Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Of course I am answering my question in a different sense than that understood by most of my correspondents. In fact, in a way it was an idle and perhaps foolish question, because to exactly relive a present life is so impossible that it is hardly conceivable. But let us oldsters realize that if we are sated, it is because our appetite has flagged and not because viands are scantier or less toothsome. Perhaps we all wish we had been born later so that we should be now in our prime. Most of us would probably have sacrificed a few of the earlier, if by so doing we could add a few more to the later, years of our life. Perhaps the very restlessness of old people, their retirement from activity, their propensity to a change of scene or mode of life, or their not infrequent Wanderlust, is the result of a blind instinct to exploit unused and submerged faculties and thus to complement or vicariate for the loss of certain possibilities always involved in realizing other careers. Certain it is that even those who do not make a clean break with their past develop views, interests, habits, modes of life, personal associations, or perhaps take pleasure in becoming novices, apprentices, or amateurs, in new fields and find thus a certain rejuvenation, the strong instinct for which has found so many unworthy forms of expression that the term “second childhood” as applied to age is commonly one of reproach and the affectations of youth by the old are ridiculous. We all tend to live our lives over again in our children and grandchildren and this impulse is another expression of the deep instinct for renewal and living other lives again. How shall we explain, too, the so common inclination of the old to plant trees they will never see mature or build houses they can hope to live in only a short time; or to get into and keep in such sympathetic rapport with the young; to engage in works of charity; or to grow tolerant of errors, of persons, and of opinions they once bitterly opposed. What can all these phenomena mean save that the barriers of egoism are falling down and that we tend to live more and more not only for but in others by a kind of sympathetic identification with them. Three of my correspondents had a period of reorienting themselves to new interests as if to find themselves again, which is suggestive of the period in youth when one vocation after another is taken up and abandoned before a fit life purpose has been found. Whether these tentatives in the old were a recrudescence of a series of earlier circummutations, like those of a climbing vine seeking a fit support, our data do not show.

Did you experience an “Indian summer” of revived energy before the winter of age began to set in?

Only five responses were affirmative to this question. One of the most eminent men of science with a world-wide reputation reported, at seventy-two, that he had never worked so effectively and was now engaged on a program that would require from ten to twenty years of strenuous activity for its completion, besides answering several scores of letters daily. Another scarcely less eminent, at the age of seventy-three, had lately undertaken an arduous line of investigation that would “require many years to complete” but was confident that he could finish it, for “a task is a life-preserver.” My returns suggest that men engaged in scientific research have more power to “carry on” than any other class and that those engaged in the professions are perhaps least likely to do so when they cease active practice. Several specify greater mental clarity in seeing through delusions, shams, and vanities. Others feel a certain exaltation at times, dependent perhaps upon digestion or the weather. Others specify new and deeper self-knowledge. Others find much satisfaction in the settling of a few fixed and cardinal ideas or convictions. A few feel new ambitions to begin new enterprises. Several found in the war and its results a mental stimulus that they felt to be rejuvenating and longed and believed that they must live on to see the settlement of some of the great questions now so wide open. Four had observed such awakenings in others. Most, however, felt themselves going on about as before, with no change save gradual abatement of energy. Some felt as strong physically and mentally as ever until they set themselves to some serious task and then realized that this feeling was illusory. Others were sure they would have felt a revival of springtide but for some infirmity or disaster. It is, however, hard for others to judge on this matter and harder perhaps for the individual to answer the question for himself.

The remission of responsibilities and the dropping of burdens would of itself give a certain sense of exaltation, because all such changes involve a new balance between ambitions and accomplishments. Retired clergymen often feel a great relief from being no longer accountable to others for their opinions and some often find a joyful sense of emancipation from old doctrines surprising, not only to others but most of all to themselves. One writes, “I found, on sober second thought, I no longer really believed certain dogmas I had preached all my life and that in my inmost heart I really believed certain things I had often condemned as heresies.” He found an intense mental stimulus in thus reconstructing his own creed. A clergyman of seventy-nine once told me he had ceased to preach, even as a supply, because since his resignation his new views gave offense. Old physicians, too, sometimes, though far more rarely and to a less extent, drop as illusions certain fundamental principles by which the practice of a lifetime had been regulated.

Again, the new lines of interest to which the old, set free from the tasks of their lives, sometimes turn show that there is a half-delusive and half-real sense of psychic rejuvenation associated with the pursuit of a new topic. On the whole, however, it would seem that withdrawal from exacting duties, the freedom from the necessity of self-support and the leisure thus resulting, the abatement of the vita sexualis and the storm and stress this is now known to cause, the fact that one is now no longer anxious lest he do or say anything that would interfere with his own future career, and the sense that he can both live and think as he lists, would altogether constitute a loud call to revise his views, to get down to fundamentals, be more sincere and independent, to get better acquainted with his inmost self, review his past life, and draw from it its lessons. Morale, as I have elsewhere tried to show,[194] consists in keeping ourselves, body and mind, always at the tiptop of condition and this is ever harder to do as age advances. But I think we may conclude that just in proportion as this is done there is a perhaps prolonged and delightful “Indian summer” that is caused by the kind of mental housecleaning that dispenses with all non-essentials and consists in warming up the deeper emotions, quickening the intellect and reinforcing the will, and that this period combines uniquely the charm of summer and fall without excessive heat and without dangerous chill. All invites to synthesis, for the age of excessive and diverting specialization that is forced upon the young and immature in our day is past and the season for harvest has come. And it is just this that our distracted world now most lacks and needs. Sane and ripe old age has a new sense of values, relations, perspectives; and no form of culture man has ever produced is ripe until the fruitage it contributes to morals and life has been garnered. To show how all our achievements affect human conduct is the thing the world most needs to-day and needs far more than at any other period in history. This is what our age calls so loudly upon the old to supply. Just in proportion as civilization advances and life becomes more and more complex and distracting, the need of older and wiser men increases, for only from their outlook tower can things be seen in their true perspective. Wells’s new conspectus of history represents the old man’s view and one of my correspondents writes that in a long literary life he has never come upon anything quite so stimulating and absorbing. It is this sort of work that should have been done by an old man and such tasks can only be accomplished by those younger men who have the rare power of genius to anticipate the choicest gifts of age. Plato saw that the proper business of old men was to philosophize; and what is religion, to which so many senescents turn, but a condensed philosophy put in the form of symbol, myth, and rite.

Old women, perhaps even more than old men, seem to enjoy an “Indian summer” of life. The best of them grow serene, tolerant, liberal, often devote themselves with great assiduity to charity, to causes, to helpful and intelligent ministrations to others, perhaps with utter self-abnegation; while others carry on affairs, conduct enterprises of moment, and really guide all about them without their knowledge and without realizing themselves that they are doing so; still others read with an abandon that they have never experienced before and are often wise in counsel, even subordinating their own daughters, husbands, and perhaps sons in a way that suggests the possibility of a new matriarchate. They sometimes develop a therapeutic skill that is a modern analogue of the old grandmother’s medicinal herb-lore and is as unexplained as the old countryman’s weather wisdom. They are almost always more religious than old men but rarely dogmatic or theological and often grow indifferent or almost oblivious of the creeds they affected in their earlier years. Thus they illustrate at every stage of life what is true of all its stages, that woman lives nearer to the life of the race, is a better representative of it, and so a more generic being than man, and is thus less prone to dwarfing specialization.

Do you rely more or less on doctors or find that you must study yourself and be your own doctor?

In the answers to this question there was a general consensus to the effect that doctors were resorted to only in emergencies of illness, accident, or perhaps surgery, and several mentioned the old saw to the effect that in the fourth or fifth decade a man is either a fool, an invalid, or a physician to himself. Only a few followed the practice of having a look-over at intervals as a prophylactic. Two had special friendships for a particular doctor, except for whom they would have no use for the profession. Several expressed their gratitude to physicians who were responsible for a vacation, a tour, or other change. Several had turned away from the regulars to homeopathy, osteopathy, or Christian Science. Some allowed doctors to examine and prescribe and then used their own judgment as to how much of their medicines should be taken or prescriptions followed. Some relied much upon physicians who had known them personally for a long period or practiced in their family but had little faith in new physicians. One doctor professed loss of confidence in his profession and had “returned to nature.” A few had found fasting of from twenty-four to forty-eight hours beneficial for most of their ailments. None doubted, and several expressed very special gratitude to specialists, particularly ophthalmologists and even surgeons. There is a very general aversion to drugs, although a few dosed themselves for years, tried many patent medicines, and one thought he had exhausted almost all the pharmacopœia. Aging people often regret the replacement of the old family physician by experts who in prescribing for one defective function ignore and perhaps injure others. Occasionally old people of both sexes retain or revert to old family traditions of the virtue of herbs, which played such a great rôle in the ancient days of the herbalists. We find, too, outcrops of the fear that surgeons are too ready to operate. One old man told me that in a recent illness it took him a month to get over the disease and three months to recover from the effects of the medicines the doctor had prescribed. Another followed the precept of young doctors for special and acute, and old doctors for general, troubles and for prescriptions of regimen. It is often deplored that while women’s diseases, troubles of sight, throat, lungs, abdomen, and children’s disorders, have each their own specialists, there are almost none who have specialized on old age and that when the old are seriously ill, there is a general tendency in the profession to give up hope too soon, to pay less attention to those who because of age and its feebleness will die soon anyway. We have frequent illustrations of remarkable recoveries of old people who had been given up by physicians.

It must not be forgotten, however, that medicine has made great strides in the last few decades and that the older generation now passing has not yet come to a full realization of the new resources that the advances of modern pathology and the other sciences that underlie the healing art have brought to it. Perhaps we might commend to the aged, when they first fully realize that they are old, the course of one of our respondents, who made a round of the specialists for the different organs to reinforce his own hygienic self-knowledge, although he found the prophylactic prescriptions of the different experts so contradictory as to be often practically impossible. Unhappily, however, we have no agencies to examine the whole ensemble of parts and functions and suggest modes of life fit for each individual, as for example, the Life Extension Institute should do. Nothing is more certain than that every senescent should, with increasing frequency, have himself looked over that he may anticipate, at as early a stage as possible, the onset of the many physiological failures that impend.

Do you get more or less from the clergy and the church than formerly?