ABSTRACT
Since suicide is a social phenomenon by virtue of its essential element, it is proper to discuss the place it occupies among other social phenomena.
The first and most important question which concerns the subject is to discover whether or not suicide should be classed among the actions permitted by morality or among those proscribed by it. Should it be regarded to any degree whatever as a criminal act? The question, as is well known, has always been warmly discussed. For its solution a certain conception of ideal morality is usually first formulated and then the question is raised whether or not suicide logically contradicts it. For reasons elsewhere set forth1 this cannot be our method. An uncontrolled deduction is always suspect, and as such, moreover, starts from a pure postulate of individual feeling; for everyone conceives in his own way the ideal morality so axiomatically assumed. Instead, let us first seek to discover how peoples actually have estimated suicide morally in the course of history; then try to find the reasons for this estimate. Then, we will have only to see
whether and how far these reasons are founded in the nature of present-day societies.2
