Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

Thus the fear of death which had long haunted him now excluded everything else and he was in despair. He turned to the working people, whom he had always liked, to study them and found that although they anticipated death they did not worry about it but had a simple faith that bridges the gulf between the finite and the infinite, although they held much he could not accept. Thus for a year while he was considering whether or not to kill himself, he was haunted by a feeling he describes as searching after God, not with his reason but with his feelings. Kant and Schopenhauer said that man could not know Him. Tolstoy at first feared that these experiences presaged his own mental decline. He had joined the church and clung to orthodoxy for three years but in the end left and was later excommunicated. He became a peasant and finally left his pleasant home for a monastery, and as the church had failed he turned to the Gospels, the core of which he found in the Sermon on the Mount. Here was the solution of his problem. If everyone strives for self there is no happiness. Nor is there any love of family and friends alone, but love must extend to all mankind and even to being, and this must be all-embracing. No doubt of immortality can come to any man who renounces his individual happiness. Instead of God he now worships the world-soul and attains the goal of perfection he once sought in self-development.

Fechner,[11] born in 1801, made professor of physics in 1833, turned to more psychological studies in 1838. He had visual troubles and could not work without bandaging his eyes, lived in a blue room, had insomnia, and seemed about to die. But in 1843 he improved and felt he was called by God to do extraordinary things, prepared for by suffering. His philosophical inclinations now came into the foreground. He was on the way to the secret of the universe. He believed in insight rather than induction, and this was in the decades when German philosophy was at its lowest ebb. So his works fell dead. Not only Buchner and Moleschott but Kant belonged to what he called the “night side,” for the latter’s Ding-an-Sich was a plot to banish joy. Fechner knew no epistemology and thought we could come into direct contact with reality itself. Man lives three times: once before birth and in sleep; second alternating; and finally in death comes to the eternal awakening. The spirit will then communicate with others without language and all the dead live in us as Christ did in His followers. The earth will return its soul to the sun. Visible phantoms may be degenerate souls. In his Zendavesta (Living Word) he gives us a philosophy that he deems Christian and that really sums up his final view of things. The childish view is nearest right and the philosopher only reverts to it. Fechner died November 18, 1887, at the age of eighty-six, and after his crisis was really more poet than scientist.

Auguste Comte, born 1798, married at the age of twenty-seven and was divorced at forty-four. He experienced losses by the failure of his publisher and had his first crisis when he was forty. He met Clotilde de Vaux when he was forty-seven but she died a year later. He then became the high priest of humanity, developing his Politique Positive and a new religion. His father, a government official, had given him an excellent scientific education, but during his early years his emotional life was entirely undeveloped and this now took the ascendency.[12]

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688. He had his first vision in London in 1745 at the age of 57, became a seer and mystic, and changed from a subjective to an objective type of thought and developed his doctrine of correspondencies. The change was due to overwork and eye-strain, as was the case with Comte.[13]

Giovanni Segantini[14] affords us perhaps the very best picture of a man who died at the age of forty-three of what might be called meridional mental fever. His life was a struggle against an obsessive death thought and a compensatory will-to-live. His first painting, at the age of twelve, was of a child’s corpse, which he tried to paint back into life. Haunted by the idealized image of his mother, who died when he was very young, and which he fancied he at length found in a peasant girl whom he made his model for years, this life-affirming motif was always in conflict with the thought of death, which in later years became an obsession. His struggle for sublimation was typified by his removal from the world and retirement to a high Alpine village where the mountains, in the ideal of which it was his final ambition to embody all the excelsior motives of life, so drew him that he had a passion for exploring their heights and once slept in the snow, to the permanent impairment of his health. He had several narrow escapes from death, which afterwards always provoked greater activity. He painted an upright corpse, the fall of which he thought (with the characteristic superstition of neurotics) was ominous. Death became, in the end, his muse as his mother had been in the earlier stages of his development. He seemed fascinated with the idea of anticipating death in every way, even though this was a more or less unconscious urge. It was as if he revolted against the ordinary fate of man to await its gradual approach with the soporific agencies that old age normally supplies, and was anxious to go forth and meet it face to face at the very summit of his powers. At times he let down all precautions and took great risks, so characteristic a result of acute disappointments or of general disenchantment with life.

He seemed to revel in the stimulus of the hurry-up motive that so often supervenes, but far more slowly, in those who realize that they have reached the zenith of their powers. Love of his mother made him an artist and he early married a wife who was the mother-image, which was never marred by any childish jealousy of his father, of whom he had known little, but was sublimated into love of mankind and even of animals. But his later greater love of death obscured the mother image and even overcame his passion for home, which he had idealized, and dominated his exquisite feeling for and worship of nature, which he always regarded as charged with symbolic meanings.

At a crisis in the early thirties a prevalent depressive mood gave way to the joy of creation, and his character and the method of his art seemed to undergo a transformation. His resentment at his own fate seemed to vent itself in the desire to banish if not, as Abraham thinks, to punish his mother by representing her in scenes of exquisite suffering; and when at the age of thirty-six his Alpinism made him at home only with the mountains the break with his past life became more and more marked. The ordinary vicissitudes of life were not sufficient and he wished to gamble not with the mere abatement or reinforcement of life but with life and death themselves. Even his dreams were haunted by a thanatic mood, and his superstitions were such that they almost made life itself a hateful dream. He tells us of fancying himself sitting in a retired nook that was at the same time like a church, when a strange figure stood before him, a creature of dreadful and repulsive form, with white gleaming eyes and yellow flesh tone, half cretin and half death. “I rose, and with impressive mien ordered it away after it had ogled me sideways. I followed it with my eye into the darkest corner until it had vanished.” And this vision he thought ominous. When he turned around he shuddered, for the phantom was again before him. Then he arose like a fury, cursed and threatened it, and it vanished and did not return, for it was more obedient than Poe’s Raven. His ambivalent reaction against this was not only to work harder but to affirm that there was no death and thus to revive much of the earlier religiosity of his childhood. One of his pictures was of a dying consumptive which he transformed into one of blooming life. More and more the death thought mastered his consciousness—almost as much as it did the soul of the insane painter, Wertz—and provoked him to greater enthusiasm and ever longer and more arduous programs for his future life. But from the subconscious he was always hearing more and more clearly the call of death, for which his deeper nature seems to have passionately longed, while the opposite will-to-live became more and more impotent. All his prodigious activity in later life seems to have been thus really due to a subdominant will to die. When he fell ill for the first time in his life, “the dark powers of his unconscious nature came in to help the disease and make the disintegrative process easier and to invite death,” as if love of it were the consummation of his love of all things that lived, and the latter would not have been complete without the former.

Another case of a genius who hurried through the table d’hôte Nature provides and left the table sated to repletion when her regular guests were but half through the course was the German poet, Lenau.[15] Born in 1802, he studied philosophy, law, and medicine successively, sought contact with primeval nature in America at thirty, returned to find himself famous, and, after a period of prolonged chastity, became promptly infected with syphilis, falling a victim to insanity at forty-two and dying of progressive paralysis at forty-eight. Syphilis is perhaps the most psychalgic of all diseases that afflict man, for it not only poisons the arrows of love and makes its ecstasy exquisite pain but weakens all the phyletic instincts, like the climacteric, and like it brings hyperindividuation in its train. He knew both the joys and the pains of life, the depths of misery and the heights of euphoria. Eros and Thanatos were inseparable in his soul, and both had their raptures and inspired him by turns. Amorousness brought acute religiosity, and between his erotic adventures he lapsed far toward the negation of all faiths and creeds. When not in love his violin was treated as a paramour, and he forgot it when the tender passion glowed again in his soul. I doubt if any poet ever had a truer and deeper feeling for nature or was a more eloquent interpreter of all her moods and aspects. He exhausted both homo- and heterosexual experiences, remaining through a series of love affairs, however, true to his Sophie, who was like his mother and with whom his relations were pure and whose influence was beneficent. Even before his infection megalomania alternated with misanthropy, and he had all the fluctuations of mood that are such characteristic stigmata of hysteria. Spells of lassitude alternated with Berserker energy; masochism with sadism; excesses, including those of drink, with spells of depression. In his aggressive moods he stormed up mountains, which to him were symbols of mental elevation, until he was completely exhausted. Sometimes he fancied himself a nobleman or even a monarch and always strove to reduce all about him to servile satellites. The Job-Faust-Manfred motive often took possession of him, and sometimes he played his violin half the night, dancing in rapt ecstasy and unable to keep time. In his periods of self-reproach after orgasms of ecstasy he became ascetic. His poetry and converse were, especially for such a man, singularly pure. He said he carried a corpse around within him. Most insanities are only an exaggeration or breaking out of previous traits, and this was exceptionally so in his case. At one time he seemed to want to break with all his old and to find a new set of friends.

In the high temperature at which he lived, with so many impulses that were either frustrated or crucified, always hot with love or its ambivalent hate, he died—not like Segantini, because he was hypnotized by death at the very acme of his power and willed it actively, though unconsciously, as surely as if he had committed suicide, but he rather turned to it from sheer repletion of life, most of the experiences of which he had exhausted. It was as if a congeries of souls took possession of him by turns, so that in middle life he had himself already played most of the parts in the drama and thus knew it far more exhaustively than those who lead more unitary lives, however prolonged they may be. He was by no means theoretically a miserabilist or even a pessimist but was simply burned out (blasé, abgelebt). As if to anticipate the Weltschmerz that his diathesis made it certain would later become acute, his passionate love for nature, deep and insightful as it was, did not prove an adequate compensation, and we cannot but wonder whether, if he had lived more normally and without infection to four-score, his life would not inevitably have ended with the same, though less acute, general symptoms. Yet even he never cursed the fate that brought him into life or inveighed against his parentage. His life was like a candle in the wind blown every way by turns, now and then flaring up and emitting great light and heat, now almost put out, smoking, sputtering, and malodorous in a socket like a blue flame just before its final extinction.

The psychograph of the poet Heinrich von Kleist (d. 1811, a.e. 34) affords another example of a genius who died of premature old age near the period of its dawn or at the critical turn of the tide.[16] In the University his passion for omniscience impelled him to enroll for so many and diverse courses that his professors protested. Later he actually tried eight and attempted to sample other callings. “He would have liked to be everything.” In the space of fourteen years no less than nine women had engaged his fancy, although none had made a deep or lasting impression. He had also a veritable Lust for traveling and after every important event in his life resorted to this kind of fugue from reality to lose himself in new scenes. “There is nothing consistent in me save inconsistency.” His demands on his friends, and also his ambitions, knew no bounds. He would “tear the crown from Goethe’s brow.” He felt he must storm all heights and do it now or never.