As a part of the process of reorientation I felt impelled, as I think natural enough for a psychologist, to write my autobiography and get myself in focus genetically. To this I devoted the first year after my retirement. It is now complete and laid safely away and may or may not be published sometime, although certainly not at present. Its preparation served me well in advancing my understanding of the one I know best of all, and I would earnestly prescribe such an occupation as one of the most pleasant and profitable services intelligent old people can render to themselves and perhaps their posterity and friends, if not to the world at large. The reading of “lives,” too, is often one of the most absorbing and sometimes almost exclusive intellectual occupation of the old.

Incidental to this work I unearthed many written data of the past—my youthful diaries, school exercises, some two feet of letters from my parents, especially my mother, for more than a quarter of a century after I left home and before her death; and several hundred large envelopes of carefully filed correspondence with many friends and strangers on many topics. All these had to be at least cursorily glanced over. Part of this voluminous material no one, I am convinced, will ever care to reperuse. My own offspring have no interest in it, so why not consign it to oblivion now that it has served its final purpose? There is little of value to the living or of special credit to the dead in it all; so I conclude there is more of real piety, even to the memory of my mother, to select a number of the best of her missives which most clearly show her constant and affectionate solicitude and love, and burn all the rest. I am sure that both she and my father would heartily commend this course. So, as I watched them burn in the grate one solitary spring at evening twilight, I felt that I had completed a filial function of interment of her remains. No profane ear can now ever hear what she whispered into mine. She tried to convey everything good in her beautiful soul to me, her eldest, wanted me to do everything commendable that she could not and realize all her own thwarted ambitions. I hope that I may yet do something more worthy of her fondest hopes. If I seem to have cremated her very soul, or so much of it as she gave me, I feel that I have thus done the last and most sacred act of service which such a son can render such a mother.

By all this purgation I have, at any rate, saved my offspring from a task that could not be other than painful and embarrassing to them, and relieved them from inheriting a burden of impedimenta which they themselves would not have the hardihood to destroy, at least for years after my demise, and which could be of no earthly use to them or any one else.

And now it only remained for me to make my last will and testament and bequeath all that I have left where I hope it may do most good. This should have been done long ago but I have been withheld from this duty, partly by preoccupation but far more by the instinctive reluctance all feel to thus anticipate their own death. A dozen modes of disposing of my modest estate had occurred to me and there were countless considerations to be weighed. Some provisions were obvious but more were beset with a puzzling array of pros and cons. But the time was over-ripe, and so I nerved myself for this ordeal, feeling sure there would be regrets, revisions, or perhaps codicils every year I lived. But when it was duly signed and witnessed there was, on the whole, great relief, as from having accomplished a long-looming and difficult task.

For myself, I feel thrice fortunate in having really found my goru, the one thing in which I am up to date and seething with convictions, which I have never before had the courage to express, and that I can now hope to devote myself to with all my spirit and understanding and with the abandon the subject really demands. I will not accept the subtle but persistently intrusive suggestion that it will do no good or that former colleagues whom I esteem, and whose judgment I greatly prize, will ignore it because other old men have written fatuously. I can, at least, speak more honestly than I have ever dared to do before, and if I am never read or even venture into print, I shall have the satisfaction of having clarified and unified my own soul.

But before I can enter fully into the functions or the service age ought to render and begin the one thing I have always planned for this stage of life, I would know more about what it really is, find out its status, estimate its powers, its limitations, its physical and mental regimen; and especially, if I can, look death, which certainly cannot be very far off, calmly in the face. It is in this final stage of preparation for what I yet hope to do later that I invite the reader to accompany me through the following pages in the fond hope that not only the old may be helped to better realize their estate and their responsibilities and duties in the world of to-day but that those just emerging from middle life and for whom the shadows have just begun to lengthen may be better fitted to meet old age when it overtakes them.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction[vii]
I.The Youth of Old Age[1]
The turn of the tide of life—Relative amount and importance of work accomplished before and after forty—The sexual life at the turn of the tide in man and woman—Osler’s views and critics (E. G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland, E. S. P. Haynes)—Illustrations from Tolstoi, Fechner, Comte, Swedenborg—The typical cases of Segantini, Lenau, von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel, Ruskin, and Nietsche—Michaëlis’ “dangerous age” in women—The difficulty of determining this age—The nature of the changes, conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that people in this stage of life should lay to heart—H. G. Wells and Ross.
II.The History of Old Age[32]
The age of plants and animals—The Old Stone Age—Treatment of old age among existing savage tribes—The views of Frazer—The ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament—The Greeks (including Sparta, the Homeric Age, the status of the old in Athens, the views of Plato, Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)—The Romans—The Middle Ages—Witchcraft and old women—Attitude of children toward the old—Mantegazza’s collection of favorable and unfavorable views of age—The division of life into stages—The relation of age groups to social strata—The religion of different ages of life—The Vedanta—The Freudian war between the old and the young—History of views from Cornaro to our own time—Bacon—Addison—Burton—Swift.
III.Literature by and on the Aged[100]
Harriet E. Paine—Amelia E. Barr—Mortimer Collins—Col. Nicholas Smith—Byron C. Utecht—J. L. Smith—Sanford Bennet—G. E. D. Diamond—Cardinal Gibbons—John Burroughs—Rollo Ogden—James L. Ludlow—Brander Matthews—Ralph Waldo Emerson—Oliver Wendell Holmes—Senator G. F. Hoar—William Dean Howells—H. D. Sedgwick—Walt Mason—E. P. Powell—U. V. Wilson—D. G. Brinton—N. S. Shaler—Anthony Trollope—Stephen Paget—Richard le Gallienne—G. S. Street—C. W. Saleeby—Bernard Shaw—A few typical poems and quotations.
IV.Statistics of Old Age and Its Care[154]
I. Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands where data are available—Actuarial and other mortality tables—Expectation of life and death-rate at different ages—Longevity and fecundity—Death-rate in different occupations—Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the Middle Ages—Diversity of statistical methods and results. II. Growing need of care for the indigent old—Causes of improvidence—Ignorance and misconception of what old age is and means—Why the old do not know themselves—Old age pensions in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and her colonies, France, Belgium, United States—Industrial pensions and insurance, beginning with railroads—Trades unions—Fraternal organizations—Retiring pensions in the army and navy—Local and national insurance—Teachers’ pensions—The Carnegie Foundation—Criticism of pension systems—Growing magnitude, urgency, and diversity of views and methods—The Life Extension Institute—“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs—Should the old organize?
V.Medical Views and Treatment of Old Age[195]
The self-knowledge that doctors give—Insidious approach of many diseases—Medical views of the old of body and mind (senile dementia)—Charcot—G. M. Humphrey—Sir James Crichton-Browne—H. M. Friedman—H. Gilford—H. Oertel—A. S. Warthin—W. Spielmeyer—I. L. Nascher—Sir Dyce Duckworth—Robert Saundy—Arnold Lorand—T. D. Crothers—C. G. Stockton—W. G. Thompson—M. L. Price—G. S. Keith—J. M. Taylor—C. W. Saleeby—C. A. Ewald—Raymond Pearl—Protest against the prepotence of heredity in determining longevity.
VI.The Contributions of Biology and Physiology[248]
Weismann’s immortality of the germ plasm and his denial of the inheritance of acquired qualities—The truth and limitations of his views—The theories of Hering and Simon—Metchnikoff’s conception of the disharmonies in man, of the rôle of intestinal fauna and their products, of euthanasia, and of the means and effects of prolonging life—C. S. Minot’s conception of the progressive arrest of life from birth on as measured by declining rate of growth, and his neglect to consider the dynamic elements—C. M. Child’s studies of rejuvenation in lower and higher forms of life in the light of the problems of senescence—J. Loeb’s studies of the effects of lower temperature, of toxins and ferments—The preservation of cells of somatic tissues potentially immortal under artificial conditions—Account of the studies of Carrel, Pozzi, and others—Investigations upon the effects on sex qualities and age of the extracts and transplantations of glands, from Claude Bernard—Investigations of Eugene Steinach on the interchange of sex qualities and rejuvenation by glandular operations in animals and man—G. F. Lydston’s work—Serge Voronoff’s experiments and his exposition of the achievements and hopes of glandular therapy—Some general considerations in view of work in this field.
VII.Report on Questionnaire Returns[319]
Their value suggestive but only for a class—(1) Age and effect of the first realization of the approach of old age—(2) To what do you ascribe your long life?—(3) How do you keep well?—(4) Are you troubled by regrets?—(5) What temptations do you feel, old or new?—(6) What duties do you feel you still owe to others or to self?—(7) Is interest in public affairs for the far future and past, as compared with what is closer at hand, greater or less?—(8) In what do you take your greatest pleasures?—(9) Do you enjoy the society of children, youth, adults, those of your own age more or less than formerly?—(10) Would you live your life over again?—(11) Did you experience an “Indian summer” of renewed vigor before the winter of age began?—(12) Do you rely more or less upon doctors than formerly?—(13) Do you get more or less from the clergy and the church than formerly?—(14) Do you think more or less of dying and the hereafter?—A few individual returns from eminent people.
VIII.Some Conclusions[366]
The early decades of age—The deadline of seventy—The patheticism of the old—The attitude of physicians toward them—Fluctuations of youth—Erotic decline—Alternations in the domain of sleep, food, mood, irritability, rational self-control, and sex—The dawn of old age in women—Dangers of the disparity when December weds May—Sexual hygiene for the old—Mental effects of the dulling of sensations—Lack of mental pabulum—The tedium vitæ—Changes in the emotional life—Age not second childhood—Women in the dangerous age—Need of a new and higher type of old age—Aristotle’s golden mean and the magnanimous man—The age of disillusion—Increased power of synthesis—Nature’s balance between old and young—Superior powers of the old in perspective and larger views—New love of nature and the country—Their preëminence in religion, politics, philosophy, morals, and as judges—Looking within and without—Merging with the cosmos.
XI.The Psychology of Death[439]
The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as recapitulating that of the race—Suicide—The death-wish—Necrophilism—The Black Death—Depopulation by the next war—The evolutionary nisus and death as its queller—Death symbolism as pervasive as that of sex—Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of death—Schopenhauer’s view of death—The separation of ghosts from the living among primitive races—The thanatology of the Egyptians—The journey of the soul—Ancient cults of death and resurrection in the religions about the eastern Mediterranean, based on the death of vegetation in the fall and its revival in the spring, as a background of Pauline Christianity—The fading belief in immortality and Protestantism which now at funerals speaks only of peace and rest—Osler’s five hundred deathbeds—Influential, plasmal, and personal immortality and their reciprocal relations—Moral efficacy of the doctrine of future rewards and punishments—Belief in a future life for the individual being transformed into a belief in the future of the race on earth and the advent of the superman—Does man want personal immortality—Finot’s immortality of the decomposing body and its resolution into its elements—The Durkheim school and the mana doctrine—Schleiermacher—The Schiller-James view of the brain and consciousness as repressive of the larger life of the great Autos—The views of Plato and Kant—Have God and Nature cheated and lied to us if the wish to survive is false?—Noetic and mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of general ideas—Views of Howison, Royce, and others—Is there a true euthanasia or thanatophilia?—Diminution of the desire for personal immortality with culture and age.