Chapter 6

On the Differences between the Ages of Life.

Voltaire said most beautifully:

Whoever lacks the spirit of his ageHas all the misfortune of his age.

It will therefore be fitting, at the close of these reflections on happiness, to glance at the changes the ages of life bring about in us.

Throughout our whole life we possess only the present, and never anything more. Its sole differences are that at the beginning we see a long future before us, toward the end a long past behind us; and that our temperament, though not our character, passes through certain familiar changes, each giving the present a different coloring.—

In my principal work, Bd. 2, Kap. 31, S. 394 ff. (3. Aufl. 499 ff.), I explained that and why in childhood we are far more knowing than willing. On precisely this rests the happiness of the first quarter of life, which afterward lies behind us like a lost paradise. In childhood we have few relations and small needs, and thus little stimulation of the will: the greater part of our being is therefore absorbed in knowing.—The intellect, like the brain, which reaches its full size already in the seventh year, develops early, though it is not mature, and continually seeks nourishment in a whole world of still-new existence, where everything, everything is varnished with the charm of novelty. Hence our childhood years are a continual poetry. For the essence of poetry, like that of all art, consists in apprehending the Platonic Idea in each individual thing: what is essential, and thus common to the whole kind. Each thing thereby appears as representative of its species, and one case stands for a thousand. Although it seems that in the scenes of childhood we are always occupied only with the particular individual object or event, and only insofar as it interests our momentary willing, the matter is different at bottom. Life in all its significance still stands before us so new and fresh, its impressions not dulled by repetition, that amid our childish activities we are always silently and without distinct intention occupied in apprehending, through individual scenes and events, the essence of life itself, the fundamental types of its forms and representations. As Spinoza puts it, we see all things and people under the aspect of eternity. The younger we are, the more each individual thing represents its whole species. This diminishes increasingly from year to year, and on it rests the great difference between the impressions things make upon us in youth and old age. Hence the experiences and acquaintances of childhood and early youth later become the fixed types and headings of all subsequent knowledge and experience, their categories, so to speak, under which we subsume everything later, though not always with clear awareness. Thus the firm foundation of our view of the world, and therefore its shallowness or depth, is formed already in childhood; it is later elaborated and completed, but not essentially changed. Consequently, through this purely objective and therefore poetic outlook essential to childhood, reinforced by the will's still being far from its full energy, as children we are much more purely knowing than willing. Hence the serious, contemplative gaze of some children, which Raphael used so felicitously for his angels, especially those of the Sistine Madonna. For this very reason childhood years are so blissful that their memory is always accompanied by longing.—While we apply ourselves with such seriousness to our first perceptual understanding of things, education, on the other hand, endeavors to teach us concepts. But concepts do not provide what is truly essential: this, the foundation and genuine content of all our knowledge, lies rather in the perceptual apprehension of the world. We can gain this only ourselves; it cannot in any way be taught to us. Hence our intellectual worth, like our moral worth, does not enter us from outside but arises from the depths of our own being; no Pestalozzian educational arts can turn a born fool into a thinking person: never! He is born a fool and must die a fool.—The deeply inward apprehension of the first world of outward perception described here also explains why childhood surroundings and experiences impress themselves so firmly on memory. We were given over to them undividedly, nothing distracted us, and we looked at the things before us as though they were the only ones of their kind, indeed the only things in existence at all. Later, the multitude of objects then known to us robs us of courage and patience.—If we now recall what I demonstrated at S. 372 ff. (3. Aufl. 423 ff.) of the aforementioned volume of my principal work—that the objective existence of all things, their existence in mere representation, is thoroughly delightful, whereas their subjective existence, consisting in willing, is heavily mixed with pain and sorrow—we may accept as a brief expression of the matter the proposition: all things are splendid to see, but terrible to be. According to the foregoing, in childhood things are known to us far more from the side of seeing, of representation and objectivity, than from the side of being, which is the side of will. Since the former is the delightful side of things, while their subjective and terrible side remains unknown to us, the young intellect takes all the forms reality and art present to it for so many blissful beings. It imagines that as beautiful as they are to see, it would be just as beautiful, and much more so, to be them. The world accordingly lies before it like an Eden: this is the Arcadia in which we are all born. Somewhat later, this gives rise to the thirst for actual life, the impulse toward deeds and sufferings that drives us into the world's turmoil. There we learn the other side of things, that of being, of willing, which is thwarted at every step. Gradually the great disillusionment approaches, after whose arrival one says, the age of illusions has passed; yet it still continues and grows ever more complete. We may therefore say that in childhood life presents itself like a theater set seen from far away; in old age, like the same set seen at the closest quarters.

Finally, the following also contributes to childhood's happiness. Just as at the beginning of spring all foliage has the same color and almost the same shape, so in early childhood we too all resemble one another and therefore harmonize excellently. With puberty, however, divergence begins and, like the radii of a circle, grows ever greater.

What darkens, indeed makes unhappy, the rest of the first half of life—which has so many advantages over the second—namely youth, is the pursuit of happiness in the firm assumption that it must be found in life. From this arises continually disappointed hope, and from that discontent. Shimmering images of a dreamed, indefinite happiness hover before us in capriciously chosen forms, and we seek their original in vain. Hence in our youthful years we are usually dissatisfied with our situation and surroundings, whatever they may be, because we attribute to them what belongs everywhere to the emptiness and poverty of human life, with which we are now making our first acquaintance after expecting entirely different things.—Much would be gained if early instruction could eradicate in the young the delusion that there is much to be had in the world. But the reverse occurs, because we usually come to know life through literature before reality. The scenes it depicts shine before our gaze in the dawn of our own youth, and now we are tormented by the longing to see them realized—to grasp the rainbow. A young person expects his life's course in the form of an interesting novel. Thus arises the deception I have already described at S. 347 (3. Aufl. 428) of the aforementioned second volume. For what gives all those images their charm is precisely that they are mere images and not real, so that while contemplating them we are in the peace and complete self-sufficiency of pure knowing. To become real means to be filled with willing, which brings unavoidable pain. The interested reader is also referred here to the passage at S. 427 (3. Aufl. 488) of that volume.

If the character of the first half of life is thus unsatisfied longing for happiness, that of the second is fear of misfortune. For with it comes the more or less clear knowledge that all happiness is chimerical, while suffering is real. Hence now, at least by more rational characters, mere freedom from pain and an undisturbed condition are sought rather than enjoyment[V].—In my youthful years, when my doorbell rang, I grew pleased, thinking: now it is coming. In later years, however, my feeling on the same occasion was much closer to fear: I thought, "Here it comes."—Regarding the human world, distinguished and gifted individuals, who precisely as such do not quite belong to it and therefore stand more or less alone according to the degree of their advantages, likewise have two opposed feelings. In youth they often feel abandoned by it; in later years, that they have escaped it. The first, unpleasant feeling rests on not knowing it, the second, pleasant one on knowing it.—Consequently the second half of life, like the second half of a musical period, contains less striving but more repose than the first. In general this rests on our thinking in youth that the world offers wondrous happiness and enjoyment, only difficult to reach; while in old age we know there is nothing to be gained there, and thus, entirely at ease on that score, enjoy a tolerable present and even take pleasure in little things.—

[V] In old age we know better how to prevent misfortunes; in youth, how to bear them.

What a mature man has gained through his life's experience, making him see the world differently from a youth or boy, is first of all freedom from preconception. Only he sees things quite simply and takes them for what they are, while for the boy and youth an illusory image composed of self-created fancies, inherited prejudices, and strange imaginings covered or distorted the actual world. For the first task experience finds before it is to free us from the fantasies and false concepts that took hold in youth. Preserving youth from these would certainly be the best education, though merely a negative one, but is very difficult. For this purpose we would have to keep the child's horizon as narrow as possible, while teaching only clear and correct concepts within it; only after the child had rightly understood everything within it should we gradually widen it, always ensuring that nothing obscure, half-understood, or misunderstood remained behind. The child's concepts of things and human relations would thus still be limited and very simple, but clear and correct, always needing only expansion, not correction; and so on into youth. This method especially requires that novels not be permitted, but replaced by suitable biographies, such as Franklin's, Moritz's Anton Reiser, and the like.—

When young, we imagine that the events and people important and consequential in our life's course will enter with drums and trumpets; in old age, however, looking back shows that they all slipped in quite quietly through the back door, almost unnoticed.

In the respect considered so far, life may also be compared to an embroidered fabric, of which everyone sees the right side in the first half of life and the reverse in the second. The latter is not so beautiful, but more instructive, since it reveals how the threads connect.—

Intellectual superiority, even the greatest, will assert its decided preponderance in conversation only after the fortieth year. For maturity of years and the fruit of experience may be surpassed by it in many ways, but never replaced; they give even the most ordinary person a certain counterweight to the powers of the greatest mind as long as that mind is young. I mean here only the personal sphere, not the works.—

Any person of some excellence, anyone who does not belong to the 5/6 of humanity so sadly endowed by nature, will scarcely remain free after forty from a certain touch of misanthropy. Naturally, he had inferred others' nature from his own, and has gradually been disillusioned, discovering that in head or heart, usually both, they remain in his debt and never settle accounts. He therefore gladly avoids dealings with them; in general, everyone will love or hate solitude—that is, his own company—according to his inward worth. Kant also discusses this kind of misanthropy in the Krit. der Urteilskraft, toward the end of the general observation on § 29 of the first part.

In a young person it is a bad sign, intellectually and morally, to know very early how to find his way among human activities, to feel immediately at home in them and enter them as though prepared: it announces vulgarity. In this respect, by contrast, an estranged, startled, awkward, and mistaken manner points to a nobler nature.

The cheerfulness and courage for life of our youth rest partly on our not seeing death as we climb uphill, because it lies at the foot of the mountain's other side. But once we have crossed the summit, we actually catch sight of death, until then known only by hearsay; and since at the same time vital power begins to ebb, courage for life also sinks. A gloomy seriousness now displaces youthful exuberance and impresses itself even on the face. As long as we are young, whatever people may tell us, we regard life as endless and treat time accordingly. The older we grow, the more economically we use our time. For in later age every day lived out arouses a feeling akin to that felt at every step by a condemned man being led to execution.

Viewed from youth's standpoint, life is an infinitely long future; from old age's, a very short past. At first it therefore appears to us as things do when we put the objective lens of opera glasses to our eye; at last, as when we use the eyepiece. One must have grown old, and thus lived long, to recognize how short life is.—The older we become, the smaller human affairs appear, one and all. Life, which stood firm and stable before us in youth, now reveals itself as the rapid flight of ephemeral appearances: the nothingness of the whole emerges.—Time itself moves far more slowly in our youth; hence the first quarter of life is not only the happiest but also the longest, leaving far more memories, so that if called upon everyone could relate more from it than from two of the following quarters. Indeed, as in the spring of the year, so in the spring of life, the days finally grow burdensomely long. In the autumn of both they become short, but brighter and more settled.

Why, then, in old age does the life behind us seem so short? Because we take it to be as short as our memory of it. Everything insignificant and much that is unpleasant has fallen out of that memory, leaving little behind. For just as our intellect in general is very imperfect, so is memory: what has been learned must be practiced, the past pondered, if both are not gradually to sink into the abyss of oblivion. Yet we do not usually ponder the insignificant, nor generally the unpleasant, as would be necessary to preserve them in memory. And the insignificant grows ever more plentiful: through frequent and finally countless repetitions, many things that at first seemed significant gradually become insignificant. We therefore remember earlier years better than later ones. The longer we live, the fewer events seem important or significant enough to ponder afterward, which alone could fix them in memory; they are therefore forgotten as soon as they are past. Thus time runs its course leaving ever fewer traces.—Further, we do not like to ponder the unpleasant, least of all when it wounds our vanity, which is mostly the case, since few sufferings have struck us entirely without our own fault. Much that is unpleasant is therefore forgotten too. These two losses make our memory so short, and proportionately shorter as its material grows longer. Like objects on a shore from which we depart by ship, becoming ever smaller, less recognizable, and harder to distinguish, so are our past years with their experiences and actions. Moreover, memory and imagination sometimes bring a long-past scene of life before us as vividly as yesterday, so that it draws quite close. This happens because it is impossible to bring the long interval between then and now before our minds in the same way: it cannot be surveyed in a single image, and most events within it have also been forgotten. Only a general knowledge in the abstract remains, a mere concept, not a perception. Hence the individual event long past seems as close as yesterday, while the intervening time vanishes and the whole of life appears incomprehensibly short. Indeed, sometimes in old age the long past behind us, and with it our own age, may momentarily seem almost fabulous, chiefly because we still have before us the same abiding present. Such inward processes ultimately rest on the fact that not our being in itself, but only its appearance, lies in time, and that the present is the point of contact between object and subject.—Why, conversely, in youth does the life still before us seem immeasurably long? Because there must be room for the boundless hopes with which we people it, for whose realization Methuselah would die too young; and because we measure it by the few years already behind us, whose memory is always rich in material and therefore long, since novelty made everything appear significant, so that it was pondered afterward, often repeated in memory, and thereby impressed upon it.

Sometimes we believe we long to return to a distant place, while really we long only for the time we spent there, when we were younger and fresher. Time thus deceives us under the mask of space. If we travel there, we discover the deception.—

Given a faultless constitution as an indispensable condition, there are two ways to reach a great age, illustrated by two burning lamps: one burns long because, with little oil, it has a very thin wick; the other because, with a thick wick, it also has much oil. The oil is vital power; the wick its consumption in every way and manner.

Regarding vital power, until the thirty-sixth year we resemble people living on their interest: what is spent today is there again tomorrow. From that point on, however, our analogue is the person living on investments who begins to encroach on capital. At first the matter is quite imperceptible: most expenditure still restores itself; a slight deficit goes unnoticed. But it gradually grows and becomes noticeable; its increase itself increases daily, eating ever deeper, each today poorer than yesterday, with no hope of a halt. Thus the decline accelerates increasingly, like falling bodies, until at last nothing remains. It is a very sad case when the two things compared here, vital power and property, really are melting away together; hence love of possessions increases with age.—At first, however, until adulthood and somewhat beyond, in vital power we resemble people who add something from their interest to their capital: not only is expenditure restored of itself, but capital grows. And sometimes, through an honest guardian's care, this happens with money at the same time. O happy youth! O sorrowful age!—Nevertheless we should spare our youthful powers. Aristotle observes (Polit. L. ult. c. 5) that of the Olympic victors only two or three had won once as boys and then again as men, because the early exertion required by training so exhausts their powers that these are afterward lacking in manhood. As this holds for muscular power, it holds still more for nervous power, whose expressions are all intellectual achievements. Hence the precocious talents, the child prodigies, the fruits of hothouse education who astonish as boys, later become very ordinary minds. Even early, forced exertion in learning the ancient languages may be responsible for the later sluggishness and lack of judgment of so many learned minds.—

I have observed that almost everyone's character seems particularly suited to one age of life, so that he appears to greater advantage in it. Some are lovable youths, and then it is over; others vigorous, active men whom age robs of all worth; some appear to greatest advantage in old age, when they are gentler because more experienced and composed: this is often the case with the French. The matter must rest on character itself possessing something youthful, manly, or elderly, with which the particular age agrees or against which it acts as a corrective.

Just as, aboard a ship, we notice our progress only by the retreat and consequent shrinking of objects on shore, so we become aware of growing old and older by finding that people of ever greater years seem young to us.

We have already discussed how and why, the older we become, everything we see, do, and experience leaves fewer traces in the mind. In this sense it could be maintained that we live with full consciousness only in youth, and in old age with only half. The older we become, the less consciously we live: things hurry past without making an impression, like a work of art seen a thousand times; we do what we have to do and afterward do not know whether we have done it. As life thus becomes ever less conscious the more it hastens toward complete unconsciousness, the course of time thereby also grows ever swifter. In childhood the novelty of all objects and events brings each into consciousness; hence the day is immeasurably long. The same happens on travels, where one month therefore seems longer than four at home. Yet this novelty does not prevent the time that seems longer in both cases from often genuinely "dragging" in both, more than in old age or at home. Gradually, however, long familiarity with the same perceptions so polishes the intellect that everything increasingly glides over it without effect; the days thus grow ever less significant and therefore shorter: a boy's hours are longer than an old man's days. The time of our life accordingly moves with acceleration, like a ball rolling downhill; and just as on a rotating disk each point moves faster the farther it lies from the center, so for everyone time passes faster and ever faster in proportion to his distance from life's beginning. We may consequently assume that, in our mind's immediate estimate, a year's apparent length varies inversely with the number of years in our age: if, for example, the year amounts to 1/5 of our age, it seems ten times as long as when it amounts to only 1/50. This difference in time's speed has the most decisive influence on our whole mode of existence at every age. First, it makes childhood, though comprising perhaps only 15 years, the longest period of life and therefore the richest in memories; then, we are subject to boredom throughout in inverse proportion to our age. Children constantly need occupation, whether play or work; if it stops, terrible boredom seizes them at once. Youths too are still greatly subject to it and look apprehensively at unfilled hours. In manhood boredom diminishes increasingly; to old people time is always too short, and days fly past swift as arrows. It goes without saying that I speak of human beings, not cattle grown old. Through this acceleration of time's course, boredom thus generally disappears in later years, and since the passions too fall silent with their torment, if only health has been preserved, life's burden is really lighter on the whole than in youth. Hence the period preceding the onset of weakness and the troubles of greater age is called "the best years." For our comfort they may really be so; youth, however, when everything makes an impression and enters consciousness vividly, retains the advantage of being the mind's fertile season, its budding spring. Deep truths can only be seen, not calculated: their first recognition is immediate and elicited by the impression of the moment; it can therefore occur only while this is strong, vivid, and deep. In this respect everything consequently depends on making use of youth. In later years we can act more upon others, indeed upon the world, because we ourselves are complete and finished and no longer belong to the impression; but the world acts less upon us. These years are therefore the time of doing and achieving; the earlier ones, of original apprehension and knowledge.

In youth perception predominates; in old age, thought. Hence the former is the time for poetry, the latter more for philosophy. In practice too, in youth we let ourselves be determined by what we perceive and its impression; in old age, only by thought. This rests partly on the fact that only in old age have enough perceptual cases occurred and been subsumed under concepts to give those concepts full meaning, content, and authority, while habit has moderated perception's impression. In youth, by contrast, especially in lively and imaginative minds, the impression of what is perceived, and thus of things' outward aspect, so predominates that they regard the world as a picture. Their chief concern is therefore how they figure in it and appear, rather than how they inwardly feel. This is already shown in young people's personal vanity and fondness for finery.

The greatest energy and highest tension of intellectual powers undoubtedly occur in youth, at the latest up to the thirty-fifth year; from then they diminish, though very slowly. Yet later years, even old age, are not without intellectual compensation. Experience and learning have only now become truly rich: there has been time and opportunity to view and consider things from every side, compare each with every other, and discover their points of contact and connecting links. Only now, therefore, do we truly understand them in context. Everything has grown clear. Hence even what we already knew in youth is now known far more thoroughly, because we have far more evidence for every concept. What we believed we knew in youth we really know in old age; moreover, we really know much more, and possess knowledge thought through on every side and therefore genuinely coherent, while in youth our knowledge is always incomplete and fragmentary. Only someone who grows old acquires a complete and adequate conception of life, surveying it in its entirety and natural course, especially not merely from the entrance, like others, but also from the exit. This particularly enables him to recognize its nothingness fully, while others remain caught in the delusion that the real thing is still to come. Youth, by contrast, has greater conception, and can therefore make more of the little it knows; old age, however, has greater judgment, penetration, and thoroughness. An exceptional mind already gathers in youth the material of his own knowledge and original fundamental views, what he is destined to give the world; but he becomes master of his material only in later years. Accordingly, great writers will generally be found to have produced their masterpieces around fifty. Yet youth remains the root of the tree of knowledge, though only its crown bears fruit. But just as every historical age, even the most wretched, considers itself much wiser than the immediately preceding one and earlier ages, so does every age of human life; both, however, often err. In the years of bodily growth, when our intellectual powers and knowledge also increase daily, today grows accustomed to looking down on yesterday with contempt. This habit takes root and persists even when intellectual decline has begun and today ought rather to look at yesterday with reverence; hence we then often undervalue both the achievements and judgments of our youthful years.

In general we should observe here that although the intellect, the head, like character or the human heart, is inborn in its fundamental qualities, it by no means remains as unchangeable as the latter. Rather, it is subject to many transformations, which in general even occur regularly, partly because it has a physical foundation and partly because it has empirical material. Thus its own power gradually grows to its peak and then gradually declines to feeblemindedness. On the other hand, the material occupying and activating all these powers—the content of thinking and knowing, experience, information, practice, and thus perfection of insight—is a continually growing quantity until perhaps decided weakness sets in and lets everything fall. This composition of a human being from something absolutely unchangeable and something regularly changing in two opposed ways explains the differences in his appearance and standing at different ages.

In a broader sense we may also say: the first forty years of life supply the text; the following thirty supply its commentary, which first teaches us truly to understand the text's meaning and coherence, together with its moral and all its subtleties.

Toward life's end it is like the end of a masked ball, when the masks are removed. We now see who those people we encountered in our life's course really were. Characters have revealed themselves, deeds borne their fruits, achievements received their just appreciation, and all illusory images fallen apart. Time was needed for all this.—The strangest thing, however, is that only toward life's end do we really recognize and understand even ourselves, our own goal and purposes, especially in relation to the world and to others. Often, though not always, we shall have to assign ourselves a lower place than formerly imagined; sometimes, however, a higher one, because we had no adequate conception of the world's baseness and therefore set our goal higher than it. We discover, incidentally, what there is in us.—

People commonly call youth the happiest time of life, and old age the sad one. This would be true if the passions made us happy. They toss youth to and fro with little joy and much pain. They leave cool old age in peace, and at once it acquires a contemplative character: knowledge becomes free and gains the upper hand. Since knowledge in itself is painless, consciousness becomes happier the more it predominates within it. We need only consider that all pleasure is negative in nature, pain positive, to understand that passions cannot make us happy, and that old age is not to be pitied because certain pleasures are denied it. For every pleasure is always merely the satisfaction of a need: that the pleasure falls away together with the need is no more lamentable than that someone cannot eat after a meal and must remain awake after a full night's sleep. Plato, at the beginning of the Republic, judges old age much more correctly to be happy insofar as it is finally free of the sexual drive that until then incessantly disturbed us. One might even maintain that the varied and endless fancies produced by the sexual drive, and the emotions arising from them, sustain a constant mild madness in human beings as long as they remain under the influence of that drive, or that devil by whom they are constantly possessed; only after its extinction would they become entirely rational. Certainly, however, in general and apart from all individual circumstances and conditions, a certain melancholy and sadness belong to youth, a certain cheerfulness to old age. The reason is simply that youth still lives under the rule, indeed in the forced service, of that demon, who scarcely grants it a free hour and is at the same time the direct or indirect author of almost every misfortune that strikes or threatens humanity. Old age, however, has the cheerfulness of someone released from a long-worn fetter and now moving freely.—On the other hand, one might say that after the sexual drive has died out, life's true kernel is consumed and only its shell remains; indeed, that it resembles a comedy begun by human beings and afterward played to its end by automatons wearing their clothes.

Be that as it may, youth is the time of unrest; old age, of repose. From this alone we might infer their respective comfort. A child stretches eager hands far out toward everything colorful and varied before him: he is stimulated by it because his sensory apparatus is still so fresh and young. The same occurs with greater energy in the youth. He too is stirred by the colorful world and its manifold forms: his imagination at once makes more of them than the world can ever bestow. Hence he is full of desire and indefinite longing, which rob him of the peace without which there is no happiness. In old age, by contrast, all this has subsided, partly because the blood has grown cooler and the excitability of the sensory apparatus has diminished; partly because experience has clarified the worth of things and the content of pleasures, gradually freeing us from the illusions, chimeras, and prejudices that formerly obscured and distorted a free and pure view of things. We now know everything more correctly and clearly, take it for what it is, and have also attained, more or less, insight into the nothingness of all earthly things. This is precisely what gives almost every old person, even one of very ordinary abilities, a certain air of wisdom distinguishing him from the young. Above all, these things have brought about peace of mind, a great part of happiness, indeed its condition and essence. Thus while the youth thinks wondrous things are to be gained in the world if only he could discover where, the old person is permeated by Ecclesiastes's "all is vanity" and knows that all nuts are hollow, however richly gilded.

Only in later age does a person truly attain Horace's marvel at nothing: the immediate, sincere, firm conviction of the vanity of all things and the hollowness of all the world's glories. The chimeras have vanished. He no longer imagines that somewhere, in palace or hut, a special happiness dwells, greater than what he too essentially enjoys everywhere when free of bodily or mental pain. Great and small, distinguished and lowly by the world's measure, are no longer different for him. This gives the old person a special peace of mind in which he looks down smiling on the world's deceptions. He is completely disillusioned and knows that however one may dress up human life and drape ornaments over it, its poverty soon shines through all such fairground tinsel; however one colors and adorns it, it is essentially the same everywhere: an existence whose true worth must always be estimated only by the absence of pains, not by the presence of pleasures, much less pomp. (Hor. epist. L. I, 12, v. 1-4.) The fundamental trait of advanced age is disillusionment: the illusions that until then lent life its charm and activity its spur have vanished. We have recognized the nothingness and emptiness of all the world's glories, especially pomp, brilliance, and the appearance of grandeur; learned how little lies behind most desired things and longed-for pleasures; and thus gradually attained insight into the great poverty and emptiness of our whole existence. Only in the seventieth year does one fully understand Ecclesiastes's first verse. Yet this is also what gives old age a certain peevish cast.—

People generally think the lot of the old is illness and boredom. The former is by no means essential to old age, especially if one is to reach a great age, for as life increases, health and illness increase. As for boredom, I have shown above why old age is even less exposed to it than youth. Nor is boredom at all a necessary companion of solitude, toward which old age certainly leads us for easily understood reasons; it is so only for those who have known no pleasures beyond sensual and social ones, leaving their minds unenriched and their powers undeveloped. Intellectual powers admittedly decline in advanced age too; but where there was much, enough will always remain to combat boredom. Further, as shown above, correct insight still increases through experience, knowledge, practice, and reflection; judgment grows sharper and connections clearer. In everything one gains an increasingly comprehensive view of the whole. Thus through ever-new combinations of accumulated knowledge and its occasional enrichment, one's deepest inward self-cultivation still progresses in every respect, occupying, satisfying, and rewarding the mind. All this compensates to some degree for the decline mentioned. Moreover, as I have said, time runs much faster in old age, counteracting boredom. The decline of bodily powers does little harm if they are not needed to earn a living. Poverty in old age is a great misfortune. If it is banished and health preserved, old age can be a very tolerable part of life. Comfort and security are its chief needs; hence money is loved still more in old age than earlier, because it replaces missing powers. Released by Venus, one will gladly seek some cheer with Bacchus. The need to see, travel, and learn has been replaced by the need to teach and speak. It is fortunate, however, if an old man retains love of his studies, of music and theater, and a certain receptivity to the outside world generally, as some indeed do into the latest age. What someone "possesses in himself" never benefits him more than in old age. Most people, admittedly, having always been dull, become more and more like automatons in advanced age: they always think, say, and do the same things, and no outward impression can change anything or call forth anything new. Speaking to such old men is like writing in sand: the impression vanishes almost immediately. An old age of this kind is indeed only the dead residue of life.—Nature seems to wish to symbolize the onset of second childhood in great age through the third teething that then occurs in rare cases.

The fading of all powers with advancing age, more and more, is certainly very sad, yet necessary, indeed beneficial; otherwise death, for which it prepares the way, would be too hard. The greatest gain brought by reaching a very great age is therefore a gentle death: dying exceedingly easily, preceded by no illness, accompanied by no convulsion, and not felt at all. A description may be found in the second volume of my principal work, Kap. 41, S. 470 (3. Aufl. 534).—

In the Upanishad of the Veda (Vol. II, p. 53), the natural span of life is given as 100 years. I believe this is right, since I have observed that only those who have passed their ninetieth year partake of a gentle death: they die without any illness, without apoplexy, convulsions, or a death rattle, indeed sometimes without growing pale, generally sitting and after eating; or rather, they do not die at all, but merely cease to live. At every earlier age one dies only of illnesses, and thus prematurely[W].—

[W] [Variant:] In the Old Testament (Psalm 90, 10), human life is set at 70 years, or at most 80; and, more significantly, Herodotus (I, 32 und III, 22) says the same. Yet this is false and merely the result of a crude and superficial interpretation of daily experience. For if the natural span of life were 70–80 years, people between 70 and 80 would have to die of old age. But this is not the case at all: like younger people, they die of illnesses, and illness is essentially an abnormality, so this is not the natural end. Only between 90 and 100 do people die, then generally of old age, without illness, struggle, rattling breath, or convulsions, sometimes without growing pale; this is called a gentle death. Hence here too the Upanishad is right in setting the natural span of life at 100 years.

Human life cannot properly be called either long or short[X], because at bottom it is the measure by which we estimate all other lengths of time.—

[X] For however long one lives, one never possesses more than the indivisible present; memory, meanwhile, loses more daily through forgetting than it gains through additions.

The fundamental difference between youth and old age always remains that the former has life in prospect, the latter death; the former thus possesses a short past and a long future, the latter the reverse. Certainly, when old, we have only death before us; but when young, we have life before us, and the question is which of the two is more alarming, and whether life, taken as a whole, is not something better behind us than before us. Ecclesiastes (7, 2) already says: "The day of death is better than the day of birth." To desire a very long life is in any case a rash wish. For whoever lives a long life lives through much evil, says the Spanish proverb.—

The individual course of life is not, as astrology would have it, traced out in the planets; yet the course of human life in general is, insofar as a planet corresponds in sequence to each age, and life is thus successively ruled by all the planets.—In the tenth year Mercury rules. Like him, a person moves swiftly and lightly within the narrowest circle: trifles can change his mood, but he learns much and easily under the god of cunning and eloquence.—With the twentieth year begins the rule of Venus: love and women possess him entirely. In the thirtieth year Mars rules: a person is now strong, vehement, bold, warlike, and defiant.—In the fortieth year the 4 planetoids rule, and life accordingly broadens. He is thrifty, serving the useful through the power of Ceres; has his own hearth through Vesta; has learned what he needs to know through Pallas; and as Juno the mistress of the house, his wife, rules[Y].—In the fiftieth year, however, Jupiter rules. A person has already outlived most others and feels superior to the present generation. Still in full enjoyment of his strength, he is rich in experience and knowledge; according to his individuality and position, he has authority over all around him. Accordingly he no longer wants to be commanded, but to command. He is now best fitted to lead and rule within his sphere. Thus Jupiter culminates, and with him the fifty-year-old.—Then, in the sixtieth year, follows Saturn, and with him the heaviness, slowness, and tenacity of lead:

But old folks, many feign as they were dead;Unwieldy, slow, heavy and pale as lead[Z],

Rom. et. Jul. A. 2 sc. 5.

[Y] The approximately 60 additional planetoids discovered since are an innovation I want nothing to do with. I therefore treat them as philosophy professors treat me: I ignore them because they do not fit my purposes.

[Z]

Many old people seem already like the dead:Like lead, heavy, tenacious, stiff, and pale.

Last comes Uranus: then, as people say, one goes to heaven. I cannot include Neptune here—unfortunately thoughtlessness has christened him so—because I am not allowed to call him by his true name, Eros. Otherwise I would show how the beginning joins the end: how Eros stands in a secret connection with death, by virtue of which Orcus, or the Egyptians' Amenthes (according to Plutarch de Iside et Os. c. 29), is the taking and giving one, thus not only the taker but also the giver, and death the great reservoir of life. Hence, then, hence from Orcus comes everything, and everything now alive has already been there. If only we were capable of comprehending the conjuring trick by which this happens, everything would be clear.

The End.

On the differences between the stages of life.

Voltaire put it beautifully:

Whoever lacks the spirit of his ageHas all the unhappiness of his age.

So it will be appropriate, at the close of these reflections on happiness, to look at the changes the different stages of life bring about in us.

Throughout our whole life, we possess only the present, and never anything more. What distinguishes it is merely that at the beginning we see a long future ahead of us, while toward the end we see a long past behind us. Also, our temperament, though not our character, undergoes some familiar changes, giving the present a different coloring each time.

In my main work, Bd. 2, Kap. 31, S. 394 ff. (3. Aufl. 499 ff.), I explained that in childhood we are engaged much more in knowing than in willing, and why this is so. This is precisely the basis of the happiness of the first quarter of our lives, which afterward lies behind us like a lost paradise. In childhood we have few relationships and few needs, so there is little to stimulate the will. The greater part of our being is therefore absorbed in knowing. The intellect develops early, though it is not yet mature, just as the brain reaches its full size as early as the 7th year. It constantly seeks nourishment in a whole world of existence that is still new, where everything, everything is coated with the charm of novelty. That is why our childhood years are one continuous poem. The essence of poetry, like all art, consists in grasping the Platonic Idea in each individual thing: what is essential and therefore common to the whole kind. Each thing then appears as a representative of its class, and one instance stands for a thousand. It may seem that in the scenes of our childhood we are always occupied only with the particular object or event before us, and only insofar as it concerns our momentary desires. But fundamentally this is not so. Life in all its significance still stands before us so new and fresh, its impressions undulled by repetition, that amid our childish activities we are always silently and without any clear intention trying to grasp, in individual scenes and events, the essence of life itself, the basic types of its forms and appearances. As Spinoza puts it, we see all things and people from the standpoint of eternity. The younger we are, the more each individual thing represents its whole class. This decreases more and more each year. It accounts for the great difference between the impression things make on us in youth and in old age. So the experiences and acquaintances of childhood and early youth later become the fixed types and headings of all subsequent knowledge and experience, their categories, as it were. We place everything later under them, though not always with clear awareness. Thus the firm foundation of our view of the world is laid in childhood, including its shallowness or depth. Later it is developed and completed, but not essentially changed. This purely objective and therefore poetic way of seeing is characteristic of childhood. Supported by the fact that the will is still far from appearing with its full energy, it makes us, as children, far more purely knowing than willing. Hence the serious, contemplative look of some children, which Raphael used so successfully for his angels, especially those of the Sistine Madonna. For this very reason, too, childhood is so happy that remembering it is always accompanied by longing. While we are so seriously occupied with first understanding things through direct perception, education, on the other hand, tries to give us concepts. But concepts do not provide what is truly essential. That—the foundation and genuine content of all our knowledge—lies instead in our grasp of the world through direct perception. We can gain this only for ourselves; it cannot be taught to us in any way. So our intellectual worth, like our moral worth, does not come into us from outside, but arises from the depths of our own being. No educational arts of Pestalozzi can turn a born fool into a thinking person: never! He was born a fool and must die a fool. The deeply absorbed way we first grasp the external world through perception also explains why our childhood surroundings and experiences imprint themselves so firmly on memory. We gave ourselves to them undividedly; nothing distracted us. We looked at the things before us as though they were the only ones of their kind, indeed the only things in existence at all. Later, the multitude of objects we then know takes away our courage and patience. Now recall what I demonstrated at S. 372 ff. (3. Aufl. 423 ff.) of the volume of my main work mentioned above: the objective existence of all things, their existence in mere representation, is thoroughly enjoyable, while their subjective existence, which consists in willing, is heavily mixed with pain and sorrow. You will then probably accept this brief expression of the matter: all things are splendid to see, but terrible to be. According to what I have said, in childhood we know things much more from the side of seeing—representation, objectivity—than from the side of being, which is that of the will. Since the former is the enjoyable side of things, while the subjective and terrible side is still unknown to us, the young intellect takes all the figures that reality and art present to it for so many happy beings. It thinks that, beautiful as they are to see, it would be just as beautiful, and much more beautiful, to be them. So the world lies before it like an Eden: this is the Arcadia in which we are all born. A little later this gives rise to the thirst for real life, the urge for action and suffering that drives us into the world's bustle. There we come to know the other side of things: being, that is, willing, which is thwarted at every step. Then the great disillusionment gradually approaches. Once it has arrived, we say the age of illusions is over. Yet it keeps going, becoming ever more complete. We can therefore say that in childhood life appears to us like stage scenery seen from a distance; in old age, like the same scenery seen from very close up.

Finally, something else contributes to childhood's happiness. Just as all the leaves have the same color and almost the same shape at the beginning of spring, so in early childhood we are all alike and therefore get along wonderfully. But with puberty the divergence begins and grows ever greater, like the radii of a circle.

What darkens the rest of the first half of life—which has so many advantages over the second—that is, our youth, and even makes it unhappy, is the chase after happiness in the firm belief that it must be found in life. This produces hope that is continually disappointed, and disappointment produces dissatisfaction. Elusive images of a dreamed-of, undefined happiness float before us in whimsically chosen forms, and we search in vain for their original. So in our youthful years we are usually dissatisfied with our situation and surroundings, whatever they may be. We blame them for what belongs everywhere to the emptiness and poverty of human life, with which we are now becoming acquainted for the first time, after expecting quite different things. Much would be gained if timely instruction could root out young people's delusion that there is a great deal to be had in the world. But the opposite happens, because we usually come to know life through imaginative literature before we know it through reality. The scenes literature portrays shine before our eyes in the dawn of our own youth. Now we are tormented by the longing to see them made real—to grasp the rainbow. A young person expects his life to take the form of an interesting novel. Thus arises the illusion I have already described at S. 347 (3. Aufl. 428) of the second volume already mentioned. For what gives all those images their charm is precisely that they are mere images and not real. In looking at them, we are therefore in the peace and complete self-sufficiency of pure knowing. To become real means to be filled with willing, and willing brings unavoidable pains. The interested reader is also referred here to the passage at S. 427 (3. Aufl. 488) of that volume.

So if the first half of life is characterized by an unsatisfied longing for happiness, the second is characterized by fear of misfortune. For by then we have come to recognize, more or less clearly, that all happiness is imaginary, while suffering is real. Now, therefore, at least the more reasonable characters aim more at mere freedom from pain and an undisturbed condition than at enjoyment[V]. When the bell rang at my door in my youthful years, I was pleased: I thought, now it is coming. But in later years, on the same occasion, my feeling was much closer to fear. I thought: “Here it comes.” There are also two opposite feelings about the human world for distinguished and gifted individuals. Precisely because they are such, they do not quite belong to it and therefore stand alone, more or less according to the degree of their advantages. In youth they often feel abandoned by it; in later years they feel they have escaped it. The first feeling is unpleasant and rests on not knowing the world; the second is pleasant and rests on knowing it. Consequently, the second half of life, like the second half of a musical period, contains less striving but more calm than the first. This is generally because in youth we think the world contains wonders of happiness and enjoyment, only they are hard to reach. In old age we know there is nothing to be had there. So, completely at peace on that score, we enjoy a tolerable present and even take pleasure in little things.

[V] In old age we are better at preventing misfortunes; in youth, at enduring them.

What a mature man has gained from his experience of life, and what makes him see the world differently from a youth or boy, is above all freedom from preconceptions. Only he sees things quite simply and takes them for what they are. For the boy and the youth, a deceptive image made up of self-created fancies, inherited prejudices, and strange fantasies covered or distorted the real world. For the first task experience finds waiting for it is to free us from the fantasies and false concepts that took hold in youth. Protecting young people from these would certainly be the best education, though only a negative one. But it is very difficult. To do this, we would have to keep the child's field of view as narrow as possible, while giving him nothing but clear and correct concepts within it. Only after he had correctly understood everything within that field should we gradually expand it, always making sure that nothing obscure, half understood, or misunderstood remained. As a result, his concepts of things and human relationships would still be limited and very simple, but they would be clear and correct. They would always need only expanding, not correcting. This would continue into youth. In particular, this method requires not allowing novels, but replacing them with suitable biographies, such as Franklin's, Moritz's Anton Reiser, and the like.

When we are young, we imagine that the events and people important to our life's course, and far-reaching in their consequences, will appear with drums and trumpets. But in old age, looking back shows that they all slipped in quite quietly through the back door, almost unnoticed.

From the point of view considered so far, we can also compare life to an embroidered fabric. In the first half of our time, we see the front; in the second, the reverse. The latter is not as beautiful, but it teaches us more, because it lets us see how the threads connect.

In conversation, intellectual superiority, even the greatest, will assert its decisive advantage only after the age of forty. It may often surpass the maturity of years and the fruit of experience, but it can never replace them. These give even the most ordinary person a certain counterweight to the powers of the greatest mind while that mind is young. I mean only personal interaction here, not works.

Anyone with any outstanding qualities, anyone who does not belong to the 5/6 of humanity so sadly endowed by nature, will scarcely remain free of a certain touch of misanthropy after forty. Naturally, he had judged others by himself, and has gradually been disappointed. He has realized that in either head or heart, and usually both, they fall short of him and cannot give him an equal return. So he prefers to avoid dealing with them. In general, everyone will love or hate solitude—that is, his own company—in proportion to his inner worth. Kant also discusses this kind of misanthropy in the Krit. der Urteilskraft, toward the end of the general remark on § 29 of the first part.

In a young person, it is a bad sign both intellectually and morally if he knows very early how to find his way in people's activities, immediately feels at home in them, and enters them as if prepared. It indicates an ordinary, low nature. On the other hand, behavior in this respect that is bewildered, hesitant, awkward, and mistaken points to a nature of a nobler kind.

The cheerfulness and high spirits of our youth rest partly on the fact that, as we climb uphill, we do not see death: it lies at the foot of the other side of the mountain. But once we have crossed the summit, we actually catch sight of death, which until then we knew only by hearsay. Since our vital strength begins to ebb at the same time, our zest for life also sinks. A somber seriousness now displaces youthful exuberance and stamps itself on our face too. As long as we are young, whatever people may tell us, we regard life as endless and treat time accordingly. The older we get, the more carefully we manage our time. For in later life, each day lived through arouses a feeling akin to what a condemned criminal feels at every step as he is led to execution.

Seen from youth, life is an endlessly long future; seen from old age, a very short past. So at first it appears to us as things do when we put the objective lens of opera glasses to our eye, but at last as they do when we use the eyepiece. We must have grown old, and therefore lived a long time, to recognize how short life is. The older we get, the smaller all human things appear. Life, which stood firm and stable before us in youth, now reveals itself as the swift flight of fleeting appearances. The nothingness of the whole becomes evident. Time itself moves much more slowly in our youth. So the first quarter of our lives is not only the happiest but also the longest. It leaves behind far more memories, and anyone, if it came to that, would have more to tell from it than from two of the following quarters. Indeed, in the spring of life, as in the spring of the year, the days eventually become tiresomely long. In the autumn of both, they become short, but brighter and steadier.

But why, in old age, do we see the life behind us as so short? Because we take it to be as short as our memory of it. Everything insignificant, and much that was unpleasant, has fallen out of that memory, so little remains. Just as our intellect in general is very imperfect, so is our memory. What we have learned must be practiced, and the past must be thought over repeatedly, if both are not gradually to sink into the abyss of oblivion. Yet we do not usually think repeatedly about insignificant things, nor, for the most part, about unpleasant ones, though this would be necessary to keep them in memory. But more and more becomes insignificant. Through frequent and finally countless repetition, many things that at first seemed important gradually become unimportant. So we remember earlier years better than later ones. The longer we live, the fewer events seem important or significant enough to think over afterward, which alone could fix them in memory. So they are forgotten as soon as they are past. Time thus passes leaving ever fewer traces. Furthermore, we do not like to think over unpleasant things, least of all when they wound our vanity, as is usually the case, since few sufferings have struck us entirely without our fault. So much that is unpleasant is also forgotten. These two losses make our memory so short, and proportionately shorter and shorter as its material grows longer. Objects on the shore become ever smaller, harder to recognize, and harder to distinguish as we sail away from it. So do our past years, with their experiences and actions. In addition, memory and imagination sometimes bring a scene from our life long ago before us as vividly as yesterday. It then comes quite close to us. This happens because we cannot picture the long time elapsed between then and now with equal vividness. We cannot survey it in a single image; besides, most of its events have been forgotten. Only a general knowledge of it in the abstract remains—a mere concept, not a perception. Thus a particular event from long ago seems as close to us as if it had happened only yesterday, while the time in between disappears, and the whole of life seems incomprehensibly short. Indeed, in old age the long past behind us, and with it our own age, can sometimes seem almost mythical for a moment. This is chiefly because we still see the same, unchanged present immediately before us. Such inner processes ultimately rest on the fact that not our being in itself, but only its appearance, lies in time, and that the present is the point of contact between object and subject. And why, conversely, in youth do we see the life still before us as so immeasurably long? Because we must have room for the boundless hopes with which we populate it, whose fulfillment would find even Methuselah dying too young. Also, we measure it by the few years already behind us. Their memory is always rich in material, and therefore long, since novelty made everything seem significant. So it was thought over afterward, repeated often in memory, and thereby imprinted on it.

Sometimes we think we long to return to a distant place, when really we long only for the time we spent there, when we were younger and fresher. Time then deceives us under the mask of space. If we travel there, we become aware of the deception.

There are two ways to reach a great age, with a sound constitution as an indispensable condition. We can illustrate them through the burning of two lamps. One burns a long time because, though it has little oil, it has a very thin wick. The other does so because, along with a thick wick, it has plenty of oil. The oil is vital force; the wick is the consumption of it in every possible way.

In terms of vital force, until the age of 36 we can be compared to people living on their interest: what is spent today is back again tomorrow. But from that point on, our counterpart is the person of independent means who begins drawing on his capital. At first it is not noticeable at all. Most of the expenditure still replaces itself, and a small deficit goes unnoticed. But it gradually grows and becomes noticeable. Its increase itself increases with every day; it eats in more and more. Each today is poorer than yesterday, with no hope of a halt. So the decline accelerates more and more, like a falling body, until at last nothing is left. It is a very sad case when the two things compared here, vital force and property, really are melting away together. This is precisely why love of possessions grows with age. At the beginning, however, until adulthood and a little beyond, we are, in terms of vital force, like people who still add some of their interest to their capital. Not only does expenditure replace itself, but the capital grows. And again, through the care of an honest guardian, this sometimes happens with money at the same time. Oh, happy youth! Oh, sad old age! Nevertheless, we should conserve the strength of youth. Aristotle notes (Polit. L. ult. c. 5) that only two or three Olympic victors had won once as boys and then again as men. The early exertion required by preliminary training exhausts their strength so much that later, in manhood, it is lacking. What is true of muscular strength is even truer of nervous strength, of which all intellectual achievements are expressions. So precocious talents, child prodigies, the products of hothouse education who amaze people as boys, later become very ordinary minds. Even the early, forced effort to learn the ancient languages may be to blame for the later mental sluggishness and lack of judgment of so many scholarly minds.

I have observed that almost everyone's character seems especially suited to one stage of life, so that he appears to better advantage in it. Some are lovable youths, and then it is over. Others are vigorous, active men whom old age robs of all worth. Some show themselves to greatest advantage in old age, when they are gentler because they are more experienced and calm. This is often the case with French people. It must be because character itself has something youthful, manly, or elderly about it, with which the particular stage of life either agrees or acts as a corrective.

On a ship, we notice our forward movement only through objects on the shore receding and therefore growing smaller. In the same way, we become aware that we are growing older and older because people of increasingly advanced years seem young to us.

We have already discussed how and why everything we see, do, and experience leaves fewer traces in the mind the older we get. In this sense we could claim that we live with full awareness only in youth, and in old age with only half. The older we get, the less consciously we live. Things hurry past without making an impression, just as a work of art we have seen a thousand times makes none. We do what we have to do and afterward do not know whether we have done it. As life thus becomes increasingly unconscious the more it hurries toward complete unconsciousness, time's course also becomes ever faster. In childhood, the novelty of every object and event brings everything into consciousness. So the day seems endlessly long. The same happens when we travel, which is why one month there seems longer than four at home. Yet the novelty of things does not prevent the time that seems longer in both cases from often genuinely “dragging” in both, more than in old age or at home. Gradually, however, long familiarity with the same perceptions wears the intellect so smooth that more and more everything glides over it without effect. The days then become ever less significant and therefore shorter. A boy's hours are longer than an old man's days. Thus the time of our lives moves with increasing speed, like a ball rolling downhill. And just as every point on a rotating disk moves faster the farther it is from the center, so time passes faster and faster for each of us in proportion to our distance from life's beginning. Accordingly, we may assume that in our mind's immediate estimate, the length of a year stands in inverse proportion to the number of times it divides into our age. For example, when a year amounts to 1/5 of our age, it seems ten times as long as when it amounts to only 1/50. This difference in the speed of time has the most decisive influence on our whole manner of existence at each stage of life. First, it makes childhood, even if it covers only about 15 years, the longest period of life, and therefore the richest in memories. Second, it makes us subject to boredom in inverse proportion to our age. Children constantly need something to pass the time, whether play or work. If it stops, terrible boredom instantly seizes them. Young people are still very subject to it too, and look with concern at unoccupied hours. In manhood boredom dwindles more and more. For old people time is always too short, and the days fly past as fast as arrows. Of course, I am speaking of human beings, not cattle that have grown old. Because time's course speeds up, boredom thus mostly disappears in later years. And since, on the other hand, the passions and their torment also fall silent, the burden of life, provided health has been preserved, is on the whole really lighter than in youth. So people call the period before the onset of the weakness and troubles of advanced age “the best years.” In terms of our comfort, they may really be so. Youth, however, when everything makes an impression and everything enters consciousness vividly, retains the advantage of being the fruitful time for the mind, its budding spring. Deep truths can only be seen, not calculated. That is, our first knowledge of them is immediate and is brought about by the impression of the moment. It can therefore occur only while that impression is strong, lively, and deep. So in this respect everything depends on how we use our youthful years. In later years we can have more effect on others, indeed on the world, because we ourselves are complete and settled and no longer subject to impressions. But the world has less effect on us. These years are therefore the time for action and achievement; the earlier ones are the time for original perception and knowledge.

In youth, perception predominates; in old age, thought. So youth is the time for poetry, old age more for philosophy. In practical matters too, in youth we let ourselves be guided by what we see and its impression; in old age, only by thinking. This is partly because only in old age have enough directly perceived instances occurred and been placed under concepts to give these their full meaning, content, and authority, while at the same time familiarity moderates the impression of what we perceive. In youth, on the other hand, especially for lively and imaginative minds, the impression of what is seen, and thus also of the outward side of things, is so overwhelming that they see the world as a picture. So their chief concern is how they figure in it and how they look—more than how they feel inwardly. This already shows itself in young people's personal vanity and fondness for dressing up.

The greatest energy and highest intensity of mental powers undoubtedly occur in youth, up to the age of 35 at the latest. From then on they decline, though very slowly. Yet later years, even old age, have intellectual compensation for this. Only now have experience and learning become truly rich. We have had time and opportunity to look at and think about things from every side, to compare each with all the others and discover their points of contact and connecting links. Only now do we really understand them in their context. Everything has become clear. So even what we already knew in youth we now know much more thoroughly, since we have far more evidence for every concept. What we thought we knew in youth, we really know in old age. Besides, we really know much more, and possess knowledge thought through on every side and therefore genuinely connected, while in youth our knowledge is always full of gaps and fragmentary. Only someone who grows old gains a complete and adequate idea of life. He surveys it in its entirety and natural course, and especially not just from the entrance, like everyone else, but also from the exit. This lets him fully recognize its nothingness in particular, while the others remain trapped in the delusion that the real thing is still to come. Youth, however, has more creative conception, so we can then make more out of the little we know. But old age has more judgment, insight, and thoroughness. The material of his own distinctive knowledge, his original basic views—in short, what an exceptional mind is destined to give the world—is gathered already in youth. But he becomes master of his material only in later years. Accordingly, we will usually find that great writers produced their masterpieces around the age of fifty. Nevertheless, youth remains the root of the tree of knowledge, even though only the crown bears fruit. But just as every historical age, even the most wretched, considers itself far wiser than the one immediately before it and all earlier ones, so does every stage of a person's life. Yet both are often mistaken. In the years of bodily growth, when our mental powers and knowledge also increase daily, today gets into the habit of looking down on yesterday with contempt. This habit takes root and remains even when mental powers have begun to decline and today ought instead to look at yesterday with reverence. So we then often undervalue both the achievements and the judgments of our younger years.

In general, we should note here that although the intellect—the head—is inborn in its basic qualities, just as a person's character or heart is, it by no means remains as unchangeable as character. It undergoes many changes, which even occur regularly on the whole. This is partly because it has a physical foundation and partly because it has material supplied by experience. Thus its own power gradually grows to its peak, and then gradually declines into mental incapacity. On the other hand, the material that occupies all these powers and keeps them active—the content of thought and knowledge, experience, information, practice, and the resulting perfection of understanding—is a constantly growing quantity, until perhaps the onset of pronounced weakness makes everything fall away. A person thus consists of something absolutely unchangeable and something that changes regularly in two opposite ways. This explains the differences in how he appears and how he is regarded at different stages of life.

In a broader sense, we can also say that the first forty years of our life provide the text, and the following thirty its commentary. Only the commentary teaches us to understand properly the text's true meaning and connections, together with its moral and all its subtleties.

Toward the end of life, things are just like the end of a masked ball, when the masks are removed. We now see who the people we came into contact with during our lives really were. Their characters have revealed themselves; their deeds have borne fruit; their achievements have received their proper assessment; and all deceptive images have collapsed. All this required time. But the strangest thing is that only toward the end of life do we really recognize and understand even ourselves, our own aims and purposes, especially in relation to the world and to others. Often, though not always, we will have to assign ourselves a lower place than we previously imagined. Sometimes, however, it will be a higher one. This happens because we had no adequate idea of the world's low level and therefore set our goal above it. Along the way, we find out what we are worth.

People usually call youth the happiest time of life, and old age the sad one. That would be true if the passions made us happy. They drag youth back and forth, with little joy and much pain. They leave cool old age in peace, and it immediately takes on a contemplative character: knowledge becomes free and gains the upper hand. Since knowledge in itself is painless, consciousness becomes happier the more it predominates. We need only consider that all enjoyment is negative in nature, while pain is positive, to understand that the passions cannot make us happy, and that old age is not to be pitied because some pleasures are denied it. Every enjoyment is always only the satisfaction of a need. When the enjoyment disappears along with the need, this is no more regrettable than someone's being unable to eat more after a meal, or having to stay awake after a full night's sleep. Plato judges far more correctly, at the beginning of the Republic, that old age is happy insofar as it is finally rid of the sex drive that until then has constantly troubled us. We could even claim that the varied and endless fancies generated by the sex drive, and the emotions arising from them, keep a constant mild madness alive in a person as long as he remains under the influence of that drive, or that devil which continually possesses him. He would become entirely rational only after it had died out. But it is certain that, in general and apart from all individual circumstances and conditions, a certain melancholy and sadness belong to youth, and a certain cheerfulness to old age. The reason is simply that youth is still under the rule, indeed in the forced service, of that demon, who scarcely grants it a free hour and is at the same time the direct or indirect author of almost every evil that strikes or threatens human beings. Old age, however, has the cheerfulness of someone freed from a long-worn shackle, now moving freely. Yet on the other hand, we could say that once the sex drive has died out, the real core of life has been consumed and only its shell remains. Indeed, life would then resemble a comedy begun by human beings and afterward played to the end by automatons in their clothes.

Be that as it may, youth is the time of unrest; old age is the time of rest. From this alone we could infer their respective levels of well-being. A child stretches out eager hands into the distance toward everything colorful and varied it sees before it. It is stimulated by these things because its sensory apparatus is still so fresh and young. The same happens with greater energy in a young person. He too is stimulated by the colorful world and its many forms. His imagination immediately makes more of them than the world can ever give. So he is full of desire and undefined longing. These rob him of peace, without which there is no happiness. In old age, however, all this has settled down. This is partly because the blood has cooled and the sensory apparatus has become less excitable. It is also partly because experience has taught us the value of things and the content of pleasures. We have thereby gradually got rid of the illusions, fantasies, and prejudices that once covered and distorted a free and pure view of things. Now we understand everything more correctly and clearly, and take it for what it is. We have also come, more or less, to understand the nothingness of all earthly things. This is precisely what gives almost every old person, even one of very ordinary abilities, a certain appearance of wisdom that distinguishes him from younger people. Above all, all this has brought peace of mind. That is a great component of happiness, indeed its condition and essential element. So while a young person thinks there are wonders to be had in the world, if only he could find out where, an old person is thoroughly convinced of Ecclesiastes' “all is vanity” and knows that all the nuts are hollow, however heavily gilded they may be.

Only in later life does a person truly attain Horace's marvel at nothing: the immediate, sincere, and firm conviction of the vanity of all things and the hollowness of all the world's splendors. The fantasies have vanished. He no longer imagines that somewhere, whether in a palace or a hut, there lives some special happiness greater than what he too essentially enjoys everywhere whenever he is free from bodily or mental pain. The great and the small, the distinguished and the lowly by the world's measure, no longer differ for him. This gives an old person a special peace of mind in which he looks down smiling on the world's tricks. He is completely disillusioned. He knows that, whatever we do to dress and drape human life, its poverty soon shows through all that fairground tinsel. However we color and decorate it, it is essentially the same everywhere: an existence whose true value must always be judged only by the absence of pain, not by the presence of pleasures, still less of pomp. (Hor. epist. L. I, 12, v. 1-4.) The basic characteristic of advanced age is disillusionment. Gone are the illusions that until then gave life its charm and activity its spur. We have recognized the nothingness and emptiness of all the world's splendors, especially pomp, glitter, and the appearance of grandeur. We have learned that there is very little behind most desired things and longed-for pleasures, and have thus gradually come to understand the great poverty and emptiness of our whole existence. Only at 70 do we fully understand the first verse of Ecclesiastes. But this is also what gives old age a certain grumbling quality.

People usually think that the lot of old people is illness and boredom. The first is not at all essential to old age, especially if it is to be prolonged, for as life increases, health and illness increase. As for boredom, I have shown above why old age is even less exposed to it than youth. Nor is boredom at all a necessary companion of solitude, toward which old age certainly leads us for easily understood reasons. It accompanies solitude only for those who have known no pleasures except sensual and social ones, and have left their minds unenriched and their powers undeveloped. Admittedly, mental powers also decline in advanced age. But where there was much, enough will always remain to fight boredom. Moreover, as shown above, correct understanding continues to increase through experience, knowledge, practice, and reflection. Judgment sharpens, and connections become clear. In everything we gain a more and more comprehensive view of the whole. Thus, through ever new combinations of accumulated knowledge and occasional additions to it, our innermost self-development still advances in every respect, occupying, satisfying, and rewarding the mind. All this compensates to some degree for the decline mentioned. Besides, as I said, time moves much faster in old age, which counteracts boredom. The decline of physical strength does little harm if we do not need it to earn a living. Poverty in old age is a great misfortune. If it has been kept away and health remains, old age can be a very tolerable part of life. Comfort and security are its chief needs. So in old age we love money even more than before, because it replaces the strength we lack. Dismissed by Venus, we gladly seek a little cheer from Bacchus. The need to see, travel, and learn has been replaced by the need to teach and speak. But it is fortunate if an old person still retains his love for his studies, and also for music and the theater, and in general a certain receptiveness to the external world, as some people certainly do into the latest old age. What someone “has in himself” never benefits him more than in old age. Most people, admittedly, having always been dull, become more and more like automatons in advanced age. They always think, say, and do the same things. No external impression can change any of it or draw anything new from them. Speaking to such old people is like writing in sand: the impression disappears almost immediately. Old age of this kind is admittedly only the dead residue of life. Nature seems to want to symbolize the onset of second childhood in advanced age by the third set of teeth that appears then in rare cases.

The loss of all our powers as we grow older, ever more and more, is certainly very sad. Yet it is necessary, indeed beneficial, because otherwise death would be too hard. It prepares the way for death. So the greatest gain from reaching a very great age is an easy death: dying with extraordinary ease, not preceded by any illness, accompanied by no convulsion, and not felt at all. A description of this can be found in the second volume of my main work, Kap. 41, S. 470 (3. Aufl. 534).

In the Upanishad of the Veda (Vol. II, p. 53), the natural span of life is given as 100 years. I believe this is right, because I have observed that only those who have passed 90 experience an easy death. That is, they die without any illness, without a stroke, convulsion, or death rattle, sometimes without even turning pale, usually sitting down and after a meal. Or rather, they do not die at all, but simply stop living. At every earlier age, people die only of illnesses, and therefore prematurely[W].

[W] [Variant:] In the Old Testament (Psalm 90, 10), the human lifespan is set at 70 years, or at most 80. More importantly, Herodotus (I, 32 und III, 22) says the same. Yet it is wrong and is merely the result of a rough, superficial interpretation of daily experience. For if the natural lifespan were 70–80 years, people between 70 and 80 would have to die of old age. But that is not the case at all. Like younger people, they die of illnesses. Illness, however, is essentially an abnormality, so this is not the natural end. Only between 90 and 100 do people die, as a rule, of old age, without illness, without a death struggle, without a death rattle, without convulsion, sometimes without turning pale. This is called an easy death. So here too the Upanishad is right in setting the natural lifespan at 100 years.

Human life cannot really be called either long or short[X], because it is basically the measure by which we estimate all other lengths of time.

[X] For however long we live, we never possess more than the indivisible present. Memory, meanwhile, loses more each day through forgetting than it gains through additions.

The fundamental difference between youth and old age always remains this: youth has life in prospect; old age has death. So youth possesses a short past and a long future; old age, the reverse. Admittedly, when you are old, you have only death ahead of you. But when you are young, you have life ahead of you. The question is which of the two is more alarming, and whether, taken as a whole, life is not something better to have behind you than before you. Ecclesiastes (7, 2) already says: “The day of death is better than the day of birth.” In any case, wanting a very long life is a rash wish. For Whoever lives a long life lives through much evil, as the Spanish proverb says.

The course of an individual's life is not mapped out in the planets, as astrology claimed. But the course of human life in general is, insofar as each stage of life corresponds in order to a planet, and a person's life is thus ruled successively by all the planets. In the tenth year of life, Mercury rules. Like Mercury, the person moves quickly and easily within a very narrow orbit. Trifles can change his mood, but he learns a great deal and easily, under the rule of the god of cleverness and eloquence. With the twentieth year, the rule of Venus begins: love and women possess him entirely. In the thirtieth year, Mars rules. The person is now strong, fierce, bold, warlike, and defiant. In the fortieth, the 4 planetoids rule. His life accordingly broadens. He is thrifty, that is, devoted to what is useful, through Ceres. He has his own hearth through Vesta. He has learned what he needs to know through Pallas. And the mistress of the house, his wife, rules as Juno[Y]. But in the fiftieth year, Jupiter rules. The person has already outlived most people, and feels superior to the present generation. Still enjoying his full strength, he is rich in experience and knowledge. According to his individuality and situation, he has authority over everyone around him. So he no longer wants to take orders, but to give them himself. He is now best suited to be a guide and ruler in his own sphere. Thus Jupiter reaches its highest point, and with it the fifty-year-old. But then, in the sixtieth year, Saturn follows, bringing the heaviness, slowness, and tenacity of lead:

Many old people act as if they were dead;Clumsy, slow, heavy, and pale as lead[Z],

Rom. et. Jul. A. 2 sc. 5.

[Y] The roughly 60 planetoids discovered since then are an innovation I want nothing to do with. So I treat them as philosophy professors treat me: I ignore them because they do not fit my scheme.

[Z]

Many old people already seem like the dead:Like lead, heavy, sluggish, clumsy, and pale.

Finally comes Uranus: then, as the saying goes, we go to heaven. I cannot include Neptune here—unfortunately, thoughtlessness gave it that name—because I may not call it by its true name, which is Eros. Otherwise I would show how the beginning joins onto the end: how Eros stands in a secret connection with death. Through this connection, Orcus, or the Egyptians' Amenthes (according to Plutarch de Iside et Os. c. 29), is the one who takes and gives, and thus not only the taker but also the giver, and death is the great reservoir of life. From there, then—from Orcus—everything comes, and everything now alive has already been there. If only we could understand the sleight of hand by which this happens, everything would be clear.

The end.