CHAPTER 3 PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES

Now that we know what suicide is, its species and its principal laws, we must seek to find what attitude present-day societies should take toward it.

But this question itself presupposes another. Should the present state of suicide among civilized peoples be considered as normal or abnormal? According to the solution one adopts, he will consider reforms necessary and possible with a view to restraining it, or, on the contrary, will agree, not without censure, to accept it as it is.

I

Some are perhaps astonished that this question could be raised.

It is true, we usually regard everything immoral as abnormal. Therefore, if suicide offends the public conscience, as has been established, it seems impossible not to see in it a phenomenon of social pathology. But we have shown elsewhere that even the preeminent form of immorality, crime itself, need not necessarily be classed among morbid manifestations. To be sure, this declaration shocked certain persons and may have seemed, on superficial examination, to shake the foundations of morality. Nevertheless there is nothing subversive about it. To assure one’s self one need only refer to the argument on which it rests, which may be summarized as follows.

Either the word disease means nothing or it means something avoidable. Doubtless, not everything avoidable is morbid, but whatever is morbid may be avoided, at least by most people. Without abandoning all distinctions of ideas and terms alike, one cannot call a state or characteristic morbid which members of a species cannot avoid having, one necessarily implied in their constitution. On the other hand, we have only one objective and empirically determinable sign, controllable by others, by which we may recognize the existence of this necessity: universality. When two facts always and everywhere occur together without a single cited exception, it is contrary to all methodology to suppose that they can be separated. Not that one is always the other’s cause. The bond between them may be mediate, but it exists and is necessary, none the less.

Now there is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it. Consequently it is normal. It is useless to invoke the inevitable imperfections of human nature and maintain that evil does not cease to be evil even though it cannot be prevented; this is the preacher’s language, not the scholar’s. A necessary imperfection is not a disease; otherwise disease would have to be postulated everywhere, since imperfection is everywhere. No organic function, no anatomical form exists, some further perfection of which may not be conceived. It has been said that an oculist would blush to have constructed so crude an instrument of vision as the human eye. But from this it has not been and could not be concluded that the structure of this organ is abnormal. Moreover, to employ the somewhat theological language of our adversaries, whatever is necessary must have some perfection in it. Whatever is an indispensable condition of life cannot fail to be useful, unless life itself is not useful. The proposition is inescapable. And we have actually shown how crime may be of service. But it serves only when reproved and repressed. The mere fact of cataloguing it among the phenomena of normal sociology has been wrongly thought to imply its absolution. If it is normal that there should be crimes, it is normal that they should be punished. Punishment and crime are two terms of an inseparable pair. One is as indispensable as the other. Every abnormal relaxation of the system of repression results in stimulating criminality and giving it an abnormal intensity.

Let us apply these ideas to suicide.

We have not sufficient data, it is true, to be sure that there is no society where suicide is not found. Statistics on suicide are available to us for only a small number of peoples. For the rest, the existence of chronic suicide can be proved only by the traces it leaves in legislation. Now, we do not know with certainty that suicide has everywhere been the object of juridical regulation. But we may affirm that this is usually the case. It is sometimes proscribed, sometimes reproved; sometimes its interdiction is formal, sometimes it includes reservations and exceptions. But all analogies permit the belief that it can never have remained a matter of indifference to law and morality; that is, it has always been sufficiently important to attract the attention of the public conscience. At any rate, it is certain that suicidogenetic currents of different intensity, depending on the historical period, have always existed among the peoples of Europe; statistics prove it ever since the last century, and juridical monuments prove it for earlier periods. Suicide is therefore an element of their normal constitution, and even, probably, of any social constitution.

It is also possible to see their mutual connection.

This is especially true of altruistic suicide with respect to lower societies. Precisely because the strict subordination of the individual to the group is the principle on which they rest, altruistic suicide is there, so to speak, an indispensable procedure of their collective discipline. If men, there, did not set a low value on life, they would not be what they should be; and from the moment they value it so lightly, everything inevitably becomes a pretext for them to abandon it. So there is a close connection between the practice of this sort of suicide and the moral organization of this sort of society. It is the same today in those special settings where abnegation and impersonality are essential. Even now, military esprit can only be strong if the individual is self-detached, and such detachment necessarily throws the door open to suicide.

For opposite reasons, in societies and environments where the dignity of the person is the supreme end of conduct, where man is a God to mankind, the individual is readily inclined to consider the man in himself as a God and to regard himself as the object of his own cult. When morality consists primarily in giving one a very high idea of one’s self, certain combinations of circumstances readily suffice to make man unable to perceive anything above himself. Individualism is of course not necessarily egoism, but it comes close to it; the one cannot be stimulated without the other being enlarged. Thus, egoistic suicide arises. Finally, among peoples where progress is and should be rapid, rules restraining individuals must be sufficiently pliable and malleable; if they preserved all the rigidity they possess in primitive societies, evolution thus impeded could not take place promptly enough. But then inevitably, under weaker restraint, desires and ambitions overflow impetuously at certain points. As soon as men are inoculated with the precept that their duty is to progress, it is harder to make them accept resignation; so the number of the malcontent and disquieted is bound to increase. The entire morality of progress and perfection is thus inseparable from a certain amount of anomy. Hence, a definite moral constitution corresponds to each type of suicide and is interconnected with it. One cannot exist without the other, for suicide is only the form inevitably assumed by each moral constitution under certain conditions, particular, to be sure, but inescapably arising.

We shall be answered that these varied currents cause suicide only if exaggerated; and asked whether they might not have everywhere a single, moderate intensity? This is wishing for the conditions of life to be everywhere the same, which is neither possible nor desirable. There are special environments in every society which are reached by collective states only through the latter being modified; according to circumstances, they are strengthened or weakened. For a current to have a certain strength in most of the country, it therefore has to exceed or fail to reach this strength at certain points.

But not only are these excesses in one or the other direction necessary; they have their uses. For if the most general state is also the one best adapted to the most general circumstances of social life, it cannot be so related with unusual circumstances; yet society must be capable of being adapted to both. A man in whom the taste for activity never surpassed the average could not maintain himself in situations requiring an unusual effort. Likewise, a society in which intellectual individualism could not be exaggerated would be unable to shake off the yoke of tradition and renew its faiths, even when this became necessary. Inversely, where this same spiritual state could not on occasion be reduced enough to allow the opposite current to develop, what would happen in time of war, when passive obedience is the highest duty? But, for these forms of activity to be produced when they are needed, society must not have totally forgotten them. Thus, it is indispensable that they have a place in the common existence; there must be circles where an unrelenting spirit of criticism and free examination is maintained, others, like the army, where the old religion of authority is preserved almost intact. Of course, in ordinary times, the influence of these special foci must be restricted to certain limits; since the sentiments which flourish there relate to particular circumstances, they must not be generalized. But if they must remain localized, it is equally important that they exist. This need will seem still clearer if we remember that societies not only are required to confront different situations in the course of a single period, but that they cannot even endure without transformation. Within one century, the normal proportions of individualism and altruism fitting for modern peoples will no longer be the same. But the future would be impossible if its germs were not contained in the present. For a collective tendency to be able to grow weaker or stronger through evolution, it must not become set once for all in a single form, from which it could not free itself; it could not vary in time if it were incapable of variation in space.

The different currents of collective sadness which derive from these three moral states have their own reasons for existence so long as they are not excessive. Indeed, it is wrong to believe that unmixed joy is the normal state of sensibility. Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character. So, melancholy is morbid only when it occupies too much place in life; but it is equally morbid for it to be wholly excluded from life. The taste for happy expansiveness must be moderated by the opposite taste; only on this condition will it retain measure and harmonize with reality. It is the same with societies as with individuals. Too cheerful a morality is a loose morality; it is appropriate only to decadent peoples and is found only among them. Life is often harsh, treacherous or empty. Collective sensibility must reflect this side of existence, too. This is why there has to be, beside the current of optimism which impels men to regard the world confidently, an opposite current, less intense, of course, and less general than the first, but able to restrain it partially; for a tendency does not limit itself, it can never be restrained except by another tendency. From certain indications it even seems that the tendency to a sort of melancholy develops as we rise in the scale of social types. As we have said in another work, it is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear. Now, for it to exist and maintain itself, there must be a special organ in society to serve as its substratum. There must be groups of individuals who more especially represent this aspect of the collective mood. But the part of the population which plays this role is necessarily that where ideas of suicide easily take root.

But it does not follow from the fact that a suicidogenetic current of a certain strength must be considered as a phenomenon of normal sociology, that every current of the same sort is necessarily of the same character. If the spirit of renunciation, the love of progress, the taste for individuation have their place in every kind of society, and cannot exist without becoming generators of suicide at certain points, it is further necessary for them to have this property only in a certain measure, varying with various peoples. It is only justified if it does not pass certain limits. Likewise, the collective penchant for sadness is only wholesome as long as it is not preponderant. So the above remarks have not settled the question whether the present status of suicide among civilized nations is or is not normal. We need further to consider whether its tremendous aggravation during the past century is not pathological in origin.

It has been called the ransom-money of civilization. Certainly, it is general in Europe and more pronounced the higher the culture of European nations. In fact, it rose 411 per cent in Prussia from 1826 to 1890, 385 per cent in France from 1826 to 1888, 318 per cent in German Austria from 1841-45 to 1877, 238 per cent in Saxony from 1841 to 1875, 212 per cent in Belgium from 1841 to 1889, only 72 per cent in Sweden from 1841 to 1871-75, 35 per cent in Denmark during the same period. Italy, since 1870, or since it became an active sharer in European civilization, saw the number of its suicides rise from 788 cases to 1,653, an increase of 109 per cent in twenty years. Moreover, suicide is most widespread everywhere in the most cultivated regions. Thus it was conceivable that a link might exist between the progress of intelligence and of suicide, that one went hand in hand with the other; this is a thesis similar to that of an Italian criminologist, that the increase of crimes was caused and compensated by the parallel increase of economic transactions. If it were admitted, one would have to conclude that the characteristic constitution of higher societies implies an exceptional stimulation of suicidogenetic currents; so that their actual extreme violence would be normal because necessary, and there would be no way of taking special measures against it without simultaneously taking them against civilization.

But one fact especially should throw us on our guard against this reasoning. In Rome, at the very height of the empire, a veritable hecatomb of voluntary deaths likewise occurred. So that one might have concluded then as now that this was the price of the intellectual development achieved and that it is a law of cultivated peoples that they must furnish a greater number of victims to suicide than others. But the historical sequel showed how unfounded such an induction would have been; for this epidemic of suicides lasted only for a time, while Roman culture survived. Not only did the Christian societies assimilate its best fruits, but from the 16th century on, after the discovery of printing, after the Renaissance and the Reformation, these societies had far surpassed the highest level ever attained by the socities of antiquity. Yet suicide had developed only slightly until the 18th century. Progress was not therefore the necessary cause of so much bloodshed, since its results could be preserved and even surpassed with no continuation of these homicidal effects. Is it not probable, therefore, that the same is true today, that the course of our civilization and that of suicide do not logically involve one another, and that the latter may accordingly be checked without the other stopping simultaneously? Besides, we have seen that suicide is found in the first stages of evolution and that it is even, sometimes, of the utmost virulence. If, then, it exists among the crudest peoples, there is no reason to suppose it to be necessarily related to extreme refinement of manners. Those types of suicide observed at these distant periods have, of course, partly disappeared; but this very disappearance should somewhat reduce our annual tribute and it is thus much more surprising that it keeps becoming heavier.

Thus, we may believe that this aggravation springs not from the intrinsic nature of progress but from the special conditions under which it occurs in our day, and nothing assures us that these conditions are normal. For we must not be dazzled by the brilliant development of sciences, the arts and industry of which we are the witnesses; this development is altogether certainly taking place in the midst of a morbid effervescence, the grievous repercussions of which each one of us feels. It is then very possible and even probable that the rising tide of suicide originates in a pathological state just now accompanying the march of civilization without being its necessary condition.

The rapidity of the growth of suicides really permits no other hypothesis. Actually, in less than fifty years, they have tripled, quadrupled, and even quintupled, depending on the country. On the other hand, we know their connection with the most ineradicable element in the constitution of societies, since they express the mood of societies, and since the mood of peoples, like that of individuals, reflects the state of the most fundamental part of the organism. Our social organization, then, must have changed profoundly in the course of this century, to have been able to cause such a growth in the suicide-rate. So grave and rapid an alteration as this must be morbid; for a society cannot change its structure so suddenly. Only by a succession of slow, almost imperceptible modifications does it achieve different characteristics. The possible changes, even then, are limited. Once a social type is fixed it is no longer infinitely plastic; a limit is soon reached which cannot be passed. Thus the changes presupposed by the statistics of contemporary suicides cannot be normal. Without even knowing exactly of what they consist, we may begin by affirming that they result not from a regular evolution but from a morbid disturbance which, while able to uproot the institutions of the past, has put nothing in their place; for the work of centuries cannot be remade in a few years. But if the cause is so abnormal, the effect must be so, as well. Thus, what the rising flood of voluntary deaths denotes is not the increasing brilliancy of our civilization but a state of crisis and perturbation not to be prolonged with impunity.

To these various reasons another may be added. Though it is true that collective sadness has, normally, a role to play in the life of societies, it is not ordinarily general or intense enough to reach the higher centers of the social body. It remains a submerged current, felt vaguely by the collective personality, which therefore undergoes its influence without clearly taking it into account. At least, if these vague dispositions do affect the common conscience, it is only by tentative and intermittent thrusts. Generally they are expressed merely by fragmentary judgments, isolated maxims, unrelated to one another and which, in spite of their intransigeant aspect, are intended to convey only one side of reality, to be corrected and supplemented by contradictory maxims. Thence come the melancholy sayings and proverbial sallies at life’s expense in which sometimes is put the wisdom of nations, but without being more frequent than their opposite numbers. Clearly they convey passing impressions, which have transiently touched consciousness without taking full possession of it. Only when such sentiments acquire unusual strength do they sufficiently absorb public attention to be seen as a whole, coordinated and systematized, and then become the bases of complete theories of life. In fact, in Rome and in Greece, it was when society felt itself seriously endangered that the discouraging theories of Epicurus and Zeno appeared. The formation of such great systems is therefore an indication that the current of pessimism has reached a degree of abnormal intensity which is due to some disturbance of the social organism. We well know how these systems have recently multiplied. To form a true idea of their number and importance it is not enough to consider the philosophies avowedly of this nature, such as those of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, etc. We must also consider all the others which derive from the same spirit under different names. The anarchist, the aesthete, the mystic, the socialist revolutionary, even if they do not despair of the future, have in common with the pessimist a single sentiment of hatred and disgust for the existing order, a single craving to destroy or to escape from reality. Collective melancholy would not have penetrated consciousness so far, if it had not undergone a morbid development; and so the development of suicide resulting from it is of the same nature.

All proofs combine therefore to make us consider the enormous increase in the number of voluntary deaths within a century as a pathological phenomenon becoming daily a greater menace. By what means shall we try to overcome it?

II

Some authors have recommended the reestablishment of the comminatory penalties formerly in use.

It is willingly accepted that our present indulgence towards suicide is really excessive. Since it offends morality, it should be repulsed more energetically and precisely, and this reprobation should be expressed by definite external signs, that is, penalties. The relaxation of our repressive system at this point is in itself an abnormal phenomenon. Yet somewhat severe punishments are impossible; they would not be tolerated by the public conscience. For as we have seen, suicide is a close kin to genuine virtues, which it simply exaggerates. So public opinion is easily divided in its judgment. Since suicide, up to a certain point, emanates from sentiments respected by public opinion, the latter’s blame is tempered with reserve and hesitation. Thus arise the ever-recurring controversies between theorists as to whether or not it is contrary to morality. Since a continuous series of graduated, intermediary acts connects it with other acts approved or tolerated by morality, it has naturally enough been regarded at times as of the same nature as they and been apt to benefit by the same tolerance. Far more rarely have such doubts been aroused in behalf of homicide and robbery, because the line of demarcation is more clearly drawn here.Moreover, the mere fact of the death which the victim has inflicted on himself inspires, in spite of everything, too much pity for the censure to be implacable.

For all these reasons only moral penalties could be decreed. The only possible thing would be to refuse the suicide the honors of a regular burial, to deprive the author of the attempt of certain civic, political or family rights, such as certain attributes of the paternal power and eligibility to public office. We believe that public opinion would readily agree that whoever tried to evade his fundamental duties should be deprived of his corresponding rights. But however legitimate these measures were, they could never have more than a very secondary influence; it is childish to suppose that they could check so violent a current.

Besides, all by themselves, they would not touch the evil at its source. Actually, if we have renounced the legal prohibition of suicide, it is because its immorality is too little felt. We let it develop freely because it no longer revolts us to the same extent as formerly. But our moral sensitiveness will never be aroused by legislative measures. It does not depend on the legislator that a fact shall appear morally hateful or not. When the law forbids acts which public sentiment considers inoffensive, we are indignant with the law, not with the act it punishes. Our excessive tolerance with regard to suicide is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves; we are too saturated with it not partly to excuse it. But then the only way of making ourselves more severe is to act directly on the current of pessimism, to lead it back to its normal bed and confine it there, to relieve most consciences from its influence and to strengthen them. Once they have recovered their moral equilibrium they will react appropriately against whatever offends them. A repressive system will no longer have to be created out of nothing; it will take shape itself under the pressure of need. Until then it will be artificial and of little use for that reason.

Would not education be the surest means of obtaining this result? As characters may be influenced through it, would it not suffice for them to be so shaped as to become braver and thus less indulgent towards those who willingly give themselves up? This is Morselli’s opinion. For him, the prophylactic treatment for suicide entirely consists of the following precept:“To develop in man the power of coordinating his ideas and feelings, so that he may be able to follow a definite purpose in life; in brief, to give strength and energy to the moral character.” A thinker of quite a different school reaches the same conclusion: “How,” asks Franck, “shall we attack suicide at its source? By improving the great work of education, by striving to improve character as well as intelligence, convictions as well as ideas.”

But this is to ascribe to education a power it lacks. It is only the image and reflection of society. It imitates and reproduces the latter in abbreviated form; it does not create it. Education is healthy when peoples themselves are in a healthy state; but it becomes corrupt with them, being unable to modify itself. If the moral environment is affected, since the teachers themselves dwell in it they cannot avoid being influenced; how then should they impress on their pupils a different orientation from what they have received? Each new generation is reared by its predecessor; the latter must therefore improve in order to improve its successor. The movement is circular. It may well happen that at great intervals a person emerges whose ideas and aspirations go beyond those of his fellows; but isolated individuals are not enough to remake the moral constitution of peoples. Of course, we enjoy believing that an eloquent voice is enough to transform magically the material of society; but here as elsewhere nothing comes from nothing. The strongest wills cannot elicit non-existent forces from nothingness and the shocks of experience constantly dissipate these facile illusions. Besides, even though through some incomprehensible miracle a pedagogical system were constituted in opposition to the social system, this very antagonism would rob it of all effect. If the collective organization whence comes the moral state it is desired to combat, is intact, the child is bound to feel its effect from the moment he first has contact with it. The school’s artificial environment can protect him only briefly and weakly. To the extent that real life increasingly takes possession of him, it will come to destroy the work of the teacher. Education, therefore, can be reformed only if society itself is reformed. To do that, the evil from which it suffers must be attacked at its sources.

Now, these sources we know. We discovered them when we showed the springs from which the chief suicidogenetic currents flow. There is one, however, which certainly has no share in the present progress of suicide: the altruistic current. Today, indeed, it is losing much more ground than it gains; it appears principally in lower societies. Though persisting in the army it does not seem to be of an abnormal intensity there; for to a certain extent it is required to maintain military spirit. Besides, even there it is constantly declining. Egoistic suicide and anomic suicide are the only forms, therefore, whose development may be regarded as morbid, and so we have only them to consider.

Egoistic suicide results from the fact that society is not sufficiently integrated at all points to keep all its members under its control. If it increases inordinately, therefore, it is because the state on which it depends has itself excessively expanded; it is because society, weak and disturbed, lets too many persons escape too completely from its influence. Thus, the only remedy for the ill is to restore enough consistency to social groups for them to obtain a firmer grip on the individual, and for him to feel himself bound to them. He must feel himself more solidary with a collective existence which precedes him in time, which survives him, and which encompasses him at all points. If this occurs, he will no longer find the only aim of his conduct in himself, and, understanding that he is the instrument of a purpose greater than himself, he will see that he is not without significance. Life will resume meaning in his eyes, because it will recover its natural aim and orientation. But what groups are best calculated constantly to reimpress on man this salutary sentiment of solidarity?

Not political society. Especially today, in our great modern States, it is too far removed from the individual to effect him uninterruptedly and with sufficient force. Whatever connection there may be between our daily tasks and the whole of public life, it is too indirect for us to feel it keenly and constantly. Only when matters of serious import are at stake do we feel our dependence on the body politic strongly. Of course, the idea of country is rarely wholly obscured among the moral elite of the people; but in ordinary times it is overshadowed, barely perceptible, and even wholly eclipsed. Such unusual circumstances as a great national or political crisis are necessary for it to assume primary importance, invade the consciences of men, and become the guiding motive of action. No such intermittent influence as this can regularly restrain the suicidal tendency. Not only occasionally but continually the individual must be able to realize that his activity has a goal. For his existence not to seem empty to him, he must constantly see it serving an end of immediate concern to him. But this is possible only if a simpler and less extensive social environment enwraps him with real intimacy and offers his activity a nearer aim.

Religious society is equally unadapted to this function. Of course, it has been able to exert a beneficent influence under given conditions; but the necessary conditions are no longer given. In reality, it secures against suicide only if powerfully enough constructed to have a close grip on the individual. Because the Catholic religion imposes on its faithful a vast system of dogmas and practices, and so penetrates all the details of even their earthly life, it attaches them to this life with greater force than Protestantism. The Catholic is much less likely to lose sight of the ties binding him to the confessional group of which he is part, because at every moment this group is recalled to him in the shape of imperative precepts applying to different circumstances of life. He need not anxiously watch his step; he refers each step to God because most of them are divinely regulated, that is, by the Church which is the visible body of God. But furthermore, because these commands supposedly emanate from superhuman authority, human reflection has no right to bring itself to bear on them. It would be actual contradiction to attribute such an origin to them and permit free criticism of them. Religion, therefore, modifies the inclination to suicide only to the extent that it prevents men from thinking freely. This seizure of possession of human intelligence is difficult at present and will become more and more so. It offends our dearest sentiments. We increasingly refuse to admit that limits may be set to reason and that one may say: Thou shalt go no further. And this is no movement of yesterday; the history of the human mind is the very history of the progress of free thought. It is childish to wish to check a current which everything proves irresistible. Unless the great societies of today helplessly crumble and we return to the little social groups of long ago, that is, unless humanity returns to its starting-point, religions will no longer be able to exert very deep or wide sway on consciences. This does not mean that new ones will not be founded. But the only viable ones will be those permitting more freedom to the right of criticism, to individual initiative, than even the most liberal Protestant sects. So they could not have the strong effect on their members necessary to set up an obstacle to suicide.

Though many authors have considered religion the only remedy for the evil, they are mistaken as to the sources of its power. They make it consist almost wholly of a number of lofty thoughts and noble maxims which are capable, on the whole, of accommodating themselves to rationalism, and which they think need only be rooted in the heart and mind of men to prevent weakness. But this is an error, both as to the essence of religion and especially as to the causes of the immunity it has sometimes conferred against suicide. Actually, this privilege belonged to religion, not because it encouraged in men some vague sentiment of a more or less mysterious beyond, but from the powerful and scrupulous discipline to which it subjected thought and conduct. When religion is merely a symbolic idealism, a traditional philosophy, subject to discussion and more or less a stranger to our daily occupations, it can hardly have much influence upon us. A God relegated by his majesty outside of the universe and everything temporal, cannot serve as a goal for our temporal activity, which is thus left without an objective. From that moment on, too many things are unrelated to him for him to give a sense to life. Abandoning the world to us, as unworthy of himself, he simultaneously abandons us to ourselves in everything respecting the world’s life. Men cannot be prevented from taking their lives through meditations on the mysteries surrounding us, nor even through belief in an all-powerful being, but one infinitely removed from ourselves, to whom we shall have to give account only in an undetermined future. In a word, we are only preserved from egoistic suicide in so far as we are socialized; but religions can socialize us only in so far as they refuse us the right of free examination. They no longer have, and probably will never again have, enough authority to wring such a sacrifice from us. We therefore cannot count on them to rear barriers to suicide. Besides, if those who see our only cure in a religious restoration were self-consistent, they would demand the reestablishment of the most archaic religions. For against suicide Judaism preserves better than Catholicism, and Catholicism better than Protestanism. Yet the Protestant religion is the freest from material practices and consequently the most idealistic. On the contrary, Judaism, in spite of its great historic role, still clings to the most primitive religious forms in many respects. How true it is that moral and intellectual superiority of dogma counts for naught in its possible influence on suicide!

We are left with the family, the prophylactic virtue of which is assured. But it would be delusive to believe that one need only reduce the number of the unmarried to stop the growth of suicide. For if married persons have less tendency to kill themselves, this tendency itself increases with the same regularity and in the same proportions as that in the case of unmarried persons. From 1880 to 1887 suicides of married persons grew 35 per cent (3,706 cases as against 2,735); suicides of unmarried persons only 13 per cent (2,894 cases as against 2,554). In 1863-68, according to Bertillon’s calculations, the rate of the former was 154 per million; it was 242 in 1887, an increase of 57 per cent. During the same time the rate for unmarried persons rose very little more; it went from 173 to 289, an increase of 67 per cent. The aggravation appearing in the course of the century is therefore independent of marital status.

Changes have actually occurred in the constitution of the family which no longer allow it to have the same preservative influence as formerly. While it once kept most of its members within its orbit from birth to death and formed a compact mass, indivisible and endowed with a quality of permanence, its duration is now brief. It is barely formed when it begins to disperse. As soon as the children’s first growth is over, they very often leave to complete their education away from home; moreover, it is almost the rule that as soon as they are adult they establish themselves away from their parents and the hearth is deserted. For most of the time, at present, the family may be said to be reduced to the married couple alone, and we know that this union acts feebly against suicide. Consequently, since it plays a smaller role in life, it no longer suffices as an object for life. Not, certainly, that we care less for our children; but they are entwined less closely and continuously with our existence and so this existence needs some other basis for being. Since we have to live without them, we also have to attach our thoughts and acts to other objects.

But it is especially the family as a collective being which this periodic dispersion reduces to non-entity. Formerly, domestic society was not just a number of individuals united by bonds of mutual affection; but the group itself, in its abstract and impersonal unity. It was the hereditary name, together with all the memories it re-called, the family house, the ancestral field, the traditional situation and reputation, etc. All this is tending to disappear. A society momentarily dissolving, only to reform elsewhere but under wholly new conditions and with quite new elements, has not sufficient continuity to acquire a personal aspect, a history of its own, to which its members may feel attachment. If men therefore do not replace this ageold objective of their activity, as it little by little disappears from among them, a great void must inevitably appear in existence.

This cause multiplies the suicides not only of married but of unmarried persons. For this state of the family forces the young people to leave their native home before they are able to found another; partly for this reason, households of a single person become increasingly numerous, and this isolation has been shown to increase the tendency to suicide. Yet nothing can stop the movement. Once, when each local environment was more or less closed to others by usages, traditions, the scarcity of communications, each generation remained perforce in its place of origin or at least could not move far from it. But as these barriers vanish, as these small environments are levelled and blended with one another, the individuals inevitably disperse in accordance with their ambitions and to further their interests into the wider spaces now open to them. No scheme can therefore offset this inevitable swarming of the bees and restore the indivisibility which was once the family’s strength.

III

Is the evil then incurable? At first glance one might think so, because not one of all the societies whose beneficent influence we have demonstrated above seems able to afford a genuine remedy. But we have shown that, while religion, the family and the nation are preservatives against egoistic suicide, the cause of this does not lie in the special sort of sentiments encouraged by each. Rather, they all owe this virtue to the general fact that they are societies and they possess it only in so far as they are well integrated societies; that is, without excess in one direction or the other. Quite a different group may, then, have the same effect, if it has the same cohesion. Besides the society of faith, of family and of politics, there is one other of which no mention has yet been made; that of all workers of the same sort, in association, all who cooperate in the same function, that is, the occupational group or corporation.

Its aptness for this role is proved by its definition. Since it consists of individuals devoted to the same tasks, with solidary or even combined interests, no soil is better calculated to bear social ideas and sentiments. Identity of origin, culture and occupation makes occupational activity the richest sort of material for a common life. Moreover, in the past the corporation has proved that it could form a collective personality, jealous, even excessively so, of its autonomy and its authority over its members; so there is no doubt of its capacity to be a moral environment for them. There is no reason for the corporative interest not acquiring in its workers’ eyes the respectable character and supremacy always possessed by social interests, as contrasted with private interests, in a well-organized society. From another point of view, the occupational group has the three-fold advantage over all others that it is omnipresent, ubiquitous and that its control extends to the greatest part of life. Its influence on individuals is not intermittent, like that of political society, but it is always in contact with them by the constant exercise of the function of which it is the organ and in which they collaborate. It follows the workers wherever they go; which the family cannot do. Wherever they are, they find it enveloping them, recalling them to their duties, supporting them at need. Finally, since occupational life is almost the whole of life, corporative action makes itself felt in every detail of our occupations, which are thus given a collective orientation. Thus the corporation has everything needed to give the individual a setting, to draw him out of his state of moral isolation; and faced by the actual inadequacy of the other groups, it alone can fulfil this indispensable office

But for it to have this influence it must be organized on wholly different bases from those of today. First, it is essential that it become a definite and recognized organ of our public life, instead of remaining a private group legally permitted, but politically ignored. By this we do not mean that it must necessarily be made obligatory, but the important thing is for it to be so constituted as to play a social role instead of expressing only various combinations of particular interests. This is not all. For the frame not to remain empty, all the germs of life of such a nature as to flourish there must find their places in it. For this grouping to remain no mere label, it must be given definite functions, and there are some which it can fulfil better than any other agency.

At present, European societies have the alternative either of leaving occupational life unregulated, or of regulating it through the State’s mediation, since no other organ exists which can play this role of moderator. But the State is too far removed from these complex manifestations to find the special form appropriate to each of them. It is a cumbersome machine, made only for general and clearcut tasks. Its ever uniform action cannot adapt and adjust itself to the infinite variety of special circumstances. It is therefore necessarily compressive and levelling in its action. On the other hand, we feel how impossible it is to leave unorganized all the life thus unattached. In so doing, by an endless series of oscillations we alternately pass from authoritarian regulation made impotent by its excessive rigidity to systematic abstention which cannot last because it breeds anarchy. Whether the question is one of hours of work, or health, or wages, or social insurance and assistance, men of good will constantly encounter the same difficulties. As soon as they try to set up some rules, they prove inapplicable to experience because they lack pliability; or at least, they apply to the matter for which they are made only by doing violence to it.

The only way to resolve this antinomy is to set up a cluster of collective forces outside the State, though subject to its action, whose regulative influence can be exerted with greater variety. Not only will our reconstituted corporations satisfy this condition, but it is hard to see what other groups could do so. For they are close enough to the facts, directly and constantly enough in contact with them, to detect all their nuances, and they should be sufficiently autonomous to be able to respect their diversity. To them, therefore, falls the duty of presiding over companies of insurance, benevolent aid and pensions, the need of which are felt by so many good minds but which we rightly hesitate to place in the hands of the State, already so powerful and awkward; theirs it should likewise be to preside over the disputes constantly arising between the branches of the same occupation, to fix conditions—but in different ways according to the different sorts of enterprise—with which contracts must agree in order to be valid, in the name of the common interest to prevent the strong from unduly exploiting the weak, etc. As labor is divided, law and morality assume a different form in each special function, though still resting everywhere on the same general principles. Besides the rights and duties common to all men, there are others depending on qualities peculiar to each occupation, the number of which increases in importance as occupational activity increasingly develops and diversifies. For each of these special disciplines an equally special organ is needed, to apply and maintain it. Of whom could it consist if not of the workers engaged in the same function?

Here, in broad outlines, is what corporations should be in order to render the services rightly to be expected of them. When their present state is considered, of course, it is somewhat hard to conceive of their ever being elevated to the dignity of moral powers. Indeed, they are made up of individuals attached to one another by no bond, with only superficial and intermittent relations, even inclined to treat each other rather as rivals and enemies than as cooperators. But when once they have so many things in common, when the relations between themselves and the group to which they belong are thus close and continuous, sentiments of solidarity as yet almost unknown will spring up, and the present cold moral temperature of this occupational environment, still so external to its members, would necessarily rise. And these changes would occur not only among the agents of economic life, as the above examples might lead one to believe. Every occupation in society would demand such an organization and be capable of receiving it. Thus the social fabric, the meshes of which are so dangerously relaxed, would tighten and be strengthened throughout its entire extent.

This restoration, the need of which is universally felt, unfortunately has to contend with the bad name left in history by the corporations of the ancient regime. Yet is there not more proof of their indispensability in the fact that they have lasted not merely since the Middle Ages but since Greco-Roman antiquity, than of their uselessness in the fact of their recent abrogation? If occupational activity has been corporatively organized, except for a single century, wherever it has developed to any extent, is it not most probable that such organization is necessary, and that if it was no longer equal to its role a hundred years ago, the remedy was to restore and improve, not radically to suppress it? Certainly, it had finally become an obstacle to the most urgent progress. The old, narrowly local corporation, closed to all outside influence, had become an anomaly in a morally and politically unified nation; the excessive autonomy it enjoyed, making it a State within a State, could not be retained while the governmental organ, ramifying itself in all directions, was more and more subordinating all secondary organs of socitety to itself. So the base on which the institution rested had to be enlarged and the institution itself reconnected with the whole of national life. But if similar corporations of different localities had been connected with one another, instead of remaining isolated, so as to form a single system, if all these systems had been subject to the general influence of the State and thus kept in constant awareness of their solidarity, bureaucratic despotism and occupational egoism would have been kept within proper limits. It is true, tradition is not preserved with such facile invariability in a great association, spread over an immense territory, as in a little coterie not exceeding the boundaries of a municipality; but at the same time each particular group is less inclined to see and pursue only its own interest, once it is in regular relationship with the directive center of public life. Only on this condition, indeed, could awareness of the public welfare be kept constantly alert in the individual consciousness. For, as communications would then be uninterrupted between each single organ and the power charged with representing general interests, society would no longer be recalled only intermittently or vaguely to the individual; we should feel it present in the whole course of our daily life. But by overthrowing existing order without putting anything in its place, corporative egoism has only been replaced by a still more corrosive individual egoism. For this reason, this is the only demolition of all those then accomplished which we have to regret. By dispersing the only groups which could persistently unite individual wills, we ourselves have broken the appointed instrument of our moral reorganization.

But not only egoistic suicide would be combatted in this way. Anomic suicide, closely related to it, might be dealt with by the same treatment. Anomy indeed springs from the lack of collective forces at certain points in society; that is, of groups established for the regulation of social life. Anomy therefore partially results from the same state of disaggregation from which the egoistic current also springs. But this identical cause produces different effects, depending on its point of incidence and whether it influences active and practical functions, or functions that are representative. The former it agitates and exasperates; the latter it disorients and disconcerts. In both cases the remedy is therefore the same. And as a matter of fact we have just seen that the chief role of corporations, in the future as in the past, would be to govern social functions, especially economic functions, and thus to extricate them from their present state of disorganization. Whenever excited appetites tended to exceed all limits, the corporation would have to decide the share that should equitably revert to each of the cooperative parts. Standing above its own members, it would have all necessary authority to demand indispensable sacrifices and concessions and impose order upon them. By forcing the strongest to use their strength with moderation, by preventing the weakest from endlessly multiplying their protests, by recalling both to the sense of their reciprocal duties and the general interest, and by regulating production in certain cases so that it does not degenerate into a morbid fever, it would moderate one set of passions by another, and permit their appeasement by assigning them limits. Thus, a new sort of moral discipline would be established, without which all the scientific discoveries and economic progress in the world could produce only malcontents.

Clearly, in no other environment could this urgent law of distributive justice be developed, nor could it be applied by any other organ. Religion, which once partially assumed this role, would now be unadapted to it. For the essential principle of the only regulation to which it can subject economic life is contempt for riches. If religion exhorts its followers to be satisfied with their lot, it is because of the thought that our condition on earth has nothing to do with our salvation. If religion teaches that our duty is to accept with docility our lot as circumstances order it, this is to attach us exclusively to other purposes, worthier of our efforts; and in general religion recommends moderation in desires for the same reason. But this passive resignation is incompatible with the place which earthly interests have now assumed in collective existence. The discipline they need must not aim at relegating them to second place and reducing them as far as possible, but at giving them an organization in harmony with their importance. The problem has increased in complexity, and while it is no remedy to give appetites free rein, neither is it enough to suppress them in order to control them. Though the last defenders of the old economic theories are mistaken in thinking that regulation is not necessary today as it was yesterday, the apologists of the institution of religion are wrong in believing that yesterday’s regulation can be useful today. It is precisely its lack of present usefulness which causes the evil.

These easy solutions have no relation to the difficulties of the situation. Of course, nothing but a moral power can set a law for men; but this must also be sufficiently associated with affairs of this world to be able to estimate them at their true value. The occupational group has just this two-fold character. Being a group, it sufficiently dominates individuals to set limits to their greed; but sees too much of their life not to sympathize with their needs. Of course, it remains true that the State itself has important functions to fulfill. It alone can oppose the sentiment of general utility and the need for organic equilibrium to the particularism of each corporation. But we know that its action can be useful only if a whole system of secondary organs exists to diversify the action. It is, above all, these secondary organs that must be encouraged.

*   *   *

There is one form of suicide, however, which could not be halted by this means; the form springing from conjugal anomy. We seem here confronted by an antinomy which is insoluble.

As we have said, its cause is divorce with all the ideas and customs from which this institution arises and which it merely establishes more firmly. Does it follow that where divorce exists it must be abrogated? This question is too complex to be treated here; it can be profitably approached only after a study of marriage and its evolution. At present we need only concern ourselves with the relations of divorce and suicide. From this point of view we shall say: The only way to reduce the number of suicides due to conjugal anomy is to make marriage more indissoluble.

What makes the problem especially disturbing and lends it an almost dramatic interest is that the suicides of husbands cannot be diminished in this way without increasing those of wives. Must one of the sexes necessarily be sacrificed, and is the solution only to choose the lesser of the two evils? Nothing else seems possible as long as the interests of husband and wife in marriage are so obviously opposed. As long as the latter requires above all, liberty, and the former, discipline, the institution of matrimony cannot be of equal benefit to both. But this antagonism which just now makes the solution impossible is not without remedy, and it may be hoped that it will disappear.

It originates in fact because the two sexes do not share equally in social life. Man is actively involved in it, while woman does little more than look on from a distance. Consequently man is much more highly socialized than woman. His tastes, aspirations and humor have in large part a collective origin, while his companion’s are more directly influenced by her organism. His needs, therefore, are quite different from hers, and so an institution intended to regulate their common life cannot be equitable and simultaneously satifying to such opposite needs. It cannot simultaneously be agreeable to two persons, one of whom is almost entirely the product of society, while the other has remained to a far greater extent the product of nature. But it is by no means certain that this opposition must necessarily be maintained. Of course, in one sense it was originally less marked than now, but from this we cannot conclude that it must develop indefinitely. For the most primitive social states are often reproduced at the highest stages of evolution, but under different forms, forms almost the opposites of their original ones. To be sure, we have no reason to suppose that woman may ever be able to fulfill the same functions in society as man; but she will be able to play a part in society which, while peculiarly her own, may yet be more active and important than that of today. The female sex will not again become more similar to the male; on the contrary, we may foresee that it will become more different. But these differences will become of greater social use than in the past. Why, for instance, should not aesthetic functions become woman’s as man, more and more absorbed by functions of utility, has to renounce them? Both sexes would thus approximate each other by their very differences. They would be socially equalized, but in different ways. And evolution does seem to be taking place in this direction. Woman differs from man much more in cities than in the country; and yet her intellectual and moral constitution is most impregnated with social life in cities.

In any case, this is the only way to reduce the unhappy moral conflict actually dividing the sexes, definite proof of which the statistics of suicide have given us. Only when the difference between husband and wife becomes less, will marriage no longer be thought, so to speak, necessarily to favor one to the detriment of the other. As for the champions today of equal rights for woman with those of man, they forget that the work of centuries cannot be instantly abolished; that juridical equality cannot be legitimate so long as psychological inequality is so flagrant. Our efforts must be bent to reduce the latter. For man and woman to be equally protected by the same institution, they must first of all be creatures of the same nature. Only then will the indissolubility of the conjugal bond no longer be accused of serving only one of the two parties pleading.

IV

In resume, just as suicide does not proceed from man’s difficulties in maintaining his existence, so the means of arresting its progress is not to make the struggle less difficult and life easier. If more suicides occur today than formerly, this is not because, to maintain ourselves, we have to make more painful efforts, nor that our legitimate needs are less satisfied, but because we no longer know the limits of legitimate needs nor perceive the direction of our efforts. Competition is of course becoming keener every day, because the greater ease of communication sets a constantly increasing number of competitors at loggerheads. On the other hand, a more perfected division of labor and its accompanying more complex cooperation, by multiplying and infinitely varying the occupations by which men can make themselves useful to other men, multiplies the means of existence and places them within reach of a greater variety of persons. The most inferior aptitudes may find a place here. At the same time, the more intense production resulting from this subtler cooperation, by increasing humanity’s total resources, assures each worker an ampler pay and so achieves a balance between the greater wear on vital strength and its recuperation. Indeed, it is certain that average comfort has increased on all levels of the social hierarchy, although perhaps not always in equal proportions. The maladjustment from which we suffer does not exist because the objective causes of suffering have increased in number or intensity; it bears witness not to greater economic poverty, but to an alarming poverty of morality.

We must not, however, mistake the meaning of the word. When an individual or social ill is said to be entirely moral, the usual meaning is that it does not respond to any actual treatment but can be cured only by repeated exhortations, methodical objurgations, in a word, by verbal influence. We reason as though a system of ideas had no reference to the rest of the universe and as if it were enough, consequently, to utter some particular formulae in a particular way in order to destroy or change it. We fail to see that this is applying to things of the spirit the beliefs and methods applied by primitive man to things of the physical world. Just as he believes in the existence of magical words capable of changing one being into another, we implicitly admit without seeing the grossness of our own conception that men’s undertakings and characters can be transformed by appropriate words. Like the savage, who by vehement declaration of his will to see some cosmic phenomenon occur, believes he can make it happen through the use of sympathetic magic, we think that if we warmly state our wish to see such a change accomplished, it will spontaneously take place. In reality, a people’s mental system is a system of definite forces not to be disarranged or rearranged by simple injunctions. It depends really on the grouping and organization of social elements. Given a people composed of a certain number of individuals arranged in a certain way, we obtain a definite total of collective ideas and practices which remain constant so long as the conditions on which they depend are themselves the same. To be sure, the nature of the collective existence necessarily varies depending on whether its composite parts are more or less numerous, arranged on this or that plan, and so its ways of thinking and acting change; but the latter may be changed only by changing the collective existence itself and this cannot be done without modifying its anatomical constitution. By calling the evil of which the abnormal increase in suicides is symptomatic a moral evil, we are far from thinking to reduce it to some superficial ill which may be conjured away by soft words. On the contrary, the change in moral temperament thus betrayed bears witness to a profound change in our social structure. To cure one, therefore, the other must be reformed.

We have explained what, it seems to us, this reform should be. But the final proof of its urgency is that it is forced on us not only by the actual state of suicide but by the whole of our historical development.

The latter’s chief characteristic is to have swept cleanly away all the older social forms of organization. One after another, they have disappeared either through the slow usury of time or through great disturbances, but without being replaced. Society was originally organized on the family basis; it was formed by the union of a number of smaller societies, clans, all of whose members were or considered themselves kin. This organization seems not to have remained long in a pure state. The family quite soon ceases to be a political division and becomes the center of private life. Territorial grouping then succeeds the old family grouping. Individuals occupying the same area gradually, but independently of consanguinity, contract common ideas and customs which are not to the same extent those of their neighbors who live farther away. Thus, little aggregations come to exist with no other material foundation than neighborhood and its resultant relations, each one, however, with its own distinct physiognomy; we have the village, or better, the city-state and its dependent territory. Of course, they do not usually shut themselves off in savage isolation. They become confederated, combine under various forms and thus develop more complex societies which they enter however without sacrificing their personalities. They remain the elemental segments of which the whole society is merely an enlarged reproduction. But bit by bit, as these confederations become tighter, the territorial surroundings blend with one another and lose their former moral individuality. From one city or district to another, the differences decrease. The great change brought about by the French Revolution was precisely to carry this levelling to a point hitherto unknown. Not that it improvised this change; the latter had long since been prepared by the progressive centralization to which the ancient regime had advanced. But the legal suppression of the former provinces and the creation of new, purely artificial and nominal divisions definitely made it permanent. Since then the development of means of communication, by mixing the populations, has almost eliminated the last traces of the old dispensation. And since what remained of occupational organization was violently destroyed at the same time, all secondary organs of social life were done away with.

Only one collective form survived the tempest: the State. By the nature of things this therefore tended to absorb all forms of activity which had a social character, and was henceforth confronted by nothing but an unstable flux of individuals. But then, by this very fact, it was compelled to assume functions for which it was unfitted and which it has not been able to discharge satisfactorily. It has often been said that the State is as intrusive as it is impotent. It makes a sickly attempt to extend itself over all sorts of things which do not belong to it, or which it grasps only by doing them violence. Thence the expenditure of energy with which the State is reproached and which is truly out of proportion with the results obtained. On the other hand, individuals are no longer subject to any other collective control but the State’s, since it is the sole organized collectivity. Individuals are made aware of society and of their dependence upon it only through the State. But since this is far from them, it can exert only a distant, discontinuous influence over them; which is why this feeling has neither the necessary constancy nor strength. For most of their lives nothing about them draws them out of themselves and imposes restraint on them. Thus they inevitably lapse into egoism or anarchy. Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him. These are really the two characteristics of our moral situation. While the State becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.

To remedy this evil, the restitution to local groups of something of their old autonomy is periodically suggested. This is called decentralization. But the only really useful decentralization is one which would simultaneously produce a greater concentration of social energies. Without loosening the bonds uniting each part of society with the State, moral powers must be created with an influence, which the State cannot have, over the multitude of individuals. Today neither the commune, the department nor the province has enough ascendency over us to exert this influence; we see in them only conventional labels without meaning. Of course, other things being equal, people usually prefer to live where they were born and have been reared. But local patriotisms no longer exist nor can they exist. The general life of the country, permanently unified, rebels at all dispersion of this sort. We may regret the past—but in vain. It is impossible to artificially resuscitate a particularist spirit which no longer has any foundation. Henceforth it will be possible to lighten somewhat the functioning of the machinery of government by various ingenious combinations; but the moral stability of society can never be affected in this way. By so doing the burden of overloaded ministries can be reduced or a little more scope given to the activity of regional authorities; but not in this way will so many moral environments be constructed from the different regions. For in addition to the fact that administrative measures would be inadequate to achieve such a result, the result itself is neither possible nor desirable.

The only decentralization which would make possible the multiplication of the centers of communal life without weakening national unity is what might be called occupational decentralization. For, as each of these centers would be only the focus of a special, limited activity, they would be inseparable from one another and the individual could thus form attachments there without becoming less solidary with the whole. Social life can be divided, while retaining its unity, only if each of these divisions represents a function. This has been understood by the ever growing number18 of authors and statesmen, who wish to make the occupational group the base of our political organization, that is, divide the electoral college, not by sections of territory but by corporations. But first the corporation must be organized. It must be more than an assemblage of individuals who meet on election day without any common bond. It can fulfill its destined role only if, in place of being a creature of convention, it becomes a definite institution, a collective personality, with its customs and traditions, its rights and duties, its unity. The great difficulty is not to decree that the representatives shall be selected by occupation and what each occupation’s share shall be, but to make each corporation become a moral individuality. Otherwise, only another external and artificial subdivision will be added to the existing ones which we wish to supplant.

Thus a monograph on suicide has a bearing beyond the special class of facts which it particularly embraces. The questions it raises are closely connected with the most serious practical problems of the present time. The abnormal development of suicide and the general unrest of contemporary societies spring from the same causes. The exceptionally high number of voluntary deaths manifests the state of deep disturbance from which civilized societies are suffering, and bears witness to its gravity. It may even be said that this measures it. When these sufferings are expressed by a theorist they may be considered exaggerated and unfaithfully interpreted. But in these statistics of suicide they speak for themselves, allowing no room for personal interpretation. The only possible way, then, to check this current of collective sadness is by at least lessening the collective malady of which it is a sign and a result. We have shown that it is not necessary, in order to accomplish this, to restore, artificially, social forms which are outworn and which could be endowed with only an appearance of life, or to create out of whole cloth entirely new forms without historical analogies. We must seek in the past the germs of new life which it contained, and hasten their development.

As for determining more exactly the special forms under which these germs are destined to develop from now on, that is, the details of the occupational organization that we shall need, this cannot be attempted within the compass of this work. Only after a special study of the corporative regime and the laws of its development would it be possible to make the above conclusions more precise. Nor must one exaggerate the importance of the too definite programs generally embraced by our political philosophers. They are imaginative flights, too far from the complexity of facts to be of much practical value; social reality is not neat enough and is too little understood as yet to be anticipated in detail. Only direct contact with things can give the teachings of science the definiteness they lack. Once the existence of the evil is proved, its nature and its source, and we consequently know the general features of the remedy and its point of application, the important thing is not to draw up in advance a plan anticipating everything, but rather to set resolutely to work.

See Règles de la Méthode sociologique, chap. III.

And is not every logical connection thus mediate? Close as the two terms it connects may be, they are always distinct, and thus there is always a space, a logical interval between them.

What helps make this question unclear is the failure to observe how relative these ideas of sickness and health are. What is normal today will no longer be so tomorrow, and vice versa. The large intestines of primitive man are normal for his environment but would not be so today. What is morbid for individuals may be normal for society. Neurasthenia is a sickness from the point of view of individual physiology; but what would a society be without neurasthenics? They really have a social role to play. When a state is said to be normal or abnormal, one must add, “With reference to this or that,” or else one is misunderstood.

Division du travail social, p. 266.

Oettingen, Ueber acuten und chronischen Selbstmord, pp. 28-32 and Moralstatistik, Ñ. 761.

Poletti ; we know his theory, however, only through its exposition by Tarde, in his Criminalité comparée, p. 72.

To escape this conclusion, to be sure, it is said (Oettingen) that suicide is only one of the evil aspects (Schattenseiten) of civilization, and that it may be diminished without affecting civilization. But this is playing with words. If suicide springs from the same causes on which culture depends, we cannot diminish one without reducing the other; for the only means of combatting it effectively is to attack its causes.

This argument is open to an objection. Buddhism and Jainism are systematically pessimistic doctrines of life; should the indication of a morbid state of the peoples who have practiced them be assumed? The author knows too little of them to decide the question. But let our reasoning be considered only with reference to the European peoples, and even to the societies of a metropolitan type. Within these limits we think it open to little dispute. It is still possible that the spirit of renunciation characteristic of certain other soceities may be formulated into a system without anomaly.

Among others, Lisle, op. cit., p. 327 and ff.

It is not that the distinction between moral and immoral acts is absolute, even in these cases. The opposition between good and evil lacks the radical character ascribed to it by the popular conscience. Imperceptible gradations lead from one to the other and frontiers are often unclear. Only when acknowledged crimes are involved is the distance great, and the relation between extremes less evident than in the case of suicide.

Op. cit., p. 499.

Art. Suicide, in Diction. Philos.

Let us not be misunderstood. Of course, the time will come for our present societies to perish; they will therefore decompose into smaller groups. But, if the future is to be judged by the past, this situation will be merely temporary and these partial groups will be the material of new societies, much larger than those of today. One may even foresee that these partial groups will be much greater than those whose combination formed present-day societies.

The first colleges of artisans go back to imperial Rome. See Marquardt, Privatleben der Roemer, II, p. 4.

See the reasons in my Division du travail social, Bk. II, ch. III, especially p. 335 ff.

It may be foreseen that this differentiation would probably no longer have the strictly regulative character that it has today. Woman would not be officially excluded from certain functions and relegated to others. She could choose more freely, but as her choice would be determined by her aptitudes it would generally bear on the same sort of occupations. It would be perceptibly uniform, though not obligatory.

Of course, we can only show the chief stages of this evolution. We do not mean to imply that modern societies succeeded directly from the city-state; we omit intermediate stages.

See on this point Benoist, L’organisation du suffrage universel, in Revue des Deux-Mondes, 1886.