Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

They are, as we have seen, very susceptible to climate and to weather changes, which they often become sagacious in predicting, and sometimes keep note of rain, snowfall, temperature, wind, the phases of the moon, etc., and are not only accredited oracles in weather wisdom but are appealed to as local weather bureaus with amazing memory for exceptional climatic phenomena for years back. Thus it is that their sympathies often widen until they become almost animistic for things without life and may come almost to personify ships, vehicles, and machines. What takes place within the soul of an old man alone with nature our imperfect psychology cannot tell; nor does he yet know. It is something resumptive, preparatory for mingling with the elements, as he will ere long do. His consciousness is a poor witness of what transpires in the depths of his soul, for he only knows that the experience of such influences gives him a new poise and calm that is sweet if it is also sad. It is in such experiences that our nature points the way to the chief palliative of the ghastly death thought. In this direction lies the true way back to the all-mother of life, to the great womb of existence whence we come and to which we must all return.

By various devices nature tends to keep the number of males and females nearly equal. But when long periods of hardship, especially wars, reduce the relative number of males, this inequality is rectified by an increase in the number of males born; while in long periods of tranquillity females tend to outnumber males. This is well established by the statistics of natality. Whether nature would thus make good any such sharp reduction in the relative number of females is less demonstrable, because there is no such cause of sudden decimation of this sex. Women do not go to war with each other. This suggests the question whether nature also tends to regulate the proportion between the old and the young where this has been abnormally disturbed. We have already seen that in new communities opened up and settled by vigorous younger men the relative number of old men, though not of old women, soon increases because it is the most viable who respond to the call of adventure and pioneering and who thus, barring the effects of hardship, tend to live longer than the less enterprising who remain behind. Selection was less operative for women who went because their men did. So far as we may identify youth with progressiveness and age with conservatism, we may safely conclude that nature does exercise the same regulative function here as in making good sex disparity. At any rate, radical new departures always bring reactions. Now, young communities and countries have short, old ones long, memories. In the former, experience counts too little; in the latter, too much. The one tends to act perhaps too precipitately, the other to deliberate too long. In one, precedent and tradition have but little, in the other excessive, weight. The one tends to make the most and best of their present opportunity, while the other is chiefly concerned that no good thing of the past be jeopardized. Thus, the tide of progress, which is always marked by alternating waves of reform and stabilization, is regulated and the most fundamental moral basis of all party distinctions is age. In this sense there are always two, and only two, sides to every question; two, and only two, parties in every state, town, and family: the old and the young. Their harmonious action and reaction constitutes the most favorable condition for real progress. Age is far-sighted and synthetic, youth myopic and analytic; but public and private welfare need both, just as science needs both the microscope and the telescope.

All sciences, most of all those that deal with man, are liable to lack the perspective that only age can give to orient them to direct their researches toward problems of most value and hold them steadily to their true course. Even the ablest and most ingenuous of our young sociologists are most prone to lose sight of wider relations and come to focus in partial and extreme views, for extreme opinions are always easiest and in trying to cope with theories too vast for our powers even sane and vigorous minds show the same traits as feeble, neurotic, and infantile ones, which find even the problems of their limited personal lives too hard for them to solve.

In the field of psychology we have now perfected a methodology of introspection that seeks to be as exact as physics or chemistry in going back to elemental sensations as if they were elements from which all higher forms of mental activity were to be evolved by logic as rigorous as mathematics itself and that ignores evolution. We also have a behaviorism that focuses upon activities and physiological processes and would evict the term consciousness, which is the muse of introspection. The psychoanalysts, again, are most genetic and would evolve nearly all psychic phenomena from sex by mechanisms that are as sacred to them as were innate ideas to scholastics and philosophers before Locke, and their work is still taboo to most orthodox psychologists. Fourth, we have the testers who are intent upon applying psychology to the grading of intelligence and the standardization and calibration of abilities. All this work is valuable but how grievously we just now need the broader synthetic view that only age and experience can fully realize and really ought to supply. Age sees more clearly than youth that studies of the brain, of children, of instincts, animals, prehistoric man, the insane, defectives, the sexes, intellect, will, feelings, and even of the history of philosophy and religion are essential for a sound knowledge of man. For to the real anthropologist nothing human is alien. He alone sees that the real value of all such special work is what it contributes to enable us to make our lives fuller, better, and more worth living.

In religion, most of even our authorized leaders show symptoms of dementia præcox in clinging to juvenile attitudes that should have long since been sloughed off. They still antagonize Darwinism, the higher criticism, and the great philosophies of pantheism, which, rightly interpreted, constitute the religion of mature and normal senescent souls. In this oldest of all culture fields the world has suffered most grievous arrest. The fact that in this direction the old have generally so often been most reactionary, if not infantile, is one of the most grievous of all their shortcomings. Here they should lead, as in more primitive times they often did. The church has too little use for its aging teachers but prefers young clergymen. Happily, however, a few of them are now helping to build this higher story of the culture temple of the race and have bid adieu to the mad immortality quest born of the age of sexual potency and which should decline and die with it. In this, as in perhaps no other field, old age should thus be constructive and build mansions for itself and it will never attain the dignity nature suggests for it until it does so. This does not mean that its verdicts should be authoritative for other periods of life since, as with each of these, its findings are not absolute but true only for its own stage. But when senescence has found and accepted the faith that fits its nature and needs, this will at least serve to mitigate the fanaticism of young converts, rebuke ratiocination, which has so long impelled immature minds to make dogma out of religious literature, and check the intolerance of intellectual orthodoxy.

So in all departments of life the function of competent old age is to sum up, keep perspective, draw lessons, particularly moral lessons. Homer, tradition tells us, was an old man who synthesized many legends before unorganized, somewhat as Moses was said to have done in composing the Pentateuch. The dialogues of Plato that deal with the deepest problems are, by general consent, ascribed to his old age. Most of the prophets were old and even the Gospel, which represented the terminal phase of apostolic inspiration, is ascribed to the very aged John. The Confucian system is preëminently a product of the senium that had seen the vanities of the world; and especially of all cults of the transcendental. Herodotus, Thucydides, and Strabo were said to have been old. Wells’ synoptical history not only meets the needs of the old but is something a wise old man might well have undertaken. The popular lectures of not a few leaders of science—DuBois-Reymond, Helmholtz, Huxley, Haeckel, and many others—are products of fertile minds unifying their life work, as befits scientists, before their powers fail, subjecting it to the supreme test by acceptance of the consensus of competent contemporaries and thus affirming the influential immortality of the authors.

The late James Bryce, at the age of 84, said words of supreme wisdom on national and international affairs at the Williamstown conference. Who is not heartened to know that Ranke wrote his famous Weltgeschichte—I think in five volumes—beginning at the age of 85; that Michelangelo was drawing the plans of St. Peters at 90; that Cornaro wrote his last version of The Temperate Life at 95; that W. S. Smith made his memorable trip around the world alone at the age of 80; that Durand edited a volume of his at 110. And it is satisfying to find not only scores but hundreds of such records, ancient and modern.

Again, if youth creates, age not only conserves but organizes. Both these functions are essential in human society and are related somewhat as are reproductive and connective tissue, as we saw in Chapter VI. Both youth and age seek truth and thrill when they feel a deep sentiment of inner conviction. But age lays more stress upon the pragmatic sanction of working well and can better understand even Loyola and Machiavelli. Thus it came that while men in their prime conceived the great religions, the old made them prevail. Thus, too, instituted and dogmatic religion owes its existence chiefly to men past the meridian of life. The old did not invent belief in supernatural powers or persons but needed and used it to sustain their position when physical inferiority would have otherwise compelled them to step aside and so they made themselves mediators between gods and men. They directed and presided over rites and ceremonies and took possession of the keys of the next world, enforced orthodoxies for the sake of order, and established and equipped the young to aid them in this work. They were behind the scenes and held the secrets, realizing the utility to society and also to themselves of much for which they had lost the primitive ardor of belief. Thus the revivalist and the reformer have always found the old arraigned against them. Perhaps they resent “new bottles” even more then they do new wine.

In the domain of sex, so vitally bound up with religion, the Hebrew race first taught the world and most of this wisdom came from the old, against whom the rise of romantic love was one of the greatest revolts in the history of culture. In many primitive societies the old, as we have seen, initiate the young of the same and even of the opposite sex into its mysteries, and in modern mores, as for example, in France, the counsels of the old are still of influence in the matings of the young. It is they who insist on prudential considerations and warn against venery and the follies into which blind Eros may lead. They have seen and know each scene in the stormy drama to the fall of the curtain. Thus to-day, though less only in degree, the sharpest phase of the eternal warfare between the old and young is just where it was in the ancient tribes in which the old barred the young from the females. Youth seeks indulgence and resents the restraint and control for which the old stand.

This eternal war between the young and the old begins at birth and increases with every restraint and prohibition imposed on the former by the latter. The infant would subject its mother’s life to its service and the psychoanalysts who urge that we begin life with a sense of omnipotence are quite as near right as those who, like Schleiermacher, found this stage of life characterized by a feeling of absolute dependence, of which he thought all religions are formulations. Both are always present and in incessant conflict, now one and now the other predominating. The child revolts, yet must submit and obey its elders. It asserts its freedom by defiance, evasion, running away, by deceits, by fancies of escaping all control and doing all it wishes. It seeks to lead its own life and to live out completely its present state regardless of all the claims of the future and of all domination by adults, whose very existence much of his play ignores. The father especially is a tyrant and is often hated as well as loved. Younger children are always bullied by older. Every school grade seeks to dominate that below. The teacher is always imposing a wisdom that is not yet demanded by the child and that is accepted by it unwillingly, cramming the memory pouches with things that can be only imperfectly appreciated, picking open buds of interest and knowledge before their time, imposing standards that are too grown up, checking natural expressions of instinct and insisting on discipline, training, the often painful acquisition of skills and conformity to manifold conventions. There is always a sense in which the school is an offense to the nature of the child. Older minds prescribe what must be learned, and how, and when, and the scholiocentric still predominates over the paidocentric method of education.