Suicide : an essay on comparative moral statistics / by Henry Morselli.

  • Enrico Morselli
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suicide : an essay on comparative moral statistics / by Henry Morselli. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    If ancient history is rich in facts such as those of Zeno, Lucretius, and Cato, and if ancient literature is of philoso- phical and moral value, such as the often quoted words of Plato, Pliny, Cicero, and Seneca, yet the character which classical paganism attributed to suicide was simply in- dividual. The famous phrase of the Stoics, ' Mori licet cui vivere non plaoet^ is nothing more than the concrete formula of this individualism of the ancient philosophical opinions. Eeligion and laws have since declared suicide to be criminal, but they have never risen to the consider- ation of this crime under the more generic aspect of a tendency certainly hurtful, but one connected with the natural developement of society. This new aspect of suicide could not become clear where metaphysical systems prevailed; it was necessary to collect all the facts, to unite them together, to con- sider their analogy and differences, to do, in short, pre- cisely the reverse of what philosophy had done up to that time. That is not to start from a preconceived system, but to base arguments on facts supplied by observation and, when possible, by experiment. In the natural sciences the experimental method was already introduced, and in the exact sciences the calculation of probabilities; thus the conviction came to be formed that to obtain knowledge of the true natural characters of phenomena, thought must remodel itself in its own way and recom- mence patient but productive analysis; that is to say, it must return to the natural process by which practical knowledge has been built up from generation to generation. For the phenomena of social life this aim can only be attained by statistics. The great reforms in habits and ideas which marked the second half of the eighteenth century prepared the ground, and the initiation of the people to a more direct participation in political