WEAKNESS OF THE ALTRUISTIC SENTIMENTS 405 



ethical influence of Christianity. Everywhere around us we 

 see conflict increasing in intensity ; and one result of our social 

 conflict — or, rather, of the conditions under which the conflict 

 is waged — ^is the increase in the rate of suicide. Although in 

 treating of suicide in general we are unable to draw a distinction 

 between altruistic and egoistic suicide, or between altruistic and 

 anomic suicide,^ since the definition must include all those acts 

 the object of which is the same, nevertheless, in their relation to 

 social life egoistic or anomic suicides must be classed together 

 in a quite distinct category. For in our Western civilisation 

 altruistic suicide, as it was practised, and is still practised, in 

 a country like India, is unknown, or, at all events, it is too 

 sporadic to be regarded as a social phenomenon. It is, on the 

 other hand, the rate of egoistic and anomic suicide which is so 

 steadily and so alarmingly increasing in every European country, 

 with the exception, perhaps, of Norway, in which the peouhar 

 conditions due to modern industrialism are less felt ; and, as a 

 counterpart, it is in densely populated and industrially de- 

 veloped Saxony that the rate of suicide is highest. 



Egoistic and anomic suicide are both of them the typical 

 fruits of that culture which the industrial system of Western 

 civilisation has produced. Individualism is the keynote of that 

 culture. The individual, thrown on his own resources in the 

 battle of life, taught to consider himself as the end of all things, 

 finds himself disappointed in life. Unsuccessful in the intense 

 economic struggle, he is exhausted by all the worry and nervous 

 tension which modem Hfe so generally engenders ; he has no 

 prop to hold him up ; he is carried along by the fast-flowing 

 stream ; he has no sheet-anchor, in the shape of an ideal which 

 transcends and dominates the individual, to which he can 

 cling ; he is lost in the great sea of life ; he longs only, hke the 

 mariner who has been on a distant voyage, for rest from the 

 stress and storm in which he is plunged ; and what rest can be 

 * See above, Introduction. 



