touch with the new, damning the know-it-all frame of mind. He must keep in sympathetic touch with youth, knowing that youth is the next generation in advance. The secrets of one generation are not those of another; but if he who possesses the earlier masters also the later he is that much the richer and wiser. The gulf which separates parents and children is one which the parents must cross. They can work onward, while the children cannot work backward. Up to a certain point the older teach the younger; beyond a certain point the younger teach the older. He who would go on living and not begin to die must be willing to be taught, reaping the harvest of both youth and age.
In the second place, he who would live must not kill anyone else. The deadly tendency in ourselves is forever at work on those about us, chiefly on those we love. We watch, tabulate, and recount their symptoms of decay. Making notes of them for ourselves we discourse of them to others. "He begins to look old," is a commonplace. The response will probably emphasise the fact. By response to response we spin round a friend the age-web which lengthens into the death-web. In our expressive American vernacular we speak of "wishing" conditions on others, an instinctive folk-recognition of the force of mentality. We do it in a sinister sense more often than by way of helpfulness. We "wish" by thinking, by talking, by creating an atmosphere, by forcing things into the general consciousness. Old age and decay, bad enough in themselves, we intensify by our habits of mind. Death, which in any case awaits our friends, we woo to them by anticipations of demise. It is not ill-intentioned. It comes out of a subconsciousness in which death and not life is the base.