Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/89

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY ?$

The sexes are affected in about the same degree. The social conditions, and especially the nature of the occupations, exercise the strongest influence. An observation of the 19,817 cases in 1853 in the asylums showed that, for each 1,000 individuals, the number of insane according to occupations was as follows:

Agriculturists - 0.2

Merchants - - 0.4

Landlords - i.o

Industrials - - i.i

State officials and employees 1.4

Domestics and day laborers - - 1.5

Soldiers and marines - 2.0

Professors and men of letters - - 3.5

Physicians and pharmacists 3.8

Clergymen - - 4.1

Lawyers - 8.5

Artists - - 9.5

Levasseur concludes that the development and exercise of the intellectual faculties is one of the predisposing causes of insanity and that, on the contrary, a life of comfort exempt from care and the quiet of agricultural life are causes of immunity.

The United States census for 1850 seems to confirm this opinion, but indicates also that the comfort of which Levasseur speaks is a state of relative stability and assured livelihood. This is, in fact, the case with the slaves, whose superiority in this respect would otherwise be inexplicable :

White population - - 7.6 insane per 1,000

Free colored population - 7.1 insane per 1,000 Slave colored population - i.o insane per 1,000

The pathology of the mind, better than anything else, or at least in a more striking manner, leads us, then, to a positive con- sideration of the social environment, both static and dynamic, in the study of which psychology in general is the natural prepara- tion, for the reason that the central nervous system is the organ par excellence of the life of relationship, or the social.

Laying aside idiocy and epilepsy, the causes of which are principally hereditary, although more or less deeply social in their origin, we recognize that the principal causes of mental