The origin and development of the moral ideas

However, side by side with the extreme seventy with which suicide is viewed by the Christian Church, we find, even in the Middle Ages, instances of more humane feelings towards its perpetrator. In mediæval tales and ballads true lovers die together and are buried in the same grave; two roses spring through the turf and twine lovingly together.212 In the later Middle Ages, says M. Bourquelot, “on voit qu’à mesure qu’on avance, l’antagonisme devient plus prononcé entre l’esprit religieux et les idées mondaines relativement à la mort volontaire. Le clergé continue à suivre la route qui a été tracée par Saint Augustin et à déclarer le suicide criminel et impie; mais la tristesse et le désespoir n’entendent pas sa voix, ne se souviennent pas de ses prescriptions.”213 The revival of classical learning, accompanied as it was by admiration for antiquity and a desire to imitate its great men, not only increased the number of suicides, but influenced popular sentiments on the subject.214 Even the Catholic casuists, and later on philosophers of the school of Grotius and others, began to distinguish certain cases of legitimate suicide, such as that committed to avoid dishonour or probable sin, or that of a condemned person saving himself from torture by anticipating an inevitable death, or that of a man offering himself to death for the sake of his friend.215 Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, permits a person who is suffering from an incurable and painful disease to take his own life, provided that he does so with the agreement of the priests and magistrates; nay, he even maintains that

these should exhort such a man to put an end to a life which is only a burden to himself and others.216 Donne, the well-known Dean of St. Paul’s, wrote in his younger days a book in defence of suicide, “a Declaration,” as he called it, “of that paradoxe, or thesis, that Self-homicide is not so naturally sin, that it may never be otherwise.” He there pointed out the fact—which ought never to be overlooked by those who derive their arguments from “nature”—that some things may be natural to the species, and yet not natural to every individual member of it.217 In one of his essays Montaigne pictures classical cases of suicide with colours of unmistakable sympathy. “La plus volontaire mort,” he observes, “c’est la plus belle. La vie despend de la volonté d’aultruy; la mort, de la nostre.”218 The rationalism of the eighteenth century led to numerous attacks both upon the views of the Church and upon the laws of the State concerning suicide. Montesquieu advocated its legitimacy:—“La société est fondée sur un avantage mutuel; mais lorsqu’elle me devient onéreuse, qui m’empêche d’y renoncer? La vie m’a été donnée comme une faveur; je puis donc la rendre lorsqu’elle ne l’est plus: la cause cesse, l’effet doit donc cesser aussi.”219 Voltaire strongly opposed the cruel laws which subjected a suicide’s body to outrage and deprived his children of their heritage.220 If his act is a wrong against society, what is to be said of the voluntary homicides committed in war, which are permitted by the laws of all countries?

Are they not much more harmful to the human race than self-murder, which nature prevents from ever being practised by any large number of men?221 Beccaria pointed out that the State is more wronged by the emigrant than by the suicide, since the former takes his property with him, whereas the latter leaves his behind.222 According to Holbach, he who kills himself is guilty of no outrage on nature or its author; on the contrary, he follows an indication given by nature when he parts from his sufferings through the only door which has been left open. Nor has his country or his family any right to complain of a member whom it has no means of rendering happy, and from whom it consequently has nothing more to hope.223 Others eulogised suicide when committed for a noble end,224 or recommended it on certain occasions. “Suppose,” says Hume, “that it is no longer in my power to promote the interest of society; suppose that I am a burthen to it; suppose that my life hinders some person from being much more useful to society. In such cases my resignation of life must not only be innocent but laudable.”225 Hume also attacks the doctrine that suicide is a transgression of our duty to God. “If it would be no crime in me to divert the Nile from its course, were I able to do so, how could it be a crime to turn a few ounces of blood from their natural channel?

Were the disposal of human life so much reserved as the peculiar province of the Almighty that it were an encroachment on his right for men to dispose of their own lives, would it not be equally wrong of them to lengthen out their lives beyond the period which by the general laws of nature he had assigned to it? My death, however voluntary, does not happen without the consent of Providence; when I fall upon my own sword, I receive my death equally from the hands of the Deity as if it had proceeded from a lion, a precipice, or a fever.”226

Thus the main arguments against suicide which had been set forth by pagan philosophers and Christian theologians were scrutinised and found unsatisfactory or at least insufficient to justify that severe and wholesale censure which was passed on it by the Church and the State. But a doctrine which has for ages been inculcated by the leading authorities on morals is not easily overthrown; and when the old arguments are found fault with new ones are invented. Kant maintained that a person who disposes of his own life degrades the humanity subsisting in his person and entrusted to him to the end that he might uphold it.227 Fichte argued that it is our duty to preserve our life and to will to live, not for the sake of life, but because our life is the exclusive condition of the realisation of the moral law through us.228 According to Hegel it is a contradiction to speak of a person’s right over his life, since this would imply a right of a person over himself, and no one can stand above and execute himself.229 Paley, again, feared that if religion and morality allowed us to kill ourselves in any case, mankind would have to live in continual alarm for the fate of their friends and dearest relations230—just as if there were a very strong temptation for men to shorten their lives. But common sense is neither a metaphysician nor a sophist. When not restrained by the yoke of a narrow theology, it is inclined in most cases to regard the self-murderer as a proper object of compassion rather than of condemnation, and in some instances to admire him as a hero.

The legislation on the subject therefore changed as soon as the religious influence was weakened. The laws against suicide were abolished in France by the Revolution,231 and afterwards in various other continental countries;232 whilst in England it became the custom of jurymen to presume absence of a sound mind in the self-murderer—perjury, as Bentham said, being the penance which prevented an outrage on humanity.233 These measures undoubtedly indicate not only a greater regard for the innocent relatives of the self-murderer, but also a change in the moral ideas concerning the act itself.