310 PHYSIOLOGY CHAP. 



thus bringing about early and serious degeneration in both 

 physical strength and psychic powers sufficient to constitute a 

 genuine form of progressive mental weakness, and of senile dementia, 

 which, accompanied by phenomena of a paralytic type, increases 

 till it ends in death. 



The first symptoms of this morbid old age affect the character ; 

 they are diffidence, avarice, change in the moral and altruistic 

 sentiments, accompanied by transitory excitement of the sexual 

 instinct. The flow of thought becomes incoherent, feeble, and 

 confused ; the realm of consciousness narrows ; the remembrance 

 of recent facts is dim and that of more distant events vivid. Such 

 old people become tiresome and uninteresting; they care about 

 nothing but their own affairs, which they are quite incapable of 

 managing; they are full of childish fancies and are extremely 

 sensitive and vain ; they are apt to suffer from attacks of giddiness, 

 drowsiness, or unconquerable insomnia. Their mentality gradually 

 reaches the last stage of decay, all active energy comes to an 

 end, and their ways, behaviour, and expression become infantile. 

 They laugh or cry without reason, tear or soil their clothes, take 

 no notice of micturition, and eat untidily. Based upon this 

 mental weakness there are often periods of disorder, with incoherent 

 ravings about persecution, maniacal agitation, and hypochondriacal 

 ideas. In these states of depression (described by Gaupp) the 

 dominant features are great psychical and ethical decadence and 

 incoherency of ideas, or a condition of anxious melancholy with 

 delusions of poverty and want, disgust with life, and attempts 

 at suicide. These phenomena are often interrupted by attacks 

 of an apoplectic or epileptic nature, states of aphasia with 

 hemiplegia, and facial, hypoglossal, or other paralysis. 



IX. The concept of death is closely bound up with that of life. 

 Their connection is only too evident : " La vie est la contraire de 

 la inort," wrote the French encyclopaedists ; " la vie est 1'ensemble 

 des fonctions qui resistent a la mort," said Bichat; "la vie est 

 creation, la mort est des traction organique," said Cl. Bernard. We 

 call the processes of creation and evolution anabolic, those of 

 destruction and involution catabolic (see Vol. I., Chapters I. and II.). 



During the anaplastic phase of life, when the organism is 

 growing, developing, and carrying out its functions with great 

 activity, the anabolic processes predominate ; during the cataplastic 

 phase, when the organism is decaying, growing old, and dying, 

 the catabolic processes have the pre-eminence. 



All we have said about the bodily basis of old age and its 

 physical and psychic phenomena affords clear proof of this state- 

 ment. Death inevitably takes place when, owing to organic 

 destruction (or, to put it better, to the prevalence of catabolic 

 processes), the vital conditions essential to the functions of the 

 organism are no longer present. It is never immediate ; there 



