From a consideration of the general statistics of various countries estimated annually, with regard to actual numbers and percentage of Suicides, we conclude that like similar statistics applied to subjects of a totally unvolitional nature, they vary from year to year and from country to country. But the variations in the two classes, of voluntary and involuntary incidents, do not range together constantly; in fact, the statistics of the continental observers seem to show that, if we class together
| Suicide |  | |
| Homicide | as VOLUNTARY ACTS, | |
| Marriage | ||
| and | ||
| Illegitimate Births | | |
| Deaths | as INVOLUNTARY ACTS, | |
| Accidental Deaths | ||
and compare a period of several years in several countries, the greatest variations occur very rarely in suicide. Suicide, then, varies less than Illegitimate Births, Deaths and Accidental Deaths. Births have varied the least. It is a curious fact that illegitimate births, the general mortality, and accidental deaths, have often offered greater variations from the average, although the human will has no power over them, than suicide, homicide, and marriages which are voluntary actions.
Hence it has been argued, that social actions dependent on human volition, varying as they do proportionally from year to year, do not differ from those observed in phenomena of a physiologic or organic nature. For a lengthened discussion on this subject, see Morselli, Rümelin, and Rhenisch: the former states, “The laws of social life are not sufficiently known to enable us to attribute the variations in suicide to one cause, such as human liberty, or free-will, different and opposite to those natural forces on which we make births and deaths to depend; for we have no positive grounds for giving different interpretations to similar phenomena, merely because variations appear in psychical facts.”─Il Suicidio.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE CAUSATION OF SUICIDE.
In considering this portion of our subject we shall be assisted by analogy, if we investigate the data of contributing causes, in a manner similar to that which is ordinarily pursued with regard to diseases, in textbooks of medicine.
I refer to the method of distributing these causes into two classes of predisposing influences, and exciting or determining causes.
It will be very necessary, however, to bear in mind that the onset of a disease is generally of a nature quite removed from the influence of the will; while, on the other hand, suicide is voluntary, the result of a distinct action, following a direct determination. It is the determination which is led up to by states of predisposition, whether they be cosmic, racial, or mental.
One large class, perhaps one-third of all suicides, are of a different nature; these are the effect of an insane act; the predisposition is lunacy; the determining cause is a delusion, hallucination, mania, or epileptic nerve storm.