This state of mind the psychologist would call dissociative, if not dissolutive. It is the dementia præcox of old age and can mean nothing but disintegration and befuddlement. True, childhood is often lost in wonder at items of experience that later are synthesized into wholes and become commonplaces. But this goes with a keen rapport with the environment, which the senses are developing, while this author’s musings reveal a falsetto last look before we are melted or diffused into the cosmos. Such reveries are letting go, not taking hold of life. They are the decadence of the philosophic spirit and belie the normal tendency of old age, which is to knit up experiences into synthetic wholes, to draw the moral of life, and to give integrity to the soul. Thus Mr. Paget seems to be the victim of a kind of senile Narcissism, revering its chief traits in his symptoms, yielding himself with a kind of masochistic pleasure to any chance impressions that present themselves. He has ceased to strive and to will, and there is no justification of his point of view, that his state is akin to that of certain transcendentalists who have fallen into deep puzzlements over what Bronson Alcott called “the whichness of the what.” Old age is neither helped nor understood by the cheap and chipper paradoxes about it of those who tell the old that they are not so save in years and that these do not count, or who affect to marvel at the passion to look and seem young. One writer[104] even tells us that the old are beautiful and thinks it is a perverse precept of social condition to think of chronological age at all. “We should say eighty years young;” “properly speaking there is no old age,” etc. All this is really the state of mind of a mental healer who does not wish old age, disease, or death, and so denies their existence and turns his back upon reality. It is the state of mind mythically ascribed to an ostrich, although the best observers deny that it ever buries its head in the sand from fear of danger. Such cajolery of the old is like baby-talk to children, which only infantilism or advanced second childhood relishes. It suggests infirmary wards and is itself a product of the type of psychic invalidism and valetudinarianism that is interesting to the psychologist because the appetite for it suggests the dreamy state of mind in which delusions become factual if they embody our desires. The old should be beyond attitudinizing or affecting a youth that is gone, for this is to live a lie, which is dangerous not only to their serenity, for old age should be the age of truth, but to health and even life.