Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/235

Rh correct to regard it as the consequence of the mode of life and habits of the Hebrew people, who are always to be found living in crowded cities (excepting, perhaps, the numerous Jewish population of Galicia, Poland, and Buckowina); and the professions they follow are more liable than others to commercial crises and the constant vicissitudes of trade.

With regard to suicide, on the other hand, the Jews of various countries differ more among themselves than Catholics from Protestants, who maintain a certain relative proportion with little variation. Great anthropological and social diversities are indeed to be observed between the Jews of Poland, Galicia, and Russia of the Dnieper, where they are very numerous and exercise an important influence on public affairs, and those of Central Europe, and in general of Catholic or mixed Catholic countries, where they have had to struggle through so many centuries against religious intolerance.

The very high average of suicides among Protestants is another fact too general to escape being ascribed to the influence of religion. Protestantism, denying all materialism in external worship and encouraging free inquiry into dogmas and creeds, is an eminently mystic religion, tending to develop the reflective powers of the mind and to exaggerate the inward struggles of the conscience. This exercise of the thinking organs, which, when they are weak by nature, is always damaging, renders them yet more sensible and susceptible of morbid impressions. Protestantism in the German states further exercises this exciting influence on the cerebral functions in yet another manner: it originated those philosophical systems which are based on the naturalistic conception of human existence, and put forward the view that the life of the individual is but a simple function of a great whole. These philosophical ideas are harmless enough to strong minds and those stored with a fit provision of scientific culture, but in the democratic atmosphere of our times the heart is not educated pari passu. The religious apathy with which the present generation is afflicted does not arise from a reasoned inquiry into the laws of nature or a scientific appreciation of its phenomena; it is not, in short, a deep conviction of the mind, but springs from a physical inertia, and from the little hold obtained by any ideas but such as are directed to material improvement and the gratification of ambition. To our mind, therefore, the great number of suicides is to be attributed to the state of compromise which the human mind occupies at the present time between the metaphysical and the positivist phase of civilization, and as this transition is more active in countries of marked mystic and metaphysical tendencies, such as is the case with Protestantism, it is natural that in them suicide should have the greatest number of victims.

It is obvious that a great difference generally exists between Catholic and Protestant countries only, not between the Catholic and