man.  The average man may be said to be purely instinctive.  In popular opinion—­that is to say, in his own opinion—­he is supposed to be a reasonable being; but a short acquaintance shows him to be illumined with no faintest ray of reason.  His sense of right and wrong is purely instinctive; talk to him about it, and you will see that you might as well ask a sheep-dog why he herds the sheep.”

“Quite so; but I do not see how that explains his aversion to suicide.”

“I think it does.  There are two forces in human nature—­instinct and reason.  The first is the very principle of life, and exists in all we see—­give it a philosophic name, and call it the ‘will to live.’  All acts, therefore, proceed from instinct or from reason.  Suicide is clearly not an instinctive act, it is therefore a reasonable act; and being of all acts the least instinctive, it is of necessity the most reasonable; reason and instinct are antagonistic; and the extreme point of their antagonism must clearly be suicide.  One is the assertion of life, the other is the denial of life.  The world is mainly instinctive, and therefore very tolerant to all assertions of the will to live; it is in other words full of toleration for itself; no one is reproved for bringing a dozen children into the world, though he cannot support them, because to reprove him would involve a partial condemnation of the will to live; and the world will not condemn itself.

“If suicide merely cut the individual thread of life our brothers would rejoice.  Nature is concerned in the preservation of the species, not in the preservation of the individual; but suicide is more than the disappearance of an individual life, it is a protest against all life, therefore man, in the interest of the life of the race, condemns the suicide.  The struggle for life is lessened by every death, but the injury inflicted on the desire of life is greater; in other words, suicide is such a stimulant to the exercise of reason (which has been proved antagonistic to life), that man, in defence of instinct, is forced to condemn suicide.

“And it is curious to note that of all the manners of death which may bring them fortune, men like suicide the least; a man would prefer to inherit a property through his father falling a prey to a disease that tortured him for months rather than he should blow his brains out.  If he were to sound his conscience, his conscience would tell him that his preference resulted from consideration for his father’s soul.  For as man acquired reason, which, as I have shown, endangers the sovereignty of the will to live, he developed notions of eternal life, such notions being necessary to check and act as a drag upon the new force that had been introduced into his life.  He says suicide clashes with the principle of eternal life.  So it does, so it does, he is quite right, but how delightful and miraculously obtuse.  We must not take man for a reasoning animal; ants and bees are hardly more instinctive and less reasonable than the majority of men.