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So unbearable is the amount of human pain that we alone among all animals manifest the remarkable phenomenon of suicide—a deliberate effort of a form of life to stop living because living hurts so much. Social evolution does not proportionately abate social suffering; it improves external conditions and insures physical existence more and more reliably; but it does not make us commensurately happier. We die of different diseases, and we do not die so soon, but we continue to suffer while alive, we continue to refer to “the sea of human misery,” we continue to kill ourselves because we cannot bear the pain of being alive.

All this distress, formerly borne by each man as simply his “lot,”—his personal allowance,—was yet vaguely recognised by larger thinkers as “our common lot”; even physical diseases, those most personal facts, we have generalised as “the ills that flesh is heir to.” This generalising is a most legitimate social instinct; now grown keener, more accurate, felt by far more persons; and in its light we have begun to recognise many of those long-borne “ills” as not only remediable, but preventable. Yet, though we have done something, our condition remains lamentable. The general causes of our still-existing difficulties are internal rather than external.