The old are remarkably and uniquely suggestible in all matters that pertain to the suppression or augmentation of life. They give up and die prematurely as victims of a tradition that it is time for them to do so and they survive no less remarkably not only troubles and hardships but even surgical operations if they feel that they can do so. We need not be faith-curers but must be vitalists and believe in some kind of élan vital or creative evolution, as opposed to materialistic or mechanistic interpretations of life, to understand the true psychology of age. It is the nascent period of a new and unselfish involution of individuation which is impossible under the domination of egoism. The new self now striving to be born is freer from the dominion of sense and of the environment and has an autonomy and spontaneity that is reinforced and recharged with energy from the primal springs of life, and man may well look to this as one of the great sources of hope in his present distress.
With the sublimation of sex in the Indian summer of the senium, thus, comes normally a higher type of individuation than is possible before. It is freer from passion, sense, selfish interest, clearer and farther sighted, but sees the identity of the individual and the race with which it is becoming incorporate. This is the first step toward the final merging into mother nature. The isolation from the outer world that comes with dimming senses, the abatement of erotism, and the reduced vocational activities are compensated for by a new noetic or meditative urge that comes straight from the primal sources of all vital energy and gives a new and deeper sense of these and, if we are philosophical, brings a new sympathy with vitalistic theories like those of Lotze, Samuel Butler, Fechner, and Bergson, to say nothing of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, or the long line of evolutionists before Darwin, which goes back at least to Heraclitus. This final rally of powers just when the processes of bodily decay are accelerated, which in times past sometimes took the form of outbreaks of prophecy, admonition, or clairvoyance as to the meaning of present tendencies for the far future of the race and the further development of which is one of the great present hopes of a world in which the processes of degeneration are now being greatly accelerated, can be nothing else than the birth throes of a new and higher stage in the evolution of man. The task now rests upon us to intensify and prolong this stage and to assure it to an ever larger number. We already see that we here escape from many, and must learn to escape from more, of Metchnikoff’s disharmonies in life. Sometime we shall both breed and educate for it, make it the ideal and goal for the young, and look for and heed its deliverances in the favored old. Having attained it, although death will seem all the darker by contrast with its regenerative light, man can meet it with less regret because he will not feel that he must be consoled by the sequel of another life. All forms of belief in the latter are, in fact, only surrogates expressive of a deeper faith and these symbols of it have served the precious purpose of keeping alive in his breast the sense that his life here was an unfinished fragmentary thing. The true Indian summer of life, when its possibilities are developed, is all that they mean, for in it all man’s belated powers will ripen and the final harvest of his life be garnered.
As to death, normal old age loves it no better than do the young. Metchnikoff, who postulated an instinct for death as the reversal of the love for life and which he thought should supervene at the end, looked for it in himself when he faced imminent and certain death at nearly three-score-and-ten; but in vain. The late Secretary Lane, facing it, was praised for saying, “I accept,” but the psychologist doubts whether anyone ever did or could welcome death understanding it to be extinction. The suicide may murder his instinctive will to live; the martyr may die in the hope of a better world beyond; the disappointed lover or the coward to life may turn to it as the lesser of two evils. A man may surrender his life as a sacrifice to a cause he deems greater than self but it is nevertheless a supreme sacrifice. A soldier accepts the fatal thrust of the bayonet and a criminal mounts the scaffold or sits in the death chair because he cannot help it. For how can life accept its own negation? It can never hope to know more of it than the sun can know of shadows, which are where it is not. Thus the old are no wiser and no more willing to die than the young, if indeed they are as much so, because it means more to the latter who have more to lose by it. All that philosophy or religion can do is to direct our minds from its full and stark envisagement.
Growing old hygienically is like walking over a bridge that becomes ever narrower so that there is progressively less range between the licet and the non licet, excess and defect. The bridge slowly tapers to a log, then a tight-rope, and finally to a thread. But we must go on till it breaks or we lose balance. Some keep a level head and go farther than others but all will go down sooner or later.
Several of my respondents say that they never on any account admit to themselves that they are old and a few advise us to avoid by every possible means all thought of death, using every method of diversion from it. One thinks that to dwell upon this theme is positively dangerous because the thought tends to bring the reality. I believe, on the contrary, that such an attitude is not only cowardly but that it involves self-deception because the memento mori is in fact always present, if unconsciously, in the old and to face the Great Enemy squarely really brings easement and safeguards us from a thanatophobia that may have far more dangerous outcrops. To have once deliberately oriented ourselves to death before our powers fail gives us a new poise whatever attitude toward it such contemplation leads us to.
My own conclusion that death is the end of body and soul alike, while it gives me a profound sense of satisfaction as having reached and accepted the final goal of all present culture tendencies which all serious souls feel impelled toward but which many of them still fight down also brings me, I frankly confess, a new joy in and love of life which is greatly intensified by contrast with the blankness beyond. As a dark background brings out a fading picture, so whatever remains of life is vastly more precious and more delectable day by day and hour by hour than it could possibly be if at the door of the tomb we only said au revoir. The very minutes seem longer because the departure into eternity is so near. Although death treats our psyche just as it does our soma, this is not so bad on our present views of the universe and insight lifts us above the need of consolation and even gives a sense of victory though Death do his worst, which those who expect another personal life never attain. And so I am grateful to senescence that has brought me at last into the larger light of a new day which the young can never see and should never be even asked to see. Thus if any of them should ever read my book thus far I would dismiss them here and in the following chapter address myself to the aged alone. That Jesus faced, and consciously, this absolute death at the close of his career seems to me now to have been made clear by modern critical and psychological investigation. But it was a sound pedagogic instinct that led the evangelists to veil this extreme experience of their Master.[203]
CHAPTER IX
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH
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 death beds—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—Thanatopsis.
From infancy to old age the conceptions of death undergo characteristic changes in the individual not unlike those through which the race has passed. The death fear or thanatophobia is, thus, a striking case of recapitulation. The infant, like the animal, neither knows nor dreads death. The death-feigning instinct in animals is only cataplexy and the horror of blood that some herbivora feel is not related to death. From Scott’s 226 cases[204] and my own 299 returns to questionnaires[205] it appears that the first impression of death often comes from a sensation of coldness in touching the corpse of a relative and the reaction is a nervous start at the contrast with the warmth that the contact of cuddling and hugging was wont to bring. The child’s exquisite temperature sense feels a chill where it formerly felt heat. Then comes the immobility of face and body where it used to find prompt movements of response. There is no answering kiss, pat, or smile. In this respect sleep seems strange but its brother, death, only a little more so. Often the half-opened eyes are noticed with awe. The silence and tearfulness of friends are also impressive to the infant, who often weeps reflexly or sympathetically. Children of from two to five are very prone to fixate certain accessories of death, often remembering the corpse but nothing else of a dead member of the family. But funerals and burials are far more often and more vividly remembered. Such scenes are sometimes the earliest recollections of adults. Scrappy memory pictures of these happenings may be preserved when their meaning and their mood have entirely vanished and but for the testimony of others they would remain unable to tell what it was all about.