Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

The psychic factors that have so overdetermined the hope-wish of personal immortality are as follows.

I. First is the desire to be remembered and esteemed by survivors. The soul abhors oblivion somewhat as it does extinction. We wish our friends not only to think of us but to think well of us. How satisfying this is both to those who die and to those who live is seen in Confucianism, where ancestor worship vicariates for belief in personal immortality. It would almost seem that some of the good and great would think more of the certainty of being canonized in due time or perpetuated in the form of bronze or marble, or enrolled in some temple of fame, than of personal immortality. At any rate, this mundane, would in some degree compensate for the loss of celestial perpetuation. Those who die in more or less full consciousness are prone in their last moments to dwell upon their friends far more than they do upon their own future state, as if the enshrinement they chiefly sought were in the hearts and minds of those they leave behind. Conversely, those who die alone, friendless, or with the execration of survivors, cling the more to the rehabilitation that death itself always tends to bring. On the basis of questionnaire data it would seem that some about to die shudder more at the thought that others would think they were totally extinct at death than from inwardly facing this conviction for themselves. We want others to think we are enjoying the best the universe can provide for its favorites, because in that case they will think more highly of us since we have obtained the diploma of the cosmos, that we have stood the test and have graduated summa cum laude from the terrestrial curriculum. Perhaps if we were early Christians we should begin to “put on airs” and affect the manners of a higher life here to impress our own valuation of ourselves upon others. An ancient sage would rather that others thought him bad and hated him than to be forgotten. Thus, in fine, if all knew that they and all their good deeds would never fade from grateful memory of their descendants, the conviction of a conscious personal existence beyond the grave would lose one of its preforming determinants and reinforcements. Therefore, those concerned to keep alive the fate and hope of another life should foster any agency that keeps the memory of the dead green. There really ought to be those who sum up effectively the good lessons and meaning of every life when it closes, as a kind of mundane judgment day so that no good influence be lost and no warning fail to have its due effect—a court of the dead to pass impartially upon each life as it sets out to sea. We censor books and are beginning to test eugenic marriages, etc.; and so, if all knew that upon their death an impartial tribunal would pass upon their lives in the interests of the common weal, even if their verdict came late or was given only to those most interested to know, ethical culture would mark a great advance and the fear of death, instead of consoling itself with belief in a future life, would be set to work in the interests of normal lives here.

II. The second mundane surrogate for transcendental immortality is doing things that will affect those who survive or will perpetuate our will and works to those who know little or nothing of us or of our name. Many last wills and testaments benefit those who knew nothing of the donor. Many such have reared buildings, started movements, built organizations, written books, invented, created works of art, transformed the face of nature with an instinct of workmanship in which all thought of self was merged. All our lives are thus greatly influenced by those who are unknown. The egoistic element tends to merge in a disinterested desire to make part of the world in some way better for our having lived. Sometimes, indeed, anonymity is actively striven for and the individuality of benefactors is hidden. The phobia here is that we may have lived for naught. Here the idea of God as an All-Discerner who sees virtue and vice, and rewards or punishes in secret, coöperates. Such hidden service to the race, with no thought of any compensation here or hereafter, has a unique charm all its own. Scientific discoveries and beneficent inventions have sometimes thus been given freely to all without any personal benefit and without a personal label. True love sometimes lavishes every gift, opportunity, and joy upon its object, with no stipulation of love or gratitude or even recognition in its turn. Indeed, the possession of wealth compels more or less attention to this field of the immortality of influence. Unlike the pauper, the millionaire must forecast if he would try to shape the future; and even if great givers attach their names to their bequests, they know that to most who profit by them their name will soon mean nothing. Jubal invented music and wandered afar and when he came back he found a great festival in honor of his art and of his name, but could not identify himself and was cast out as an impostor. “Jubal’s fame and art filled all the sky, while Jubal lonely laid him down to die,” supremely happy in the thought that he had done the race a great service. To love and serve man is far higher than to love and serve God, for we can do nothing for Him save in this way and He needs and expects no help from us save this. Men come and go but institutions and influence go on forever and those who start them share their mundane deathlessness long after they are forgotten. The cup of cold water illustrates the way of the gentleman or lady born and bred, best attested by the desire that others be happy and not that they themselves shine, be aggrandized, or have pleasure. This is the most ideal conduct and appeals most strongly of all things to the two great and ultimate standards of conduct, namely, honor and an approving conscience. And as we achieve this we belong to the order of the immortals and have triumphed over death. Desjardins, the founder of the order of the new life, said in substance, “We are never so impelled to snap our fingers in the face of death, to despise all its pomp and horror, and to defy him to do his worst to body and soul, as when we have just performed some such act of pure but passionate duty or kindness.” Then only can we truly feel that “no evil can befall a good man living or dead” and that the cosmos is moral to the core.

III. The third killer of the death-fear is children and posterity. To die childless, knowing that our heredity that began with the amœba and came down to us in an unbroken line dies, sharpens the sting of death; while, on the other hand, to have many well born and well reared children to rise up and call us blessed is one of the best antidotes to its baleful psychic virus. As every one knows, every creature, man included, lives about as long after the maximum power to propagate as his offspring requires to become mature, so that the prolongation of the period of immaturity means the prolongation of old age. Our foremost duty is to transmit the sacred torch of life undimmed, to give the maximal momentum and right direction to the nature and nurture of offspring and to bring rising generations to their full maturity—that is the highest criterion of an ever rising nation, including civilization itself. The true parent lives not only in and for the children but is the ancestor of their souls as well as of their bodies and even his belief in a future life is a good or bad thing according as it affects this. We feel this life incomplete, unfinished, and in need of a supplement because its possibilities are as yet unrealized. But we feel all this so much the less if we have children, while the dread of the inevitable hour becomes that of a kind of second or dual death for the childless because not only they but their line die in them. Yet, on the other hand, they have less ties and so less to lose, even though they may feel that they have, in a sense, lived in vain. What parent was ever so world-weary, so strong a believer in postmortem joy, that he would not rather live on here and see his children’s children thrive than go on hence to any conceivable future state? Those who leave offspring have had less time to develop morbid fears of Lethe’s waters and if they expect to enter a great peace beyond, they often find their chief joy in contemplating the fruits of their loins on earth. We have seen how the death thought begins with the life of sex and when the latter, if it has been normal and happy, comes to an end, death has already begun and we are advancing deeper into the shades of the dark valley, so that there is already less to lose. Thus the death of the aged is less tragic and less inconsolable; and, what is far more important, normal and cultured souls think and care progressively less about another life.

IV. As for the good old doctrine of personal immortality, we cannot yet escape the great law that the next life is compensatory. If men are wretched here, the future becomes a refuge and grows not only actual but attractive; while, conversely, if this life is rich and abounding, the next tends to fade. No Christian age was ever so heedless of the latter as our own. For most intelligent, prosperous women, and especially men, it has lapsed to little more than a mere convention or trope or fetish of an effete orthodoxy, and hell is at most only a nightmare of the past, a childish phantom. Our actual modus vivendi is as if another life did not exist and death were the end. No priestcraft can longer make men content with misery here in the hope of compensation hereafter. All make the most and best of this life as if it were all they were sure of and the motto of most believers is, “One life at a time and this one now.” Only in a kind of secondary falsetto Sunday consciousness do their thoughts turn to the future and does a flickering hope that death is not the end appear. Extinction is black by contrast in proportion as life is bright, happy, and absorbing, so that the death dread is in some respects growing as our life becomes richer, while it is at the same time being more and more banished from consciousness. The chief attractiveness it now has is that it brings rest and peace, for our tropes of it are more and more borrowed from sleep. Thus if the idea of the negation of life was never so dreadful, there was never such diversion from its closer envisagement. Thus, too, although suppressed, it was never so potent a factor in governing conduct, in improving hygiene, and providing for our offspring. Although we take a chance at saving our souls by church membership it is more and more bad form to discuss such matters. The real treasure of the soul is laid up elsewhere than in heaven and the growing phobia of death has now psychotherapies that are more and more effective. Its power is far greater than we know and there are endless uses to which it can yet be put in helping on the world’s work. Just as every pain that depresses the vital spirits a few points on the scale of euphoria, though they still remain far above zero, inclines to death, so when life is at its optimum or flood-tide man is wonderfully immune and recuperative in body and soul and the higher up the euphoric scale we live, the more difficult it is to fear or even think of death. Thus every legitimate fear of death is in a sense a life-preserver and -prolonger. Our business is to live and not to die, to keep at the very top of our condition and as far as possible from death, which is the summum malum.

As to the relation of these four immortalities, nominal, influential, plasmal, and orthodox, to each other, geneticism and the revelations of the dynamism of the folk-soul have shed much new light. This may be summarized in the statement that each of them is correlated with all the others. Even he who is chiefly intent on perpetuating his name is gratifying the deep instinct of transcending the limits of his own personal life and to know that he is remembered is not without consoling power even in the loss of property or if the conviction arises that death means extinction; while, conversely, the prospect of death in utter obscurity and of being completely forgotten tends to reinforce any or all of the other immortalities. Were we to rehabilitate hell in a modern sense, one of its horrors would be a sentence of summary oblivion even to our friends: “Let his name be forever taboo from mention or even from memory.” Of course, we shall all sooner or later fall under this sentence despite all our pathetic efforts to leave durable names behind.

As to anonymous influence, we are all sure of it to a degree, for the world we are born into is made by those who preceded us and we help to shape the future. In the social field we have endless illustrations of a service that involves more or less emulation. The case in point is a woman I knew who, having lived a most disinterested and self-sacrificing life, when told that God would reward her in the next world replied that she had never had either conviction or interest about another life but had been too busy doing good to think about it. If another life was in the order of things, all would be well, but if annihilation were in store, that, too, would be just as welcome, for she had found her pay in the satisfaction that each day’s work brought. She had no children and wanted no outer recognition but was content that her good deeds registered in others’ lives would follow her and nothing else really mattered in her scheme of life. The point is that in any other ages or environments the same instinct to enlarge life might have found expression in either of the other forms. Some even commit colossal crimes from a perverted form of Geltung’s propensity. Because they cannot be potent for good they make themselves so for evil. Anonymity is often a passion and finds outcrops not only in religion and philosophy but also in science. Indeed, very much of our civilization is composed of innumerable influences originated by those whose names no history or Acta Sanctorum have preserved and are products of this deep basal trend in the human soul.

As to plasmal immortality, who knows how much of all the good done in the world, if traced to its genetic roots, comes straight from the original momentum of the instinct to make the world better for posterity? To be sure, many of them are now broken erratic trends, forgetful of their source, which is really a nest-building instinct so irradiated and sublimated as to have lost orientation toward both its origin and goal. The first constructions in the world were nidifications. The first animal societies were stirpicultural. The primal examples of self-sacrifice were for the young. Everything for the world is good that squares with the functions of parenthood broadly conceived, and all is bad that contravenes it. Psychotherapy is slowly leading us to the astonishingly new insight that aberrations of the life-transmitting, young-rearing propensities constitute very many if not most of our mental abnormalities and that the rectification of these functions has marvelous therapeutic efficiency. The race is immortal, at least back to the first protozoan and indeed infinitely beyond. And so, in the future, our race and it only is immortal to the cosmic end. If we are tips of the twigs of a vast buried tree, these twigs may become themselves roots of a yet greater one and even a true superman may yet be born in the line of any of us. Thus, perhaps all the other immortalities have their dynamogeny in the instincts of parenthood.

As to the venerable belief in personal immortality, it was of course selfishness transcendentalized so as to subordinate every other goal in life to that of insuring our own happiness in a postmortem world. And we have to-day only contempt for the squalid ascetic who made his life miserable with the prime end of saving his own soul. But this crude doctrine now stands forth in a very new light, for psychology shows it to have been an ugly cyst or cast that enclosed and sheltered through hard dark ages a precious and beauteous thing now just emerging. Its content, as now revealed by analysis, is really man’s ineluctable conviction that his own life was insignificant compared with its larger meanings. Its real lesson is the subordination of the individual to the greater whole toward which it gave him a correct Einstellung. The close attachment of this doctrine to the ego was incorrect, for the self is only a trope or metaphor of the race, but even this was necessary at an earlier stage of race pedagogy. The transcendentality ascribed to a self freed from the body was inevitable because that was the only symbol by which the greater life of the race could be described or comprehended. This belief stored up and conserved the psychic promise and potency that is now again flowing over by transfer to the other outcrops of the immortality instinct. It did not say what it meant but was a pragmatic masterpiece, like so many great creations of the folksoul. From the soul of the race it went straight home to that of the individual and if it overstressed individuation for a time, that, too, was at first needful. Had man not so long or so inevitably believed in the great work of saving souls for the next world, he would now be less effective in saving them from the evils of this world. Had he not so cherished the conviction of a future heaven, he would have lost much of the very energy of his soul, which now strives to transform this world into a paradise and to populate it well. Thus we have here a great field in which the laws of the transposition of psychic trends into their kinetic equivalents, with very many different forms but with persistence of identical content, are abundantly shown. Man’s instinct has always been right and only his more superficial conscious interpretations of it wrong.

Excess or defect of either of at least the first three immortalities hypertrophies or dwarfs the others. The doctrine of conscious personal survival was not only developed in unconscious conformity to this principle but has an even more important pedagogic rôle for the young than we had hitherto supposed. It is a pragmatic, artistic, and in no sense a scientific fact. It utterly fails before the criteria of reason but it has worked far better results than it could have done had these requirements been alone regarded. It should not only be inculcated in the young but has immense therapeutic value and to doubt this is only another side illustration of the fact that cultivated adults have, the world over and particularly in our country, unprecedentedly lost touch with youth. Wherever the instincts of parenthood have not degenerated, it must be clear that belief in future personal rewards and punishments is a wholesome regulative of the lives of the young at a stage when feeling and impulse are at their strongest and before reason is mature.