Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

But the alchemists did not make gold nor evolve an homunculus nor achieve even spontaneous generation according to our criteria. Diligently as they sought for them, they never found the philosopher’s stone, the fountain of youth, or the elixir vitæ. Active as were their immortal longings and intricate as were their products, they were all abortive. They groped toward chemistry and metallurgy and these came in due time, although they were no more products of it than the modern building trades are of freemasonry. But their quest for a transmortal life neither achieved nor was followed by any after results that seem to us to be of value.

Modern astronomy tells us that the stellar universe is at least 250,000 light years in diameter, so that if one of the remoter stars went out we should not know it for that number of years. The extensions outside the range of even our Euclidean axioms which we now know were only provisional and where time is only a fourth dimension of space (Einstein); suns a million times larger than ours; thousands of millions of celestial bodies in all stages of evolution and devolution, yet all composed of nearly the same chemical elements as our tiny planet and all following the same laws of gravity, light, heat, the conservation of energy through all its transformations so that none of it is ever or anywhere lost, with illustrations of every stage of planetary development and dissolution, some of them probably evolving life and creatures far higher than man:—it is out of this universe that our world and we came and back into it we shall both be resolved sooner or later. As we advance in life we turn our backs to all this but when the retreat begins we face the stupendous whole of it again and death is freedom from the progressive limitations involved in individuation and a return home to the One and All. It is restoration, resumption, emancipation, diffusion, reversion, and all worlds and systems as well as men are thus destined to die of old age, perhaps by collision or other accident, since time is as boundless as space and the history of our solar system is but a single tick of the cosmic clock-work which we know is always running down even though it may have the power of eternally winding itself up again. If “our hearts like muffled drums are beating funeral marches to the grave,” so is also the heart of the universe. As we “join the majority” when we die, so do suns that become extinct and those we see with the strongest telescope may be but a handful compared to those that within its range have suffered “entropy.” Thus the true death thought is the transcender of all horizons and its muse points us straight to infinity as our goal. Along with this there is a deep conviction that there is no void or vacuum but that even though the existence of universal ether is now doubted by certain experts the cosmos is somehow a plenum full to repletion of being as it is of energy and teeming with the possibilities of even life far richer and more abundant than we can conceive. Thus we see again that personality is arrest, exclusion from all this, which ceases at death when we reënter the great current that sweeps onward all that is. Thus the solar system, earth, man, and finally our own ego involve descent as from a summum genus to an infima species. This progressive individuation is at every step arrest which death removes and reverses, so that the energies which during all our lives have held up and hampered us by so many disharmonies and conflicts are gone forever.

VI. Next come the noetic theories of immortality. Gnostics, illuminati, mystics, logicians of the categories, and all who seek salvation and perdurability by the noetic way assume that as the soul leaves individual things and persons and passes to species, to genera, and on to the abstract and unconditioned, certainty increases until it tends to become cataleptic in the old Stoic sense. The ultimate goal is pure absolute being, knowledge of which brings ecstasy, love of, and identification with it. Self is merged and lost in the infinite. Negatively this seems not merely death but annihilation. It should be regarded positively as the great affirmation and realization of true existence and the proper and only true finish and completion of human life, the last stage of psychogenesis. It is involution, the at last fully developed counterpart and complement of evolution. To this the genetic life impulse with which each of us starts will take us if its trajectory suffers no arrest and does not swerve from its proper course. This ontological immortality is Oriental, eleatic, and frankly pantheistic. It is a product not only of old thinkers but of old races and civilizations. It goes with retirement from and not with useful advent into the world. Those who begin this involution by, for example, knowing that they know, knowing that they know they know, etc., find that at the mathematical point when they reach the center of the involucre, the universe bursts in upon them. By tracing self-consciousness to its deepest root all that is conscious is lost in an unconscious that is utterly without bounds or orientation.

The religious instinct has always been vastly wiser than it knew but it always needs reconstruction, often radical in form. Thus, if at death the psyche is disintegrated as much as the body is and the disintegration goes down into molecules or any of the basal forms of energy, death is not absolute. The difference is like that between the mountains and the sea level when compared with that from the surface of the earth to its center. Hering and Simon tell us that what we have called heredity is really memory. The world beyond is like an ocean to an ant accustomed to its own ant-hill but floating out to sea on a straw. The subconscious is greater than the conscious and we do not dread this in sleep and so biology is greater than psychology, just as folklore is broader than psychology or philosophy. We want to feel ultimately forces and powers that are not our own, to be inundated with a larger strength, to fall back into everlasting arms. Thus, back of Christianity is an older, larger, meta-Christian, meta-human religion found in the love of nature, and old men ought to grow progressively interested first in animals, then in plants, then in the inanimate world, with a view to the ending of life in a pantheistic absorption.

This view has had another great reinforcement of late from studies that originated with Durkheim and Lévy-Brühl, from which it appears that back of primitive animism there are always found traces of some kind of mana cult, which is not unlike that of Om in India. Man is anthropic or upward-gazing. We address the sky not as “our father in heaven” but as a vastated navel-gazing orientation toward the source of all things. Schleiermacher, who conceived religion as absolute dependence and in his earlier writings made it pantheistic at root, sought to console a young widow who said that her whole soul went out to her dead husband and she could not possibly feel that he would be resolved back into the great One-and-All by saying that this should bring her no grief for it meant merging into the highest life of the infinite whole and no longer setting up for self—“If he is now living in God and you love him eternally in God as you loved and knew God in him, can you think of anything sublimer or anything more glorious? Is not this the highest end of love?” etc. Mailander held that pantheistic divinity died in giving birth to the world and that all its processes are self-destructive, pointing ultimately to a Nirvana; that everything is traveling the road to death, the desire for which is really the universal motive, so that we are unconsciously seeking this kind of absorptive death in all we do or say. Man’s business is to know the great whole and thus he will enjoy the prospect of annihilation and attain the full and glorious will to die. We must be resolved back into primal energy, which is nothing only in the sense that it is too great to be defined.

Meyer-Denfey urges that no part of the soul can be lost any more than can any element of the body and that the fuller our life has been the more of these modifications of cosmic matter and energy does it effect. Pantheism has resources for meeting the death fear which the Western world knows little of. It should also be noted that to the psychologist consolations drawn from the persistency of the elements of our body in the above sense are related to world-soul theories merely by ambivalent variance. Psychogenetically there is little difference between concepts of absolute mind back of all conscious and sentient beings and those of preëxisting energy, stress, nebulæ, or any other mother-lye of the universe. The Schiller-James view is that matter limits the expression of the absolute mind back of all. Our brain is a thin place in the veil through which the great life of soul breaks into the world but always in restricted forms. The philosopher, Schelling, thought mind and nature at root identical but Schiller is more dualistic and regards the body as a “mechanism for inhibiting consciousness.” “With our brains we are able to forget.”

Still, the mind is in rapport, however dim, in contact, if not indeed continuous with a larger consciousness of unknown and perhaps universal scope that is disclosed to us in our subliminal self. On this view the brain does not secrete thought but obstructs it like a bad conductor, so that when the thought currents of the great Autos make the nerves glow, the phosphorescence or incandescence caused by the resistance of the brain is what appears to our fragmentary subliminal mind as consciousness. Ideation is thus a transmissive function of the brain and when it perishes, personality, which means limitation, is dissolved into the larger life of the whole. Mind stuff, like force and matter, may preëxist in minute and disseminated fragments, which our bodies mass and our brains combine into what we call souls. And on this view these fragmentary psychic elements, whether they be combined in a human or even animal ego or not, must also be immortal for all the reasons we are. Perhaps the highest combinations may be grouped into yet higher beings, which would be resolved back again into us on their way to more elemental states.

If our soul is the mouthpiece of an absolute soul, as the word persona is often interpreted to imply, inadequate though it be it is still to those lower mausolized souls somewhat as the more definite and absolute soul is to us; and as their voices are absorbed in us so we are in infinite being. We are bundles, vincula, or parentheses of more ultimate elements that preceded and will survive us, but we are somehow helping these immortal components on to their own goal, so that the real value of life is theirs and not ours. But if subliminal functions are most immortal, the dissolution of our consciousness might be desiderated, for organization obscures the ultimate reals and the massing of lower monads involves a larger sum of arrest, so that perhaps our lives really hinder rather than help on the cosmic process of evolution or redemption. As in chemistry the more complex combinations are unstable and tend to disintegrate, so the higher psychic compounds we cause and that make our minds persist a while will be resolved into lower and simpler ones that outlast them. Thus, at best the problem and conduct of our earthly life would be akin to that of a careful breeder who would leave permanent variations in the vegetable and animal species to be cultivated that would persist long after he himself is forgotten. If this soul of the world is conscious, as we are, death is lapsing down the evolutionary scale. But this ideolatry of consciousness is passing. And if the unconscious is higher and the basal cosmic energies are greater, more perfect, and more important than our psyche and soma, then we have lost our sense of direction and devolution is really upward.

VII. As to the philosophic attempts to prove the doctrine of personal immortality, no genetic psychologist can to-day despise even the most proletarian form of belief in a principle that survives death. Although the time is past when the old theological arguments for immortality are convincing, save to those whose religious development has been arrested, they will always deserve respect not only because they have done so much to sustain great souls in the past but because, as we now interpret them, they mean a larger and more complete life for man here in the future. Disregarding these, we must, however, briefly pass in review the chief views that the philosophic minds have evolved that the soul lives on.

We begin with Plato, who finds not one but many proofs of it. In the Phaedrus he finds it in the spontaneity and power of self-motion of the soul. In the Timaeus he finds it in the fact that the soul is the chef d’œuvre of the world, so wondrous and beautiful that the gods would and could not really let it die. Elsewhere he finds proof of its immortality in the soul’s struggle for knowledge, the impulse to progress to ever more general ideas, which, as we have seen, he thought akin to death. Again, he deemed it immortal because he thought no sin or evil could kill it. Once more, as all that live must die, so the correlate must hold that all the dead live or, as Cebes puts it, the latter is a necessary postulate to the idea of life. The soul, too, is simple and undecomposable and so can never be destroyed. His doctrine of reminiscence was that we remember previous incarnations, preëxistence being long thought to be as necessary and as demonstrable as postexistence. Plato found Greek life and mind confused and sought by cross-examination and induction in the psychic field to attain a few fixed ideas that the soul could anchor to in the sophistic flux, minds be drawn together, and Greece thus saved from disintegration as the old theological views crumbled. The products of all this Socratic midwifery were basal concepts, the eternal patterns of which by participation in things made them real. These Aristotle and many later writers elaborated and defined as a table of categories and in nature they were interpreted as summa genera or fixed species or types. It was the persistence of belief in these that both Darwin and Locke attacked. The species and entities of the scholastics, which underlay even the doctrine of the Eucharist, and not only nativism and apriorism but all forms of philosophic realism, as well as absolutism, metaphysics, ontology, rational transcendentalism, the passion for deducing conclusions from presuppositionless data elsewhere derived, and even the Stoic and Kantian conscience—all rest upon the assumption of definite and abiding norms in nature or mind that are simple and undecomposable by psychic analysis and from which all thinking starts and in which it ends. Thus the doctrine of ideas has been the key not only to philosophic orthodoxy but to much of the thought and most of the great controversies of the world. Not only theologians but Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel, and also no less but in a different manner, mystics, illuminati, rationalists, scientists in their quest for constants and laws of nature, and even the codifiers of Roman law, were all inspired by belief in attaining ultimate principles, and all these were looking toward immortality.