in the light of experience and reason. Men withstood infallibility, absolutism and the inquisitorial spirit, and rebelled against them. Exaggerated, revolutionary individualism and subjectivism sprang up; and they, in their turn, led to egomania and “solipsism,” to spiritual and moral isolation, to general anarchy in place of the earlier systematic Catholicism. Belief and the disposition to believe were vanquished by scepticism, criticism, irony, negation and disbelief. Men lost their peace of mind, grew restless, inconstant, nervous. Some sought in Utopian dreams outlets for their artificially stimulated energies—and in their seeking and doing suffered disillusionment after disillusionment. Idealists gave themselves up to the pursuit of pleasure, yet found in it no contentment. Pessimism spread, theoretically and practically, joylessness and discontent, vexation and despair—the parents of weariness, nervousness, morbid introspection and suicidal mania.
From a psychological standpoint, modern society is pathologically irritated, torn asunder and divided. It is in process of transformation. The statistics of suicide form, as it were, an arithmetical table of this mental and, at the same time, moral and physiological sickness. In Europe and America the average number of suicides is about one hundred thousand a year, the increasing proportion of child suicides being especially characteristic. For the benefit of those who are impressed only by big figures, we may say that, in ten years, one million, and in fifty years, five million people do away with themselves. Yet the total of war losses horrifies us—as though the suicide of one child, despairing of life and of itself, were less tragic and less significant of the modern life of civilized peoples than the death of men in war! What are we to think of a society, of its organization, of its humanity, if it can look upon this state of things with calm indifference?
Murder and blood-lust are, psychologically, the opposites of suicide and suicidal mania; for suicide is violence done to itself by an introspective, self-centred soul, whereas murder is violence done by the soul to others; it is an abnormal “objectivization.” Subjective individualism, which becomes intensified into superior self-sufficiency and Titanic pseudo-godlikeness, ends by being unbearable. In the last resort, men of this temper do violence either to themselves or to their neighbours, and commit suicide or murder.
