The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as recapitulating that of the race--Suicide--The death-wish--Necrophilism--The Black Death--Depopulation by the next war--The evolutionary nisus and death as its queller--Death symbolism as pervasive as that of sex-- Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of death-- Schopenhauer’s view of death--The separation of ghosts from the living among primitive races--The thanatology of the Egyptians--The journey of the soul--Ancient cults of death and resurrection in the religions about the eastern Mediterranean, based on the death of vegetation in the fall and its revival in the spring, as a background of Pauline Christianity--The fading belief in immortality and Protestantism which now at funerals speaks only of peace and rest--Osler’s five hundred deathbeds--Influential, plasmal, and personal immortality and their reciprocal relations--Moral efficacy of the doctrine of future rewards and punishments--Belief in a future life for the individual being transformed into a belief in the future of the race on earth and the advent of the superman--Does man want personal immortality--Finot’s immortality of the decomposing body and its resolution into its elements--The Durkheim school and the mana doctrine--Schleiermacher-- The Schiller-James view of the brain and consciousness as repressive of the larger life of the great Autos--The views of Plato and Kant--Have God and Nature cheated and lied to us if the wish to survive is false?--Noetic and mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of general ideas--Views of Howison, Royce, and others--Is there a true euthanasia or thanatophilia?--Diminution of the desire for personal immortality with culture and age. SENESCENCE CHAPTER I THE YOUTH OF OLD AGE The turn of the tide of life--Relative amount and importance of work accomplished before and after forty--The sexual life at the turn of the tide in man and woman--Osler’s views and critics (E. G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland, E. S. P. Haynes)--Illustrations from Tolstoi, Fechner, Comte, Swedenborg--The typical cases of Segantini, Lenau, von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel, Ruskin and Nietzsche--Michaëlis’s “dangerous age” in women--The difficulty in determining this age--The nature of the changes, conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that people in this stage of life should lay to heart--H. G. Wells and Ross.