180 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



To those unaccustomed to the analysis of social problems 

 the question will at once present itself whether, indeed, suicide 

 is a problem for the sociologist at all. The view generally held 

 in regard to suicide is that it is exclusively an individual 

 phenomenon, dependent for its production on certain patho- 

 logical nervous conditions ; and we are far from denying the 

 right of the neurologist to investigate the problem of suicide 

 from the point of view of nervous disease. But it is also true 

 that suicide can be considered from an entirely different stand- 

 point ; and that, in considering it, abstraction may be made of 

 the individual predisposition, and the attention concentrated 

 solely on the statistics of suicide as furnished by a given society 

 at a given time. This social aspect of suicide considered en 

 masse, and abstracted from the individual, has been hitherto 

 very largely overlooked. Oettingen, Morselli, Legoyt, Masaryk, 

 Westcott, Mayr, and, more recently, Durkheim, have dealt 

 with the question ; and it is from M. Emile Durkheim, the 

 distinguished Professor of the University of Paris, that we 

 have drawn most of our statistics on the subject.^ Nevertheless, 

 the view has, up till now, very generally prevailed that suicide 

 is an exclusively individual phenomenon ; and far more efiort 

 has been spent in endeavouring to trace each individual case of 

 suicide to an individual predisposition than in endeavouring 

 to discover the social causes of suicide considered en masse. 

 In other words, suicide has been chiefly studied as a phenomenon 

 of individual pathology ; and not sufi&cient stress has been laid 

 on it as a phenomenon of social pathology. 



The reasons which have caused many sociologists to over- 

 look this social aspect of suicide can all be traced to one source : 

 the idea that the individual is the pivot of society, and that 

 social evolution is but the evolution, at a higher degree, of the 

 individuals who compose society ; or, to express it otherwise, 

 that, society being but a collection of individuals, the laws 



' Vide E. Durkheim, Le Suicide : Stvde de Sociologie. Paris, Alcan, 1897. 



