Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/482

 468 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

be found to correspond. On the one hand, the original races can only be said to belong to palaeontology ; while the more limited groups, now called races, are nothing but peoples, or societies of people, brethren by civilization more than by blood. The race thus conceived ends by identifying itself with nation- ality ; consequently Durkheim is brought to contest the well- known theory of Morselli which distinguishes four different groups of peoples, each corresponding to a hereditary type of its own : the Germanic, the Celto-Roman, the Slav, the Uralo- Altaic ; which should be classified, according to their suicidal tendency, in the following way: (i) Germans, (2) Celto- Romans, (3) Slavs; the Uralo-Altaic not being considered, as too divergent from the European type of civilization. Above all, observes Durkheim, there are some remarkable extremes in the suicidal tendency among peoples of the same race, while the high rate of suicide attributed to the so-called German race decreases or disappears when the German is transplanted from his own social milieu?

4. Heredity. Nothing is less proved, says Durkheim, than the heredity of suicide, considered as a direct and integral transmission of the suicidal tendency from parents to children, so as to constitute a psychological automatism. All observed instances of repeated suicides in the same family originated in insanity. This is perhaps the disease which is most frequently transmitted, and one may well ask if it be not this latter rather than the suicidal tendency which is inherited. Such consider- ations, however, do not suffice to explain why in certain insane families there is an endemic tendency to suicide, why there should be "des souches de fous qui semblent destinees a se detruire." 2 To explain this fact, Durkheim substitutes, for the factor of organic heredity, that of the contagious power of example. However, the thesis of the heredity of suicide is invalidated by two facts revealed by statistics : (i) the different contribution of the two sexes to suicide, which could not be explained in the hypothesis of an organico-psychical determin-

1 Le Suicide, pp. 54-68. Ibid., p. 73.