Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Our educational curricula are still far more logical in the sequence of their subject matter and their method than they are genetic whereas they should be essentially the latter, as will be the case when the paidocentric viewpoint has become paramount, as it should, over the scholiocentric. We have made much progress since Herbart in determining true culture stages, and while there are very many exceptions to the law that in general the individual recapitulates the stages of the race, this great principle has far wider scope than we have yet recognized. Again, we have made great progress along another line, namely, in distinguishing physiological and especially psychological from chronological age, but here we have little consensus of either method or result beyond the early teens. Yet no observer of life can fail to doubt that there is the same and perhaps even, on the whole, greater average diversity among individuals in mental age as they advance along the scale of years. Some minds are young and growing at seventy while others seem to cross some invisible deadline at forty. But of all this we have no settled criteria and the age of customary or enforced retirement is arbitrary, though very diversely fixed by various industrial concerns, pension systems, etc., without regard to mental age or youth. In fact, the world has so far attempted almost nothing that could be called a curriculum for the later years of life—physical, intellectual, moral, social, or even hygienic or religious, after the very variable period when the prime of life is reached and passed. Happily, however, we do have both vestiges and modern recrudescences of such a view in the field of religion, as may be briefly illustrated in the following paragraphs.

Many have held with DuBuy,[66] that different religions best fitted different ages. He believes that Confucianism, with its stress on respect for parents and ancestors and on the cultivation of practical virtues, best fits the nature and needs of young children; that Mohammedanism, with its passionate monotheism, has a certain affinity for the next stage of life; Christianity is best from adolescence on to the age when the marriage relation is at its apex; Buddhism comes next; and Brahmanism is for old age.

Max Müller[67] says that in very ancient India it was recognized “that the religion of a man cannot and ought not to be the same as that of a child, and that the religious ideas of an old man must differ from those of an active man in the world. It is useless to attempt to deny such facts,” and we are reminded that we all have to struggle and have to pass through many stages of clearing up childish conceptions in this field. Most cultivated men come out of these struggles with certain rather firm convictions, but these later may be found to need revision.

But when the evening of life draws near and softens the light and shade of conflicting opinion, when to agree with the spirit of truth within becomes far dearer than to agree with a majority of the world without, the old questions appeal once more like long forgotten friends. The old man learns to bear with those from whom formerly he differed, and while he is willing to part with all that is non-essential—and most religious differences seem to arise from non-essentials—he clings all the more firmly to the few strong and solid planks that are left to carry him into the harbor no longer very distant from his sight. It is hardly creditable how all other religions have overlooked these simple facts, how they have tried to force on the old and wise the food that was meant for babes, and how they have thereby alienated and lost their best and strongest friends. It is therefore a lesson all the more worth learning from history that one religion at least, and one of the most ancient and powerful and most widely spread religions, has recognized this fact without the slightest hesitation.

According to the ancient canons of the Brahmanic faith, each man must pass through several stages. The youth is sent to the house of a teacher or Guru, whom he must obey and serve implicitly in every way and who teaches what is necessary for life, especially the Veda and his religious duties. He is a mere passive recipient, learner, and believer. At the next stage the man is married and must perform all the duties prescribed for the householder. But during both these periods no doubt is ever heard as to the truth of religion or the authority of laws and rites. But when the hair turns white and there are grandchildren, “a new life opens during which the father of the family may leave his home and village and retire into the forest with or without his wife. During that period he is absolved from the necessity of performing any sacrifices, although he may or must undergo certain self-denials or penances, some of them extremely painful. He is then allowed to meditate with proper freedom on the great problems of life and death, and for that purpose is expected to study the Upanishads,” to learn the doctrines in which all sacrificial duties are rejected, and the very gods to whom the ancient prayers of the Veda were addressed are put aside to make room for the one supreme impersonal being called Brahm. These mahatmas, like some medieval hermit-saints commemorated in the voluminous hagiology of the Bollandist Fathers, were reputed to have often attained very great age and wisdom and to be sought out in their retreats to solve great problems by men still in active life. The bodies of a few of them were fabled to have undergone a subtle process of transubstantiation and thus to have achieved a true mundane immortality.

Thus the religion of childhood and manhood for the venerable sage is transmuted into philosophy or meditation on the most general problems and the very nature of not only life but being itself, that Plato described as the cult of death. The old man, thus, in the classic days of ancient India directed his thoughts toward absorption. His religion was pantheism, and the theme of his contemplation was the source of all things and their return to this source as their goal. Perhaps we might now say that according to this view, if evolution is the inspiration of the intellect in its youth and its prime, involution was its muse in the stages of decline as it awaited resumption into the One-and-All. Modern pragmatists, like the best of the ancient Sophists, hold that the truth that best fits and expresses Me is and must be held with the completest conviction, and the genetic idea is that different philosophies and different faiths fit and express not only different temperaments but different stages of life, and that, therefore, creeds can never be fixed and stationary but must be constantly transformed. There is no absolute or final form of truth for all save in the dominion of pure mathematical and physical science, and it is one of the most tragic aspects of our modern culture that we so often find mature and even aging men and women arrested in infantile or juvenile stages of their development in regard to the larger problems of life, for where and just in proportion as the latter is intense there is incessant change. Christianity is the best of all religions through the entire stage of the vita sexualis from its inception to its decline. Its essence is the sublimation of love. It is the religion of personalization culminating in the faith in another individual life. It is not the religion for old men, and the revival of its attitudes, which we often see in them, is a phenomenon of arrest or reversion and not one of the advance that senescence should mark if the last stage of life is to have its complete unfoldment.

Some writers believe that age differences constitute one of the important bases, if not the chief one, in the primitive segmentation of society into layers. It is a common observation that the young tend to be progressive and radical, and the old, conservative, intent that no good thing of the past be lost. Indeed, this is often called the most natural and wholesome basis of division into parties, religious as well as political. In a sense there is eternal war between the old and young, as illustrated, for example, by Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The young are always inclined to brush aside their elders and are psychologically incapable of taking their point of view. So in many a mixed assemblage we have a clash of temperaments that divides fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.[68] In some Australian tribes there is an absolute dominance of the elders, and among some American Indians of the plain there is incessant antagonism between the young braves eager to distinguish themselves in raids against hostile tribes and the older chiefs seeking to prevent a hazardous war. F. Schurtz[69] thinks this antagonism between the older and younger generation, which separates parents from children, forms the germ of classifications of age and is the oldest type of associated groups. Lowie, however, does not think that the kind of age groupings found in such cultures have a purer natural basis but rather that they represent a blending of psychological and conventional factors. It is very hard to transcend the intuitions of one’s years. Where these segmentations occur they may or may not be fully organized, but they generally go back to a more primitive social division into boys, bachelors, and married men, very common among savages. More elaborated age distinctions probably arose a little later.