2 4 o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



custom of the Dharma, or fast, men starve themselves to death for the 

 sake of annoying their enemies. So persons of disordered nerves 

 among us, or victims of various passions, commit suicide in order 

 to excite remorse in persons to whom they become antagonistic. 

 Others die to gratify their vanity, and surround their death with 

 conditions that will attract attention or that bear a character of 

 sensational display. A great many suicides would probably never 

 commit the fatal act, no matter how hard the miseries of life might 

 oppress them, if they thought nothing would be said of the matter 

 in the press or in society; while, in fact, a supreme satisfaction 

 attends their departure from life in the anticipation of the talk there 

 will be about it. 



Persons in certain classes or occupations are attracted by par- 

 ticular modes of death. Thus death on the battlefield possesses a 

 dazzling glamour for soldiers, in whose conception of it there is no 

 thought of terror. 



Death may further be made to appear pleasant through the 

 operation of religious or political fanaticism. Multitudes of men 

 have exposed themselves to the most terrible dangers of death, and 

 multitudes of others have actually suffered it, full of enthusiasm and 

 joy, for an idea, and have given themselves up to destruction for it. 

 Such feelings acquire frightful intensity when they become epidemic 

 and are propagated through a mass of people. 



Such cases present a strange perversion of the instincts of self- 

 preservation, which are ordinarily the firmest and strongest of our 

 feelings a contradiction to the most general laws of life so complete 

 and distinct as to make a search for an explanation for it very 

 desirable. 



The explanation, we believe, may be found in the laws of asso- 

 ciation. Association is capable of changing the psychological value 

 of any object, of rendering agreeable a thing that is offensive to 

 another or under other circumstances, or an action by which others 

 are annoyed or to which they are indifferent; and can give precious 

 value to a recollection, a thought, or an image which would be 

 repulsive to others. Such associations operate with striking force 

 in cases where the passion of love is concerned. Associations con- 

 nected with a place where one has lived are agreeable or disagreeable 

 according as one has been happy or not there; and the law may 

 extend to objects and images of all kinds, and even to the merest 

 trifles. 



By the same law we may account for these exceptional elimina- 

 tions of the repulsive character from the thought of death. When 

 it is associated with intense passion, with the anticipation of glory 

 and fame, or when the gratification of animosities is the dominant 



