F. von Mueller of Munich[23] says that we can never tell when old age begins. Involution is closely connected with evolution from the start. The lymphatics, tonsils, and thymus begin to atrophy as soon as the development of the sex organs comes. Among English button workers it was found that young men did most; between the ages of 40 and 45 they did 80 per cent of the work they formerly did; 60 per cent in the fifty-fifth year, and 40 per cent after sixty-five. The power of observation is so great in youth that seventy per cent of all our acquisitions are made at this stage. Originality comes later. Age is more serious. There is less adaptation because habit is growing rigid. The emotional life stiffens and the intellectual narrows. There are more doubts. There is a stronger-felt need of recognition from others that is very deeply experienced in many ways. The capacity for producing original ideas comes latest of all. It is generally thought that the highest physical development is before 30. Some investigators think that physical deterioration begins with the brain but this is doubtful.
Bruce Birch[24] thinks the wreckage of youth spectacular; that of old age less discernible because more subtle and internal. The old should come to the fullest possible maturity. Youth must be served. The church focuses on young men. The old age here chiefly regarded is from forty-five on. Most lack intelligent encouragement to go on. They are thought too old to need advice and to only want comfort. Habits are supposed to be formed. The old are not thought to be heart-searchers.
The fact is, senescence has very new and great temptations, namely, to go on in the old way of habit and belief. The temptations of the old are largely of the spirit but sometimes also of the flesh and the devil. It is hard to keep up the struggle for personal righteousness and there are periods of storm and stress. The church has not done its duty here. Most think the most dangerous period is that of wild oats—between 16 and 26—but this writer says it is between 45 and 65 when there is the most wreckage.
1. There is a tendency to low ideals. Youth tends to lofty ideals and to realize them, but now hope often fails. With the abbreviation of life there is loss of initiative, perhaps sickness of hope deferred. Age thinks it has become all it can hope to be; so enthusiasm wanes and the tedium vitae makes us feel the game is not worth the candle and we are not willing to pay the price of sacrifice and struggle to maintain high ideals. So we aim lower. The excelsior motive is lost. So there is often a degeneration of moral character. Cheap pleasures satisfy—perhaps even those of the table, for this is the easiest way of reviving some of the tendencies of former life.
2. Hence lowering and liberalizing of conduct creeds. The frontal lobes shrink as the period of endeavor wanes. The edge of desire is dulled and so is the power to distinguish right and wrong, true and false. “Twice a child, once a man.” The powers of imagination, aggression, and resistant effort flag, and we are content with the beaten path because the motor areas have decayed. There is ruttiness, the brain is set for habitual reactions, there are fixed points of view, the apperceptive mass is allowed to interpret all new ideas, and these cannot change it. Thus it is hard to adjust to progress. There is less resistance, self-control, courage for great deeds and high purposes, less tendency to ask advice of and be influenced by younger men. Politicians often recognize this in putting forward respectable elderly, pliant candidates. One is often weak where he thinks himself strong because there is no fool like an old one. He may yield to selfishness, acquisitiveness, curiosity, secretiveness, envy, jealousy, avarice, and other primitive traits. There is too frequent moral collapse here.
3. There is a lessening of emotional intensity or stodginess. The imitative, religious, adventurous, belligerent, imaginative, initiative traits are developed early, and the younger man is the greater in the dominion of the emotions. But later poets turn to prose and others to more didactic activities. Scientists, philosophers, and statesmen are best when they are through this period. Disappointed men now become cynical, morose, petulant, or vicious as the intellect only rules. If the social and gregarious instinct fails, society may bore, friendships decline, and age may be lonely. Or, again, it may fall a prey to many dispositional, emotional, and obsessive feelings which may become insane. The patient may live in a logic-tight compartment. The obsession may be a hobby or a system of connected ideas with a strong emotional tone (complex). These are tendencies arising from instinct. When the social and sane instincts lose in the conflict, interest in the present may decline to indifference, and the obsessions may focus on real or fancied errors of the past—duty to a dead child, a business failure, etc. At any rate, there is a tendency to indulge temperament.
4. Failure in religious teaching. Versus “Be sure your sin will find you out” all the old realize that they have done much sin that is not found out and which, if it were exposed, would bring suffering, disgrace, public execration, and loss of vocation, property and friends. To fear only the consequences of evil is bad, and since they have escaped they feel a certain contempt of secular and moral law and take greater risks. The old man prefers to be respectable and righteous, but he does not care if his unrighteousness is known or suspected if it is not made too public. Thus the old dread exposure more than they do sin.
5. The church offers too little to the old but wants to see old age tap new reservoirs of energy, vigor, joy, and enthusiasm. The best it can offer is faith in Jesus. Many would say it offers a larger intellectual view.
Karin Michaëlis[25] tells her story in the form of letters and a running journal. A poor girl, she early came to feel that with her beauty she could do anything and supremely longed for wealth. After just escaping marriage with a rich old man who educated her, she married a wealthy and most exemplary husband whom she divorced, after having lived tranquilly with him for a score of years, with no cause on either side but because she felt a growing passion for solitude. She retired to a desert island in a spacious new villa planned by an architect friend eight years younger than herself. After a year of isolation, slowly realizing that she is in love with the architect, as she had long been, she offers herself to him on any terms and is rejected. She then proposes to rejoin her husband but finds him engaged to a girl of nineteen.
The remarkable merit of this book that made it something of a sensation through all western Europe ten years ago is the masterly descriptions of the state of mind of women of a certain type, and perhaps to some extent of all, at the turn of life. While there is not a phrase in it that could shock the most fastidious, it is evident throughout that the author’s soul is permeated with a sex consciousness that finds numberless indirect expressions and that she knows life and man chiefly from this standpoint, condones most of woman’s errors, advises her friends to courses that convention forbids, etc. No one ever began to write such a book, not even Octave Feuillet in his La Crise. It all reads like a marvelous confession of things no woman ever said before or could say to a man. She says: