Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

This argument, so dear to and so ably advocated by its author, is obviously suggested by the Kantian postulate. Is it true in fact, however, that the closest companionship, friendship, and even love do not take us to the real individuality of the objects of these impulsions? Though man has always been gregarious and social, it would seem that this instinct is abortive if Royce is correct and also that the reality of such an individuality as he postulates would not be conscious but rather trans-conscious or frankly unconscious.

Miss Calkins in her various writings, although not consciously intent upon proving immortality, belongs to this group. The constant sense of self, which she postulates in the teeth of the modern studies of multiple personality, harks back to Descartes and she seems to be a good illustration of Royce’s persistent quest for a self that from its very nature cannot be known, a quest that in her has its chief strength, if analytically considered, in the personal satisfaction coming from the subconscious reinforcement by reading and thinking in maturity of a juvenile stage of development, which originated in a theological and here deploys in a metaphysical stage.

C. T. Stockwell[223] assumes that there is something related to the germ plasm from which the individual sprang as it is to the rest of the body, and Shaler[224] concludes: “We may therefore say that the most complicated part of life is not that which goes out with the body’s death but that which is cradled in the infinitesimal molecule that is known to us as the germ of another life evolution.” Edwin Arnold[225] is platonic in assuming that life is so beautiful that “we may rightly feel betrayed if dysentery and maggots end everything.” So our fears may be as ridiculous as those of Don Quixote hanging from a window by the wrist over what he thought was an abyss but, when the thong was cut, falling only four inches. Such an authentic and transfiguring Yes might be pronounced if we could recombine the chemical elements of a man analyzed in the South Kensington museum into a vigorous youth. An anonymous author asks why should the soul, the noblest and last goal of evolution, perish and the cosmos throw away its crown. It is the entelechy of all evolution. In general the best survive and only the worst become extinct. The great biologos has wrought from the beginning to give itself an organ to think through and mirror itself in, and this momentum of self-preservation is too great to be entirely arrested at death. So individuality must have absolute worth and be eternized because it is the key to and the paragon of existence. It must be an ens realissimum because it has cost so much. Democracy, too, hypertrophies individuality. The Orient knew one was eternal; the Middle Ages knew a few were; and only lately did man begin to think all were so. Our motto, thus, must be Impavi progrediamur shouted with bravura. Self-conscious life is the highest of all possible categories, the model of all other units by which they are understood, and not merely a symbol of ultimate reality but the thing itself.

S. D. McConnell revives the somewhat patristic idea that man is by nature mortal but is also immortable and can attain another life by piety and knowledge, as of old the Eucharist developed the potentiality of another life or as the infant is a man, only dynamically. Man may become indestructible by a higher process of biogenesis. John Fiske, too, says, “At some period in the evolution of humanity this divine spark may have acquired sufficient concentration and steadiness to survive the wreck of material form and endure forever.” To be deified by righteousness would be a fit climax. This life is a period of probation and gestation in a new sense. Thus, too, hell is obsolete and the bad die, so that the great choice is now between continuation and extinction. Some crude prelusions of this were found among the Taoists, who held that “the grosser elements of man’s nature may be refined away and immortality attained even in this world.” This could be done by an elixir of life, the desire to discover which a century or two before and even after Christ became in many places a veritable craze. So-called pills of immortality taken in connection with certain rites and regimen, like alchemy, which could make gold out of baser metals, would purge away mortal elements and transfiguration and sublimation might result, even for animals. But where do we draw the line between the mortal and immortal, for this may be as far above as the Taoists thought it was below us?

All arguments of this kind are provincial. Man may be a mere microbe on our little dirt ball, which the high gods could hardly see if the lentiform Milky Way were the object-glass of a celestial microscope. What reason have we to think that the cosmos accepts us at our own valuation? The great sphinx has for ages suckled children at its breast only to destroy them with its claws and when men die it recks and cares not. As Fechner says, the plant world might say it was supreme and that insects, animals, and men lived to manure its seeds. Vegetation preceded, nourishes, and might at any time send out bacteria and miasma to rid the world of all animal life. Man is perhaps mean compared to the denizens of other worlds and even his type, so precious compared to individuals, may be worthless or serving other ends. Despite his decadent but titanic pride and monumental nescience of self he is really pathetic. So tempting to the vengeance of the gods is his pride that to be disappointed about another life serves him right. The great saurians were once the highest creatures and seemed the pets of nature and the goal of all, but although their period was far longer than man’s they have passed. So, perhaps the superman will sometime quarry and explore, trace by trace, the evidences of a human biped representing our own stage of existence, and man as he is to-day be classified in a tongue as yet unborn. Are we really nearer any ultimate goal than was the amphioxus? We may be only a link to the higher man and that link may sometime be missing.

What right have we to assume anything so sacrosanct and fetchingly irresistible in the human type that the great Goodheart will never seek to evolve anything better but accept us as a stereotype of finality. Such suppositions are naïve and man as a race ought to rejoice if he can serve even infinitesimally in a greater purpose. In fact, in many quarters it is now bad form to even discuss the question of personal immortality because the world is becoming—in the phrase of Osler—Laodicean, indifferent, or even antagonistic to such views and leaves passionate affirmations of a future life, so in fashion in the days of Tennyson and Browning, to mystics, clerical rhapsodists, pectoralists, or to those steeped in cardiac emotions.

There are many reasons challenging the generality or strength of the desire for another life. From a questionnaire of the Psychic Research Society it was found that very many did not feel it of urgent importance, did not wish to know for certain about it, and many did not desire it, although a few, like Huxley, “would prefer hell, if the conditions were not too rigorous,” to annihilation. Perhaps we are still haunted by submerged reminiscences of the immortality of our primeval unicellular ancestors, which, as we have seen, divide forever and never die. Man is certainly at present a very defective creature, a bundle of anachronisms with organs new and old. Even the aged die with a minority, and very often a majority of their organs and faculties charged with potencies of a longer life. Man may be not a paragon but a fluke or sport of the anthropoid apes and his death is commonly a gruesome execution by microbes, accidents, or hereditary handicaps. His sex nature may be abnormal. Unlike the beasts, he seems to have lost his hygienic or dietetic instinct or conscience. He knows more than he can practice. His consciousness is often abnormal and not remedial as it should be. It is very fallible, always partial, and by no means the oracle he has deemed it to be. It may be nothing but a thing of shreds and patches, extemporized, accidental, transient, made up of fragmentary outcrops of unconscious forces that, deep below the threshold, rule his life. To truly know himself he must go down stratum by stratum, study every outcrop of older formations, every denudation caused by disease, every psychic fossil of tics, obsessions, whims, every anatomical clue, every hint from comparative psychology, disease, crime, rudimentary organs of body or soul; and in his efforts to maximize himself must realize that if all the studies of his nature that have been made were to be depurated of the lust for a future life it would leave a vast void, for the passion for immortality has left its mark on all his cultural history.

But the fear of death and the forms of mitigating this fear are chiefly because man still dies young. If we had experienced and explored senescence fully we should find that the lust of life is supplanted later by an equally strong counter will to die. We should have no immortality mania for we should be satisfied with life here without demanding a sequel to it. Our present dreams of all forms of post-mortem existence would become a nightmare. True macrobiotism means not only more years but completeness of experience, absence of repression and limitation. Had we lived out the whole of our lives and drained all the draughts of bitter and sweet that nature has ever brewed for us, we should feel sated. The fact is, man is now cut off in his prime with many of his possibilities unrealized. Hence he is a pathetic creature doomed to a kind of Herodian slaughter and because he has dimly felt this he has always cried out to the gods and to nature to have mercy. He has imagined answers to the heartrending appeal he shouted into the void: if a man dies shall he live again? and on the warrant of fancied answers has supplemented this by another life, which, when psycho-analyzed in all its processes, means only that he has a sense that the human race is unfinished and that the best is yet to come. And so it is. Man’s future on this earth is the real, only, and gloriously sufficient fulfillment of this hope. It will be found only in the prolonged and enriched life of posterity here. The man of virtue will realize all desires and live himself completely out so that nothing essentially human will be foreign to his own personal experience.

Thus the wish for and belief in immortality is at bottom the very best of all possible augurs and pledges that man as he exists to-day is only the beginning of what he is to be and do. He is only the pigmoid or embryo of his true and fully entelechized self. Thus when he is completed and has finished all that is now only begun in him, heavens, hells, gods, and discarnate ghosts will all fade like dream fabrics or shadows before the rising sun. All doctrines of another life are thus but symbols and tropes in mythic form of the true superman as he will be when he arrives. The great hope so many have lived and died by will be fulfilled, every jot and tittle of it, not in our own lives but in the perfect man whose heralds we really are without knowing it. Deathbed visions will come true more gloriously than the dying thought. They hunger for more life but the perfect man will die of satiety passing over into aversion and the story will be completed not in a later number but in this.

Is there any true thanatophilia, the opposite of thanatophobia? Does the most complete and harmonious life bring not only the quest for death but an active striving toward Nirvana? Will man ever come to observe the approach of death in himself and in others just as we love to study and observe growth? The records of centenarians do not show it; nor do the superannuated now generally feel it. Even Nothnagel, who observed himself clinically almost up to the moment of his death, did not find it. True euthanasia is not mere resignation or the exhaustion of the momentum to live or satiety with life. We know nothing of truly natural death. But we do know that psychogenetically the old lust for personal immortality has made man now more anxious to prolong and enlarge this mundane life. We can no longer postpone our ideas of happiness. The great and good things man once expected beyond he now strives to attain here. He wants more, not less in this life because he expected so much of the other. Thus the belief in immortality is one of the psychic roots of modern hygiene although the question whether it can all go over into orthobiosis and humaniculture still remains open. If all were cut off in their prime, like Jesus, for example, another life would be even more desired and believed in, for the longer and better we live the less we care about it. Thus the answer to the problem of euthanasia strictly considered must remain in abeyance, at least until humanity is more complete. Biological studies and new therapies may develop, give more importance to, and help us to a far better knowledge of, the gerontic stage of life. At any rate, I hope and believe that the data I have gathered and presented in this volume may contribute its mite to make the status of the old more interesting to themselves and to increase the sense that they still owe important duties to a world never more in need of the very best that is in them.