The Ethics of Suicide

Abstract

I take it that no man is educated, wrote William James in one of his letters, has never dallied with the thought of Yet James was no modern Hegesias. His philosophy was an affirmation, not a deep-seated denial or questioning of life. He relied upon the sense of instinctive curiosity and pugnacity to make life worth living for those have cast away all metaphysics to get rid of hypochondria. Only in some of the sacred books of the East and the mystic novels of Russia is the message written clear-gray on black: that the highest assertion of personality of one who has not asked for his existence is suicide. The problem of suicide has generally been approached from the sociological and theological aspects. The studies of Masaryk' and Durkheim,2 who followed the pioneer work of Quetelet, have been in the main scholarly researches into the statistical correlations between the character of the climate, the variation in age, the purchasing power of wages, and other indexes of the tone of economic life, and the suicide rate. And from a molar point of view, the positive coefficients discovered to hold between these diverse social phenomena have been very illuminating. But, as is quite evident, these investigations leave the heart of the individual question entirely unaffected. This is not a criticism so much as a reminder of the self-confessed delimitation of all studies based on large numbers. Nor, on the other hand, has current theological doctrine been more discriminating in its consideration of the particular case. The teaching of Western religion since the time of