trust more to their mercy."

This explanation is little more satisfactory than the others; but it
does, nevertheless, recognize and take into account the influence of the
environment on a preexisting emotional state. It errs only in
interpretation. The smiling, happy, joyous aspect of Nature in June does
not inspire the unhappy man with confidence in the beneficence and mercy
of the higher powers. On the contrary, it shows him that the higher
powers pay no attention at all to his feelings and have no sympathy
whatever with his grief. The blue skies, sunshine, leafy trees, and
singing birds, which make up the environment of June, add to the
happiness of the man who is happy already, but they intensify, by
contrast, the misery of the man who is already miserable. In November
and December, when all is dark, bare, and cheerless, Nature seems to be
in sympathy with the unhappy man's mood, and from that voiceless,
pitying sympathy of the great World-Mother he derives a certain
sustaining comfort and consolation. In June his mood is the same, but
the mood of Nature has changed. The great World-Mother no longer
sympathizes with his grief, but laughs him to scorn with her sunshine,
her blossoming flowers, her leafy trees, and her jubilation of mating
birds. He looks about him and thinks: "Everybody is happy, everything is
rejoicing. I am the solitary exception; I am the only living thing that
is out of place." And then there comes upon him a heartbreaking sense of
loneliness, a feeling of complete isolation, as if the great, happy
world had cast him off and gone on its way singing. He has thought of
suicide before--he has thought of it often; and now, when the world, in
its triumphant gladness, ignores his very existence, when there is no
longer sympathy, nor pity, nor any further hope of a share in the
happiness that he sees about him, it seems to him that the time for
self-destruction has come. Whether he be a Russian, an American, or a
Japanese, he can observe and he can feel: and when he sees that the
whole world is jubilant, while he himself is wretched, he becomes more
acutely conscious than ever before of his loneliness and misery, and
resolves to give up the struggle and get out of the way of the world's
laughing, singing, summer-carnival procession. He ends his life; and in
some Russian, American, or Japanese table of statistics his death adds
one more to the suicides in June.[20]

The close relation that exists betwe