Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Few modern writers have written more sagely on old age than N. S. Shaler, late professor of geology at Harvard.[101] He attaches great importance to the interval between the end of the reproductive period and death, which in lower creatures is very brief if it exists at all. In domesticated animals there is hardly any normal old age and they do not seem to know a climacteric. There is a great variation among different races in this period of senescence, which is so peculiar to man. This interval is very brief among savages. But with the beginning of speech all the relations of the individual to his group change. If old animals live on, they do so to themselves and not for the benefit of their kind. But in man the old individual becomes a storehouse of acquired or traditional knowledge, and wisdom has, for the first time, a distinct value in organic association. It was in this way that the reproductive period was shortened, or perhaps we had better say that life was prolonged beyond it. In civilized society the old are still members of the species, not aliens or enemies. When a people begins to have a literature or a religion and a large body of mores as social inheritance develops, the value of old age increases.

The old have to maintain a more dignified demeanor. They are readapted and can go on with life as before, especially as they now have eyes and teeth preserved. The best attitude toward the old is one that assures a broader view of life and better sense of values and marks the modern passage from the earlier division of men into ranks and occupations, in which women, youth, and old men were once separated from the active and militant class. Thus the position of the aged is now bettered by keeping in close relation with their fellows.

The growth of wealth has helped democratic individualization and thus helped old age. “The presence of three or four generations in the social edifice gives to it far more value than is afforded by one or two.” They “unite the life of the community and bridge the gap between successive generations.” “As the body of the tradition which makes the spirit of a people becomes the greater, it is the more difficult to effect the transmission of it from stage to stage in the succession.” Despite the volume of printed matter, including history, there is a spirit of society that cannot be preserved in books. Who can doubt that if veterans of our Civil War had been more numerous and influential, we should have plunged into the late war with Spain. There would have been more men who really remembered what war meant and its lessons, for the new generation lacked the true sense of what conflict was and went about it light-heartedly. So the need of strict military discipline generally has to be relearned with each war. The same is true of hygienic policies in the army. There are, thus, many political, social, and even business follies that would have been avoided had the wisdom and experience that only old age can bring been more dominant. Thus we could make our historic records not only more effective and more complete in regard to its matter but also more perfect as regards the lessons it conveys. History is often written by men who are separated from the times they chronicle and the best way to bridge the gulf is to keep in touch as long as possible with the generation that was making history.

But the endeavor to retain the aged is not merely an effort to preserve the lives of the old but part of the problem of avoiding premature death for everyone. Thus since man came there seems to be a sudden loss of longevity if we measure it solely in terms of the period of growth. If this really has occurred, it may be that the term is less fixed than we should expect it to be if the institution were of more recent date.

Anthony Trollope[102] tells us of a small republic, Britannula, situated somewhere in the South Pacific and which had freed itself from England, that had been induced by its leader, Mr. Neverbend, who was deeply impressed with the sufferings and dangers of old age, to pass a law that at a fixed period, which after much discussion was fixed at 67½ years of age, everyone in the colony should be taken with great honor to a college beautifully situated five miles from the capital city and there spend a final year, at the end of which he was to suffer euthanasia at the hand of the chief by being placed under an opiate and bled to death. Details are given of the many discussions that led up to this legislation, with the justifications for it and descriptions of the college. When the law was passed, there was no one in the community of great age. Deposition or relegation to the college was to be a matter of much pomp and dignity, with bells, banquets, and processions, and life within the walls was to be made attractive by every means.

The first to reach the required age, Crasweller, ten years the senior of the founder, was a man of immense vitality and wealth, the most efficient proprietor of a very large estate, and when the day of his deposition drew near he dismayed the founder by insisting that he was a year younger, although all knew his age, which was to be tatooed upon the skin of everyone. Meanwhile, an interesting love episode is described between his daughter and the son of the founder. There was much bitterness and recrimination and it is realized that it will never do to compel the withdrawal by force of the first victim, who was to set a high example to all others; and so finally the year falsely claimed is allowed to pass and then Crasweller is taken in state to the college itself, which another citizen was growing weary of tending because it was untenanted. There were many criticisms of its new and unfinished state and of the proximity of the cremation furnaces, which were said even to smell of the bodies of the animals that had been consumed in them.

Meanwhile, as the others were drawing near to their term, support of the plan passed over into covert and then overt opposition, and just as the first victim with his escort entered, an English man-of-war appeared—in response, it afterwards became known, to a petition of the citizens to stop such a proceeding, which thus cost the colony its independence. Thus Crasweller was freed and Neverbend, the founder, retired to England, where his musings at last convinced him that the world was not yet quite ready for his great reform. It might work if and when men were philosophers but it would doubtless have to be postponed at least during the lives of his grandchildren, and perhaps indefinitely. Thus the women, who had always opposed it, and the populace, who welcomed it when they were young but condemned it as they grew old, had their will and its realization is yet to come. The reasons that led to the scheme were that the misery, uselessness, troublesomeness, and often obstructiveness of old age still remain and are ever increasing in force, so that something like this must surely sometime be.

Stephen Paget[103] gives us an excellent description of what he thinks a typical state of mind of old age, but which I deem an excellent illustration of senile degeneracy. The old man, he says, wonders at his own existence, is bewildered at the feel of the pen in his hand, at the taste of his food; that he is alive when so many millions are dead or unborn; at a funeral is fascinated by someone’s whisper or the contour of a face or some other irrelevancy; is smitten with momentary surprise that he is or that it is it; finds an apocalypse on looking in the glass; is oppressed by a sense of mystery that is very far from philosophic contemplation; and realizes that when others observe him thus, they reflect that there is no speculation—“No speculation in those eyes that thou dost glare with”; finds himself growing out “of the world, of life, of time”; feels it not unreasonable to consider the one, the all, the infinite, if his mind drifts that way. His mind wanders while he wonders whether heaven lies about him in his second infancy. Perhaps it all brings the kind of smile we call wistful. He may go crazy over a human eyebrow or a breath of air; common things seem novel; the dull things fascinate. One enjoys a vagabond ease on the street; is irked at fine manners; is fond of news. The old problems of politics and religion lose their charm and in place of pure art we turn to that of the street. He says we old are thus a sentimental lot and for the sake of economy live on our emotions, which cost nothing. This point of view he deems more or less philosophic, etc.

This state of mind the psychologist would call dissociative, if not dissolutive. It is the dementia præcox of old age and can mean nothing but disintegration and befuddlement. True, childhood is often lost in wonder at items of experience that later are synthesized into wholes and become commonplaces. But this goes with a keen rapport with the environment, which the senses are developing, while this author’s musings reveal a falsetto last look before we are melted or diffused into the cosmos. Such reveries are letting go, not taking hold of life. They are the decadence of the philosophic spirit and belie the normal tendency of old age, which is to knit up experiences into synthetic wholes, to draw the moral of life, and to give integrity to the soul.

Thus Mr. Paget seems to be the victim of a kind of senile Narcissism, revering its chief traits in his symptoms, yielding himself with a kind of masochistic pleasure to any chance impressions that present themselves. He has ceased to strive and to will, and there is no justification of his point of view, that his state is akin to that of certain transcendentalists who have fallen into deep puzzlements over what Bronson Alcott called “the whichness of the what.”