Chapter VIII: Some Conclusions (3)

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