Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

All answered this question, with surprising unanimity and but slight reservations, negatively. A few still loved church services, had clerical friends whom they loved and respected, went to church for the music, enjoyed university preachers, reread portions of the Bible with edification, etc. Many thought the clergy insincere or ignorant, too absorbed in money-raising, preposterously antagonistic to science, or found the same uplift in reading other great literature as in the Scriptures. Over and over we find statements to the effect that the writer has become his own high-priest, minister, oracle, captain of his soul, no longer in need of ecclesiastical mediation with the divine, etc. “Why is the church still so apologetic when science does not apologize for Copernicus?” “Why has the church waged such bitter warfare against Darwinism, when evolution is only another and better name for the revelation of the divine and should have brought such enlargement and reinforcement to religious thought and feelings?” One eminent artist finds all the religion he needs in art; students of science find it in nature; students of the humanities, in the study of the deeper nature of man. The beautiful is just as religious, if not more so, than the good or the true. “There is only one great word in the world and that is love.” “I preached all the doctrines and found some truth in many of them but have rejected most, and perhaps the form of all, as pulp and rind.” “Each of us must work out our own salvation.” “My religion is the Red Cross.” Several who had been brought up pietists and had attached themselves to various churches in turn had, in later years, withdrawn from all and come to depend on their own reading and meditation. “The clergy are blind leaders of the blind.” In one case church was discontinued because the assumptions of pulpiteers aroused “all my porcupine quills.” Some had ceased to attend divine services because they seemed irreligious compared to the deeper religion they find within. The higher criticism has brought insights to some that the church knows not of and “my real conversion was from, not to, the church. It knows and can teach us nothing about the hereafter.”

Thus, in general it would seem, if our meager returns are at all typical, that the clergyman makes less appeal to the old and knows less about ministering to their nature and needs than do physicians. It must not be forgotten, however, that, as one of our respondents says in substance, the views of those this questionnaire appealed to, people of intelligence and culture, are exceptional, and probably the majority of the uneducated have at least a falsetto belief in some institutions and teachings of the church. Our returns indicate, however, the same growth of skepticism with years as that found by the far more extensive conspectus of J. H. Leuba,[195] from which he gathered that the percentage of those who believed in God and immortality decreased both with age and with education.

Do you think or worry about dying or the hereafter more or less than formerly?

Here, as was to be expected in our age of transition and éclaircissement, there is the utmost diversity. All my respondents answered but only four of them (three women) found anything like the orthodox religious consolations afforded by the hope of a personal immortality. Most were agnostic. “I know as much about it as anyone who ever lived, which is absolutely nothing.” Four were distinctly pantheistic and found pleasure in the belief of extinction, annihilation, or absorption into the cosmos like a drop of water returning to the sea. About one-half had lost confidence in sacerdotalism and had no connection with any church and a few were bitter against ecclesiastical assumptions. Most had ceased to worry about death, a few professed never to think of it, two dreaded the pain they associated with the act of dying, and one prayed that the end might be instantaneous. Men of science wished and hoped that they might go on “thinking God’s thoughts after Him” with renewed facilities and incentives for getting nearer to the soul of the great Autos. One’s life-long religion seems to have been based on the analogy of the chick in the egg who regarded hatching as its death, when it was really coming into a vaster life. Most disclaimed all terror, although two in their youth had felt that this might recur in second childhood. The attitude of most might be described by the phrases: “one world at a time and this one now;” “consider the duty of the present moment and leave the rest;” “never be anxious concerning anything beyond our control,” etc. One wished to die like a pious Buddhist in thinking on his good deeds. One expressed a strong contempt for a god who would tolerate an orthodox hell and several felt that they would sooner or later become wearied to the point of ennui with a heaven according to any conception of it. Most had reckoned with the chance of death in the plans of their business, making their wills, etc., but believed that all thought concerning the hereafter was a waste of energy. Several found consolation only in influential immortality and wanted to live on in the memory of their friends and in the service they had rendered to others, although this idea was generally connected with thoughts of plasmal immortality or living on in their offspring. One good old lady I knew who had spent a life doing good works and had always attended church said, in answer to this question, that she had been so occupied in active services that she had never found time to think much about theology but in her heart doubted all doctrines, was not at all sure that she believed in either God or immortality, and was convinced only that whatever happened would be all right. Old clergymen seem particularly prone to suffer from doubts, sometimes of the most radical nature, and even wonder if after a life of zealous propaganda they may, after all, have been wrong. Several professed themselves more deeply religious, as they understand religion, than the church itself, and even insisted upon a larger, deeper faith than orthodoxy dreams of.

It would seem, from these and other data, that the fears of death are by far most intense in youth, and that in moments when the tide of life ebbs and there are great griefs or disappointments—not only in love, where it is most marked, but along other life lines—a terrible and sudden envisagement of death often arises, although this mood is generally flitting and soon passes. When in age the forces of life abate, death has already begun its work and if belief in personal immortality remains it is sustained and fed chiefly by poetic metaphors or similes that have little justification before the bar of reason and are essentially tenuous and sentimental. Certain it is that inhibitions of the life tide do not so readily prompt thoughts of suicide; though if they do so, as statistics show, the thought of it is more likely to prompt the act of self-destruction in the later decades than it is in youth, when nearly all coquette with these thoughts. The curve has two crests, one in adolescence and the other in senescence.

The chief psychological inference seems to be that the old generally refuse to face squarely and come to terms with the death-thought consciously because it is more fatal to them than to the young, but fly to every kind of relief from it by diversion to other things and themes. In age there is often a narrowing of the intellectual horizon to the immediate environment and this itself is opiative. Thus nature alleviates in the old the fear of death, which impends and which they know to be near. They sometimes wonder just how it will come but rarely dwell upon such details as their own obsequies or leaving last messages and think more often, if their thoughts stray to such subjects, of the effects their demise will entail upon the course of life of others. The fact is, the race has always found death too terrible to be faced in all its horrors and has camouflaged and disguised its grim details by tombs and avoided the direct envisagement of it by focusing attention upon the soul that survives in ways we shall see more clearly hereafter.

Some individuals’ returns transcended my rubrics and have a value in themselves that merit, and I hope will find, publication in full elsewhere. One man known and loved wherever the English language is spoken, who died in 1921 in his 84th year, had the supreme good fortune for nearly thirty years to have the almost daily association and assistance of a sagacious lady physician who entered sympathetically into all his interests and became his literary executor and biographer. This venerable man, so buoyant in his writings, grew depressed as age advanced, especially toward nightfall, although this is nowhere expressed in his books but abounds in his diaries. He developed an interest that seems abnormal in everything pertaining to diet, tried scores of new foods and drinks, only to discard them one after another, and became so averse to tea, coffee, and smoking that it was hard for him to tolerate those addicted to them. But it was on the problems connected with constipation and evacuation that his interest seems to have become most exaggerated. In his converse even with the young but especially with those near his own age he constantly reverted to this subject and his favorite theme of conversation seems to have been on topics of personal and especially dietary hygiene. He studied the chemistry of nutrition and corresponded with experts upon the subject and attempted to carry out upon himself all their findings as he understood them. Eggs he thought more or less poisonous and for a time he seemed almost to think that the hens that laid them could not be suitable food. His idiosyncrasies in this field would constitute a unique theme for study that would have lessons all its own. He was always checking his appetite and experimenting upon and observing himself. There were, in this case, somewhat unique signs of an Indian summer. He wrote twelve books from the age of 30 to 64, and fifteen from 64 to near 84. At 64 he felt that he had written himself out but soon struck other veins, so that his later books cannot be called inferior to his earlier ones. In editing poems of Nature at this time he found so many aspects of it that poets had overlooked that he undertook to supply the gap and had a period of rhyming that lasted about a year.

This suggests another octogenarian I knew, a great leader in mathematics and a man of international fame, who in his latest years believed that he had poetic gifts and wooed the muses, even the goddess of love, with canticles that amazed his friends, who wondered whether he was just making his acquaintance with poetry for the first time or had known it more discriminatingly earlier in life and lost his standards. Another eminent man I knew whose name is known throughout the literary world, and who was also a physician, believed in and practiced frequent naps, in which I have seen him indulge between the courses of a long public dinner, in the intervals of which he would converse with all his old sprightliness and vigor and at the close make the best speech of the occasion. There was no record of even midday sleeps with the naturalist above described. He usually did his best work in the forenoon but occasionally, even in the last years of his life, worked till late at night and resumed early in the morning, doing this for some days as with a kind of afflatus. He also kept up an active interest in public affairs until his increasing illness compelled him to narrow down his interests more and more, so that toward the end they seemed to center entirely in himself.

A man of eighty ceased manual work at fifty and had a marked intellectual renaissance and became an author. He has come to realize the limitations of doctors and, although he employs them, is his own ultimate judge in all matters pertaining to his health. He has withdrawn from the influence of the clergy. “My science and reason say that there is no hereafter while my faith says that there is but I do not give myself any trouble about their quarrel for it will all be decided soon enough.” “I am more disposed to take the far view of things and try to estimate wider relations than formerly.” “I feel that my duty is to the race and to humanity rather than to any section of it.” He reads science and occasionally a good story, although the latter “must have some interest besides that of love.” “I formerly was fond of hunting and fishing but the killing instinct has faded with age, as it does with most people; but the forest and field, the sea and land, are beautiful beyond compare and their infinitely varied forms are more bewitching than ever.” Everyone, he thinks, should have some Bohemia into which he should retreat when overtaken by age and has leisure, and his has been genealogy, mainly getting acquainted with his own ancestors and trying to visualize them as men and women, feeling that he owes to them all his qualities, mental, moral, and physical.

A liberal clergyman approaching the eighties after a life of unique eminence and service writes: “As for a future life for the soul of man, I believe it is a moral necessity to explain and justify his ethical conduct in the present sphere of existence. If, nevertheless, after death there should be no continued existence, individually and consciously, I am ready to accept this solution as also wise and right because ordained by Him who is all-wise and good—‘I cannot drift beyond His loving care.’” He believes that his devotion to great causes that he has seen advance, while “conserving divine ideals below, which ever find us young and ever keep us so,” has contributed to his exceptional vigor and his message to the young is to prepare for old age physically, economically, intellectually, morally, and religiously. He grows more charitable and appreciative, feels deep personal gratitude to physicians, who have more than once saved his life; blesses his long-lived parents for the rare constitution that has not only carried him through but given him a recuperative power at which he has often marveled, dreads the excess of sentiment he often notes in others of his age, who too readily become lachrymose; deplores the excessive freedom and growing self-affirmation, lack of restraint and modesty, courtesy, and thoughtfulness for others in the rising generation; thinks, with Goethe, that if as he grows older he has less keenness of sympathy for suffering, he thrills more deeply in the contemplation of every noble and disinterested act; finds satisfaction in knowing that his ashes (for he has long been an advocate of cremation) will lie near other dear ones on a beautiful hillside in sight of the Pacific; and takes satisfaction in reviewing his life from a large ethical standpoint.