206 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



stability of family life increases ; it necessarily follows that those 

 who are most detached by their individual life from society and 

 from family life will be those who have the greatest tendency 

 to kill themselves. The bachelor of sixty years of age is pre- 

 cisely such a person. He can no longer hope to enjoy life to 

 any considerable degree ; for the pleasures which are possible to 

 the young man are no longer possible to him. Excluded from 

 the activities or from the excitement which, in the case of young 

 men with their future before them, is often capable of tem- 

 porarily taking the place of more lasting pleasures ; deprived of 

 the great consolation of hope by reason of his advanced age ; 

 shut out from the joys and comforts of family life, the bachelor 

 of sixty will necessarily feel himself detached more or less from 

 all social ties ; he will necessarily be inchned to attach less value 

 to Ufe. Especially will this be the case if his existence has been 

 one of illusions, of hope long deferred which makes the heart 

 sick ; especially, also, will it be the case if, having no firm religious 

 belief, he is cut off from all spiritual communion with a rehgious 

 community, the immense social advantage of which is its ability 

 to absorb the individual life, to render the individual conscious 

 of his essential solidarity with the community of which he is a 

 member. Seeing his hopes unrealised— and how many can say 

 that all their hopes in life have been fulfilled ? — and having a 

 sense of the illusions which life brings with it, he finds himself 

 at the same time entirely detached from all those ties which 

 could console and strengthen him in the evening of his life. 

 He knows not the comforts, the joys, the hopes, which family 

 life can procure even to the old ; and, being thus rendered con- 

 scious of his isolation, the illusions and tribulations of the past 

 will affect him the more intensely. A sense of the uselessness 

 of all further effort, of the non-value of life, will more and more 

 take possession of his mind ; and, under these conditions, the 

 destruction of that valueless life will appear to him a natural 

 and welcome release. 



