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Age, before being a number, is the symbolic indication, rich in history and subjectivity, of a stage of life, the last of these stages being death. The first attempts at describing mortality naturally imply a concern to clarify these stages, each of which has its own characteristics, in particular its own vital force and its own risks of dying. Moreover, these ages of life are described in very different ways by authors belonging to the long tradition which evokes or studies them. A quick overview of the main elements of this tradition will show the slow transition that leads from the qualification of ages and their relationship with the duration and limit of life to the quantification of these durations and these limits.
The pastor Süssmilch, main character of this study is resolutely at odds with traditional arithmology, linked in particular to the number 7. Physical theology, here ancestor of the science of the populations and, in particular, studies on the human mortality, is not a mystique of numbers but the very opposite, namely a scientific approach based on experience and calculation. The pastor’s analysis shows, once superstition is eliminated, that a regularity reigns no less in the phenomena and that there can be no chance. It is thus the same attempt at “putting in order" that underlies these reflexions on the course of human life.