Another underlying psychic determinant is found in the intense popular interest in investigations like those of Voronoff, Steinach, and Carrel, of which the latter is perhaps least conscious while the former is almost as tinglingly so throughout as Haeckel was of these older concepts. That highly differentiated and complex somatic tissues removed from the body and given a more fit medium, and kept from all products of decomposition, etc., can keep on functioning and growing for years, better than they had done in the body in which they originated, neither has nor is ever likely to have any real practical utility for prolonging or intensifying human life. The fact may have a certain moral for cleanliness and even for nutrition but we can never wash out the tissues of the body or keep each of its cells in an optimum environment. Yet even here the mind finds a faint if, all things considered, somewhat pathetic element of hope that old age and death may sometime be deferred.
Nor can we ever hope to ward death off by keeping the tissues of the body young and growing to the end of life and breaking the law, to which nearly all species are subject, of attaining their maximum size long before age and decline set in. It has long been realized that one of the first signs of the advent of the chronic hereditary diseases in children is the arrest of growth but man can never, of course, hope to approximate immortality by attaining gigantic size. Nor can we hope to advance toward the old idea of macrobiotism by permanently lowering the temperature within the body, as experimenters show can be done with great increase of life for certain of its lower forms, especially those called cold-blooded which take the temperature of the medium in which they live. And yet here man has a very old instinct, reinforced by modern hygiene, to avoid excessive heat, an instinct that perhaps originally impelled him to leave tropic regions and haunt the edge of retreating glaciers. Nor can we ever expect to rejuvenate man by bringing about a dedifferentiation of organs or functions because just this is the price we pay for progress, evolution, and individuation. But this concept, too, has many prelusive forms in the early developmental history of human consciousness and it has its own obvious anagogic meaning. If we follow these trends they lead us, of course, straight to Pantheism and give us a painful sense of the limitations inherent in personality itself. As to the conclusion of Loeb, that life departs with breath because the absence of a fresh supply of oxygen lets loose dissolutive chemical changes its presence prevented, the pragmatic layman can only point to the recognition that in a few generations has become world-wide, of the value of ventilation, deep breathing, and the adequate oxidation of tissues. This shows that man felt that life was closely bound up with oxygen long before he could prove it. So the biological evidence that it is the brain or nervous system that dies first and determines the death of all the other parts and functions, if it has any culture correlate, finds it probably in the hazy quarter truths of the doctrines of the mental healers, that far more human ills and far more deaths and preventions and postponements of death than we know are amenable to mind cure because they are mind-made.
The only practical hope of easement from the hardships of senescence and for the postponement of death now tenable is that now arising faintly and tentatively that, some day, some mitigation of the terrors of old age and death may be found by glandular implantation or perhaps even by the injection of the secretions of certain glands. We know that the germinal glands, and especially their products, have a unique vitality of their own and also that they exert a remarkable and all-pervasive influence upon all the organs and functions of the body; and that thyroid extract retards and its absence precipitates all the processes of aging. The new studies in this field suggest that glands may be the sovereign masters of life. These studies are yet, however, in their infancy and it will be, at the best, a long time before we can know whether they are able to fulfill their promise to the human heart and to the will to live.
I deem it, however, very significant that contemporaneously with the discovery and exploitation of endocrine functions, and especially those of the sex glands, from another field and quite independently have come the discovery and exploitation of the unconscious and the recognition that its chief content is sexual. The analogies between these two lines of advance and their real relation with each other have not yet been fully recognized, much less wrought out. But already there is promise of a new and more stimulating rapport between biology and analytic and genetic psychology. If researches in the former field ever have the therapeutic value already so abundantly illustrated in the latter, we shall indeed be fortunate. Just now this seems not probable for a long time. But the physiological dominance of sex glands and their products, and the immense rôle played by sex life, especially in man, suggest that it is in this field that the cure of his most grievous ills must be sought, just as the oldest and most persistent myths and legends have so long taught that it was in this field that the so-called fall of man took place.
CHAPTER VII
REPORT ON QUESTIONNAIRE RETURNS
Their value suggestive but only for a class—(1) Effects 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.
Perhaps no one but a genetic psychologist can realize how very widely the successive stages of life in man differ from each other. Underneath the tenuous memory continuum that is the chief basis of all feeling of identity between our present and former selves, deeper even than every unity of life plan and persistence of disposition, are the great changes the years bring. These are, indeed, so great that although they very commonly modulate, each into the next stage of the series by almost imperceptible gradations, we all really live not one but a succession of lives. Further than this, just as in dementia præcox the normal development of the psyche is permanently arrested in a juvenile stage, so, but far more commonly, the normal progress from maturity to senectitude is arrested; and in the decades of involution, which is just as progressive and interesting as evolution, the old cling to or leave with great reluctance their mature stage and so never achieve true senectitude. Just as the precocious dement balks in adolescence at the growing complexity and arduousness of the problems of adulthood and so fails to mature because he lacks the energy or hereditary momentum to do so, so the old very often find themselves inadequate to the new tasks involved in beating the great retreat. They cannot break from the things that are behind and reach forward to those that are before and they cling with a tenacity that is purely arrestive to a stage of life that has passed. They refuse to accept old age and to make the most and best of it, to face its tasks and to improve all its opportunities. If they do not paint, dye, pad, or affect the fashions and manners of the young (for old age may show traits of narcissism), when the call comes to move on to a new phase of life, their mentality defaults. This type of mental defect has never so far been adequately characterized but it is probably far more common than what is usually called senile dementia, of which it is almost the diametrical opposite, although because of its prevalence it has a better claim to this designation.
Believing profoundly that involution is just as interesting a phase of life as evolution and not being satisfied with the poems, essays, and meditations of literary men and women who have addressed the public on the theme of senescence, which are, as we saw in a former chapter, often more or less hortatory, consolatory, or else were composed as exercises to hearten themselves against the great enemy, it seemed worth while to try to seek a new contact with the fresh spontaneous thoughts and feelings of normal old people concerning their estate.
Years ago I had visited homes for the aged, held converse with many inmates and officials, had given each inmate a tiny blue book and asked them to answer a few questions and add anything that occurred to them that they thought characteristic of their stage of life. The records thus secured, although voluminous enough, had very little value. Most who answered were uneducated and the data they supplied were usually trivial, tediously and irrelevantly reminiscent, or else descriptive of surroundings in earlier life, complaints, wishes, fears, etc., so that I realized that true old age as I had conceived it was not to be sought in such institutions. There was pathos and pessimism galore, while disciplined tranquillity and serenity were very rare. There is doubtless material enough in even the most inarticulate and insignificant life to repay the longest and most painstaking study. Perhaps, too, a psychotherapy may sometime be evolved that will launch such stranded and arrested lives out again into the current and give them full fruition of all the fruitage of life. But the world is as yet far from any such beneficent ministry.