Chapter VIII: Some Conclusions (1)

The early decades of age--The deadline of seventy--The patheticism
of the old--The attitude of physicians toward them--Fluctuations
of youth--Erotic decline--Alternations in the domain of sleep,
food, mood, irritability, rational self-control, and sex--The
dawn of old age in women--Dangers of the disparity when
December weds May--Sexual hygiene for the old--Mental effects
of the dulling of sensations--Lack of mental pabulum--The
_tedium vitae_--Changes in the emotional life--Age not
second childhood--Women in the dangerous age--Need of a new
and higher type of old age--Aristotle’s golden mean and the
magnanimous man--The age of disillusion--Increased power of
synthesis--Nature’s balance between old and young--The eternal
war between them--Superior powers of the old in perspective
and larger views--New love of nature and the country--Their
preëminence in religion, politics, philosophy, morals, and as
judges--Looking within and without--Merging with the cosmos--The
three ways of escaping the decay of civilization.

To learn that we are really old is a long, complex, and painful experience. Each decade the circle of the Great Fatigue narrows around us, restricting the intensity and endurance of our activities. In the thirties the athletic power passes its prime, for muscular energy begins to abate. There is also some loss of deftness, subtlety, and power of making fine, complex movements of the accessory motor system, and a loss of facility for acquiring new skills. In the forties grayness and, in men, baldness may begin and eyesight is a little less acute so that we hold our book or paper farther off. We are less fond of “roughing” it or of severe forms of exercise. We may become so discontented with our achievements or our environment that we change our whole plan of life. In the fifties we feel that half a century is a long time to have lived and compare our vitality with that of our forbears and contemporaries of the same age. Memory for names may occasionally slip a cog. We go to the physician for a “once over” to be sure that all our organs are functioning properly. We realize that if we are ever to accomplish anything more in the world we must be up and at it and give up many old hopes and ambitions as vain. Perhaps we indulge ourselves in certain pleasures hitherto denied before it is forever too late. At sixty we realize that there is but one more threshold to cross before we find ourselves in the great hall of discard where most lay their burdens down and that what remains yet to do must be done quickly. Hence this is a decade peculiarly prone to overwork. We refuse to compromise with failing powers but drive ourselves all the more because we are on the home stretch. We anticipate leaving but must leave things right and feel we can rest up afterwards. So we are prone to overdraw our account of energy and brave the danger of collapse if our overdraft is not honored. Thus some cross the conventional deadline of seventy in a state of exhaustion that nature can never entirely make good. Added to all this is the struggle, never so intense for men as in the sixties, to seem younger, to be and remain necessary, and perhaps to circumvent the looming possibilities of displacement by younger men. Thus it is that men often shorten their lives and, what is far more important, impair the quality of their old age, so that we yet see and know but little of what it could, should, or would be if we could order life according to its true nature and intent. Only greater easement between fifty and seventy can bring ripe, healthful, vigorous senectitude, the services of which to the race constitute, as I have elsewhere tried to show, probably the very greatest need of our civilization to-day.

In the seventies we often begin to muse on how our environment will look and what our friends will do when we are gone; and now the suspicion, hitherto nebulous, that there are quarters in which our demise would be welcome may arise to consciousness and perhaps take definite form. There are those who, also perhaps unconsciously, are waiting for our place or positions and so we grow hypersensitive to every manifestation of respect or esteem and not only resist being set aside or being superseded but seek to find new kinds of service that will be recognized as useful. The seventieth is the saddest of all birthdays and if we “linger superfluous on the stage,” we feel that society regards us as, to some extent, a class apart; and so we instinctively make more effort to compensate our clumsiness by spryness and gently resist the kindly offices and tokens of respect to which the young incline or, perhaps more often, are taught to render the old. We are a trifle more prone to lose or mislay things, perhaps almost resent the family’s solicitude for our glasses, slippers, cane, overcoat, diet, and quiet. We have to give ever-increasing time and attention to health and to nursing ourselves and in many exceptional experiences feel that we are seeing persons and may be doing things for the last time. All our plans and efforts and prospects directed toward the future have a new element of uncertainty and tentativeness. We can easily be spoiled by kindness or soured by neglect and our own personality requires so much attention in making the new adjustments that are necessary that we are in new danger of becoming selfish; while our nerves are liable to grow irritable and there is a new trend to depressive states as our activities abate.

It is not strange that one of our grievous dangers is patheticism. One who begins to suspect waning love on the part of those in his sphere may come to accept and even crave pity in its place and farther on in the infirmities of age a husband or wife may do the same and magnify to their partner ailments and symptoms to this end. A little farther yet in this direction lies what may be called the hysteria of senescents. We may come to love to be waited on more than is needful and thus grow into a fictive helplessness and dependence on the ministrations of others. We love to pour our troubles into sympathetic ears and may be spoiled by the too great devotion of our married partner, sons, or daughters, whom we sometimes permit to become slaves not only to our infirmities but to our very whims and notions. Who has not known old people otherwise excellent who almost seem to have lived by the precept of never doing for themselves anything they can get others to do for them. There are fathers who, with no thought that they are selfish, monopolize the love and services of their daughters, and mothers who do the same of grown sons, and these of the younger generation may lavish upon their parents the devotion that was meant for a mate or a family of their own. We know that marriage, when it comes to such people, is likely to be unhappy unless the wife is in the image of the fondled mother or the husband in that of the too much loved father. We are prone to forget that for the old, as truly as for the young, it is more blessed to give than to receive and that we must not insist on our rights and forget that each has its corresponding duties. The old are rarely oppressed by a sense of gratitude and may come to feel that because they have reared their children they have laid them under obligations of a return service that can never be fully discharged, forgetting that beyond certain limits they pay us best by rendering the same service not to us but to their own children. Most of us are or are destined to become a real burden and this we should strive to delay and lighten and not to accelerate or increase, and we should not come to make a luxury of our sense of dependence. Thus if the old have savings, however small, they should never expropriate but retain and use them wherever and when their help will be most serviceable. The fact that we have withdrawn from larger outside activities naturally inclines us to strive to be of compensatingly more account in the smaller circle left us but this must not make us arbitrary in this narrowed field for self-assertion and we should not feel that as we become less important to the world we must become more so within the family circle. We have, in fact, a new place and must exert ourselves to learn and keep it, without interference with those who are taking ours or making their own careers.

In his dealings with such cases the physician needs a special sagacity. He must realize the great satisfaction it gives his aged patients to have him listen patiently and sympathetically to all their ills and should encourage them to trust him fully and with no reservations. This not only shields others but by humoring the wise doctor can not only gain full confidence but may be able to bring such patients to see their own selfishness and thus effect a real cure even in their physical condition. I have known cases where such ministrations were a benediction to the family. Where old patients have thus built up a system of half-fancied ailments, placeboes may work wonders, the therapy being in fact chiefly mental. Such insidious dangers to which the aged are exposed cannot be reached by medicaments but rather by pithiatism in the sense of Babinski or persuasion in the sense of Dubois, Merchenowsky, Rosenbach, or Herbert Hall, who heal by prescribing activities, physical and mental, found possible after painstaking analysis. The old often feel a falsetto invalidism that may be cured by a vigorous appeal to their moral sense or, again by changes in their daily program or regimen or by exposing them to fresh streams of rich outer impressions that correct the mental stagnation to which they are prone or keep their attention from themselves by giving their minds a larger field and a far-off focus, as against their inveterate tendency to mental short-sightedness.

In youth erotic fetishes and pet, instinctive aversions are now known to play an important if half-unconscious rôle in love between the sexes. Eyes, hair, lips, cheek, neck, or any of her little ways of movement or speech may become a focus of special charm to the young amorist. Conversely, other or even the same features, traits, automatisms, or habits may mediate no less unconscious dislike.[196] Some of the same rapports or repulsions exist between the old and the young. The former may even have their favorite children or grandchildren and dislike others in ways they themselves could only inadequately justify. This partiality is most pronounced between fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. It is the chief factor not only in what is called love at first sight but of first impressions of strangers, which are proverbially so hard to efface. Thus what we deem trifles may loom large.

The old are particularly prone to develop peculiarities which, if they do not unconsciously alienate those nearest and perhaps dearest to them, are real handicaps to their devotion. Of this the old are rarely aware, and if attention is called to them they minimize their importance. These might be listed and weighed like their analogues in the erotic field. The roster of them on the negative side would be long. There are faults in table manners, modes of eating and drinking, using table utensils from the napkin on, etc. Mastication may be noisy or otherwise subtly disagreeable, or there is slobbering, clumsiness, or neglect of common conventionalities once observed. The toilet may be neglected, the attire soiled or spotted or imperfectly put on, and so a look-over needed before we go out. We do things or make noises in the presence of others that once we only permitted ourselves when alone and there is a new indifference to personal appearance. The voice is impaired in volume, richness of inflection, and articulation; our face or form are no longer æsthetic objects; we mislay things and invoke those about us to help find them; and are tediously slow in mind and body. If, in addition to all this, we become pryingly overcurious, fault-finding, exact, and forgetful, we give our friends more to put up with than we realize, and the best of them would be shocked if they became conscious of how much they repress in their psychic attitude toward, if not in their treatment of us. On all such matters we should make frequent self-surveys. On the other hand, if we cultivate not only order and control but, above all, the poise and repose of those seeking the Great Peace, striving always to do, be, and say only our best things, we may make ourselves not only respected but loved in a new way, so that we shall be turned to not only for advice but for companionship and help in emergencies and make some of even the most obtrusive signs of physical decay attractive by association with the higher qualities of soul, as the ugliness of Socrates came to be almost loved by his disciples. Art understands this and many of its masterpieces depict old age in its glory. The same is true of literature and even of the drama, despite the fact that actors who specialize in old women’s and particularly old men’s parts so often make age repulsive and ridiculous, for it has always been a most attractive field for caricature.

The old are subject to certain fluctuations, new in kind, degree, or both. Sleep is less regular. They have good and bad nights, one or more of each alternating, which make the next day clear or cloudy with dregs. If fatigue comes more quickly, so does recuperation by rest. They are often refreshed by a very brief nap or by recumbency, or even by a period of solitude during the day. Thus on the periodicity of day and night is superposed one of less amplitude or briefer duration, perhaps after one or each meal. Thus the distinction between the sleeping and waking state comes to be less sharp, slumber is not so deep or long, and the dreamy states of reverie invade mentation by day. The great restorer does not quite make losses good and the accumulation of these deficits explains very many of the phenomena of old age, which might be characterized as sleepiness for death, the rest that is complete and knows no waking. Capitulation to the siesta habit is marked in some by a distinct improvement of condition. They speak of a new balance between activity and repose and sleep all the better nights, while others resist such tamperings with nature’s rhythm and if they acquire the midday habit find themselves nervous or less refreshed the morning after. Some retire and rise with the sun and find a certain elation of spirits in this reversion to nature and praise the morning hour or even sunrise, of which the urbanized world about them knows little and ever less; while others find a virtue in lying abed late. While we know too little of the hygiene of the aged to prescribe, it is certain that they tend to break with the old regulations and really need some of the indulgences they are often too inclined to permit themselves.

The appetites fluctuate and may readily become capricious. Some would eat more and less often than before and love to experiment with new viands. Some think some items of diet once beneficial become harmful and so eliminate them, while some like and can digest things impossible before. Sometimes they indulge for days or even weeks in a favorite dish that at intervals they cannot touch with impunity, as if there were spells of immunity broken by intervals during which the same article produces deleterious results. One says that what is at one time a food becomes for him at another time a poison. This seems particularly true of certain fruits, while the acid balance seems very liable to upsets. Most tend to overeat and are always struggling with their appetite. Yet they often have periods when foods lose their attraction, as if Nature decreed a fast. Here she is often right and a day or more of relative or even entire abstinence may prove helpful. So the former diet periods do not need to be observed; nor need the old be coaxed at such times with tempting food.

Springtime is hard on the assimilative processes of all but especially on those of the old. This is partly because the tides of life everywhere set toward genesis rather than toward individuation but still more because the calorific elements of food need to be essentially reduced and also because winter’s supplies grow a little stale before summer ripens her produce. So, too, with the abated activity that years bring the need of food is reduced and hence the old can often thrive on a small percentage of what they formerly needed. Most, too, not only learn to avoid hearty meals at night but find it best to lay in most of their rations earlier in the day. Very many find in diet their chief center of interest and solicitude and the most active theme for theorization, so that in many cases more and more mentation seems to center about alimentary functions. There are very active inductions from experience and constant modifications of views hard to change in other fields. There does seem to be often a change toward either increased sensitiveness or torpidity of the alimentary tract. A few grow especially susceptible to seasoning, condiments, flavors, and even confectionery. They may become even connoisseurs in wine, tea, coffee, tobacco, while others grow indifferent and insist that they like and can eat almost anything. Nutritive ups and downs are thus more marked than before. Tendencies to decrease in weight are distinctly more favorable for prolonged life than the opposite tendency to obesity. Indeed, the former seems normal.

There are alternations of mood. Depression may be acute to-day and vanish to-morrow, depending not only upon sleep and nutrition but the weather and incidents, perhaps trivialities, in the environment. Irritability may alternate with apathy and the old may lose self-control and anon exercise a high degree of it. Some days they feel comfortable and even vigorous and on others are miserable. Now weak organs or functions, heart, stomach, bowels, rheumatism, or whatever be the besetting troubles, are much in evidence and symptoms may grow dangerous until the old have a new sense of the fragile hold they have upon life, which may end suddenly in some of these weak moments. Then these symptoms intermit and they feel well and take heart again till the next “spell.” A few never allow themselves to be caught without some one or more trusted drugs kept handy for immediate use in emergencies and much, too, might be written of “warnings” and their sometimes epochal effects upon both the inner and outer life. Thus the old may sometimes give way to their feelings and become stormy, lachrymose, perhaps even violent, and they may react from this to a state of almost philosophic poise, which passes upon even their own outbreaks with objective detachment and psychological interest, phenomena that we may call the “apologetics” of old age. Thus emotivity and reason may succeed each other.

The old are very dependent upon weather, climate, and seasons. Winter is hardest on them. Not only does it mean more indoor life and less activity but cold is one of the chief enemies of the old and winter is also supercharged with subtle and profound symbolisms of their own stage of life which deploy more beneath than above the threshold of their consciousness. What old person does not shudder at the thought of being buried in snow and ice. Even the autumn is for them full of somber analogies of the stage of the sere and falling leaves, of the ripening and garnering of the fruits of the earth, of the first blighting frosts. All the old long for the rejuvenation of springtime and perhaps daydream of it when nature is snowbound. Some keep diaries of wind, temperature, and storm and become weather-wise, while those who can, seek warmer climes, especially when winter begins to break, a season statistics show is most fatal for the old. The poet who sang that he could endure anything but a series of bad days must have had the psychic barometry of old age. Thus we draw nearer to nature, our source and our home.

Even sex often does not decline and die without terminal oscillations in its course and in extreme cases apathy and aversion may alternate with abnormal erotic outbreaks dangerous alike to the health of the individual, to domestic happiness, and even to public morals. Those who have led lustful lives may resort to unnatural and illegal forms of vice and thus illustrate the various perversions of this function. While only a few indulge in orgies, very few fail to note occasional spontaneous but transient calentures here suggestive of potency long after it was deemed “closed season.” Such recrudescences, though they seem to be nearly always only partial, are very prone to deceive and may lead to follies. Instead of being indulged, cultivated, or even welcomed, as by an inveterate fallacy too prevalent with the young they too often are, the old should rigorously ignore and suppress all such manifestations in this field. While the full realization of impotence brings a psychalgia all its own, it also has physiological and psychological if not conscious compensations, while belated and, especially, stimulated activity of reproductive functions not only can never result in offspring of value to the world but saps vitality and accelerates the decay of every secondary sex quality of mind and body, so that complete chastity, psychic and somatic, should be the ideal of the old. They should be not only embodiments of purity but the wisest of all counselors in this field. Only to those in whom asceticism and sublimation have done their perfect work will there come an Indian summer of calentures for the higher ideals of life and mind, while those who fail here can never know the true and consummate joy of old age.

For myself, I frankly confess that the longer I live the more I want to keep on doing so. Hence in the last two years of retired leisure I have given far more time and attention to personal hygiene, regimen, and diet than ever before and have mildly experimented with myself in many ways. I have tried eating two and four meals daily, going early and late to bed, forcing myself to lie there a fixed number of hours and at certain times again retiring and rising with no regularity as I felt like doing. I have tried systematic rub-downs, self-massage; cold and warm, frequent and infrequent baths, have equipped a modest gymnasium and taken mild but systematic exercises with various apparatus and then abandoned all this or done nothing of it without an inner prompting. I have followed prescribed diets and tried many special foods, interested myself in vitamines, beginning with Eddy’s manual and trying out vegex preparations, although no one has as yet studied the effects of any of the three species of vitamines upon old age, as has been done for other stages of life. I even used olive oil, which so many of my correspondents praise both for internal and external application, stopped smoking for a week, which seemed greatly to prolong each day after thirty years of mild addition to nicotine, corrected for a time and then yielded to the senescent’s tendency to constipation, experimented with alcohol in several forms, even with Pohl’s spermine tablets and minimal doses of phosphorus, etc. But out of all these moderate hygienic adventures I have so far found no topping specific. It would be interesting to try out the gland-grafting experiments which seem to have regenerated the famous Vienna surgeon, Lorenz, and others, and I think I would gladly offer myself as a _corpus vile_ for the Steinach operation to study its psychological effects at first hand. Although I have found in the above experiences a few things that I so far believe helpful to me, I have derived from them all no advice to offer others except, if time and inclination favor, to try out all things for themselves. Plenty of moderate exercise out of doors, active intellectual interests, both just to the point of healthy fatigue but no more, are fundamental. One must have insight and considerable power of self-observation to profit therefrom. But the main thing is to develop and maintain at its highest possible morale a rigorous and unremitting hygienic conscience that will never let down but always enforce the doing of what we know to be best. Otherwise we may eat, sleep, work, and generally do or not do what seems best as we list. I am even skeptical about the almost universal counsel for tranquillity and against worrying, for more or less anxiety is not only the normal lot of man but it gives a tonic sense of responsibility which we all need.

Special forms of pleasure that have to be prepared for attract us less but we find soul-filling satisfaction in just living, contemplating nature wherever we happen to be, eating, sleeping, and in common converse. All these things acquire a charm unknown before, while “occasions,” events, and sights that are rare and afar lose their charm. Thus we come to love each hour of each day and the most wonted and commonplace experiences, while our work (for no one can be happy without some task) even though it seemed drudgery before becomes attractive because we can do it when and as we will and as much or little of it as our strength permits or inclination impels. Meanwhile friends grow nearer and dearer, enmities fade, and we enjoy converse with those toward whom we were formerly indifferent or even averse. Thus old age may become the most satisfying and deeply enjoyable stage of life. Hitherto the rest cures we prescribed have been more or less reversionary to youthful or even primitive scenes and activities. It may be that this is wrong and that for all such cases we should prescribe for the young or middle-aged the occupations, attitudes and regimen of the old and that this would be more therapeutic.

Sensations and movements are the basis of mind and when these are reduced, as in old age, we often have the phenomena of mental starvation because the supplies of mental pabulum are lowered. If the old have little society and do not read, their psychic powers of digesting their experience run down, not from any inherent weakness but because they are on short rations for data. The mills could often grind as fine and as much as ever, and possibly more so, but the grist is lacking. Thus there are two opposite trends in the old. On the one hand, their physical state demands attention to themselves so that they tend to have “too much ego” in their cosmos, grow subjective, and may become hypochondriacal or preoccupied with their own personal problems. The simple decree of nature is that we must give more care to our health and morale and it is excess, defect, or perversion of this deep instinct that causes so many of our pains and our ill repute. Here lies our chief need of personal study, psychoanalysis, and reëducation. The other trend is in the opposite direction, toward depersonalization. We need to look out, not in; to forget self and to be absorbed in objectives. We are impelled to escape our environment and interest ourselves in things that are remote in space and time, in nature, the stars, great causes and events, personalities, masterpieces, to escape from our miserable selves by their contemplation. We cannot see the countenance of things for their soul. It is this fugue from self that perhaps impels us to so many of our petty pastimes and diversions: solitaire, idle reveries, our predilection for amusements, fussiness about our things; as well as, on the negative side, to neglect our person, really of dwindling value in the great world and soon to be effaced. All these phenomena are outcrops of the tendency by which “the individual withers and the world is more and more,” for our fate is depersonalization and resumption into nature. These symptoms are anticipations of euthanasia or, to use a phrase now current in psychology, they are extrovertive and not introvertive, just as the old were meant to be.

Thus the old need a higher kind and degree of self-knowledge than they have yet attained. They need to be individually studied and analyzed to avoid the new, peculiar, and not yet understood dementia præcox now so liable to supervene upon the youth of age. This is all the more needful now that the intensity of modern life with its industrial and managerial strain compels earlier withdrawal from its strenuosities. We live longer and also begin to retire earlier, so that senescence is lengthening at both ends. Hence, again, the need of midwives to bring us into the new world of higher sanity now possible to ever more of us. Both we and our civilization now so checked, disoriented, and misled by immaturities are in such crying need of a higher leadership that is not forthcoming! We are suffering chiefly from unripeness. The human stock is not maturing as it should. Life is so complicated that the years of apprenticeship are ever longer and harder, so that we are exhausted ere we become master workmen in our craft and the rapid age turnover this involves robs us of too many of the choicest fruits of experience.

Our retirement, even if gradual and not dated, calls attention to our age, and to our little world we grow old a decade the day it learns that we have stepped aside while to ourselves we may and ought to feel that we grow young that day by yet more. The springtide of a new stage of life stirs our pulses and we feel something of the care-free happiness of another childhood. Our intimates often remark signs of a new vitality, physical and mental. If we are normal and not too spent, we feel new hopes, ambitions, make plans to surpass our old selves and to at last be, do, say, enjoy something really worth while. As we pass our life in review, stage by stage, up to the present, it seems so incomplete, fragmentary, tentative, and altogether unsatisfying that we almost wonder whether it was we ourselves who really lived it or someone else whose career we are following with an objective detachment never felt before toward our own ego. Certain it is that a new veil falls between us and our past, gauzy and transparent though it be. Our psychic nature did not intend us for the rôle of reminiscence so persistently assigned to and so commonly accepted by us. Our juvenile memories are but the ragbag vestiges of a vaster experience that had to be forgotten to be completely incorporated in our personality and to ascribe too much significance to them is the fetishism of senility. If we write up our lives, we can make them interesting and valuable only by using our better information about and more sympathetic rapport with ourselves with the same impartiality that a close and discerning friend would do if he had all our data. It is for the things of the present and for the problems of the future that our mental vision becomes clearer than ever before. Our wish and will to achieve and make our insights known and prevail acquire new force.

How different we find old age from what we had expected or observed it to be; how little there is in common between what we feel toward it and the way we find it regarded by our juniors; and how hard it is to conform to their expectations of us! They think we have glided into a peaceful harbor and have only to cast anchor and be at rest. We feel that we have made landfall on a new continent where we must not only disembark but explore and make new departures and institutions and give a better interpretation to human life. Instead of descending toward a deep, dark valley we stand, in fact, before a delectable mountain, from the summit of which, if we can only reach it, we can view the world in a clearer light and in truer perspective than the race has yet attained. It is all only a question of strength and endurance. That is the great and only but, when we squarely face it, a staggering proviso. In all essentials we are better and more fit than ever before save only for the curse of fatigability, for age and death are nothing but fatigue advancing and finally conquering life. One single example of a hale old man dowered by nature and nurture, as immune from tire as youth is, would give the world a new idea of senectitude.

We were told that the days and years pass more quickly as we advance in age. What could be more false! Not only do the nights, of which sound sleep once made us unconscious, often drag slowly through their watches but each day is so long that we often find time hanging heavily on our hands; and when we have done all the work we can, we turn to our friends to amuse us and seek and perhaps invent pastimes or fresh occupations to kill it. Sermons, lectures, meetings of all kinds, even the drama, seem long. The winter lingers until we almost fear that spring will never come or out-of-doors attract us again. When we have to wait for things, the time stretches as if there were no limit to its elasticity, and when we turn to reveries of the past, it is a last resort from the _tedium vitae._ We really have time for anything and to spare. It is the demon fatigue that makes us so in love with diversion, for rest is more and more frequently sought and found in change.

They say our emotional life is damped. True, we are more immune from certain great passions and our affectivity is very differently distributed. But what lessons of repression we have to learn! If the fires of youth are banked and smouldering they are in no wise extinguished and perhaps burn only the more fiercely inwardly because they cannot vent themselves, as even the Lange-James theory admits for repressed feelings, inhibition of which really only makes them more intense. We get scant credit for the self-control that restrains us from so much we feel impelled to say and do and if we break out, it is ascribed not to its true cause in outer circumstance but to the irritability thought characteristic of our years. Age has the same right to emotional perturbations as youth and is no whit less exposed and disposed to them. Here, as everywhere, we are misunderstood and are in such a feeble minority that we have to incessantly renounce our impulsions. Marie Bashkirtseff has betrayed the secret of how the pubescent girl, and Karin Michaëlis, of how the woman of forty feels, but no one has ever attempted to explain the sentimental nature of aging men or women. Even Solomon and Omar Khayyam presented only the negations and not the reaffirmations of the will-to-live.

Thus it is no wonder if the old often best illustrate what Henri Bordeaux describes as “the fear of living.” René Doumic thinks that there is a new disease in our old civilization and that many in their prime only make a pretense of living. “We value our peace above everything and wish to keep it at all hazards, however dearly we must pay for it. We shun responsibilities, avoid risks and chances of struggle, flee from adventure and danger, seek to escape from everything that makes for the charm and value of life. We no longer have any faith in the future because we no longer have faith in ourselves.” How well this applies to those brought face to face with the last stage of life! The fact is, we must find and make new pleasures as well as new modes of escaping and mitigating the pains of body and mind and must learn anew how to love, hate, fear, be angry, pity, and sympathize aright. The serenity ascribed to us would pall and bring stagnation. It is a profound psychological truth that “out of the heart are the issues of life” and our heart is not dead; on the contrary, emotivity probably increases with years and most expressions of it, unless they become more sublimated, strongly tend to grow more crass and stormy. We were never more interested in things, persons, events, causes, in life itself. Slights rankle, neglect chills, attentions warm, affronts incense, and praise thrills us, and if we grow censorious, it is because our ideals of conduct and motive have become higher and purer and we are in a greater hurry to see them realized. We cannot help these gropings toward a new dispensation and their very persistence is the best reason for believing that they will sometime find their goal in a better stage of things and an improved race of men not in another world but here. Perhaps some of even what we now call the whimsies of the old will be seen to be the labor pains of humanity, which is striving thus to surpass itself, to improve the stock, and to really bring in a new and higher type of man.

Old age is called second childhood. This is all wrong for there is nothing rejuvenative about it. Childhood is the most active, healthful, buoyant, and intuitive stage of life; age, the least so. What is there really common to the morning and evening of life? We even lose much of the power we once had to understand children and if we love them, we want them at a distance, while they in turn understand and like us little by nature. They inherit far less of the results of experience with grandparents than with parents, for less of us have survived to see them and the latter often resent or even criticise our relations to them. We are nearly as immune to their prevailing faults as to their diseases. They listen to our stories but do not crave our cuddling, are jealous if we usurp the offices of their parents to them and are usually a little less free in our presence. Nature has established an old and close rapport between one generation and the next. Even young teachers get on best with young, old with maturer pupils. M. L. Reymert[197] says that his general study shows him that teachers below twenty and over forty are of less influence than teachers between these ages. The most efficient man teacher is generally from 25 to 35. The best woman teacher has a little wider range--say, 20 to 40. But of course mental and physiological age are different. Helen M. Downey “Old and Young Teachers,” _Ped. Sem._, June, 1918, concludes, on the basis of questionnaire data, that the younger teacher has other interests that keep her bright and cheerful; the older teacher excels in mental and the younger in dispositional traits; the old are careless of appearance and this does not appeal to children; the older rule by discipline, not by love and kindness; the young teacher more often overtaxes her strength; the old are more set in methods, fixed in opinions, resent suggestions for improvement. Many suggest there should be an age limit of 60. Health and temper suffer. There are often negative psychic idiosyncrasies. Older teachers lose contact. Social traits are a very great factor in consideration of the period of rapid growth. Dispositional qualities are more impressive than any other. The favorite teacher is enthusiastic, energetic, young. Pupils’ estimates do not involve age when they speak of old and young. I know an old and successful professor, interested in his work to the end, who, when he retired with powers little abated and much work yet to be completed, found that in his speech and writing he imagined himself as no longer addressing minds in the student, even graduate, stage, but wished to be at home teaching and learning from those not under forty, for at that age real wisdom begins, the effects of special training having then faded. A refocalization took place in his mind that involved not only new methods but, yet more, new topics and subject matter. What student, however mature, would care for and what curriculum in any university in the world would include, for example, the theme of this volume. And who but a _Greis_ would ever have found its preparation a fascinating task! No, the old are not childish but, if they are normal, have simply reached a stage of postmaturity that involves much of what Nietzsche called the transvaluation of all values.

But if we can no longer see over the crest of the divide that separates age from youth, if the acclivity is shut off, we do see more nearly and clearly each step of the declivity and find the catabasis of life no less zestful than its anabasis was in its time, while we have the great advantage that comes from the power of being able to compare the two and this itself opens rich mines of thought. The age of the sage has bid a final adieu not only to all puerilities but to the callow ardors of the ephebic stage. He is graduated from adulthood and turns, as by an eschatological instinct, to ultimate human problems, of which younger minds, though they may be attracted to them, can have only premonitions. To hear and heed this call is the strength and glory of those who are complete “grown-ups.” The trouble with mankind in general is that it has not yet grown up. Its faults, which we see on every hand, and the blunders that make so large a part of history are those of immaturity. Man has always felt the need of guardianship and because he lacked wisdom invented immortal omniscient gods--tribal, national, or cosmic--to guide him and as embodiments of what he felt lacking in himself. It is just this need of an all-wise providence that the old will come to supply if and as humanity slowly ripens.

If and so far as it is true that a woman is as old as she looks and a man as he feels, all this processional, especially its early stages, is, on the whole, probably much harder for her than for him. She feels not only that “the coming of the crow’s foot means the going of the beau’s foot,” but the first wrinkles about the mouth, eyes, or under the chin; the loss of fullness about the neck, to which folklore attributes such significance; the first sagging of the cheeks or the bust; the first signs of fading complexion; or the first gray hair, give her bitter food for thought. Her cult of the mirror, that man progressively eschews, increases. But woman commands far more resources against all such heralds of decay than man and gives vastly more time to compensating for them. Youth is her glory and she has more comeliness to lose than man, who can, however, never quite rival the hag in ugliness. She has also great powers of compensation by affecting girlish ways and has a stronger hold on her youth than man and old women do not feel as old as old men do. Throughout married life, if she is well, woman usually assumes the rôle of the younger mate, even though she be not so in years. Though sexual involution comes to her earlier she remains in far more sympathetic touch with the young than her husband, so that there is a half truth and not mere gallantry in the saying that a woman never grows old.

The woman just beginning to feel passé has a psychology all her own of which even the devotees of that science know little and she herself yet less, but of which Michäelis in “The Dangerous Age” has given us a few glimpses. Love, wifehood, and motherhood, as the world knows, constitute the very heart of woman’s life and as the chance of these supreme felicities begins to fade, something, which it is no extravagance to call desperation, begins to supervene. Its processes may and often do deploy so deep in the subconscious regions of the soul that even she is but little aware of the transformations that are taking place there. These she quite commonly ignores, camouflages, or honestly and resentfully denies. The psychopathologist sees most clearly the tragedies of aborted Eros as they are writ large in morbid symptoms. But with the same causes and conditions, the same processes are always more or less active, however repressed, and the unmated woman before the close of the third decennium has generally come to some terms with the death of the phyletic instinct within her, which is the core and mainspring of her life, and has dimly anticipated all the significance of old age.

Happily for her dawning senescence, it is one of the great achievements of our age that she has found a splendid vicarious function in culture and new social, vocational, professional, and political services, so that she can now give to mankind much that is best in her that was once confined to the narrower sphere of domestic life, and be little or none the worse but perhaps the better for it. This great emancipation is building a new and higher story to her life, so that as the amative, heyday charm of her youth begins to abate she need no longer despair. All her earlier occupational training that fits her for self-support, complete or even partial, is, thus, anticipatory of this third new stage of life that the senium now begins to reveal to her. This gives her now a certain advantage over man. Thus she has found a new call that means not only more safety but priceless service, to which all her superfluous energies can be devoted, and the world now waits with an eagerness that is almost suspense to see whether she will have the courage to grapple with the most vital problems that confront her sex and find the wisdom to solve them or, neglecting these, be content with the effort to do man’s work in man’s ways.

Thus, woman is older than man in the same sense that the child is older than the adult, because her qualities are more generic and she is nearer to and a better representative of the race than he and also in that she sublimates sex earlier and more completely, entering the outer shadows of senectitude in the thirties. But she is also, at the same time, younger than he in that she is less differentiated in tissues or traits, less specialized and in her early decades must learn better than he to conserve so much that is best in the physique and _esprit_ of her youth. If her physiological change, when it comes, is more marked, abrupt, and datable, the psychic changes she undergoes are far more gradual and imperceptible, while her sympathy with youth and even childhood, and in general not only her moral but all her normal instincts, which are the best gift the adolescent stage of life has to offer, are keener and surer.

This critical age has its own peculiar temptations to which woman entering middle life sometimes succumbs. She, like man, is prone to ask of the future whether it is all to be like the present or past and, if so, what is to become of the unfulfilled dreams of youth. The Prince Charming never came; or perhaps her ideal has proven only a clay image; or her affection, or his, may have found another focus that seems worthier. Hence it is in no wise strange that some women, hitherto good by the old standards, now make a break with their past, impelled to do so by an augmented desire to taste all the joys of life before it is forever too late. Not only does it seem intolerable to go on to the end as they are but there is perhaps some tempter who detects and waters these seeds of discontent and helps the middle-aged woman on to feel that she has been a coward to life. Beaudelaire, who certainly thought he understood French women, said that for most of them at thirty-five who are married and perhaps for even more who are unwed, anything was possible. Even curiosity is a spur to adventure and fancy, if not conduct, may prompt to cast off all restraints. “Why not?” is a question that incessantly arises and every answer seems unsatisfactory. And how many of us can qualify, by being without sin, to cast the first stone at those who fall here. Such women are too old to enter upon a life of vice but often form secret and occasionally very happy alliances with, usually, older men, which may last for years without involving any abandonment of their stated occupation or leaving the ranks of respectability and with now, unquestionably, a growing disposition on the part of society to condone, even though it may suspect or even know.

Again, as we men grow old, we recognize that we have lost something of whatever attraction we have had for the other sex generally and often come to regard most of its members as somewhat trivial and to prefer the society of other men. Even the love of husbands and wives happily married takes on a different character; and they are fortunate, indeed, if the losses are balanced or compensated for by the gains, as they should ideally be, or if friendship waxes as erotism wanes. The old beau who devotes attention without intention to younger women can, at best, only amuse and rarely interest them, although they may feel subtly flattered. Sometimes they find delectation in cajoling him and playing upon his weaknesses and they may also come to indulge in a freedom of speech and manner with him that they would never permit themselves with men of their own age; while, conversely, friendships between older women and younger men are always more sincere. The case of the doddering dotard with the flapper is rare, save in the literature of senile psychopathology and medical jurisprudence, where it is by no means uncommon. But this we shall not here discuss.