Excerpt from Organic to Human: Psychological and Sociological
In his Essay on Physiognomy Montaigne, dilating on the unfitness of old age for the business of writing or for any other business, says: "He who commits his decrepit age to the press is a fool if he thinks to squeeze out anything thence that does not represent him deformed with dotage and stupidity. Our understandings grow costive and thick as they grow old."
As this book was written to employ the writer in work which might occupy the time and ease the burden of the dreary decline from three to fourscore years it necessarily incurs Montaigne's censure; for it represents the writer's activity during a period when, being decrepit, he had better have been inactive or only privately active.
But is not Montaigne's dictum perhaps too absolute? Disillusioned old age, albeit failing energy unfits it for prompt decision and vigorous execution, has a set-off of some value in its store of experience, in its aloofness from affairs, in a cool judgment of them unbiassed by personal interest. Having experimentally proved and therefore vitally felt the vanity of vanities of mortal things (which full life repeats by rote but never really wishes or wills to feel), it may, as spectator of and no longer actor in them, judge sometimes more justly than younger life eagerly interested in its active doings and deeply impressed with their and its importance. How can understanding move freely and clearly amongst desires, cares, ambitions, rivalries, fears and hopes without being affected unduly or infected by them?
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