Chapter VIII: Some Conclusions (2)

Senescent men are also too prone to attribute the other manifestations of their own abatement of philoprogenitive energy to the lessened ardor of their wives and perhaps to invoke the abnormal stimulus of some wild love to sustain, or at least to test, their vigor, not realizing that such a course accelerates rather than retards the involution that comes with age. The jealousy felt towards young, ardent wives by their older husbands lest they be made cuckold constitutes probably a far less frequent triangle and involves, on the whole, less suffering than that experienced by wives who are growing frigid with years toward their still lusty spouses. The age disparity of the climacteric may open a door for suspicions, however groundless, which may secretly sap the foundations of conjugal harmony. In this connection one must always take account of the fact that there is not seldom in man an Indian summer, of months or occasionally years, of enhanced inclination toward sex before its final extinction, as returns elsewhere reported show. From personal confessions and medical literature, studies made in old men’s homes, and sporadic evidence from other sources, I am convinced that for a very large proportion of old men the progressive loss of potence, with all the complex phenomena attending it, is one of the chief, and in many cases the very most psychalgic, experience of all the changes involved in growing old. There is a very pregnant sense in which a man is as old as the glands that dominate this phase of life. Laymen, including most physicians, know very little of and find it hard to credit the devices that may be resorted to to retard this atrophy or often to conserve and even enhance the vestiges of this function, the excessive activity of which is the surest preventative of a happy old age. While there are those who late in life resort to vicious and even pathological modes of gratification, those who became debauchees in youth or middle life very rarely even attain old age and all should heed the motto to “beware the Indian summer of eroticism.” Who has not observed among his personal acquaintances, to say nothing of men conspicuous in public life, the tragic consequences to health, occupation, and even life, that follow when December weds May; and what shall we say, even from the eugenic standpoint, of women who prefer to be an old man’s darling to a young man’s slave. We know, too, that children born of postmature parents are liable, if they mature at all, to do so precociously and to show early signs of senility, just as children born of those of premature age often fail to reach full maturity. If contraceptive methods are ever justifiable, it is to prevent offspring of both but perhaps especially the former kind.

On the other hand, we have many clinical cases in which after years of impotence from psychic causes the removal of these latter not only restored the procreative function but relieved the patient of often grave symptoms and brought marked mental rejuvenation. This has been often recorded, especially for men. In some instances, apparently, children have been born after such a period of dormancy or latency that has lasted for years. Not only is the downward slope of this curve far more gradual than its pubertal rise and, as we have seen, attended by more oscillations but there is far more individual variation in the age at which decline begins and ends, so that one man’s norm would be another man’s disaster and perhaps doom.

The old should be able to think most dispassionately upon such themes and should feel it incumbent upon them to transmit the wisdom born of their own experience and observation to the younger generation. In certain primitive races and modern societies and communities the old, usually of the same but sometimes even of the opposite sex are expected to initiate the members of the rising generation in the mysteries of sex. We now know the dangers and sometimes even incestuous tendencies with which such a course is sure to be beset; and if parents attempt to discharge this function for their children, or wherever it is done personally, there are perils. Indeed, none of the methods of sex education, of which so many have lately been proposed, have been entirely satisfactory. Perhaps this kind of training really ought to be one of the special functions of grandparents and they should prepare themselves for it. At any rate, while we have learned much in recent years of sex psychology, pedagogy, and hygiene for the young, we have almost no literature, and indeed know almost nothing of it for the old; and this despite the fact that they are in the greatest need of it and have practically no help in the solution of the novel and intricate problems they must now face, as best they can, alone.

One reason why treatises on the climacteric are so few and so inadequate is that the importance of the subject has only lately been recognized even by psychiatrists, gynecologists, or gerontologists; while another and more important reason is found in the extreme reluctance of the old to tell. Psychoanalysis is impossible unless it can overcome resistance, which it is often put to its wit’s ends to do. Modesty and perhaps prudery have veiled the physiological and, far more, the psychological aspect of this function. This instinct of concealment is no less, and probably far greater, in the old. They balk, evade, and deceive the investigator at every step. Psychoanalysts have strangely neglected this theme and generally even refuse to take patients of over forty or fifty years of age. What can be learned in homes for old men is usually by observation, from attendants and from inmates’ talk of each other, and those who answer questionnaires almost always fail to note facts even remotely related to this theme. Still, in this _terra incognita_ we occasionally come upon the naked truth, only to realize that the retreat of Amor is the counterpart of its advent, as autumn is of springtide. What nature gives so prodigally in pubescent and adolescent years she garners with no less circumstance and no less attention to details, so that we are left, in the end, with no less tendencies to “polymorphic perversity” than before these were constellated into the normal sex life of maturity. Even some of the proclivities to auto-erotism and homosexuality may arise. Amatory reveries may increase as dreams of this character decrease and there are often flashing recrudescences of desire.

Despite or after the long and sometimes acute perturbations of the _vita sexualis_ as it draws to its close, there is very commonly a new and deep peace. We are glad that the storm and stress are passed and that we are henceforth immune to passion. This is doubtless the normal and, let us hope, increasingly common course. The sexes approximate each other in both traits and features as they grow old and thus if we can no longer love women sensually, we have a new appreciation of the eternally feminine, its intuitive qualities, and its more general and moral interests. Old women acquire a new power of sensing things from man’s point of view and hence companionship between old men and women may become a noble surrogate for carnal love. Happy the old who can enjoy comradeship on this plane with a congenial member of the other sex and thrice happy is the very rare case of well-mated couples who find, when the time comes, that they have qualified for this consummation of their union with each other!

Folklore, especially in its grosser forms, but also classical and medieval,[198] and even modern literature--medical, psychiatric, and most of all the writings of psychoanalysis--abound in descriptions of the tragic results that ensue when husband and wife do not grow old together or when their age disparity is too great. Even in the purest, most loyal, and best mated pairs there is often a period of unspoken and perhaps half unconscious suspicion and jealousy, which each partner regrets and tries to banish from waking thoughts, outcrops of which often appear in dreams. Roués have always felt that the young wives of old men were their legitimate prey. The former seem more liable to fall before temptation than if they had remained single. Bitter, indeed, is often the lot of Senex who dotes on a young bride and seeks to atone by lavishing gifts and providing every kind of service and social enjoyment that infatuation can suggest for waning marital potency. While society austerely and even ostentatiously condemns such a wife who errs, it secretly judges her to be not without some excuse and has little pity, and often only covert derision, for such a husband.

Yet more pathetic is the converse case of the aging wife of a spouse yet young and lusty. The sense that she is losing her charm for the man she loves is gall and wormwood to her very soul. She, too, seeks to atone by making herself physically more attractive, not only to him but to others that he may see their admiration, by every kind of personal ministration and often by seeking literary, artistic, or other success outside the family circle. She becomes painfully conscious of the attractions of younger or otherwise more favored women whom her mate meets and easily grows suspicious, not only with but often without cause. She may feel the lure of incentives other women use to attract men which her pride will not permit her to cultivate, although she may make concessions to these more or less unconsciously. Tendencies thus repressed may find outcrops in other fields and may even take the form of symptoms, perhaps of fears for the well-being of her mate, even of physical harm, business failure, social disgrace, or perhaps religious heresy. In other cases she may be at last forced to admit infidelity on his part and then it is that she finds herself face to face with the dour problem of either trying to ignore or condone, and perhaps conceal or excuse, his fault to others and living a hollow life of sham and convention on the one hand; or of openly breaking and separating and living henceforth a more or less isolated life, on the other. She must thus very carefully weigh not only her own material interests but the future of her children and the chance of pitiless public scandal.

In the medical literature on the menopause (Kisch, who studied 96 cases; Laudet, 95; Tilt, Faye, and Mayer, 97 each; and especially the more philosophical Börner and Currier) we find very little save records of physiological and anatomical changes, so that it has remained for the Freudians to exploit the perhaps far more important psychic changes that characterize this stage of life. The love life in the new and larger sense in which this is now coming to be understood is the very heart and core of woman’s nature and it plays a vaster rôle in the life of man than had till lately been suspected. Whatever thwarts or diverts the _vita sexualis_ from its normal course brings all kinds of disasters in its train. About all the transformations of senescence root in the fact that by this recession of the life tide we are gradually cut loose from the more vital currents of the life of the race and individuality now has its unique innings. The debauchee, who marries perhaps late and after long experience with women of easy virtue, often finds a modest wife disappointing and misses all the arts of allurement he had found in his orgies. So, too, when the happily married man finds the earlier ardors of his wife growing cool, he is only too liable to suspect waning affection, when in fact nature is only following her inexorable course. He may even wonder if, in the inscrutable ways Eros has, his wife’s fancy may have unconsciously strayed to some more engaging man or fallen a victim to some baseless suspicion of him, or at any rate grown weary of his advances and perhaps come to a new and deeper realization of some of his faults or limitations. Feeling that their present relations are not all they once were, he fails to recognize that it is the very nature of love to grow sublimated as years pass and to become more and more an affair of the soul, as it perhaps once was of the body; and that it is just at this critical point that it normally becomes richer, riper, and more truly devoted. The wife’s impulse to minister disinterestedly to her husband is never so strong or pure as at the moment when the power of giving complete physical satisfaction first begins to wane and it is at this epoch that it can so easily and naturally be transmuted into the impulse to serve, help, enter into closer and more sympathetic mental relations, to know more of his inner life, struggles, ideals, ambitions and even his business and in general to enlarge the surface of personal contact. This is thus the psychological moment for man to interest his mate in the affairs he has most at heart and to make her a partner, perhaps even of some of the details, of his own vocation. This golden opportunity, however, is brief, and if it passes unimproved it will soon be forever too late and each mate will, ere long, find him- or herself starting on devious ways that will lead them ever further apart.

Conversely, when a young wife first realizes that her husband is aging, she should understand that nature now impels him to compensate for physical by mental devotion and she may have even to face some form of the above choice whether it is better to be an old man’s darling or a young man’s slave. In him this is the nascent hour for becoming interested in her inmost wishes, aims, feelings, ideals, and to help her actualize them. In extreme cases he may come to devote himself to dancing attendance upon her wishes and even whims unless she herself has the good sense to restrain him from this fatuity, for by cleverly humoring and restraining him she can just now make him very plastic to her will. Thus her problem sometimes is to save him from an infatuation for her that might become ridiculous and that some wives are foolish enough to love to display. She must, however, learn to develop in and accept from him better succedanea for the more libidinous eros and to do this she must enter more sympathetically and intellectually into his life, as instinct now impels him to enter into hers. The impulse in the physiologically younger partner of every married pair to anticipate the age of the older one, if wisely met, may result in greater sanity and more true happiness for both. Who does not know fortunate cases where just this has occurred, rare though they may be and many as are the wreckages that have resulted from too great age disparity? If the wife tends to be in the mother image and the husband in the image of the father, a rich and rare blend of parent and mate love is sometimes seen. The feelings of the ideal bridegroom for the ideal bride are never without a strong ingredient of the affection he once cherished for his own mother, while one factor of her love for him was transferred from or first developed toward her father. At the same time each has a small ingredient of parental feeling toward the other, as if they were each child and each parent to the other. In all such unions the younger partner rejuvenates the older far more than the older ages the younger.

In all of us oldsters the problem of personal hygiene looms up with new dimensions. In our prime we gave little attention to health. The body responded to most of the demands we made upon it. If we were very tired, we slept the sounder. We paid no attention to minor ailments, which soon righted themselves. We ate or drank what, and as much as, appetite called for; exposed ourselves to wind and weather, heat and cold, wet and dry, with impunity. We could go without sleep a night or two if necessary and feel but little the worse for it; could abuse our eyes, nerves, heart, digestion, muscles, and more or less escape all evil consequences; could work at top speed and with an intensity that rung up all our reserve energies for days or weeks if need be, and could feel sure that our good constitutions would enable us to bear the strain and to more or less promptly recuperate. But now our credit at the bank of health begins to run low. We must husband our resources lest we overdraw them. Overdoing is a veritable bugaboo. There are certain symptoms we must never disregard on pain of days of lessened efficiency. We have had one or more signs of special weaknesses we must heed. There are some things that we must rigorously refrain from eating or doing. There is a weak organ, too, that must be humored. Appetite has perhaps been too keen and must be reined in. We must select the items of our dietary with discretion and self-restraint. A typical respondent says he can still indulge his love of hill-climbing, bicycling, swimming, and even skating, and exercises with diverse gymnastic apparatus that he has had set up in his garage, to say nothing of golf, which he holds to be best of all, and autoing, which has become with him a veritable craze. All these things at the age of seventy-five he still does occasionally but is becoming shy of doing so lest he be thought trying to seem young. He lately stole out alone at twilight to skate, when one urchin called to another, “Hey, Johnnie, doesn’t that old man skate bully?” He said he felt like cuffing him for calling him “old” and hugging him for praise of his performance.

One correspondent says in substance that he did his best mental work evenings, continuing usually until at least one o’clock in the morning and then tumbling into bed, perhaps after a half an hour spent on a novel as a nightcap or brain sponge, and falling at once into profound sleep undisturbed by dreams and with hardly a change of posture till nature’s demands were entirely satisfied. Now all his serious study can best be done by daylight and particularly in the early part of the day and he has a simple set of routine prescriptions for going to bed and to sleep. He occasionally awakes and even arises before morning, knows the sounds of all the night watches and is generally aware of the early dawn despite darkened windows, and is sometimes disturbed by troublesome dreams. He needs less sleep as measured by hours but is more dependent upon its soundness. Again, he sometimes feels moody, depressed, irritable, and wonders if anyone observes it. He has a new horror of nerves, of constipation, of age lapsing to dotage, anecdotage, and garrulity or taciturnity. If anything goes physically wrong, he recuperates more slowly and blesses his stars that his good heredity pulls him through, and nurses his weaknesses the more thereafter. He has a notion that by keeping at work all he is able to, he is conserving an energy that by letting up, if he is ill, will be drawn upon to restore him to condition; whereas if he were habitually idle this reserve would be thereby dissipated. With all the precautions and handicaps thus entailed he is still sometimes able to attain a high state of morale, to feel again the old youthful joy and exuberance of life, although it now has a new and unique quality. There are also certain new ambitions he dares not express. He even longs for new adventures before it is forever too late. He realizes that all his life he has been more or less repressed by “the fear of living” and would now entirely escape it. He is not content to grind over the old mental stores but would reach out into other fields and find new ones. He fears intellectual stagnation and routine as the senses begin to grow dull and that he is not well nourished mentally or suitably prepared for old age and the psychic marasmus to which it is so prone.

The old tend to grow stale and sterile of soul from two causes: lack of fresh mental pabulum and abatement of the power of creative ideation, and so their mentation lapses and they become fatuous about trifles and feel that just as they must live circumspectly lest their body suffer some sudden collapse so their psychic self may crumble into senility and the subtle processes of disintegration and dementia slowly supervene, a decline of which we are usually far less aware than of physical decay. All these considerations, however, may and together should constitute a splendid stimulus to activity. The very danger of decline or breakdown is a spur to develop the higher powers of man in this their time.

In such experiences we seem to have a condition of great interest and also of practical importance. Physical infirmity and accident which compel special attention to body-keeping often result in such added care to hygienic condition that we are actually better and more effective for the impairment. Just as an old man who takes special care not to fall or to take risks is often safer from injury than a stronger and less careful man, so in mental work consciousness of certain shortcomings may act as a spur to take more pains and so to do superior work. To this is added another stimulus. A senescent knows that his friends and enemies will be liable to ascribe any imperfections in his intellectual output to failing powers, and his horror of betraying this is an added incentive to do his very best. If his last product could be his best, he could die happier, and he cannot bear the thought of exhibiting signs or stages of senile debility. To be willing to accept the allowances that his hostile or even his amiable critics would be willing to make for his years is craven. His chief danger is lest the standards of self-censorship for his performances should unconsciously decline and that he should come to judge his own inferior work as superior. Of this the history of literature has countless examples, more perhaps than of the opposite tendency.

Unquestionably, too, there is a certain maturity of judgment about men, things, causes, and life generally that nothing in the world but years can bring, a real wisdom that only age can teach. But to observe and rely on this to compensate for thoroughgoing rigorism in demonstration or mastery of copious details is a fatality too often seen. Finally, we must realize that our own brain work must be done with less of the afflatus that often aided us in youth or in maturity. Once our best ideas came to us in heat after a warming up of our faculties, perhaps into an erethic or second-breath state. We found ourselves in the grip of a sort of inspiration that carried us on perhaps far into the night or impelled us to exceptional activities for days or even weeks and brought a reaction of lassitude in its train. But now, not only is this generally less or lacking but our mentation must be more stated, our hours of intense application must be kept within bounds, and there is the perennial danger of overdoing and its penalties are surer and more severe. Thus with age we must develop a new system or method that recognizes and comports with our true mental age. We must have safely passed the Scylla and Charybdis of affecting to be younger than we are and of aping or adhering too conservatively to the manners of thought and feeling characteristic of earlier youth, on the one hand; or, on the other, we must escape the opposite attitude that often supervenes later in the very old of vaunting their years and posing as prodigies of senescence. In a word, the call to us is to construct a new self just as we had to do at adolescence, a self that both adds to and subtracts much from the old personality of our prime. We must not only command a masterly retreat along the old front but a no less masterly advance to a new and stronger position and find compensation for what old age leaves behind in what it brings that is new. What, more precisely, is this latter?

Youth should anticipate the wisdom of age and age should conserve the spontaneity of youth, for this latter becomes not less but only more inward as we advance in years. As the eye dims and the dominance of optical impressions over attention declines, we see ideas clearer and follow the associations of thought rather than those of the external world with some of the same freedom as that which comes to dreams when we close the eyes in sleep. So, when audition becomes less sensitive, we turn to the voices of inner oracles. If current events impress and absorb us less, we can knit up the past, present, and future into a higher unity. As the muscles grow weak the will, of which they were the organ, grows strong to make the new adjustments necessary, while easy fatigue suggests renunciation and the acceptance of fate. Love that is less individualized may become not only broader but stronger. We worry because we feel we have not made the new adjustments necessary or unsealed all the new sources of wisdom and strength. Symptoms call upon us to develop hygienic sagacity and censoriousness may be only a negative expression of a higher idealism that longs for a better world. Schleiermacher[199] developed this thought, insisting that age was not only conserved but renewed youth, that no one should feel old till he feels perfect, that age brings us into contact with new sources of life and gives a new sense of the independence of the soul from the body, not thus presaging a higher post-mortem existence but being itself an entirely new life.

If I were charged with the task of compiling a secular bible for the aged, I would include two great and historic sections from Aristotle.[200] In the one he describes virtue as the golden mean between the extremes of excess and defect, as, for example, courage between timidity and foolhardiness; liberality between avarice and prodigality; modesty between bashfulness and impudence; courtesy between rudeness and flattery; vanity between solemnness and buffoonery, etc., in each of his twelve spheres of life. In the other passage he characterizes the magnanimous man as slow, dignified in speech and movement, forgetful of injuries, not seeking praise, open and not secretive because unafraid, attempting but few things but those things of gravity, neither shunning nor seeking danger, ready to die for a great cause, more disposed to bestow than to receive benefits or favors, inclined to be proud to the proud and kindly to the meek and humble, always animated by the effort to make his conduct in life as nearly ideal as possible--or, in a word, making honor his muse and striving always to be worthy of it. Now, most of these traits belong more to the ideal of old age than to that of any earlier period in life. The most advanced regimen and hygiene of to-day--personal, mental, moral, social, political, judicial, and even religious--have little better to suggest for old age, in which all the qualities here implied should culminate, bringing poise and philosophic calm.

This brings me to the main thesis of this book, which is that intelligent and well-conserved senectitude has very important social and anthropological functions in the modern world not hitherto utilized or even recognized. The chief of these is most comprehensively designated by the general term synthesis, something never so needed as in our very complex age of distracting specializations.

In the first place, it has been noted that withdrawal from biological phyletic functions is often marked by an Indian summer of increased clarity and efficiency in intellectual work. Not only does individuation now have its innings but the distractions from passion, the lust for wealth and power, and in general the struggle for place and fame, have abated and in their stead comes, normally, not only a philosophic calm but a desire to draw from accumulated experience and knowledge the ultimate, and especially the moral, lessons of life--in a word, to sum up in a broader view the net results of all we have learned of the _comédie humaine_. Taylor even considers the climacteric as not pathological but as “a conservation process of nature to provide for a higher and more stable phase of development, an economic lopping off of functions no longer needed, preparing the individual for a different form of activity.” Shaler, too, noted “an enlargement of intellectual interests;” and there is much in experience and literature to confirm this view. The dangers and excitements of life are passed. Normal men tend to become more judicial and benevolent and these traits suggest new possibilities for the race as vicariate for the loss of the power of physical procreation. Many think these phenomena are more marked in women but even men who seem to have crossed the deadline at fifty or even forty are sometimes later reanimated. Apperceptive data have increased facility for getting together, perhaps even into a new and larger view of the world and there may come a genuine psychic erethism or second-breath, half ecstatic, as the soul on the home stretch expatiates “o’er all the world of man a mighty maze, yet not without a plan.”

There is, thus, a kind of harvest-home effort to gather the fruitage of the past and to penetrate further into the future. It is especially interesting to note that this is a stage of life in which most of the Freudian mechanisms and impulsions fail to act or strike out in new ways and very different ones take their place, which as yet lack any adequate psychology, much as this is needed. This is the wisdom of Solomon and the Psalmists, the vision of the mystics, and it exists only in those senescents who have found the rare power of developing and conserving the morale of their stage of life, which, as always, consists in keeping themselves at the top of their condition. The Binet-Simon devotees have furnished us with no inkling of how physiological and mental age are related in the old. Only when we know this shall we be able to evaluate the mentality of real sages wise in the school of life. This kind of sapience has a value quite apart from and beyond the methods of our most advanced pedagogy. St. John thinks that there is a certain rejuvenation due to a change from _a posteriori_ to _a priori_ habits of mind and that subjectivity and perhaps introversion now have their innings. However this be, ripe old age has been a slow, late, precarious, but precious acquisition of the race, perhaps not only its latest but also its highest product. Its modern representatives are pioneers and perhaps its task will prove to be largely didactic. It certainly should go along with the corresponding prolongation of youth and increasing docility in the rising generation if we are right in charging ourselves with the duty of building a new story to the structure of human life. Thus, while old age is not at all venerable _per se_ we have a mandate to make it ever more so by newer orientation, especially in a land and age that puts a premium upon its splendid youth, who are now often called to precocious activities that sometimes bring grief and disaster because we have been oblivious of the precept, “Old men for counsel.”

True old age is not, as we have seen, second childhood. It is no more retrospective than prospective. It looks out on the world anew and involves something like a rebirth of faculties, especially of curiosity and even of naïveté. Moreover, age is in quest of first principles just as, though far more earnestly and competently, ingenuous youth is. We have seen that Plato taught that the love and quest of general ideas was the true achievement of immortality because it brought participation in the deathlessness of these consummations of the noetic urge, for to him philosophy was anticipatory death because it involved a withdrawal from the specific and particular toward the vastness and generality of the absolute.

But to-day normal old age cannot be merely contemplative. True, our very neurons do seem to aggregate into new and more stable unities as if the elements of our personality were being bound more closely together, perhaps in order that we might survive some disruptive crisis or that our souls might not be torn apart by the wind if we chance to die when it blows. But now we must conceive the synthetic trend as chiefly in the pragmatic service of mankind. Our message must not be a mere _morituri salutamus_, however cheerful, but must have a positive and practical meaning and our outlook tower should have a really directive significance.

One outstanding and central trait of good old age is disillusionment. It sees through the shams and vanities of life. Many of the most brilliant intellectual achievements of youthful geniuses in thought construction are precocious achievements of the insights that more properly belong to this later stage of life. Even Carlyle’s _Sartor_, Hegel’s _Phänomenologie_, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Emerson, and many more, to say nothing of Jesus and Buddha, show premature age. Young men who occupy themselves with the highest and most abstract philosophical problems are unconsciously affecting or striving to anticipate the most advanced mental age and many of them who discourse so sapiently on “experience” are really those who have had very little of it. The ancient Hindus knew this for, as Max Müller tells us, the wise grandfather rises above all the superstitions of his progeny, who still worship the old gods while he has come to revere only the great One and All and to see all faiths and rites as but painted shadows that fancy casts upon the unknown, while he awaits the blessed absorption into Nirvana.

Fewest of all are those who ripen to senescence in religion and realize that there is no external god but only physical and human nature and no immortality save that of our offspring, our work, or our influence. All who fall short of this are arrested in juvenile if not infantile stages of their development. So, in all matters pertaining to sex, marriage, and the family, most remain slaves of the mores of their age and do not recognize the pregnant sense in which love and freedom, the greatest words in all languages, should somehow be wedded, even though we do not yet know how. Only when the age of sex passes can we look dispassionately upon all these problems and glimpse the ways that easier divorce, backfires to lust and prostitution, some of which current hypocrisy still taboos the very mention of, can bring. So, too, in other social and in our economic conditions we are drifting perilously near to wrecking reefs. The very basis of our civilization is in the greatest danger for want of the very aloofness, impartiality and power of generalization that age can best supply. We oldsters do see these things in a truer perspective and the time has now come to set them forth, despite the penalty of being voted pessimistic and querulent.

With all these problems so wide open by and since the war crying out for solution, surely senescents who have retired and enjoy a superacademic freedom, with no responsibilities to Boards, institutions, or corporate interests; with no personal ambitions, no temptations of the flesh, and leisure for the highest things, have here an inspiring function which they must rise to. Age, with a competence sufficient for its needs, freed from anxieties about a future state, with none of the dangers young men feel lest they impair their future careers, should not devote itself to rest and rust (_Rast Ich, so rost Ich_) or to amusements, travel, or self-indulgence of personal taste, much as the old may feel they have deserved any and all of these, but should address itself to these new tasks, realizing that it owes a debt to the world which it now vitally wants it to pay. Great founders of great institutions have acknowledged this debt and striven to pay it in the service the rich can render. We intellectuals cannot pay it in their coin, but we owe it no less and must pay in the currency we can command.

Thus, old age is not passive and peace-loving but brings a new belligerency. Many of us longed for the physical ability to enter the war as soldiers and we did our “bit” in ways open to us with as much zest as our juniors. We not only want but need spiritual conflicts and feel reinforced aggressiveness against ignorance, superstition, errors, the sins of cupidity, and lust. What a list of evils we could make which we wanted to attack in our prime but lacked courage to grapple with! One of these is the current idea of old age itself. We have too commonly accepted the conventional allotment of three-score-and-ten as applicable now, but the man of the future will be ashamed and feel guilty if he cannot plan a decade or two more of activity and he will not permit himself to fall into a thanatopsis mood of mind or retire to his memories or to the chimney corner because an allotted hour has struck.

If we have lived aright, nature does give us a new lease of life when passion and the bodily powers begin to abate and the very danger of collapse, as we have seen, is in itself a spur. The human race is young but most are cut off prematurely. It is ours to complete the drama, to finish the window of Aladdin’s tower, to add a new story to the life of man, for as yet we do not know what full maturity really is and the last culminating chapter of humanity’s history is yet to be written.

Never, then, was the world in such crying need of Nestors and Merlins. What a priceless crop of experience in these postbellum days remains unharvested for want of precisely the objectivity, impartiality, breadth, and perspective that age alone can supply! These were the qualities that enabled the venerable Joffre to make his masterly two-weeks’ retreat at the Marne. It was done against the will and wish of every one of his younger generals, who now admit that he saved Paris and the war and that he was, in a sense, a true superman. The world never so needed the wisdom, which learning cannot give, that sees the vanity and shallowness of narrow partisanship and jingoism, of creeds that conceal more than they reveal, of social shams that often veil corruption, the insanity of the money hunt that monopolizes most of the energy of our entire civilization, and realizes that with all our vaunted progress man still remains essentially juvenile--much as he was before history began.

What the world needs is a kind of higher criticism of life and all its institutions to show their latent beneath their patent value by true supermen who, like Zarathustra, are old, very old, with the sapience that long life alone can give. We need prophets with vision who can inspire and also castigate, to convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. Thus, there is a new dispensation at the door which graybeards alone can usher in. Otherwise humanity will remain splendid but incomplete. Heir of all the ages, man has not yet come into his full heritage. A traveler, he sets out for a far and supreme goal but is cut off before he attains or even discerns it. The best part of his history is yet unwritten because it is unmade.[201]

Now that the pressure of outer reality and its duties remit, attention tends more to focus on self and introspontaneity and mentation may take on a slightly dreamy character in that it is less under the dominion of the objective environment, from which there is a new sense of freedom. The demand for rigorous proof of one’s theorizations is somewhat less insistent and critics of them are felt to be lacking in insight. There is a slight shift from inductive to deductive thinking and as the senses begin to grow dim their verification of our speculations seems a trifle less imperative. Experience has furnished masses of data that yet remain uncoordinated and as we feel the need of a deeper synthesis we grope our way to a bed-rock of first principles that will explain the riddle of life better and give it more unity and give us new personal satisfaction. Tendencies that have been repressed during our active life revive.

Perhaps we take up fads or occupations that have hitherto had only a secondary place in our lives or indulge ourselves by giving them now the first place as centers of interest. Now at last we can do things we have long wanted to do but for which we have had no time or strength. We can also now indulge our taste in reading in fields we have long desired to know better, can abandon ourselves to the enjoyment of music or the fine arts; or we travel, collect, or occupy ourselves with horticulture, agriculture or farm life. Again, there are more reveries and these most commonly gravitate to things about us or especially to the remote past. Thus we often revive and idealize old situations and incidents. We think of things we said and did and supplement them by imagining what we could, would, or should have said and done and fill lost opportunities fuller of “might-have-beens.” Yet many as are the lost chances such retrospect brings to view, and imperfect as we realize our responses to circumstances and the environment have been, we are rarely oppressed by regret and still less often by remorse, so that the wish to relive our lives is never very strong. The flaws in our surroundings or our errors in judgment, even in moral conduct, are usually regarded with leniency and viewed with a certain detachment, however clearly they are seen and however impersonally they are judged. This is in part because we have to accept them as inevitable and are trying to make a virtue of so doing, but yet more perhaps because we are consoled by the fact that had our mistakes been very grave we should not have attained our advanced age in such good condition of body and mind. Thus we make our very age a kind of vindication of our course of life. We find yet more comfort in the fact that we discover so many points in which things might have been worse. We have escaped so many perils and survived so many trials that have overwhelmed many others that, on the whole, we deem ourselves among the fortunate of the earth.

I am inclined to think that the above, instead of being an optimistic should rather be regarded on the whole as a pessimistic view of old age. Fielding Hall tells us that in Burma, where it is purest, Buddhism teaches men to “die thinking on their good deeds.” I cannot believe this is final but opine rather that old age has its positive duties to the present and to the future as well as its privileges and immunities. To be sure, if sex love is the mainspring of the most and best in the human psyche, it follows that when this goes there is little worth while left in us. Hence, the implications of the new analytic psychology are most tragic for senescence and man is doomed to spend the shriveled remnants of life in the contemplation of its only real stage, which is now gone or fast vanishing. I urge, on the contrary, that the facts of the soul-life of the aged teach us very clearly that if the _vita sexualis_ has been anything like normal, we graduate from it into a larger love of man, nature, and being itself which can never be complete till the urge of sex has waned.

What are these facts? First, the very incident that the old tend to develop more sharply their own individuality as the powers of genesis decline points in this direction. Senescents in the post-climacteric acuminate their personality, sometimes to the point of idiosyncrasy and eccentricity. The _Ich-trieb_ now has its innings. This selfishness of the old, repulsive and unsocial as are now its commonest manifestations, expresses a deep instinct that is really groping toward a new and higher type of personality, evolving a new synthesis of the factors of life when the chord of sex shall have passed in music out of sight. It means man’s reaffirmation of the self and of the will-to-live, although this points not, as the immortalists would argue, to a post-mortem rehabilitation of the ego but only expresses again the fact that man is as yet incomplete here and that even the old now die prematurely because they have not yet learned how to build the last story of the house of many mansions.

Again, as sex love declines friendship takes its place. Old lovers, and husbands and wives if happily mated, become friends and find new joys in these new relations. How we prize old friends and feel closer even to those of our contemporaries we have known but slightly! A fine old man of my acquaintance made a systematic effort by many letters to get into touch with all his old schoolmates who were living and to learn all he could of those who were dead. Another felt wronged whenever a friend of earlier days died and he had no word of it. Yet another wrote to a venerable colleague whom he knew but slightly, but whose career he had followed, exhorting him “not to die yet a while” because he would feel more lonely in the world with him out of it. There is a unique loyalty of veterans of war toward each other, although they are little together and do not always get on well with each other if they attempt intimacy. Moreover, there is a new type of interest in young people and in children, whom even grandmothers do not so much fondle and pet as indulge and serve in ways mothers do not always sympathize with. The “Borrowed Time” clubs of old men and young people’s associations are both based chiefly upon the gregarious instinct which is strongest among adolescents, before woman has taken her place beside man, and among senescents when the charm of sex as such abates. Most of the scores of associations and fraternities of men of mature years are for material advantage and the typical clubman has failed to find, or else has lost, the normal anchorage of the true home. The homosexual friendships of the old are not chummy and do not demand close contact. These have been far too much neglected and their cultivation, which is greatly needed, is possible under modern conditions as never before. It is interesting to know that an old people’s journal is projected.

Love in the aged also tends to broaden into the higher and more sublimated form of interest in the subhuman world, in animals, plants, trees, gardening, and country life generally. The charm of a rural contrasted with an urban environment increases. How often the old take pleasure in planting or setting out trees they will never see mature or bear fruit and in building homes they know they can at best live in but for a short time. Burbank knew and Burroughs felt this and Cato said that all the aged should dwell in the country, as so many of the old Romans did. The aged rarely have animal pets but they do feel a new dread of destroying life. They love scenery and commune with forests and mountains; revisit their rural boyhood homes and find deep satisfaction in reënvisaging old landmarks.

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.