CHAPTER 6 INDIVIDUAL FORMS OF THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF SUICIDE

ONE result now stands out prominently from our investigation: namely, that there are not one but various forms of suicide. Of course, suicide is always the act of a man who prefers death to life. But the causes determining him are not of the same sort in all cases: they are even sometimes mutually opposed. Now, such difference in causes must reappear in their effects. We may therefore be sure that there are several sorts of suicide which are distinct in quality from one another. But the certainty that these differences exist is not enough; we need to observe them directly and know of what they consist. We need to see the characteristics of special suicides grouped in distinct classes corresponding to the types just distinguished. Thus we would follow the various currents which generate suicide from their social origins to their individual manifestations.

This morphological classification, which was hardly possible at the commencement of this study, may be undertaken now that an aetiological classification forms its basis. Indeed, we only need to start with the three kinds of factors which we have just assigned to suicide and discover whether the distinctive properties it assumes in manifesting itself among individual persons may be derived from them, and if so, how. Of course, not all the peculiarities which suicide may present can be deduced in this fashion; for some may exist which depend solely on the person’s own nature. Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon. But these causes in turn must stamp the suicides they determine with a shade all their own, a special mark expressive of them. This collective mark we must find.

To be sure, this can be done only approximately. We are not in a position to describe methodically all the suicides daily committed by men or committed in the course of history. We can only emphasize the most general and striking characteristics without even having an objective criterion for making the selection. Moreover, we can only proceed deductively in relating them to the respective causes from which they seem to spring. All that we can do is to show their logical implication, though the reasoning may not always be able to receive experimental confirmation. We do not forget that a deduction uncontrolled by experiment is always questionable. Yet this research is far from being useless, even with these reservations. Even though it may be considered only a method of illustrating the preceding results by examples, it would still have the worth of giving them a more concrete character by connecting them more closely with the data of sense-perception and with the details of daily experience. It will also introduce some little distinctiveness into this mass of facts usually lumped together as though varying only by shades, though there are striking differences among them. Suicide is like mental alienation. For the popular mind the latter consists in a single state, always identical, capable only of superficial differentiation according to circumstances. For the alienist, on the contrary, the word denotes many nosological types. Every suicide is, likewise, ordinarily considered a victim of melancholy whose life has become a burden to him. Actually, the acts by which a man renounces life belong to different species, of wholly different moral and social significance.

I

One form of suicide, certainly known to antiquity, has widely developed in our day: Lamartine’s Raphaël offers us its ideal type. Its characteristic is a condition of melancholic languor which relaxes all the springs of action. Business, public affairs, useful work, even domestic duties inspire the person only with indifference and aversion. He is unwilling to emerge from himself. On the other hand, what is lost in activity is made up for in thought and inner life. In revulsion from its surroundings consciousness becomes self-preoccupied, takes itself as its proper and unique study, and undertakes as its main task self-observation and self-analysis. But by this extreme concentration it merely deepens the chasm separating it from the rest of the universe. The moment the individual becomes so enamoured of himself, inevitably he increasingly detaches himself from everything external and emphasizes the isolation in which he lives, to the point of worship. Self-absorption is not a good method of attaching one’s self to others. All movement is, in a sense, altruistic in that it is centrifugal and disperses existence beyond its own limitations. Reflection, on the other hand, has about it something personal and egoistic; for it is only possible as a person becomes detached from the outside world, and retreats from it into himself. And reflection is the more intense, the more complete this retreat. Action without mixing with people is impossible; to think, on the contrary, we must cease to have connection with them in order to consider them objectively—the more so, in order to think about oneself. So the man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. If he loves, it is not to give himself, to blend in fecund union with another being, but to meditate on his love. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.

On the other hand, all internal life draws its primary material from without. All we can think of is objects or our conceptions of them. We cannot reflect our own consciousness in a purely undetermined state; in this shape it is inconceivable. Now consciousness becomes determined only when affected by something not itself. Therefore, if it individualizes beyond a certain point, if it separates itself too radically from other beings, men or things, it finds itself unable to communicate with the very sources of its normal nourishment and no longer has anything to which it can apply itself. It creates nothingness within by creating it without, and has nothing left upon which to reflect but its own wretched misery. Its only remaining object of thought is its inner nothingness and the resulting melancholy. It becomes addicted and abandoned to this with a kind of morbid joy which Lamartine, himself familiar with it, describes so well in the words of his hero: “The languor of all my surroundings was in marvelous harmony with my own languor. It increased this languor by its charm. I plunged into the depths of melancholy. But is was a lively melancholy, full enough of thoughts, impressions, communings with the infinite, half-obscurity of my own soul, so that I had no wish to abandon it. A human disease, but one the experience of which attracts rather than pains, where death resembles a voluptuous lapse into the infinite. I resolved to abandon myself to it wholly, henceforth; to avoid all distracting society and to wrap myself in silence, solitude and frigidity in the midst of whatever company I should encounter; my spiritual isolation was a shroud, through which I desired no longer to see men, but only nature and God.”

However, one cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist. This is the element of truth in the parallelism Hartmann claims to observe between the development of consciousness and the weakening of the will to live. Ideation and movement are really two hostile forces, advancing in inverse directions, and movement is life. To think, it is said, is to abstain from action; in the same degree, therefore, it is to abstain from living. This is why the absolute reign of idea cannot be achieved, and especially cannot continue; for this is death. But this does not mean, as Hartmann believes, that reality itself is intolerable unless veiled by illusion. Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth; but to create it our thought must be abnormal. If consciousness sometimes constitutes unhappiness for a man, it is only by achieving a morbid development in which, revolting against its own very nature, it poses as an absolute and seeks its purpose in itself. It is so far from being a belated discovery, from being the ultimate conquest of knowledge, that we might equally well have sought the chief elements of our description in the Stoic frame of mind. Stoicism also teaches man to detach himself from everything external in order to live by and through himself. Only, the doctrine ends in suicide since life then has no reason.

The same characteristics reappear in the ultimate act which follows logically from this moral condition. There is nothing violent or hasty about its unfolding. The sufferer selects his own time and meditates on his plan well in advance. He is not even repelled by slow means. A calm melancholy, sometimes not unpleasant, marks his last moments. He analyzes himself to the last. Such is the case of the business man mentioned by Falret who goes to an isolated forest to die of hunger. During an agony of almost three weeks he had regularly kept a journal of his impressions, which has been preserved. Another asphyxiates himself by blowing on the charcoal which is to kill him, and jots down his observations bit by bit: “I do not consider that I am showing either courage or cowardice; I simply wish to use my few remaining moments to describe the sensations felt during asphyxiation and the length of the suffering.” Another man, before abandoning himself to what he calls “the intoxicating perspective of rest,” builds a complicated apparatus to accomplish his own death without having his blood stain the floor.

It is clear how these various peculiarities are related to egoistic suicide. They are almost certainly its consequence and individual expression. This loathness to act, this melancholy detachment, spring from the over-individuation by which we have defined this type of suicide. If the individual isolates himself, it is because the ties uniting him with others are slackened or broken, because society is not sufficiently integrated at the points where he is in contact with it. These gaps between one and another individual consciousness, estranging them from each other, are authentic results of the weakening of the social fabric. And finally, the intellectual and meditative nature of suicides of this sort is readily explained if we recall that egoistic suicide is necessarily accompanied by a high development of knowledge and reflective intelligence. Indeed, it is clear that in a society where consciousness is normally compelled to extend its field of action, it is also much more in danger of transgressing the normal limits which shelter it from self-destruction. A mind that questions everything, unless strong enough to bear the weight of its ignorance, risks questioning itself and being engulfed in doubt. If it cannot discover the claims to existence of the objects of its questioning—and it would be miraculous if it so soon succeeded in solving so many mysteries—it will deny them all reality, the mere formulation of the problem already implying an inclination to negative solutions. But in so doing it will become void of all positive content and, finding nothing which offers it resistance, will launch itself perforce into the emptiness of inner revery.

But this lofty form of egoistic suicide is not the only one; there is another, more commonplace. Instead of reflecting sadly on his condition, the person makes his decision cheerfully. He knows his own egoism and its logical consequences; but he accepts them in advance and undertakes to live the life of a child or animal, except for his knowledge of what he is doing. He assigns himself the single task of satisfying his personal needs, even simplifying them to make this easier. Knowing that he can hope for nothing better, he asks nothing more, prepared, if unable to reach this single end, to terminate a thenceforth meaningless existence. This is Epicurean suicide. For Epicurus did not enjoin his disciples to hasten their death, but advised them on the contrary to live as long as they found any interest in doing so. Only, as he felt clearly that if a man has no other purpose in life, he risks momentarily having none at all, and as sensual pleasure is a very slight link to attach men to life, he exhorted them always to be ready to leave it, at the least stimulus of circumstance. In this case philosophic, dreamy melancholy is replaced by sceptical, disillusioned matter-of-factness, which becomes especially prominent at the final hour. The sufferer deals himself the blow without hate or anger, but equally with none of the morbid satisfaction with which the intellectual relishes his suicide. He is even more passionless than the latter. He is not surprised at the end to which he has come; he has foreseen it as a more or less impending event. He therefore makes no long preparations; in harmony with all his preceding existence, he only tries to minimize pain. Such especially is the case of those voluptuaries who, when the fatal moment arrives when they can no longer continue their easy existence, kill themselves with ironic tranquillity and a matter-of-course mood.

*   *   *

When we established the nature of altruistic suicide, sufficient examples were given to make it superfluous to describe its characteristic psychological forms at length. They are the opposite of those characterizing egoistic suicide, as different as altruism itself from its opposite. The egoistic suicide is characterized by a general depression, in the form either of melancholic languor or Epicurean indifference. Altruistic suicide, on the contrary, involves a certain expenditure of energy, since its source is a violent emotion. In the case of obligatory suicide, this energy is controlled by the reason and the will. The individual kills himself at the command of his conscience; he submits to an imperative. Thus, the dominant note of his act is the serene conviction derived from the feeling of duty accomplished; the deaths of Cato and of Commander Beaurepaire are historic types of this. When altruism is at a high pitch, on the other hand, the impulse is more passionate and unthinking. A burst of faith and enthusiasm carries the man to his death. This enthusiasm itself is either happy or somber, depending on the conception of death as a means of union with a beloved deity, or as an expiatory sacrifice, to appease some terrible, probably hostile power. There is no resemblance between the religious fervor of the fanatic who hurls himself joyously beneath the chariot of his idol, that of the monk overcome by acedia, or the remorse of the criminal who puts an end to his days to expiate his crime. Yet beneath these superficially different appearances, the essential features of the phenomenon are the same. This is an active suicide, contrasting, accordingly, with the depressed suicide discussed above.

The same quality reappears in the simpler suicides of primitive man or of the soldier, who kill themselves either for a slight offense to their honor or to prove their courage. The ease with which they are performed is not to be confused with the disillusionment and matter-of-factness of the Epicurean. The disposition to sacrifice one’s life is none the less an active tendency even though it is strongly enough embedded to be effected with the ease and spontaneity of instinct. A case which may be considered the model of this species is reported by Leroy. It concerns an officer, who, after having once unsuccessfully tried to hang himself, prepares to make another attempt but first takes care to record his last impressions: “Mine is a strange destiny! I have just hung myself, had lost consciousness, the rope broke, I fell on my left arm…. My new preparations are complete, I shall start again shortly but shall smoke a final pipe first; the last, I hope. I experienced no struggle with my feelings the first time, things went very well; I hope the second will go as well. I am as calm as though I were taking an early morning glass. It’s strange, I will confess, but it is so. It is all true. I am about to die a second time with perfect tranquillity.” Underneath this tranquillity is neither irony nor scepticism nor the sort of involuntary wincing which the voluptuary never quite manages completely to hide when committing suicide. The man’s calmness is perfect; there is no trace of effort, the action is straightforward because all the vital inclinations prepare his course.

*   *   *

There is, finally, a third sort of persons who commit suicide, contrasting both with the first variety in that their action is essentially passionate, and with the second because this inspiring passion which dominates their last moment is of a wholly different nature. It is neither enthusiasm, religious, moral or political faith, nor any of the military virtues; it is anger and all the emotions customarily associated with disappointment. Brierre de Boismont, who analyzed the papers left behind by 1,507 suicides, found that very many expressed primarily irritation and exasperated weariness. Sometimes they contain blasphemies, violent recriminations against life in general, sometimes threats and accusations against a particular person to whom the responsibility for the suicide’s unhappiness is imputed. With this group are obviously connected suicides which are preceded by a murder; a man kills himself after having killed someone else whom he accuses of having ruined his life. Never is the suicide’s exasperation more obvious than when expressed not only by words but by deeds. The suicidal egoist never yields to such displays of violence. He too, doubtless, at times regrets life, but mournfully. It oppresses him, but does not irritate him by sharp conflicts. It seems empty rather than painful to him. It does not interest him, but it also does not impose positive suffering upon him. His state of depression does not even permit excitement. As for altruistic suicides, they are quite different. Almost by definition, the altruist sacrifices himself and not his fellows. We therefore encounter a third psychological form distinct from the preceding two.

This form clearly appears to be involved in the nature of anomic suicide. Unregulated emotions are adjusted neither to one another nor to the conditions they are supposed to meet; they must therefore conflict with one another most painfully. Anomy, whether progressive or regressive, by allowing requirements to exceed appropriate limits, throws open the door to disillusionment and consequently to disappointment. A man abruptly cast down below his accustomed status cannot avoid exasperation at feeling a situation escape him of which he thought himself master, and his exasperation naturally revolts against the cause, whether real or imaginary, to which he attributes his ruin. If he recognizes himself as to blame for the catastrophe, he takes it out on himself; otherwise, on some one else. In the former case there will be only suicide; in the latter, suicide may be preceded by homicide or by some other violent outburst. In both cases the feeling is the same; only its application varies. The individual always attacks himself in an access of anger, whether or not he has previously attacked another. This reversal of all his habits reduces him to a state of acute over-excitation, which necessarily tends to seek solace in acts of destruction. The object upon whom the passions thus aroused are discharged is fundamentally of secondary importance. The accident of circumstances determines their direction.

It is precisely the same whenever, far from falling below his previous status, a person is impelled in the reverse direction, constantly to surpass himself, but without rule or moderation. Sometimes he misses the goal he thought he could reach, but which was really beyond his powers; his is the suicide of the man misunderstood, very common in days when no recognized social classification is left. Sometimes, after having temporarily succeeded in satisfying all his desires and craving for change, he suddenly dashes against an invincible obstacle, and impatiently renounces an existence thenceforth too restrictive for him. This is the case of Werther, the turbulent heart as he calls himself, enamoured of infinity, killing himself from disappointed love, and the case of all artists who, after having drunk deeply of success, commit suicide because of a chance hiss, a somewhat severe criticism, or because their popularity has begun to wane.

There are yet others who, having no complaint to make of men or circumstances, automatically weary of a palpably hopeless pursuit, which only irritates rather than appeases their desires. They then turn against life in general and accuse it of having deceived them. But the vain excitement to which they are prey leaves in its wake a sort of exhaustion which prevents their disappointed passions from displaying themselves with a violence equal to that of the preceding cases. They are wearied, as it were, at the end of a long course, and thus become incapable of energetic reaction. The person lapses into a sort of melancholy resembling somewhat that of the intellectual egoist but without its languorous charm. The dominating note is a more or less irritated disgust with life. This state of soul was already observed by Seneca among his contemporaries, together with the suicide resulting from it. “The evil which assails us,” he writes, “is not in the localities we inhabit but in ourselves. We lack strength to endure the least task, being incapable of suffering pain, powerless to enjoy pleasure, impatient with everything. How many invoke death when, after having tried every sort of change, they find themselves reverting to the same sensations, unable to discover any new experience.” In our own day one of the types which perhaps best incarnate this sort of spirit is Chateaubriand’s René. While Raphaël is a creature of meditation who finds his ruin within himself, René is the insatiate type. “I am accused,” he exclaims unhappily, “of being inconstant in my desires, of never long enjoying the same fancy, of being prey to an imagination eager to sound the depth of my pleasures as though it were overwhelmed by their persistence; I am accused of always missing the goal I might attain. Alas! I only seek an unknown good, the instinct for which pursues me. Is it my fault if I everywhere find limits, if everything once experienced has no value for me?”

Raphaël, ed. Hachette, p. 6.

Hypochondrie et suicide, p. 316.

Brierre de Boismont, Du suicide, p. 198.

Ibid., p. 194.

Examples will be found in Brierre de Boismont, pp. 494 and 506.

Leroy, op. cit., p. 241.

See cases in Brierre de Boismont, pp. 187-189.

De tranquillitate animi, II, sub fine. Cf. Letter XXIV.

René, ed. Vialat, Paris, 1849, p. 112.

See above, p. 258.

Seneca praises Cato’s suicide as the triumph of the human will over material things (See De Prov. 2, 9 and Ep. 71, 16).

Morselli, pp. 445-446.

See Lisle, op. cit., p. 94.

This description conclusively illustrates the relations and differences between egoistic and anomic suicide, which our sociological analysis had already led us to glimpse. Suicides of both types suffer from what has been called the disease of the infinite. But the disease does not assume the same form in both cases. In one, reflective intelligence is affected and immoderately overnourished; in the other, emotion is over-excited and freed from all restraint. In one, thought, by dint of falling back upon itself, has no object left; in the other, passion, no longer recognizing bounds, has no goal left. The former is lost in the infinity of dreams, the second in the infinity of desires.

Thus, not even the psychological formula concerning the suicide has the simplicity commonly attributed to it. It is no definition to say of him that he is weary of life, disgusted with life, etc. There are really very different varieties of suicides, and these differences appear in the way suicide is performed. Acts and agents may thus be classified in a certain number of species; these species also correspond in essential traits with the types of suicide we have established previously in accordance with the nature of the social causes on which they rest. They are like prolongations of these causes inside of individuals.

We should add, to be sure, that they are not always found in actual experience in a state of purity and isolation. They are very often combined with one another, giving rise to composite varieties; characteristics of several types will be united in a single suicide. The reason for this is that different social causes of suicide themselves may simultaneously affect the same individual and impose their combined effects upon him. Thus invalids fall a prey to deliria of different sorts, involved with one another but all converging in a single direction so as to cause a single act, despite their different origins. They mutually re-enforce each other. Thus again, widely different fevers may coexist in one person and contribute each in its own way and manner to raising the temperature of the body.

Two factors of suicide, especially, have a peculiar affinity for one another: namely, egoism and anomy. We know that they are usually merely two different aspects of one social state; thus it is not surprising that they should be found in the same individual. It is, indeed, almost inevitable that the egoist should have some tendency to non-regulation; for, since he is detached from society, it has not sufficient hold upon him to regulate him. If, nevertheless, his desires are not usually excited, it is because in his case the life of the passions languishes, because he is wholly introverted and not attracted by the world outside. But he may be neither a complete egoist nor a pure victim of agitation. In such cases he may play both roles concurrently. To fill up the gap he feels inside himself, he seeks new sensations; he applies, to be sure, less ardour than the passionate temperament properly so-called, but he also wearies sooner and this weariness casts him back upon himself, thus re-enforcing his original melancholy. Inversely, an unregulated temperament does not lack a spark of egoism; for if one were highly socialized one would not rebel at every social restraint. Only, this spark cannot develop in cases where the action of anomy is preponderant; for, by casting its possessor outside himself, it prevents him from retiring into himself. If anomy is less intense, however, it may permit egoism to produce certain characteristic effects. The obstacle, for example, against which the victim of insatiate desires dashes may cause him to fall back upon himself and seek an outlet for his disappointed passions in an inner life. Finding there nothing to which he can attach himself, however, the melancholy inspired by this thought can only drive him to new self-escape, thus increasing his uneasiness and discontent. Thus are produced mixed suicides where depression alternates with agitation, dream with action, transports of desire with reflective sadness.

Anomy may likewise be associated with altruism. One and the same crisis may ruin a person’s life, disturb the equilibrium between him and his surroundings, and, at the same time, drive his altruistic disposition to a state which incites him to suicide. Such is notably the case of what we have called suicides of the besieged. If, for example, the Jews killed themselves en masse upon the capture of Jerusalem, it was both because the victory of the Romans, by making them subjects and tributaries of Rome, threatened to transform the sort of life to which they were accustomed and because they loved their city and cult too much to survive the probable destruction of both. Thus it often happens that a bankrupt man kills himself as much because he cannot live on a smaller footing, as to spare his name and family the disgrace of bankruptcy. If officers and noncommissioned officers readily commit suicide just when forced to retire, it is also doubtless because of the sudden change about to occur in their way of living, as well as because of their general disposition to attach little value to life. The two causes operate in the same direction. There then result suicides where either the passionate exultation or the courageous resolution of altruistic suicide blends with the exasperated infatuation produced by anomy.

Finally, egoism and altruism themselves, contraries as they are, may combine their influence. At certain epochs, when disaggregated society can no longer serve as an objective for individual activities, individuals or groups of individuals will nevertheless be found who, while experiencing the influence of this general condition of egoism, aspire to other things. Feeling, however, that a constant passage from one egoistic pleasure to another is a poor method of escaping themselves, and that fugitive joys, even though constantly renewed, could never quiet their unrest, they seek some durable object to which to attach themselves permanently and which shall give meaning to their lives. Since they are contented with nothing real, however, they can find satisfaction only in creating out of whole cloth some ideal reality to play this role. So in thought they create an imaginary being whose slaves they become and to which they devote themselves the more exclusively the more they are detached from everything else, themselves included. To it they assign all the attachment to existence which they ascribe to themselves, since all else is valueless in their eyes. So they live a twofold, contradictory existence: individualists so far as the real world is concerned, they are immoderate altruists in everything that concerns this ideal objective. Both dispositions lead to suicide.

Such are the sources and the nature of Stoic suicide. Immediately above we pointed out its reproduction of certain essential qualities of egoistic suicide; but it may be considered under a totally different aspect. Though the Stoic professes absolute indifference to everything beyond the range of the individual personality, though he exhorts the individual to be self-sufficient, he simultaneously assigns the individual a close dependence on universal reason, and even reduces him to nothing more than the instrument through which this reason is realized. He thus combines two antagonistic conceptions: the most radical moral individualism and an immoderate pantheism. The suicide he commits is thus both apathetic, like that of the egoist, and performed as a duty like that of the altruist. The former’s melancholy and the active energy of the latter appear in this form of suicide; egoism here mingles with mysticism. This same combination also distinguishes the mysticism characteristic of periods of decadence, which, contrary to appearances, is so different from that observed among young, formative peoples. The latter springs from the collective enthusiasm which carries individual wills along with it on its own way, from the self-abnegation with which citizens forget themselves to share in a common work; the former is mere self-conscious egoism, conscious also of its own nothingness, striving to surpass itself but succeeding only artificially and in appearance.

II

One might think a priori that some relation existed between the nature of suicide and the kind of death chosen by the one who commits it. It seems quite natural that the means he uses to carry out his resolve should depend on the feelings urging him on and thus express these feelings. We might therefore be tempted to use the data concerning this matter supplied us by statistics to describe the various sorts of suicides more closely, by their external form. But our researches into this matter have given only negative results.

Social causes, however, certainly determine the choice of these means; for the relative frequency of the various ways of committing suicide is invariable for long periods in a given society, while varying very perceptibly from one society to another, as Table XXX shows.

Thus, each people has its favorite sort of death and the order of its preferences changes very rarely. It is even more constant than the total number of suicides; events which sometimes transiently modify the latter do not always affect the former. Moreover, social causes are so preponderant that the influence of cosmic factors does not appear to be appreciable. Thus suicides by drowning, contrary to all presumptions, do not vary from one season to another in accordance with any special law. Here is their monthly distribution in France for 1872-78 compared with that of suicides in general:

TABLE XXX—Distribution of the Different Kinds of Death Among 1,000 Suicides (Both Sexes Combined)

Suicides by drowning increase very little more than others during the fine season; the difference is insignificant. Yet it would seem that Summer should favor them exceptionally. It has, to be sure, been said that drowning was less employed in the North than in the South, and this fact has been attributed to climate. But at Copenhagen during the period from 1845 to 1856 this form of suicide was no less common than in Italy, (281 cases per thousand as against 300). None was more common in St. Petersburg during the years 1873-74. So temperature affords no obstacle to this sort of death.

The social causes on which suicides in general depend, however, differ from those which determine the way they are committed; for no relation can be discovered between the types of suicides which we have distinguished and the most common methods of performance. Italy is a fundamentally Catholic country where scientific culture was relatively little developed until recent times. Thus it is very probable that altruistic suicides are more frequent there than in France and Germany, since they occur somewhat in inverse ratio to intellectual development; several reasons to be found in the remainder of this work will confirm this hypothesis. Consequently, as suicide by fire-arms is much more common there than in the central European countries, it might be thought not unconnected with the state of altruism. In support of this supposition, it might also be noted that this is also the sort of suicide preferred by soldiers. Unfortunately, it happens that in France it is the most intellectual classes, authors, artists, officials, who kill themselves oftenest in this way.13 It might likewise seem that suicide from melancholy finds its natural expression in hanging. Actually, it is most employed in the country, yet melancholy is a state of mind more characteristic of the city.

The causes impelling a man to kill himself are therefore not those determining him to do so in one way rather than in another. The motives which set his choice are of a totally different sort. First, the totality of customs and usages of all kinds, placing one instrument of death rather than another at his disposal. Always following the line of least resistance so long as no opposing factor intervenes, he tends to employ the means of destruction lying nearest to his hand and made familiar to him by daily use. That, for example, is why suicides by throwing one’s self from a high place are oftener committed in great cities than in the country: the buildings are higher. Likewise, the more the land is covered with railroads the more general becomes the habit of seeking death by throwing one’s self under a train. The table showing the relative share of the different methods of suicide in the total number of voluntary deaths thus partly reproduces the state of industrial technology, of the most wide-spread forms of architecture, of scientific knowledge, etc. As the use of electricity becomes commoner, suicides by means of electric processes will become commoner also.

But perhaps the most powerful cause is the relative dignity attributed by each people, and by each social group within each people, to the different sorts of death. They are far from being regarded as all on the same plane. Some are considered nobler, others repel as being vulgar and degrading; and the way opinion classifies them varies with the community. In the army, decapitation is considered an infamous death; elsewhere, it is hanging. This is why suicide by strangulation is much commoner in the country than in the city and in small cities than in large ones. It is because it connotes something gross and violent which conflicts with the gentleness of urban manners and the regard of the cultivated classes for the human body. Perhaps this revulsion is also associated with the dishonorable repute clinging for historical reason to this sort of death, one which is felt more keenly by refined urban populations than is possible for the simpler rural sensibility.

The form of death chosen by the suicide is therefore something entirely foreign to the very nature of suicide. Intimately related as these two elements of a single act seem, they are actually independent of each other. At least, there are only external relations of juxtaposition between them. For while both depend on social causes, the social conditions expressed by them are widely different. The first has nothing to teach us about the second; it was discovered by a wholly different study. That is why we shall not dwell on these various forms longer, though they are customarily treated at some length relative to suicide. To do so would add nothing to the results given by our preceding studies and summarized in the following table:

AETIOLOGICAL AND MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE SOCIAL TYPES OF SUICIDE

Such are the general characteristics of suicide, that is, those which result directly from social causes. Individualized in particular cases, they are complicated by various nuances depending on the personal temperament of the victim and the special circumstances in which he finds himself. But beneath the variety of combinations thus produced, these fundamental forms are always discoverable.