Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

In fine, it cannot be too strongly urged or too often repeated that at present we know little of old age and that little is so predominantly of its inferior specimens, its unfavorable traits and defects and limitations, that the old have been prone to repudiate their years. Some even in the seventies and eighties to whom I ventured to send my questionnaire resented it as imputing to them an age they denied all knowledge of, while others had come precociously to not only accept a padded life but to even crave services and sympathy and demand privileges and immunities to which they were not entitled, thus growing querulous because of a helplessness more affected than real. The fundamental passion of the normal old is to serve, to subordinate self, and, if in some ways they must be served, to help others in turn in such ways as they can. This instinct of expropriation of self is the voice of nature pointing to the effacement that awaits them. The fact that age is so often selfish should not blind us to the fact that in its true nature it is altruistic and thus in its later stages often finds its greatest trial in the progressive abatement of its power of actually benefiting others. Its greatest bitterness is that it must be so much ministered to, and one of my correspondents regretted that he could not die at sea or his corpse, when he was done with it, be left to nature so that his relatives might not have the fuss of a funeral and burial. Indeed, he seemed to have grown morbid about the trouble he was thus to make them. Even the new love of the country and of inanimate as well as animate nature into which they are soon to be resolved may be another outcrop of the deep but blind and groping immolation motive. It is love disengaging itself from persons and special objects and perfecting itself by attaining its goal, which is nothing less than the love of, and the resolution of self into, the cosmos from which we sprang. Hence there is a sense in which chemistry and physics, and even the Einstein doctrine of relativity, are studies of man’s immortality.

Old age and death are eloquent of voices that call us to come home or back to nature, the all-mother, and to the earth from which we sprang and which is the terminal resting place of all who have gone before, with whose remains our dust will mingle. The more we know of the chemistry and physics of matter and energy, and even of the history, constitution, and contents of the earth’s crust, the less dreadful do the grave and the processes that take place in it seem, and the less prone are we to become cowards, slackers, or malingerers in facing the Great Enemy. What we know of what is still often called brute matter shows it to be so much more dynamic and lawful than life and life is so much more fecund and complex than mind that there is now a new and most pregnant sense in which the way of even physical death is upward, not downward. Who, too, yet knows just how much of the charm of æsthetic contemplation of inanimate nature or even the urge that impels science to know ever more of it is due to what it does and will entomb. At any rate, as we realize far more clearly that none of the sons of men ever did or ever can come back, we can now find some compensation in the ever clearer understanding of the immortality of our somatic elements and see the meaning of the deep instinct that inclines the old to the country and to closer communion with nature as they withdraw from life.

The greatest influence of the old upon the young has, from time immemorial, been near the dawn of puberty, when almost every race initiates youth into manhood. This, too, is still the age of most conversions and church confirmations. Here education culminates and here, too, in a sense, it began and extended slowly upward toward the university and downward toward the kindergarten as civilization advanced. The age of nubility, which follows, is the period of the greatest break with the preceding generation for young couples generally set up for themselves and the increase of the interval between generations generally means a prolonged period of subjection and docility. When a third generation was added and grandparents became common in the families, conservative influences were increased, and if four living generations ever become common in the same family progress would probably be retarded and great-grandparents would think grandparents more or less radical or innovative, so that it is well that the former do not linger superfluous on the stage for this would make the tension between the past and the future too great. Thus the Great Silencer’s work of oblivion is benign for the race.

Such excessive contemporaneity of generations is not the goal of eugenics, for while it tends to prolong life it also increases the average span of years between generations and the longer-lived are also more fecund. Should it ever come that ancestors of half a dozen or a dozen generations live together, the advance of the world would probably be greatly retarded, perhaps to the point of stagnation. Therefore, for both their influence and for our love of them it is fortunate that they are well dead and live only in our memory, in the vitality they have bequeathed to us, and in the works that follow them. As it is, it is old minds and those that they have mainly influenced that have kept evolution, which is more charged with culture stimulus than any influence in the modern intellectual world, so largely out of our educational system. It is due to them that so large a part of Christendom has repudiated the higher criticism, another great achievement that has reanimated all scriptures and made them glow with a new light and has given insight and zest where before there was a confusion and indifference that kept religious consciousness so medieval and ultra-conservative. It is psychological age that makes statesmen suddenly confronted with new and vast world problems too large for them take refuge in the counsels of Washington, which were wise in their day but utterly inadequate for meeting the issues of our own time.

The World War was not primarily a young men’s war, for most of them were sent by their elders and met their death that the influence of the latter might be augmented. Men may be made senile by their years without growing wise. Thus the world is without true leaders in this hour of its greatest need till we wonder whether a few score funerals of those now in power would not be our greatest boon. A psychological senility that neither learns nor forgets is always a menace and a check instead of being, as true old age should be, a guide in emergencies. Thus we have not grown old aright and are paralyzed by a wisdom that is obsolete or barnacled by prejudice. How often is it said of reforms great and good that they are earnestly needed and entirely practical but must wait for their accomplishment until certain venerable but obstructive personages of a generation that is passing are out of the way, because they are prone to think the old good and the new bad, and that every change, therefore, must be for the worse. Thus many live too long and undo the usefulness of their earlier years.

In fine, not only has the Western world now lost the exhilarating sense of progress that has for generations sustained and inspired it but civilization faces to-day dangers of decay such as have never confronted it since the incursion of the barbarians and of the Moslems into Europe. Other more disastrous wars are possible. Class hatred and the antagonisms of capital and labor, national and individual greed, race jealousies and animosities, the ferment of Bolshevism, the ascendency of the ideals of kultur over those of culture in our institutions for higher education in every land, industrial stagnation and unemployment, the crying lack of leaders and the dominance of mediocrity everywhere, the decay of faith and the desiccation of religion, the waning confidence in democracy: these are the prospects we must face if we are not to flee from reality and be cowards to life as it confronts us. If men still believed in an omnipotent all-wise god they would expect him to now intervene by a new, perhaps a third, dispensation such as Renan believed in. But the good old All-Father that saved a remnant and drowned the rest in the days of Noah and that sent His Son later to save the world when it seemed lost is dead and survives only as a memory, and we realize to-day that man must be his own savior or perish.

There seem at present three and only three ways of escape, each of them radical, arduous, slow, and perhaps desperate, and which only those who have the supreme power of presentification or the genius that sees all problems in terms of the here and now can clearly discern. The first of these is (1) eugenics. We must learn to breed a better race of men. This is, indeed, a religion and already has its apostles and martyrs and a growing body of disciples who are propagandists of its new gospel. But the obstacles of ignorance and prejudice are appalling. The fact remains, however, as poor Nietzsche realized, that if man cannot surpass his present self he is lost.

(2) Others, like H. G. Wells to-day and like Comenius in his day, see our chief hope not so much in nature and preformation as in nurture and epigenesis and would reconstruct, vastly enlarge, and unify our entire educational system, reversing many a present consensus to the end of ultimately obliterating all national boundaries and racial prejudices and organizing a world state, “a parliament of man, a federation of the world.”

(3) Others, like Metchnikoff and Bernard Shaw, look for salvation in the prolongation of human life that man may have the longer apprenticeship he now needs in order to wisely direct the ever more complex affairs of civilization. Compared with the task it now imposes, the wisest and ablest are only children and the disasters of our day are because young Phaethons have thought they could drive the chariot of the sun when in fact they were “nicht dazu gewachsen.” If man could live and learn, not seventy but two or three times seventy years, and could begin to be at his best when he now declines and retires, he might know enough to guide the world in its true course. He must absorb more knowledge, and of a different kind, and assimilate it better in order to secrete the wisdom now needed. As the adolescent decade prepares for maturity, so the senescent decades must prepare for old age and look forward to it with all the anticipation with which youth now looks forward to maturity. The limitations of old age must be made spurs to its greater efficiency just as so many in middle life have had to do with the chronic handicaps of poor health. Two prevalent traditions must be ruthlessly broken and destroyed. The first is that old people’s hold on life is so precarious that medical care is less likely to be rewarded with success than at earlier stages of life. The fact is that normal and healthy age is not only immune to many diseases common to middle life but often has exceptional recuperative powers, while even under present conditions the percentage of deaths is not so very much increased at seventy. Physicians who specialize in gerontology could do very much here. The other vicious tradition is that retirement or marked abatement of activity should occur at a certain age. This ought to be always a personal matter and all who can really “carry on” should do so with all the powers they possess as long as they are fully able.

An “Indian summer” should be both expected and utilized to the uttermost for this is a precious bud of vast potentialities. In it we already glimpse the superhumanity yet to be. We can already guess something of the soteriological functions that now lie concealed and are yet to be revealed in it. It brings a new poise and a new perspective of values and hence a new orientation and new and deeper insights into essentials. The very fact that the old who have approximated ever so remotely this ideal have so far been exceptions and, in a sense, “sports” should at least open our eyes to the fact that the great all-mother can still show her original wish and intent.