"I dread¹（惧怕） to come to the end of the year, said a friend to me recently," it makes me realize I am growing old."

 

William James, the great psychologist, said that most men are "old fogies at twenty-five", He was right. Most men at twenty-five are satisfied with their jobs. They have accumulated the little stock of prejudices that they call their "Principles," and closed their minds to all new ideas. They have ceased to grow.

 

The minutea man ceases to grow-no matter what his years-that minute he begins to be old. On the other hand, the really great man never grows old.

 

Goethe passed out at eighty-three, and finished his Faust only a few years earlier; Gladstone took up a new language when he was seventy.

 

Laplace, the astronomer², was still at work when death caught up with him at seventy-eight. He died crying, "What we know is nothing; what we do not know is immense."

 

And there you have the real answer to the question, "When is a man old?"

 

Laplace at seventy-eight died young. He was still unsatisfied, still sure that he had a lot to learn.

 

As long as a man can keep himself in that attitude of mind, as long as he can look back on every year and say, "I grew," he is still young.

 

The minute he ceases to grow, the minute he says to himself, "I know all that I need to know," --that day youth stops. He may be twenty-five or seventy-five, it makes no difference. On that day he begins to be old.

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