SUICIDE A PHENOMENON OF SOCIAL PATHOLOGY 263 



reproduce. If the general physiological condition of mankind 

 is to be maintained at its highest possible degree of development, 

 individuals who faU below this level must disappear. But this 

 is by no means the case. Individuals presenting all the stigmata 

 of degeneracy are allowed to survive and multiply on equal, 

 terms with those who do not present these stigmata. Degenerate 

 individuals, in a word, are not eliminated, and superior indi- 

 viduals are not selected. The result we see to be an alarming 

 increase of physical and mental degeneracy. 



If we grant that suicide is a pathological feature of social life, 

 an aberration from the normal type, we must admit at the 

 same time that the causes which produce it are pathogenic in 

 their nature. Were the number of suicides always the same 

 from year to year, we might certainly regard this phenomenon 

 as socially necessary, if not normal ; for we might very well 

 consider it as a simple elimination of the waste matters of the 

 social organism. But when the suicide-rate is constantly on 

 the increase, an increase which is disproportionate to that of 

 the population during a given period, we are obliged to regard 

 it as a pathological phenomenon. Suicide, being more exclu- 

 sively social in its causes than mental disease, cannot be ex- 

 plained, as far as its great increase is concerned, by the multi- 

 pUcation of individuals inclined to suicide ; for, in the first place, 

 this hereditary suicidal mania is far from being proven ; and, 

 in the second place, suicide is not necessarily connected with 

 the increase of any clinical form of mental disease, so that we 

 cannot speak of the multiplication of " suicidists " as we do of 

 the multipUcation of persons afflicted with epilepsy or with 

 general progressive paralysis. 



But although the law of panmixia, which implies the equalisa- 

 tion of conditions for the survival and reproduction of persons 

 inclined to suicide and persons not so inclined, cannot be used 

 to explain the increase of the suicide-rate, yet this increase is 

 none the less pathological ; for it shows that the pathogenic 



