Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/479

 SUICIDE IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT STUDIES 465

advantage of eliminating the vague and uncertain criterion of the so-called "freedom " of the act, substituting for it the char- acter more directly ascertainable of a prevision of the conse- quences of the act itself. It thus permits us clearly to distin- guish suicide from every other manner of death, in which the agent, as in the case of insane suicides, is himself the uncon- scious means of his own destruction, and also permits us to include, in the notion of suicide, all cases in which death is accepted as the inevitable condition of the attainment of an aim ; as, for instance, that of the soldier who sacrifices himself in order to save his regiment, or of the believer who calmly meets death for the triumph of his own faith. 1

At first sight, observes Durkheim, one is inclined to consider suicide as an act of the individual depending exclusively on individual factors. But, if we consider the ensetnble of the suicides committed in a given society, we ascertain that the total thus obtained is not a mere sum of independent unities, un tout de collection, but that it constitutes, by itself, a new fact and, stti generis having an individuality of its own, consequently its own nature, which is, moreover, eminently social. In fact, being given a society, as long as we do not trace our observations too far back, the result is almost always invariable, the reason being that from one year to another the circumstances in which social life develops remain remarkably unchanged. 3 In proof of such a relative stability of the suicidal rate, Durkheim quotes the statistics of suicide for the principal countries of Europe (France, Prussia, England, Bavaria, Denmark, Saxony) from 1841 to 1872.3 According to Durkheim the relative invaria- bility of the suicidal rate is greater than that of the chief demo- graphic phenomena ; as, for instance, the general mortality which, from year to year, shows more oscillations than suicide. We cannot obtain a relative stability in general mortality with- out comparing the averages of long periods, instead of the total amount of successive years. In this case, however, the regu- larity results from the attenuation of the accidental changes

Lt Suicidt, pp. 3-5. Ibid. % p. 8. J Ibid. % p. 9.