G. Stanley Hall

“ She longs for infinite stretches of hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop wildly on her steed; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles; revels in the hurricane, and would rise in and fly and whirl with it adrift far out in the immensity of space. She tells us, "Of genius and light I'm a blithe, millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the everlasting ice of lofty mountains, the immortal silence of the Alps; sings of her "sad twenty years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and spent." ”

“ Mimnermus tells us to enjoy the delights of love, for “when old age with its pains comes upon us it mars even the fair, wretched cares besiege the mind; nor do we delight in beholding the rays of the sun but are hateful to boys and despised among women, so sore a burden have the gods made old age.” “When youth has fled, short-lived as a dream, forthwith this burdensome and hideous old age looms over us hateful and dishonored, which changes the fashion of man’s countenance, marring his sight and his mind with its mist.” ”

“ The oracles of infancy and childhood will never fail. Distracted as we are in the maze of new sciences, skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not fully coördinate by our logic or curriculize by our pedagogy; confused between the claims of old and new methods; needing desperately, for survival as a nation and a race, some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold modern cultures, we have now at least one source to which we can turn—we have found the only magnet in all the universe that points steadfastly to the undiscovered pole of human destiny. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It can not be touched, "'but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love, you would not be happy or want to play.' The beautiful truth burst upon my mind. I felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirit of others." This period seems to have came gradually and naturally to this wonderful child, whose life has been perhaps the purest ever lived and one of the sweetest. None has ever loved every aspect of nature accessible to her more passionately, or felt more keenly the charm of nature or of beautiful sentiments. ”

“ To youth the energy of the world is inexplicable. All is the product of brute force. Out of the dust came the eye and the brain and the mind, and all the turmoil is like labor-pangs to produce love, beauty, and happiness. Everything is full of aspiration. Out of the universe will come God, who is slowly evolving from the material without. If the matter of life has produced the passions of humanity, it is charged with potential divinity. ”

“ If our love is deep, obedience is an instinct if not a religion. The child learns that while it can not excite our fear, resentment or admiration, etc., it can act on our love, and this should be the first sense of its own efficiency. Thus, too, it first learns that the way of passion and impulse is not the only rule of life, and that something is gained by resisting them. It imitates our acts long before it can understand our words. As if it felt its insignificance, and dreaded to be arrested in some lower phase of its development, its instinct for obedience becomes almost a passion. ”

“ Such philosophy as my life and studies have taught me begins and ends in the thesis that the supreme criterion of everything, including religion, science, art, property, business, education, hygiene, and every human institution and everything in our environment, is what it contributes to make life longer, fuller, and saner, so that each individual shall live out more completely all the essentials in the life of the race. If the best survive, it is not the good but the bad and unfit who die young. To have lived long but narrowly is just as bad. ”

“ Such a man, if he ever walks the earth, will be the idol of youth, will know their physical secrets, will come almost as a savior to the bodies of men, and will, like Jahn, feel his calling and work sacred, and his institution a temple in which every physical act will be for the sake of the soul. The world of adolescence, especially that part which sits in closed spaces conning books, groans and travails all the more grievously and yearningly, because unconsciously, waiting for a redeemer for its body. ”

“ It is love disengaging itself from persons and special objects and perfecting itself by attaining its goal, which is nothing less than the love of, and the resolution of self into, the cosmos from which we sprang. Hence there is a sense in which chemistry and physics, and even the Einstein doctrine of relativity, are studies of man’s immortality.
Old age and death are eloquent of voices that call us to come home or back to nature, the all-mother, and to the earth from which we sprang and which is the terminal resting place of all who have gone before, with whose remains our dust will mingle. ”

“ Play can do just as hard and painful tasks as work, for what we love is done with whole and undivided personality. Work, as too often conceived, is all body and no soul, and makes for duality and not totality. Its constraint is external, mechanical, or it works by fear and not love. Not effort but zestless endeavor is the tragedy of life. Interest and play are one and inseparable as body and soul. Duty itself is not adequately conceived and felt if it is not pleasure, and is generally too feeble and fitful in the young to awaken much energy or duration of action. ”

“ Walt Whitman exclaimed: “If rats and maggots end us, then alarum! for we are betrayed.” Human nature has been called a lie and God a liar if there is no future life and those who do not desire it have been called in reality already dead. It is a potent motive to escape eternal pain and secure eternal bliss for our own ego hereafter. “If,” says one, “our souls do not hold the latchstring of a new world’s wicket, then goodbye, put out the lights, ring down the curtain. We have had our turn and it is all so nauseating that even suicide is a welcome spectacle.” ”

“ The full moon is an old malicious spy, peeping stealthily with evil eye. She is a bird caught in a cursed cage, and prays some one to unlock the door and give her space and light, and let her soar away in ecstasy and glory. Nothing less than infinite space will satisfy her. Even the tempest, the demon, or a malevolent spirit might bear her away on unbridled wings. In one poem she apostrophizes Marie Bashkirtseff as warring with vast genius against unknown powers, but who now is in her coffin among worms, her skull grinning and showing its teeth. ”

“ As the body becomes cadaverous or corpse-like and the springs of love begin to dry up at their source, secondary sex qualities fade and the sexes again become more alike, as in childhood, and the extremely senile are but the husk or shadow of their former selves. Tenaciously as life is clung to, it is at the same time felt to be less worth saving either here or hereafter, for whoever heard of senile decrepitude wanting to be continued beyond the grave. All ideals of a future life assume a restoration of maturity if not of youth. ”

“ Though she doubts everything else, she will keep the one atom of faith in love and the truth that is love and life in her heart. When something shrieks within her, she feels that all her anguish is for nothing and that she is a fool. She is exasperated that people call her peculiar, but confesses that she loves admiration; she can fascinate and charm company if she tries; imagines an admiration for Messalina. She most desires to cultivate badness when there is lead in the sky. "I would live about seven years of judicious badness, and then death if you will." ”

“ Honor is a sense of personal dignity and worth, so the bushi is truthful without an oath. At the tender age of five the samurai is given a real sword, and this gives self-respect and responsibility. At fifteen, two sharp and artistic ones, long and short, are given him, which must be his companions for life. They were made by a smith whose shop is a sanctuary and who begins his work with prayer. They have the finest hilts and scabbards, and are besung as invested with a charm or spell, and symbolic of loyalty and self-control, for they must never be drawn lightly. ”

“ Youth is exclusive in its foolish divisions. The old do not dwell on differences but common qualities. The old man finds no solace in isolation but in community. He loves humanity; seeks a refuge for self; passes lightly over differences of speech, clothes, and customs. Perhaps this is due to the slow approach of night, which makes all draw together for the warmth of friendship. The old man snuggles to the breast of humanity and is less prone to lose himself in random interests. If he cannot get about in space, he turns to the essential truth of the universe. ”

“ But we feel all this so much the less if we have children, while the dread of the inevitable hour becomes that of a kind of second or dual death for the childless because not only they but their line die in them. Yet, on the other hand, they have less ties and so less to lose, even though they may feel that they have, in a sense, lived in vain. What parent was ever so world-weary, so strong a believer in postmortem joy, that he would not rather live on here and see his children’s children thrive than go on hence to any conceivable future state? ”

“ He wrestled with the problem of the origin of his soul and destiny, but could find no solution; revolted at the assertion that all is designed for the best; "a man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an infinitely superior manner." He discovered that no one ever died of old age, but only of disease; that we do not even know what old age would be like; found that his soul is infinite, but lies in abeyance; that we are murdered by our ancestors and must roll back the tide of death; that a hundredth part of man's labor would suffice for his support ”

“ 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. ”

“ He loved to gaze on dead faces in the Paris Morgue although the haunt of them made the sunshine sickly for days, and his long fancy that they had not really gone nor were quite motionless, but led a secret, half fugitive life, freer by night, and perhaps dodging about in their old haunts with no great good-will toward the living, made him by turns pity and hate the ghosts who came back in the wind, beating at the doors. ”

“ Man is thus deprived of the nascent period in which this wooing of death is due to arise and does not reach his true end or final goal. Dreamy illusions about it have always haunted his soul as unsubstantial surrogates. When man now in the making is finished, what we at present call old age will be a sort of superhumanity, a new and higher story, and its completion will spontaneously bring with it new and deeper insights; and he will approach and finally enter Nirvana with the same zest and buoyancy with which he now takes possession of life. ”

“ We can not conceive that she bemoaned any limitations of her sex, but she has been an object of adoration all these centuries because she glorified womanhood by being more generic, nearer the race, and richer in love, pity, unselfish devotion and intuition than man. The glorified madonna ideal shows us how much more whole and holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator, professor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to be a man is larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, general, president, or millionaire. ”

“ To truly know himself he must go down stratum by stratum, study every outcrop of older formations, every denudation caused by disease, every psychic fossil of tics, obsessions,514 whims, every anatomical clue, every hint from comparative psychology, disease, crime, rudimentary organs of body or soul; and in his efforts to maximize himself must realize that if all the studies of his nature that have been made were to be depurated of the lust for a future life it would leave a vast void, for the passion for immortality has left its mark on all his cultural history. ”

“ Not only is all muscle culture at the same time brain-building, but a book-worm with soft hands, tender feet, and tough rump from much sitting, or an anemic girl prodigy, "in the morning hectic, in the evening electric," is a monster. Play at its best is only a school of ethics. It gives not only strength but courage and confidence, tends to simplify life and habits, gives energy, decision, and promptness to the will, brings consolation and peace of mind in evil days, is a resource in trouble and brings out individuality. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She imagines herself springing into the water which closes over her, while her naked soul, ghostly pale, whirls past through the lonely dale. She imprecates the licentious world of crafty burghers, coquettes, gamblers, well-fed millionaires, cursed geese and serpents that make the cowardly vile world, and whom she would smite in the face with her indignant verse. "Thou crawlest and I soar." She chants the champions of the spade, hammer, pick, though they are ground and bowed with toil, disfigured within, with furrowed brows. She pants for war with outrage and with wrong ”

“ As every one knows, every creature, man included, lives about as long after the maximum power to propagate as his offspring requires to become mature, so that the prolongation of the period of immaturity means the prolongation of old age. Our foremost duty is to transmit the sacred torch of life undimmed, to give the maximal momentum and right direction to the nature and nurture of offspring and to bring rising generations to their full maturity—that is the highest criterion of an ever rising nation, including civilization itself. ”

“ By such a curriculum, potential creativeness, if it exists, will surely be evoked in its own good time. It will, at first, attempt no commonplace drawing-master themes, but will essay the highest that the imagination can bode forth. It may be crude and lame in execution, but it will be lofty, perhaps grand; and if it is original in consciousness, it will be in effect. Most creative painters before twenty have grappled with the greatest scenes in literature or turning points in history, representations of the loftiest truths, embodiments of the most inspiring ideals. ”

“ Thus the wish for and belief in immortality is at bottom the very best of all possible augurs and pledges that man as he exists to-day is only the beginning of what he is to be and do. He is only the pigmoid or embryo of his true and fully entelechized self. Thus when he is completed and has finished all that is now only begun in him, heavens, hells, gods, and discarnate ghosts will all fade like dream fabrics or shadows before the rising sun. All doctrines of another life are thus but symbols and tropes in mythic form of the true superman as he will be when he arrives. ”

“ She falls on her knees sobbing, praying to God with outstretched hands as if He were in her room; almost vows to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem one-tenth of the way on foot; to devote her money to good works; lacks the pleasures proper to her age; wonders if she can ever love again. On throwing a bouquet from a window into a crowd in the Corso a young man choked so beautifully a workman who caught it that by that one act of strangling and snatching the bouquet she fell in love. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even where there is no tyranny and oppression, good form is steadily hampering nature and the free play of personality. Togs and targets, balls and bats, rackets and oars are graded or numbered, weighed, and measured, and every emergency is legislated on and judged by an autocratic martinet, jealous of every prerogative and conscious of his dignity. All this separates games from the majority and makes for specialism and professionalism. Not only this, but men are coming to be sized up for hereditary fitness in each point and for each sport. ”

“ He was stretching forth to a wider and, as he felt, a nobler conception of life and destiny, but the transition was through much travail of soul.”20 He wrote, “It is a difficult thing to live without hope of another world when one has been used to it for forty years. But by how much the more difficult, by so much it makes one braver and stronger.” And again, “It may be much nobler to hope for the advance of the human race only than for one’s own immortality, much less selfish to look upon oneself merely as a leaf on a tree than as an independent spirit, but it is much less pleasant.” ”

“ Pleasure is always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely ancestral joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges our life. Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its traces in us. Some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from play; but the play field broadens with succeeding generations youth is prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of youth. ”