Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/98

 84 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

As in the case of insanity, suicide is in reality an institution, a condition of equilibrium in an unstable state.

Insanity and suicide, in representing the most excessive oscil- lations of the mental order in relation to the physiological con- dition of individuals, are nevertheless rigorously limited and determined by the social environment and the physiological condition. By the latter they are connected with the most general laws of inorganic equilibrium and, in a manner still more simple, to those of mechanics by the intermediation of the mus- cular phenomena and organization of the individuo-social being or man. As M. Ch. Richet has well said:

The nervous system and, consequently, the psychical life, is subject to a simple and fundamental law ; cold paralyzes its activity ; heat exaggerates it ; but this is within very narrow limits. From this point of view, as well as from others, the nervous system is subject to physiological laws which resemble very much those of the muscles. Now, the function of the muscles is contraction, and the function of the nervous system is intelligence : heat, by exciting and then destroying the tissue, stimulates, but afterwards sup- presses, the function. In both cases the origin of the force which is set free is in the interstitial combustion. It is impossible not to think that a phenome- non so rigorously subjected to this law is not a phenomenon, if not of the physico-chemical order, at least of the material order. Above 45 there is no intelligence and none below o. 1

Again all psychical manifestations, even the most complex, as 1 well as organic and inorganic phenomena, can, from the point of view of general philosophy, be reduced to the simplest laws of movement, and sociology as well as philosophy seems to us more and more as a special and more complex application of universal order.

CHAPTER V. AGGREGATES.

SECTION I. STATICAL LIMITS OF AGGREGATES DISTRIBUTION OF CLIMATE; ISOTHERMAL, ISOCHEIMAL, AND ISOTHERAL LINES.

Up to this time we have studied separately (i) the character of aggregates considered as inorganic and organic masses; (2) the natural limits of organic and inorganic factors considered in abstracto, that is to say, of bodies considered independently and where their elements are integrated. We shall now combine the


 * ssai de psychologic glnlrale. Alcan, 1891.