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. The group of influences which we shall consider as predisposing, must in the case of insane suicides be considered as the predisposing causes of the unsoundness of mind. And, again, the causes denoted as exciting, in these pages, are also the exciting causes of the insanity in most cases. From this point of view, the fact of Suicide is only an incident occurring in Lunacy. The various forms of insanity, and their influence in promoting suicide, their treatment, and the means of avoiding the fatal act, will be referred to, later on. M. Casimir Broussais, in his work “Hygiène Morale,” divides the causes thus:─ A. Circumstances independent of the will. B. Voluntary causes. In Class A. he recounts: individual organisation, heredity, sex, age, state of health, or disease, country, climate, seasons, historical epochs. In Class B. he places employment, education, misery, loss of fortune, gambling, disappointed love, jealousy, domestic troubles, calumny, wounded self-love, failure of ambition, remorse, religious and political fanaticism, imitation. M. Tissot, in his treatise on our subject, proposes the following arrangement of the causes of suicide: 1. Remote negative causes, such are want of religion and want of morality.