Without insisting on a merely accessory point, it is certain that suicide, as a manifestation of emotional life, brings us face to face with a psychological problem as yet insufficiently noticed. If there is an incontestable fact—one which, even among the ancients, was familiar to triteness—it is that in every animal the fundamental, ineradicable instinct is that of self-preservation, of existing, and persisting in existence. Now, suicide, whether voluntary or unreflecting, deliberate or impulsive, is the negation of the fundamental tendency, not a theoretic or partial negation, or one in word only, but in deed and absolute. And the sacrifice of life is not subordinated to some other end which acts by superior attraction, such as devotion to a belief, to friends, to humanity, to one’s country, it is a suppression pure and simple, a liberation desired in and for itself. The ethnological, moral, and social study of suicide does not form part of our subject, having already been fully worked out.[155] Our aim is merely the psychological problem, which we must now define with more precision. Footnote 155: Among the very copious existing literature on suicide I must mention Morselli’s monograph, _Il Suicidio_, in which the various causes—cosmic, ethnic, social, biological, and psychological—are studied in great detail. His principal theoretical conclusions are—(1) Among all civilised nations suicide increases more rapidly than the geometrical ratio of the population and the general mortality; (2) suicides are in inverse proportion to homicides at any given time or in any given country. This last “law” has been strongly contested by Tarde and others. The act of suicide results from two very different mental states, that of reflection and that of impulsion. In deliberate, reflective, voluntary suicide there is a struggle between two factors: the instinct of conservation and the insupportable state caused by pain (incurable disease, ruin, misery, grief, frustrated ambition, dishonour). Reflection decides, and as pain is always a beginning of destruction, it prefers a total and rapid destruction to a partial and slow one. The act is rational, since it tends towards the lesser evil, or at least what is judged to be such. Impulsive suicide is harder to explain. A man throws himself suddenly out of a window, poisons himself, cuts his throat. In some cases death has been premeditated, but always appears as a compelling, inevitable force, inexorably claiming its victim; the epithet “irresistible” says everything. To the outside spectator the act appears motiveless, without reason, without cause. It is all the more surprising that the struggle, in this case, is no longer between instinct and reflection, but between two instincts, the conservative and the destructive, of which the one which usually is the strongest succumbs, and the individual turns against himself the destructive tendency originally destined to act on others.