Chapter III: Introduction: vii

I. THE YOUTH OF OLD AGE 1

The turn of the tide of life--Relative amount and
importance of work accomplished before and after forty--
The sexual life at the turn of the tide in man and woman--
Osler’s views and critics (E. G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland,
E. S. P. Haynes)--Illustrations from Tolstoi, Fechner,
Comte, Swedenborg--The typical cases of Segantini, Lenau,
von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel, Ruskin, and
Nietsche--Michaëlis’ “dangerous age” in women--The
difficulty of determining this age--The nature of the
changes, conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that
people in this stage of life should lay to heart--H. G.
Wells and Ross.

II. THE HISTORY OF OLD AGE 32

The age of plants and animals--The Old Stone Age--
Treatment of old age among existing savage tribes--
The views of Frazer--The ancient Hebrews and the Old
Testament--The Greeks (including Sparta, the Homeric
Age, the status of the old in Athens, the views of Plato,
Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)--The Romans--
The Middle Ages--Witchcraft and old women--Attitude
of children toward the old--Mantegazza’s collection of
favorable and unfavorable views of age--The division of
life into stages--The relation of age groups to social
strata--The religion of different ages of life--The
Vedanta--The Freudian war between the old and the young--
History of views from Cornaro to our own time--Bacon--
Addison--Burton--Swift.

III. LITERATURE BY AND ON THE AGED 100

Harriet E. Paine--Amelia E. Barr--Mortimer Collins--
Col. Nicholas Smith--Byron C. Utecht--J. L. Smith--
Sanford Bennet--G. E. D. Diamond--Cardinal Gibbons--
John Burroughs--Rollo Ogden--James L. Ludlow--Brander
Matthews--Ralph Waldo Emerson--Oliver Wendell Holmes--
Senator G. F. Hoar--William Dean Howells--H. D.
Sedgwick--Walt Mason--E. P. Powell--U. V. Wilson--D. G.
Brinton--N. S. Shaler--Anthony Trollope--Stephen Paget--
Richard le Gallienne--G. S. Street--C. W. Saleeby--
Bernard Shaw--A few typical poems and quotations.

IV. STATISTICS OF OLD AGE AND ITS CARE 154

I. Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands
where data are available--Actuarial and other mortality
tables--Expectation of life and death-rate at different
ages--Longevity and fecundity--Death-rate in different
occupations--Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the Middle
Ages--Diversity of statistical methods and results.

II. Growing need of care for the indigent old--Causes of
improvidence--Ignorance and misconception of what old
age is and means--Why the old do not know themselves--
Old age pensions in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and
her colonies, France, Belgium, United States--Industrial
pensions and insurance, beginning with railroads--Trades
unions--Fraternal organizations--Retiring pensions in the
army and navy--Local and national insurance--Teachers’
pensions--The Carnegie Foundation--Criticism of pension
systems--Growing magnitude, urgency, and diversity
of views and methods--The Life Extension Institute--
“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs--Should the old
organize?

V. MEDICAL VIEWS AND TREATMENT OF OLD AGE 195

The self-knowledge that doctors give--Insidious approach
of many diseases--Medical views of the old of body and
mind (senile dementia)--Charcot--G. M. Humphrey--Sir
James Crichton-Browne--H. M. Friedman--H. Gilford--H.
Oertel--A. S. Warthin--W. Spielmeyer--I. L. Nascher--
Sir Dyce Duckworth--Robert Saundy--Arnold Lorand--T. D.
Crothers--C. G. Stockton--W. G. Thompson--M. L. Price--
G. S. Keith--J. M. Taylor--C. W. Saleeby--C. A. Ewald--
Raymond Pearl--Protest against the prepotence of heredity
in determining longevity.

VI. THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF BIOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY 248

Weismann’s immortality of the germ plasm and his denial
of the inheritance of acquired qualities--The truth and
limitations of his views--The theories of Hering and
Simon--Metchnikoff’s conception of the disharmonies in
man, of the rôle of intestinal fauna and their products,
of euthanasia, and of the means and effects of prolonging
life--C. S. Minot’s conception of the progressive arrest
of life from birth on as measured by declining rate of
growth, and his neglect to consider the dynamic elements--
C. M. Child’s studies of rejuvenation in lower and higher
forms of life in the light of the problems of senescence--
J. Loeb’s studies of the effects of lower temperature, of
toxins and ferments--The preservation of cells of somatic
tissues potentially immortal under artificial conditions--
Account of the studies of Carrel, Pozzi, and others--
Investigations upon the effects on sex qualities and age
of the extracts and transplantations of glands, from
Claude Bernard--Investigations of Eugene Steinach on the
interchange of sex qualities and rejuvenation by glandular
operations in animals and man--G. F. Lydston’s work--
Serge Voronoff’s experiments and his exposition of the
achievements and hopes of glandular therapy--Some general
considerations in view of work in this field.

VII. REPORT ON QUESTIONNAIRE RETURNS 319

Their value suggestive but only for a class--(1) Age and
effect of the first realization of the approach of old
age--(2) To what do you ascribe your long life?--(3) How
do you keep well?--(4) Are you troubled by regrets?--(5)
What temptations do you feel, old or new?--(6) What duties
do you feel you still owe to others or to self?--(7) Is
interest in public affairs for the far future and past, as
compared with what is closer at hand, greater or less?--
(8) In what do you take your greatest pleasures?--(9) Do
you enjoy the society of children, youth, adults, those of
your own age more or less than formerly?--(10) Would you
live your life over again?--(11) Did you experience an
“Indian summer” of renewed vigor before the winter of age
began?--(12) Do you rely more or less upon doctors than
formerly?--(13) Do you get more or less from the clergy
and the church than formerly?--(14) Do you think more or
less of dying and the hereafter?--A few individual returns
from eminent people.

VIII. SOME CONCLUSIONS 366

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 vitæ--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--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.

XI. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DEATH 439

The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as
recapitulating that of the race--Suicide--The
death-wish--Necrophilism--The Black Death--Depopulation
by the next war--The evolutionary nisus and death as its
queller--Death symbolism as pervasive as that of sex--
Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of death--
Schopenhauer’s view of death--The separation of ghosts
from the living among primitive races--The thanatology of
the Egyptians--The journey of the soul--Ancient cults of
death and resurrection in the religions about the eastern
Mediterranean, based on the death of vegetation in the
fall and its revival in the spring, as a background of
Pauline Christianity--The fading belief in immortality and
Protestantism which now at funerals speaks only of peace
and rest--Osler’s five hundred deathbeds--Influential,
plasmal, and personal immortality and their reciprocal
relations--Moral efficacy of the doctrine of future
rewards and punishments--Belief in a future life for the
individual being transformed into a belief in the future
of the race on earth and the advent of the superman--Does
man want personal immortality--Finot’s immortality of the
decomposing body and its resolution into its elements--The
Durkheim school and the mana doctrine--Schleiermacher--
The Schiller-James view of the brain and consciousness as
repressive of the larger life of the great Autos--The
views of Plato and Kant--Have God and Nature cheated and
lied to us if the wish to survive is false?--Noetic and
mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of
general ideas--Views of Howison, Royce, and others--Is
there a true euthanasia or thanatophilia?--Diminution of
the desire for personal immortality with culture and age.

SENESCENCE