Perry, Ralph Barton

Perry, Ralph Barton (1876-1957), author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of William James, one-time president of the American Philosophical Association, and philosophy professor at Harvard for forty years, graduated from Princeton in 1896. He was later made an honorary member of the Class of 1896 at Harvard (as well as an honorary doctor of letters at both Princeton and Harvard). In 1941 he attended the forty-fifth reunion of both classes and gave the same talk at the two class dinners. This talk, printed in the Princeton Alumni Weekly and the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and later published in a little book by the Vanguard Press of New York, decried the tendency of youth to shelve those past forty, and made a Plea for an Age Movement.

``Let us make virtue of our necessities [Perry counselled his Princeton and Harvard classmates]. Age should not have its face lifted, but rather teach the world to admire wrinkles, as the etchings of experience and the firm lines of character. Let us not suffer from insomnia, or regret the fact that we cannot sleep; but rather rejoice that we need not. . . . And when we are told that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, our answer should be that old dogs have already learned their bagful, and may now practice the tricks they know.

``There is a pride of youth, and I would not have it one whit abated. But there is also a pride of age, which is ours if we will only affirm it.''

From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).