only in antiquity, but in modern days; some, like Dr. Donne, claiming for the act the same degrees of culpability that the law attaches to homicide, others founding their pleas on the ground that Holy Writ nowhere condemns the crime, and one profanely arguing that his life is a man’s own to do with as he will. Goethe may be called an apologist for suicide, and so may all those historians or novelists who make their heroes “die nobly” by their own hands; and De Quincey himself seems to have been at one time inclined to excuse under certain circumstances the act of “spontaneous martyrdom.”
Pity at first carries away the feelings of the sympathetic, but there are few healthy minds to which, on the second thought, does not come the reflection that suicide is, after all, an insult to human nature, and, for all its pathos, cowardly. There are, indeed, circumstances, such, for instance, as hideous, incurable disease, that tend to soften the public verdict upon the unhappy wretch, who, in taking his own life, had otherwise committed a crime against humanity, and played a traitor’s part to all that is most noble in man. But these, as actually resulting in suicide, are very exceptional and infrequent. In most cases life is thrown away impatiently and peevishly, a sudden impulse of remorse or grief nerving the victim to forget how grand life really is, with its earnest aims and hearty work, and how bright it is with its e very-day home affections and its cheerful hopes of better things and better times. Our courts of law generalize such impulses under the term “temporary insanity,” and the world accepts the term as a satisfactory one, for it is not human to believe that, a sane person would under any circumstances throw up life. Races, our own notably, conspicuous wherever
