Senescence : the last half of life / by G. Stanley Hall.

  • G. Stanley Hall
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Senescence : the last half of life / by G. Stanley Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SENESCENCE CHAPTER I THE YOUTH OF OLD AGE 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—Osier’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 Nietzsche— Michaelis’s “dangerous age” in women—The difficulty in 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. The easiest division of every whole is into two halves. Thus day and night are bisected by noon and midnight, the year by both the solstice and the equinox; the racer turns in the middle of his course; curricula, apprentice¬ ships, and long tasks have, from immemorial time, cele¬ brated the completion of their first moiety, and halfway houses divide established courses of travel. So, too, we speak of middle age and think vaguely of it as half way between birth and death or between adolescence and se¬ nescence. If we think of life as a binomial curve rising from a base line at birth and sinking into it at death, midway is the highest point with the longest ordinate; and as the crest of a wave has its spindrift, so life at this point often foams, or at least shows emulsive ten¬ dencies. We come in sight of the descent while the ascent behind is still visible. The man of thirty-five hopes to live the allotted span of seventy and at forty
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