late suppers now. So you will see that you have to make fifteen
stages at any rate, and that it would not be hard to make
twenty-five; five primary, each with five secondary divisions.

The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same
ingenuous simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them as
the first stage of the earlier periods of life shows. The great
delusion of mankind is in supposing that to be individual and
exceptional which is universal and according to law. A person is
always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man
for the first time.

Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on
board of vessels,--in a state of intoxication. We are hustled into
maturity reeling with our passions and imaginations, and we have
drifted far away from port before we awake out of our illusions.
But to carry us out of maturity into old age, without our knowing
where we are going, she drugs us with strong opiates, and so we
stagger along with wide open eyes that see nothing until snow
enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our comatose brains out of
their stupid trances.

There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the
physical ones;--I mean the formation of Habits. An old man who
shrinks into himself falls into ways that become as positive and as
much beyond the reach of outside influences as if they were
governed by clock-work. The ANIMAL functions, as the physiologists
call them, in distinction from the ORGANIC, tend, in the process of
deterioration to which age and neglect united gradually lead them,
to assume the periodical or rhythmical type of movement. Every
man's HEART (this organ belongs, you know, to the organic system)
has a regular mode of action; but I know a great many men whose
BRAINS, and all their voluntary existence flowing from their
brains, have a systole and diastole as regular as that of the heart
itself. Habit is the approximation of the animal system to the
organic. It is a confession of failure in the highest function of
being, which involves a perpetual self-determination, in full view
of all existing circumstances. But habit, you see, is an action in
present circumstances from past motives. It is substituting a vis
a tergo for the evolution of living force.

When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a
year, has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he
must economize force s