On the other hand, some, like the Stoics, have not only affected to accept death with perfect equanimity but call it the highest good that God has given men. The Epicurean said death was no evil because as long as we live it is not present and when it is present we are not there. Pliny said the gods have given us nothing more to be desired than brevity of life. Others say that the old may have weak bodies but normally have good will and this compensates. Others stress the dignity of age or its steadfastness, its fondness for children and the young. Sometimes the old become epicures in eating and connoisseurs in drinking. Some commend as a laudable ambition the desire of the old to live as long, as well, and as fully as possible. Others think the love of beauty, especially in nature, is greater; still others find a new love of order, better knowledge of self, both physical and mental. He suggests that old age should be almost a profession, as we have to fit to new conditions. It is possible then to take larger views, and he says that of the three attitudes toward death, (1) not to think of it at all, the recourse of the common and the weak, (2) belief in immortality, a very pleasing and comforting delusion, and (3) to face and get familiar with it, the last is by far the highest and hardest. Thus the old must realize that they are as brittle and fragile as glass, cannot do what they once could, become ill from slighter causes and recover more slowly, must especially guard against colds, fatigue, change of habit, and must be always on their guard not to accept others’ precepts about keeping themselves in the top of their condition but work out those best for themselves. In all ages since civilization began we have frequent outcrops of the tendency to divide human life into stages, many or few, more or less sharply marked off one from the other. L. Löw has given us a comprehensive survey of this subject. There has never been, however, any general agreement as to these age demarcations save two, namely, the beginning and the end of sex life, which divides life into three stages. Child life, as we all know, has lately been divided into various epochs--the nursling; the pre-school age; the quadrennium from eight to twelve; puberty; the age of attaining majority; nubility; the acme of physical ability (for example, for athletes _circa_ thirty); the beginning of the decline of life, most often placed between forty and fifty, a stage that has many marked features of its own; the development of the senium, marked by impotence, with occasional subdivisions of this stage, as, for example in Shakespeare: