Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/486

 47 2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Thus Durkheim, finding a close relationship between the number of suicides and the intensity of the three causes already mentioned ( I ) morbid individualism, (2) absorption of the indi- vidual by the group, (3) independence of individual from every moral restraint) and finding that the rate of suicide varies from one country to another according to the different degree of intensity of said factors, comes to the conclusion that they are the real motives of the propensity to suicidal tendency particular to the various societies.

The individual factors (chiefly, nervous degeneration) do not have any influence on the social rate of suicide. They can only explain why one individual in preference to another should be liable to yield to the pressure of the courant suicidogtne. The cause of the phenomenon goes beyond the individuals ("est en dehors des individus") .*

IV.

In the foregoing summary the reader has gained a view of the main conclusions of Durkheim's researches on suicide. We do not need to follow the author in his discussion of the prac- tical problem : as to the best means of restraining the suicidal tendency in modern societies, a question with which Book III of Durkheim's work deals. Nor do we intend to discuss the exactitude of the interpretations given by Durkheim to the sta- tistical figures of suicide. Leaving this inquiry to professional statisticians, who will probably find much to say about some of Durkheim's statements, we only wish to ascertain whether or not he has succeeded in the ultimate aim of his studies on sui- cide, the verification of his conception of the social phenom- enon. His conclusions on the character of the courants suicidogtnes bring us just within the limits of his sociological theory. In the so-called " collective " causes of suicide, as opposed to the individual factors, reappears to us the favorite explanation of the social phenomenon which Durkheim has so strongly emphasized, that is to say the conception of its being

1 Le Suicide, p. 366.