Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/480

 466 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

occurring every year. Thus it is clear that the general death rate only attains such regularity by becoming something general and impersonal, that cannot be called upon to characterize a given society. In fact, it shows a remarkable similarity in all those nations that have more or less reached the identical state of civilization. On the contrary, suicide exhibits from year to year a stability equal to, if not greater than, that which general mortality only reveals from period to period ; while the suicidal rate shows very marked differences from one society to another, the difference being as I to 2, to 3, to 4, and even more. Thus, concludes Durkheim, the rate of suicide is peculiar to every social group in a much higher degree than the general death rate. It is even so intimately connected with that which is most deeply con- stitutional in every national temperament that, in respect to it, the order in which the different societies are classed remains almost rigorously the same at very different epochs. 1 The relative stability from one year to another in one and the same society, and the great variableness from one society to another in the same period, prove, according to Durkheim, that the rate of suicide is a definite fact corresponding to an order of causes entirely distinct from those that concur in determining suicide in every particular case. 2 It expresses the suicidal tendency which collectively affects each social group. Every society, says Durkheim, is predestined to furnish a determined share of voluntary deaths. To look into the causes of this collective tendency, that finds a numerical expression in the proportion of the absolute number of voluntary deaths to the population of every age and sex, is the problem Durkheim has undertaken to solve in his study on suicide.

II.

The first book of Durkheim's work deals with the question, whether such a collective tendency to suicide be the result of extra-social factors, like the organico-psychical predispositions,

1 Le Suicidt, p. 13. * Ibid,, p. 1 5.