CHAPTER I 



SUICIDE AS A SOCIAL FACTOR 



In the first part of this work we have considered the facts 

 relating to heredity and to selection, basing our inquiry on recent 

 biological researches — especially on those of Weismann. We 

 have seen that biological research tends more and more to insist 

 upon the importance of selection as a factor in organic evolution. 

 The fruitful conception of natural selection which we owe to 

 Darwin has been further developed by Weismann ; who, in his 

 theory of germinal selection, has given reasons for believing that 

 selection is already at work among the most elementary vital 

 particles in the germ-plasm of each individual. But the laws 

 of heredity and selection, as we have endeavoured to expound 

 them, contain a stiU higher philosophy : they show us that 

 everjrwhere a struggle for existence is in progress ; and they show 

 us, further, that any given organism can be maintained at a 

 high stage of development only on condition that it be subjected 

 to the full operation of the laws of selection. If an organism is, 

 by some means or other, withdrawn from the struggle for exist- 

 ence, and, consequently, from the sphere of operation of the laws 

 of selection, that organism will inevitably fall below the standard 

 of development attained by it while subjected to the operation 

 of these laws ; it will sink back to an inferior level of evolution ; 

 and, as retrogression means annihilation under the existing con- 

 ditions of life, this sinking back impUes ultimate destruction. 



That this must indeed be the case is evident if we bear in mind 

 the conditions under which all organic evolution occurs. In the 



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