The almost superhuman pluck of certain prize-fighting
animals--bulldogs and badgers, for instance--may in reality be
founded on a temporary insensibility to pain, and the evident
advantages of that negative endowment suggest its development by
the agency of natural selection. Individuals gifted with that
faculty of emotional anesthesia were less likely to succumb to
the terrors of a life-and-death struggle, and therefore more
apt to prevail in that struggle for existence which in a state
of nature is implied by the frequent necessity of contesting
the physical superiority of sexual rivals or alien antagonists.
The invigorating tendency of certain passions may have been
developed in a similar manner. The formidable and, indeed, quite
abnormal strength of infuriated man is so well known that even
an athlete will hesitate to try conclusions with an adversary
under the influence of raging passions, and in such moments
fury-inspired vigor has often accomplished feats which afterward
surprized even the hero of the exploit. “The saints do help a
man in a desperate plight,” said an old Creole planter, who had
rescued his family from the attack of a brutal negro. The same
strength-sustaining influence of fury may explain the almost
miraculous victories of small bodies of desperate men over large
armies of better-armed foes, as in the three murderous battles
which the rustic avengers of John Huss gained against the
ironclad legions of his enemies, or in that still less expected
defeat of an entire Russian army by a few hundred followers of
the hero-prophet Shamyl. Religious frenzy has often produced a
similar effect, and on any other theory only a miracle could
explain the almost constant victories of the Saracens, who, in
spite of determined resistance of millions of better disciplined
and physically superior opponents, succeeded in less than a
century in extending their empire from the Ganges to the Bay of
Biscay.--FELIX OSWALD, _The Open Court_.
(1176)