Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

In my teens in the country I often, and with a willingness that was hard for myself or my parents to understand, took my turn in watching with the sick and dying neighbors or “setting up” with corpses. On two occasions, once entirely alone, I performed as best I could the office of “laying out” the body of an old neighbor who died in the middle of the night. Other young people of my acquaintance were generally very ready to perform such offices although they involved great nervous tension, and in general a companion watcher was sought or provided. Another personal experience illustrates the persistence of juvenile attitudes toward death in mature life. As a boy in the country I had to pass, in going to and coming from the village, a lonely country church yard, by which I used to run and in which many of my relatives for generations were buried. Only a few years ago I yielded, during a sojourn at the village inn, to the whim of revisiting this graveyard by moonlight one midnight. I forced myself to climb over the high black entrance gate, for all was surrounded by a wall of dark-colored stone and by a row of pine trees. I walked deliberately through the graveyard and back, striking a match on my grandfather’s tomb to light a cigar as a culmination of a kind of bravado that left nothing that an observer could detect as indicating anything but perfect poise and control. I did not even quite shudder when, as I stood amidst the grave stones, a dark cloud obscured the moon, and after walking back and forth there for a time I leisurely clambered out and went back. But the strange thing about it all was a nervous tension, the flitting fears and fancies that had to be kept under and that constantly impelled me to turn and run. On returning I found myself in a state of high nervous excitement and realized that almost any sudden unexpected shock would have caused me, as the sudden obscurity of the moon nearly did, to yield to precipitate flight.

Thus, we see in the young buds of about all of the many and diverse attitudes the race has assumed toward death. Most of them are polymorphic and perverse, some merely organic residua of long phyletic influences. Thus, as in sex, the components of the death attitudes are early present but are not organized into unity until puberty, when the racial experiences in both fields come to be more or less unified. It would seem that death has no business with young people or they with it and that it is as absurd for them to occupy themselves with it at this age as it would be for them to worry about posterity before the dawn of adolescence. Since the life and growth of the psyche and soma are now at their flood-tide, it would seem that every intimation of death would be not only foreign to the very nature of young people but would be arrestive of the course of nature and should be veiled in reticence, like sex, before its time, with only provisional answers to the genuine questions about it. Indeed, the above data seem to show that the genetic impulse itself seems to shield the child by diverting it from the central fact of death to countless irrelevancies, trivialities, and accessories. Just as the instinct of the race has blindly striven to avoid sex precocity, if not to delay puberty, and more consciously and purposively to enforce a period of repression between the age of pubescence and that of nubility, so myth, primitive religion, and especially Christianity, have provided ways of mitigating, even for adults but more especially for the young, the nameless horror of direct envisagement of the fact that all must die and cease to be, body and soul, or, like the Nirvana cult, to make this conviction more tolerable.

Indeed, it is probably a normal instinct of compensation that often leads young people to visit morgues and perhaps dissecting rooms, to develop a certain immunity from such obsessive tendencies as the above.[208] Great earthquakes, disastrous floods, and, above all, war and pestilence compel us to face the death thought at close quarters for a season and there are always those who revel in describing it in its most gruesome details, although there is a tacit consensus of the press to suppress the most horrible of them. Soldiers have to be hardened to inflict it in its most direct and personal way, as, for example, by the bayonet, as well as to keep cool when they are first under fire and to carry on and not turn and flee in panic when their comrades are torn to pieces about them. Such experiences, while they often mature the unripe and give a new poise to character, also tend to make human life seem cheaper, so that it is not strange that wars are followed by crime waves and especially by marked increase in assaults. For disguise it as we may, war is at root licensed murder and its heroes are they who have killed the most of those who have been declared enemies. Indeed, it is self-evident that the normal man who can deliberately stake his life in a fight in which he knows that he must either kill or be killed does so because he realizes that there is something that he values more than he does his life, and to have had one such experience marks an epoch of the utmost moral import. Perhaps it is not too much to say that only those who have made this supreme sacrifice in spirit are finished and complete men.

When death holds high carnival and whole populations are depleted, long periods of readjustment follow and human nature breaks out in strange ways. Defoe’s very realistic though fictive story of the Great Plague showed this. J. W. Thompson[209] says that the Black Death, A.D. 1348–1349, swept away at least one-third of the population of Europe and brought in its train economic chaos, social unrest, profiteering, lack of production, phrenetic gayety, dissipation, wanton spending, recklessness, greed, debauchery, avarice, hysteria, and decay of morals. The nerves of the people were shattered. Goods were without owners but everything movable was immediately appropriated by survivors. Prices first shrank very low and then rose to preposterous heights. The Plague was like an invasion and there were great migrations for years. There was administrative inefficiency for the trained class was cut down. The machinery of government almost stopped and there were thousands of ignorant and incompetent men in important public places. The church was no better off and it had to press unfit raw recruits into its service. Flagellants exhibited a mixture of religion and sex rivaling the psychology of the crusades. Thought went off on all kinds of tangents. There were charlatans, mind-readers, sorcerers, witch doctors, soap-box preachers, and the Pied Piper very likely really did lead the excited children with his mad antics and weird music to wander off with him until, as in the children’s crusade, they were lost. Thompson points out that although there are many points of difference, there are more very significant analogues between the after-effects of this plague and those of the World War. A Danish historian estimates that in the latter ten million soldiers died in battle or of wounds, three million were permanently disabled, and probably some thirty million more people would have been alive to-day but for it. Such a decimation of Europe has certainly brought social, economic, and psychological changes that it would take us long to evaluate.

Meanwhile, we cannot entirely escape the looming prospect of a far more disastrous war that may yet come. W. Irwin[210] has cleverly hit off some of the possibilities of the awful holocaust that death would probably celebrate if such a conflict ever came to pass. Instead of liquid flame we have now Lewisite gas, which is invisible, sinks, and would search out every dugout and cellar, while it also attacks the skin and almost always kills, having a spread fifty-five times greater than that of any other poison gas. He quotes an expert as saying that a dozen Lewisite air-bombs of the greatest size and under favorable atmospheric conditions would practically eliminate the population of Berlin and we even have hints of a gas beyond this. Gas will very likely be the chief weapon of the future war. Moreover, the bombing airplane has a range, of course, far beyond any gun. Bombs grew in size during the war from that of a grapefruit to eight feet in length, with half a ton of explosives and gas-generating chemicals, costing some $3,000 each and the planes carrying these will be directed by wireless, so that the airplane is thus the supergun. Hitherto warfare has been directed against soldiers, but in the future it will be against whole peoples and this generation may see a great metropolis suddenly made into a necropolis. Formal declaration of war, too, will become as obsolete as a Fauntleroy courtesy. Killing will be not by hand but by machinery; not in retail but by wholesale. War will be not between individual nations or small groups of them but will embrace the entire world, even the East, so that there will be no neutrals. Tanks will be used as super-dreadnoughts and poison gases will perhaps paralyze the soil for years, as indeed they have done to some extent in eastern France. Thus if war in the future becomes one hundred per cent efficient in the use of the resources at present at its command and those that it is only the part of common sense to anticipate, the depopulation caused will be incalculable and the world may experience again all the phenomena that Europe did after the Black Death, and perhaps more.

There is an evolution larger than Darwinism and far older than science in which all who think have everywhere and always believed. The common phenomena of growth suggest it to every mind. It is almost of the nature of thought to seek origins and to trace things to their simple beginnings. Indeed, the most perfect knowledge of anything is the description of the processes of its development. Special creation myths, cosmogonies, and religious theories of the world and man, philosophies and histories, are all products of the same deep instinct to know the cosmos as a whole and also its parts genetically. And it is a deep and dominant noetic instinct that has given us the far more highly evolved evolutionism that now prevails in every department of human knowledge. Thus, even those who oppose its recent applications to man are only halting at the last step in a path that all have traveled far and long.

The will-to-live, the struggle for survival, the élan vital, libido, etc., are only new names given to the impelling forces of the growth-urge in its higher stages; but these have become types and symbols, if a bit anthropomorphic, of all the more basal and earlier processes by which the homogeneous tends to differentiate itself. Thus we may conceive the universe as being from the first in labor to produce life. Everything that lives hungers to do so more intensely and as for man “’tis life of which our nerves are scant, more life and fuller—that we want.” Macrobiotism was the term used to designate the lust to maximize our lives, to make them vivid and long, and to exhaust all the possibilities of human experience; but, more especially, to enlarge the pleasure field and narrow that of pain, which is arrestive. We want to enjoy everything of which man’s estate is capable and we want it here and now. In youth, particularly, we long for wealth, knowledge, power, strength, fame, health, and beauty because these make us glow and tingle with life. The things to which we ascribe worth and value are those that enhance the joy of living. All of them are only forms of the affirmation of the will-to-live or fulfillments of the wish to be well, happy, and of consequence to ourselves and others. Progress, reform, enlightenment, enterprise, efficiency, are terms used as we climb the heights of the excelsior mount of promise. “More life and fuller”—we want nothing else here or hereafter.

But death, ghastly, inevitable death, is our goal. It is the great and universal negation of life and coregent with it of the world. All that lives must die. How the death-thought sometimes springs like a beast of prey from its ambush upon youth when life is most intense and how it blights, sears, stings, and wounds but nevertheless charms and fascinates! Here is the first of all dualisms, the greatest of all contrasts, and the most universal of all conflicts. Death is dissolution, defeat, retreat, abnegation, the processes of which begin with life itself and even the old who still “carry on” know that they must soon become carrion and that no funeral pomp or tomb can do more than camouflage putridity in order to divert us from the horrid thought to escape which the very concept of the soul itself was entified and immortalized, just as all the devices of modesty and all the precepts of sexual morality were evolved to divert us from the envisagement of bare sex organs and acts. Death is not only the king of terrors but to the genetic psychologist every fear is at bottom the fear of death, for all the scores of phobias that prey upon man are of things and of experiences that abate life. Death is thus a matter of infinite degrees from the loss of a penny or a sore tooth to that of a friend or to our own extinction. Freudians rightly ascribe many ailments of mind and body to abnormalities and disharmonies of sex love, which presides over the life of the race. But this now needs to be supplemented by quite another and probably no less important psychoanalysis that will show, when it is explored, that the fear of death or of life-abatement for the individual is no whit less pervasive and dominant than are love and hunger, which are so often said to rule the world. Only one psychologist has, although but very partially, recognized this and his findings are résuméd as follows.

W. Stekel says that not only has death played a great rôle in poetry, folklore, myth, religion, and art, but it is a more or less disguised theme of many dreams, especially those of neurotics.[211] He urges that not only the death fear but the death wish, masked in very diverse symbolic forms, is extremely common in the dreams of psychopaths. He ascribes a thanatic meaning to very many factors that analytic Freudians have usually interpreted as having only a sexual significance and holds that the same mechanisms apply to both. He would have all psychoanalysts look for the death thought, which he believes hardly less common and quite as disguised and illusive as sex, not only in dreams but in the illusions of the insane. To our bestial unconscious self, which in these experiences escapes the censor, the ego is supreme and finds its ultimate goal only in the destruction of others; and if it does not kill those in our way, it pictures their death or finds some way for their removal. This, indeed, is involved in the realization of very many of our secret hopes. A woman loves a man whom she cannot see and so she dreams that her child dies, for she knows that he would attend the funeral and there see and also pity her. A man has more or less unconsciously ceased to love his wife but suppresses the realization of the fact from his waking consciousness and so dreams of her as talking with his grandfather, long since dead. Another man in a like state of mind dreamed that his wife suddenly and mysteriously vanished.

The most common death symbols are going away, a journey, wandering; or there may be still more remote focalization of the death wish upon sandals, feet, footsteps, a path, going home, passing through a narrow street or door, growing small; or even vehicles of any sort or anything suggestive of transportation may signify death. Instead of a skeleton or skull the dream may conceive death under the form of a rider, huntsman upon a white or black horse, a deaf mute—suggestive of the silence of the grave—or blindness, symbolic of its darkness; a doctor, perhaps Doctor White or Doctor Black, a tailor cutting a thread, a messenger, raven, black cat or dog, thirteen, a clergyman, priest, weeping willow, a woodman felling a tree, a mower or reaper, a small house or room, fire or flood.