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THE CONQUEST OF FEAR
BASIL KING
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY
HENRY C. LINK
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE
II. THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD
III. GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION
IV. GOD'S SELF-EXPRESSION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY
V. THE MIND OF TO-DAY AND THE WORLD AS IT IS
VI. THE WORLD AS IT IS AND THE FALSE GOD OF FEAR
VII. THE FALSE GOD OF FEAR AND THE FEAR OF DEATH
VIII. THE FEAR OF DEATH AND ABUNDANCE OF LIFE
INTRODUCTION
by Henry C. Link, Ph.D.
_Author of_ THE REDISCOVERY OF MAN, THE RETURN TO RELIGION, etc.
There are many books which give some help to many people. There are
books which give a set of rules, or even one master rule, by which to
meet the problems of life. This is not such a book. It suggests no
simple recipe for the conquest of fear. Instead, it presents, what all
too few of us to-day possess, a philosophy of life.
Moreover, in contrast to the dominant thinking of our age, which is
materialistic, King's philosophy is spiritual and religious. Indeed, the
ideas in this book are so profoundly different from the commonly
accepted ideas of our times that they will come as a shock to many
readers. One purpose of this introduction is to prepare the reader for
such a shock.
I have said that the dominant thinking of our age is materialistic, and
by that I mean also physical. Let me illustrate this broad statement
with reference to the subject of fears alone. The conquest of fear has
gone on year after year chiefly through physical means. Physical pain
has always been one of the great sources of fear. Now ether and other
anaesthetics have eliminated the chief pains of major operations. Older
people can still remember their fear of the dentist, when killing a
nerve or pulling a tooth caused excruciating pain. Now local
anaesthetics even in minor troubles have made dentistry almost painless.
We have not conquered these fears of pain--rather their cause has
been removed.
Twilight sleep, the artificial sleep to alleviate the pains of
childbirth, is the perfect expression of the scientific and
materialistic elimination of fear. By a chemical blackout of the mind, a
dimming of the conscious self, the person is enabled to escape the
necessity of facing and conquering fear through his own resources.
I am not condemning the physical alleviation of pain or the progress of
physical science. I am only describing a trend, and that is the growing
emphasis on the elimination of fears by science rather than on their
conquest by the individual.
Illness has always been a great source of fear, and still is. The dread
of cancer is one of the terrifying fears of our time and fortunes are
spent in cancer research and education. THE CONQUEST OF FEAR was written
as a result of the author's threatened total blindness. He faced a fact
for which there seemed no physical remedy--hence his great need for a
spiritual conquest of this great fear.
And yet, year by year, physical science has been eliminating or
reducing the dangers of sickness. Vaccines for the prevention of the
dread disease, small-pox, are now a matter of course. Vaccines and
specifics against the deadly tetanus, against typhoid fever, diphtheria,
syphilis, and other fearful diseases have become commonplace. The fear
of pneumonia has been almost eliminated through the discoveries of the
miraculous sulpha drugs. Science has done wonders toward the elimination
of such fears. A man need hardly conquer the fear of any particular
sickness--there is left for his conquest chiefly the fear of dying.
In addition to physical disease, our civilization has now developed
mental ailments of all kinds. These include a large category of fears
called phobias--claustrophobia, agoraphobia, photophobia, altaphobia,
phonophobia, etc.
Three fields or professions, other than religion and philosophy, have
sought to deal with these fears, the psychiatric, the psychoanalytic,
and the psychological. The medical psychiatric profession has naturally
emphasized physical remedies beginning with sedatives and bromides to
induce artificial relaxation and ending up with lobectomy or the
complete cutting off of the frontal lobes of the brain, the centers of
man's highest thought processes. Between these two extremes are the
shock treatments in which an injection of insulin or metrazol into the
blood stream causes the person to fall into a sort of epileptic fit
during which he loses consciousness. Through a series of such shock
treatments some of the higher nerve centers or nerve pathways are
destroyed. By this process a person's fears may also be eliminated and
he may be permanently or temporarily cured. In short, the person does
not conquer the fears in his mind; the psychiatrist or neurologist, by
physically destroying a part of the person's brain, destroys also
the fears.
How strongly this physical approach has taken hold of people was made
plain to me through an article of mine on how to conquer fears. The
emphasis in this article was on how people could overcome their fears
and worries through their own efforts. To illustrate the opposite
extreme, I mentioned the brain operations and shock treatments by which
psychiatry now often deals with fears. Among the many people who wrote
to me as a result of this article, _the majority inquired where they
could obtain such an operation_! To such extremes have many people gone
in their desire to eliminate fear by physical means rather than conquer
it through their own spiritual powers.
The psychoanalyst deals with a person's phobias through what seems like
an intellectual or rational process. According to psychoanalysis,
phobias or fears are due to some buried or subconscious complex. By
daily or frequent talks with a psychoanalyst for a period of six months
or a year, a person's subconscious disturbance _may_ be brought to
light, and if so, the fear is supposed automatically to disappear. Even
if true, this process is a highly materialistic one, at least in the
sense that only people who can spend thousands of dollars can afford
such treatments.
The psychologist, as well as some psychiatrists who have studied normal
psychology, regard many fears as normal experiences which the individual
can cope with largely through his own resources and with very little
help in the way of visits or treatment. The trouble arises in the case
of those people who have no personal resources to draw on. Their lives
are so lacking in spiritual power, or so full of intellectual scepticism
and distrust, that they cannot help themselves. They have no religious
convictions or certainties by which to obtain leverage in their
struggles. They have no firm philosophy of life on which they or those
who would help them can lay hold. They are putty in the hands of the
fears and forces that beset them from without.
The psychologist and the psychiatrist both find it difficult to do much
to help such a person. And yet, this is the kind of person our
civilization and education tends increasingly to produce. By the
physical elimination of the causes of fear we have gradually undermined
man's inner resources for the conquest of fear.
This materialistic trend has received a new impetus from the fields of
political science, economics, and sociology. A dozen years ago economic
disaster threatened to stampede the nation. Millions who had lost their
jobs began to fear penury and want. Millions who still had jobs feared
that they would lose them. Other millions began to fear the loss of
their money and possessions. Rich and poor, becoming afraid that the
country was going to pieces, rushed to the banks to withdraw their
savings and brought on the nation-wide bank closings. Those were days
when everyone knew paralyzing fears.
History will record the fact that these fears were met, not by conquest,
not by drawing on the moral resources and inner fortitude of the
American citizen, but by a collection of wholesale materialistic
schemes. These schemes included such devices as inflating the dollar,
raising prices, expanding the government debt, paying farmers not to
produce crops, government housing projects, and many others. The fears
of unemployment and poverty in old age were to be eliminated wholesale
through a planned economy, a new social order. By an elaborate system of
book-keeping called Social Security, a whole nation was to win freedom
from want and freedom from fear.
But while we were building our smug little house of Social Security, the
whole world was crashing around us. Instead of achieving local security
we find ourselves now in the midst of world-wide insecurity. Far from
having eliminated the economic causes of fear, we now find these causes
multiplied many times. To the fear of losing our money is now added the
fear of losing our sons. To the fear of losing our jobs is added the
fear of losing our lives. To the fear of depression and inflation is
added the fear of losing the very freedoms for which the war is
being fought.
At last we see, or are on the point of seeing, that materialism breeds
worse fears than it cures; that economics and sociology create more
social problems than they solve; that science makes it possible to
destroy wealth and lives much faster than it can build them. It took
years of science to achieve the airplane and to eliminate people's fear
of flying. Now, suddenly, the airplane has become the greatest source of
destruction and of fear on the globe. Cities which were decades in the
building are blasted out of being in a night. Millions of people must
regulate their lives in fear of these dread visitors.
This is the background against which the conquest of fear presents its
philosophy of courage and of hope. It is a philosophy diametrically
opposed to the dominant beliefs and practices of our materialistic age.
One hesitates to use the words spiritual and moral because they have
become catch words. Nevertheless, King's philosophy is a spiritual and a
moral one, and the reader will gain from it a clearer concept of what
these words really mean.
When I remember my reactions to the first portion of this book, I can
readily picture the impatience and even scorn of many intellectuals and
pseudo-intellectuals. Because of its emphasis on the religious nature of
the universe and on the spiritual power of the individual, it may seem
to them naïve. Because of its consistent condemnation of Mammon, of
materialism and the economic-sociological interpretation of life, it may
seem to them old-fashioned. Actually, the book is highly sophisticated
and is more novel to-day than the day it was written because since that
time we have strayed twenty years further from the truth.
One day I was having luncheon with a man who, during the course of the
conversation, remarked: "I want to tell you how much I enjoyed your
latest book,--" As almost any writer would, I pricked up my ears
expectantly.
"Yes," he went on, "I got a great deal out of your recent book, but the
book which helped me more than any I have ever read is a book called THE
CONQUEST OF FEAR, by Basil King. Do you happen to know it?"
"Know it!" I exclaimed. "I not only know it, I am just on the point of
writing an introduction to a new edition of the book. Would you mind
telling me how it helped you?"
He thereupon related how, at a certain period of his life, he had left
an excellent position to take a new one which seemed more promising. It
soon developed that the difficulties of this position were such as to
make his success seem almost hopeless. He became obsessed with the idea
that the people with whom he had to deal were "out to get him." His
fears of the job and of his associates grew to the point where a nervous
breakdown seemed inevitable.
One day his daughter told him that she needed a book in her school work
which he remembered having packed in a box that had been stored in the
attic and not yet opened. When he opened the box, the first book which
he picked up was THE CONQUEST OF FEAR. It was evidently one of those
books which had somehow come into the possession of his family, but
which he had never read.
This time, however, he sat down in the attic and began to read it.
During the course of the next year or so he read it carefully not once
but four or five times. "It marked the turning point in my life," he
told me. "It enabled me to conquer the fears which were threatening to
ruin me at the time, and it gave me a philosophy which has stood me in
good stead ever since."
A philosophy which marked the turning point in his life and which has
stood him in good stead ever since! THE CONQUEST OF FEAR offers
such a philosophy not only to individuals suffering from fears peculiar
to them, but to a world of individuals suffering, or about to suffer,
from the collapse of world-wide materialism. In this day of chaos and
uncertainty, here is the modern version of the parable of the man who
built his house upon a rock instead of on the sand: "and the rain
descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that
house; and it fell not for it was founded upon a rock."
H. C. L.
CHAPTER I
FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE
I
When I say that during most of my conscious life I have been a prey to
fears I take it for granted that I am expressing the case of the
majority of people. I cannot remember the time when a dread of one kind
or another was not in the air. In childhood it was the fear of going to
bed, of that mysterious time when regular life was still going on
downstairs, while I was buried alive under sheets and blankets. Later it
was the fear of school, the first contact of the tender little soul with
life's crudeness. Later still there was the experience which all of us
know of waking in the morning with a feeling of dismay at what we have
to do on getting up; the obvious duties in which perhaps we have grown
stale; the things we have neglected; those in which we have made
mistakes; those as to which we have wilfully done wrong; those which
weary or bore or annoy or discourage us. Sometimes there are more
serious things still: bereavements, or frightfully adverse conditions,
or hardships we never expected brought on us by someone else.
It is unnecessary to catalogue these situations, since we all at times
in our lives have to face them daily. Fear dogs one of us in one way and
another in another, but everyone in some way.
Look at the people you run up against in the course of a few hours.
Everyone is living or working in fear. The mother is afraid for her
children. The father is afraid for his business. The clerk is afraid for
his job. The worker is afraid of his boss or his competitor. There is
hardly a man who is not afraid that some other man will do him a bad
turn. There is hardly a woman who is not afraid that things she craves
may be denied her, or that what she loves may be snatched away. There is
not a home or an office or a factory or a school or a church in which
some hang-dog apprehension is not eating at the hearts of the men,
women, and children who go in and out. I am ready to guess that all the
miseries wrought by sin and sickness put together would not equal those
we bring on ourselves by the means which perhaps we do least to
counteract. We are not sick all the time; we are not sinning all the
time; but all the time all of us--or practically all of us--are afraid
of someone or something. If, therefore, one has the feeblest
contribution to make to the defeat of such a foe it becomes difficult to
withhold it.
II
But even with a view to conquering fear I should not presume to offer to
others ideas worked out purely for myself had I not been so invited. I
do not affirm that I have conquered fear, but only that in self-defence
I have been obliged to do something in that direction. I take it for
granted that what goes in that direction will go all the way if pursued
with perseverance and good will. Having thus made some simple
experiments--chiefly mental--with what to me are effective results, I
can hardly refuse to tell what they have been when others are so good as
to ask me.
And in making this attempt I must write from my own experience. No other
method would be worth while. The mere exposition of a thesis would have
little or no value. It is a case in which nothing can be helpful to
others which has not been demonstrated for oneself, even though the
demonstration be but partial.
In writing from my own experience I must ask the reader's pardon if I
seem egoistic or autobiographical. Without taking oneself too smugly or
too seriously one finds it the only way of reproducing the thing that
has happened in one's own life and which one actually knows.
And when I speak above of ideas worked out purely for myself I do not,
of course, mean that these ideas are original with me. All I have done
has been to put ideas through the mill of my own mind, co-ordinating
them to suit my own needs. The ideas themselves come from many sources.
Some of these sources are, so deep in the past that I could no longer
trace them; some are so recent that I know the day and hour when they
revealed themselves, like brooks in the way. It would be possible to say
to the reader, "I owe this to such and such a teaching, and that to such
and such a man," only that references of the kind would be tedious. I
fall back on what Emerson says: "Thought is the property of him who can
entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain
awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we have
learned what to do with them, they become our own. Thus all originality
is relative." The thoughts that I shall express are my own to the extent
that I have lived them--or tried to live them--though the wind that
bloweth where it listeth may have brought them to my mind.
Nor do I think for a moment that what I have found helpful to me must of
necessity be helpful to everyone. It may be helpful to someone. That is
the limit of my hope. It is simple fact that no one can greatly help
anyone else. The utmost we can do is to throw out an idea here and there
which another may seize, and by which he may help himself. Borrowed help
has the awkwardness which Emerson attributes to borrowed thoughts. It is
only when a concept has lain for a time in a man's being, germinated
there, and sprung into active life, that it is of much use to him; but
by that time it has become his own. The kingdom of heaven must begin
within oneself or we shall probably not find it anywhere.
These pages will contain, then, no recipe for the conquest of fear; they
will offer, with much misgiving and diffidence, no more than the record
of what one individual has done toward conquering it. This record is
presented merely for what it is worth. It may be worth nothing. On the
other hand, someone may find it worth something, and in that case all
that the writer hopes for will be attained.
III
As a matter of fact, in my own case the reaction against fear was from
the beginning more or less instinctive. With the first exercise of the
reasoning faculty I tried to argue against the emotion. I remember that
as a little boy I was afraid of a certain dog that barked at me when I
went to a certain house to which I was sent perhaps two or three times a
week. The house had a driveway, and from the minute of passing the
entrance my knees trembled under me. But even then, I recall, it seemed
to me that this terror was an incongruous thing in life, that it had no
rightful place there, and that, if the world was what my elders told me
it was, there must be in it a law of peace and harmony which as yet I
hadn't arrived at. I cannot say that when the dog barked this reasoning
did more than nerve me to drag my quaking limbs up to the doorstep,
whence my enemy, a Skye terrier, invariably took flight.
During a somewhat stormy childhood and boyhood, in which there was a
good deal of emotional stress, I never got beyond this point. Specific
troubles were not few, and by the time I reached early manhood a habit
of looking for them had been established. "What's it going to be now?"
became a formula of anticipation before every new event. New events
presented themselves most frequently as menaces. Hopes rarely loomed up
without accompanying probabilities of disappointment. One adopted the
plan of "expecting disappointment" as a means of cheating the "jinx." I
am not painting my early life as any darker than most lives. It was, I
fancy, as bright as the average life of youth.
IV
But, contrary to what is generally held, I venture to think that youth
is not a specially happy period. Because young people rarely voice
their troubles we are likely to think them serene and unafraid. That has
not been my experience either with them or of them. While it is true
that cares of a certain type increase with age the knowledge of how to
deal with them increases, or ought to increase, in the same progression.
With no practical experience to support them the young are up against
the unknown and problematical--occupation, marriage, sexual urge, life
in general--around which clings that terror of the dark which frightened
them in childhood. Home training, school training, college training,
religious training, social influences of every kind, throw the emphasis
on dangers rather than on securities, so that the young life emerges
into a haunted world. Some are reckless of these dangers, some grow
hardened to them, some enjoy the tussle with them, some turn their minds
away from them, while others, chiefly the imaginative or the
intellectual, shrink from them with the discomfort which, as years go
on, becomes worry, anxiety, foreboding, or any other of the many
forms of care.
V
My own life followed what I assume to be the usual course, though in
saying this I am anxious not to give an exaggerated impression. It was
the usual course, not an unusual one. "There's always something" came to
be a common mental phrase, and the something was, as a rule, not
cheering. Neither, as a rule, was it terrible. It was just
_something_--a sense of the carking hanging over life, and now and then
turning to a real mischance or a heartache.
It strikes me as strange, on looking back, that so little attempt was
made to combat fear by religion. In fact, as far as I know, little
attempt was made to combat fear in any way. One's attention was not
called to it otherwise than as a wholly inevitable state. You were born
subject to fear as you were born subject to death, and that was an
end of it.
Brought up in an atmosphere in which religion was our main
preoccupation, I cannot recall ever hearing it appealed to as a
counteragent to this most persistent enemy of man. In dealing with your
daily dreads you simply counted God out. Either He had nothing to do
with them or He brought them upon you. In any case His intervention on
your behalf was not supposed to be in this world, and to look for
rewards from Him here and now was considered a form of impiety. You were
to be willing to serve God for naught; after which unexpected favours
might be accorded you, but you were to hope for nothing as a right. I do
not say that this is what I was taught; it was what I understood; but to
the best of my memory it was the general understanding round about me.
In my fight against fear, in as far as I made one, God was for many
years of no help to me, or of no help of which I was aware. I shall
return to the point later in telling how I came to "discover God" for
myself, but not quite the same God, or not quite the same concept of
God, which my youthful mind had supposed to be the only one.
VI
At the same time it was to a small detail in my religious training--or
to be more exact in the explanation of the Bible given me as a boy--that
I harked back when it became plain to me that either I must conquer fear
or fear must conquer me. Having fallen into my mind like a seed, it lay
for well on to thirty years with no sign of germination, till that
"need," of which I shall have more to say presently, called it
into life.
Let me state in a few words how the need made itself pressing.
It was, as life goes, a tolerably dark hour. I was on the borderland
between young manhood and early middle age. For some years I had been
losing my sight, on top of which came one of those troubles with the
thyroid gland which medical science still finds obscure. For reasons
which I need not go into I was spending an autumn at Versailles in
France, unoccupied and alone.
If you know Versailles you know that it combines all that civilisation
has to offer of beauty, magnificence, and mournfulness. A day's visit
from Paris will give you an inkling of this, but only an inkling. To get
it all you must live there, to be interpenetrated by its glory of decay.
It is always the autumn of the spirit at Versailles, even in summer,
even in spring; but in the autumn of the year the autumnal emotion of
the soul is poignant beyond expression. Sad gardens stretch into sad
parks; sad parks into storied and haunting forests. Long avenues lead to
forgotten châteaux mellowing into ruin. Ghostly white statues astonish
you far in the depths of woods where the wild things are now the most
frequent visitors. A Temple of Love--pillared, Corinthian, lovely--lost
in a glade to which lovers have probably not come in a hundred
years--will remind you that there were once happy people where now the
friendliest sound is that of the wood-chopper's axe or the horn of some
far-away hunt. All the old tales of passion, ambition, feud, hatred,
violence, lust, and intrigue are softened here to an aching sense of
pity. At night you will hear the castle clock, which is said never once
to have failed to strike the hour since Louis the Fourteenth put it in
its place, tolling away your life as it has tolled away epochs.
Amid these surroundings a man ill, lonely, threatened with blindness,
can easily feel what I may call the spiritual challenge of the ages. He
must either be strong and rule; or he must be weak and go down. He must
get the dominion over circumstance, or circumstance must get the
dominion over him. To be merely knocked about by fate and submit to it,
even in the case of seemingly inevitable physical infirmity, began to
strike me as unworthy of a man.
It is one thing, however, to feel the impulse to get up and do
something, and another to see what you can get up and do. For a time the
spectre of fear had me in its power. The physical facts couldn't be
denied, and beyond the physical facts I could discern nothing. It was
conceivable that one might react against a mental condition; but to
react against a mysterious malady coupled with possibly approaching
blindness was hardly to be thought of. When one added one's incapacity
to work and earn a living, with all that that implies, it seemed as if
it would take the faith that moves mountains to throw off the weight
oppressing me. It is true that to move mountains you only need faith as
a grain of mustard seed, but as far as one can judge not many of us have
that much.
It was then that my mind went back all of a sudden to the kernel planted
so many years before, in my island home, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. If
I become prolix over this it is only that I want to show how often it
happens to parents, teachers, and others who deal with children, to
throw out a thought which after lying dormant for years will become a
factor in the life. Had it not been for the few words spoken then I
should not, as far as I can see, now have such mastery over self as I
have since attained--not very much--but I should not be writing
these lines.
VII
My boyhood was placed in the times when Darwin's "Origin of Species" and
"Descent of Man" had thrown the scientific and religious worlds into
convulsion. The struggle between the old ideas and the new calls for no
more than a reference here; but the teacher to whom I owe most was one
who, while valuing the old, saw only an enrichment in the new,
explaining the Bible in that spirit. So it happened that he spoke one
day of the extraordinary ingenuity of the life-principle, which somehow
came to the earth, in adapting itself to perpetually new conditions.
Nothing defeated it. For millions of years it was threatened by climatic
changes, by the lack of food, by the ferocity of fellow-creatures. Heat,
cold, flood, drought, earthquake, and volcanic eruption were forever
against it. Struggling from stage to stage upward from the slime a new
danger was always to it a new incentive to finding a new resource.
Pursued through the water it sought the land. Pursued on the land it
sought the air. Pursued in the air it developed fleetness of wing, and
in fleetness of wing a capacity for soaring, circling, balancing,
dipping, and swinging on itself of which the grace must not blind us to
the marvellous power of invention.
In other words, the impulses leading to the origin of species proclaim a
resourcefulness on the part of what we call life which we have every
reason to think inexhaustible. Whatever the Fount of Being from which
the life-principle first came into the waters of our earth there is no
question but that with it came a conquest-principle as well. Had it been
possible to exterminate the life-principle it would never have gone
further than the age which saw the extinction of the great reptiles. The
great reptiles went, but the life-principle stayed on, with the ability
to assume, within our limited observation, all the forms between the
bacillus and the elephant, while as to what lies beyond our observation
the possibilities are infinite.
Long before it works up to man we see this amazing force stemming an
uncountable number of attacks, and meeting ruinous conditions with
daring contrivances. For one kind of danger it develops a shell, for
another a sting, for another a poison, for another a protective
colouration. To breathe in the sea it puts forth gills, and makes lungs
for itself when stranded on the land. In glacial cold it finds the means
of growing fur; when heat and cold assail it by turns it packs itself
with feathers; when climates become temperate it produces hair. For the
creature which keeps to the water it webs the foot; for that which takes
to the trees it makes the toes prehensile; for the one which learns to
stand erect and run along the ground it flattens the sole, making it
steady and supporting. To resist, to survive, to win through, is the end
to which the life-principle sets itself with such singleness of aim as
to unfold a wealth of potentiality astounding to us in looking backward.
VIII
This was the idea which came back to me that autumn at Versailles, and
from which in the course of time I drew my conclusions.
Briefly, those conclusions were to the effect that as individuals we
need difficulties to overcome, and that fear is a stimulus to overcoming
them. Otherwise expressed, fear loses much of its fearfulness when we
see it as the summons to putting forth new energies. Unless we were
conscious of the energies such a call would not reach us. The creatures
preceding man could have felt no misgiving, since they lacked the
imagination essential to a dread. Such fear as they were equal to must
have seized them in paroxysms of terror when calamities threatened to
overwhelm them. If they made good their escape no trace of the fear
remained behind, the brain having little or no power of retention. We
may take it for granted that the pterodactyl and the trachodon had none
of the foreboding based on experience which destroys the peace of man.
Fear, as we understand it, was in itself a signal of advance. It could
only have begun with the exercise of reason. Arrived at the rudiments of
memory the creature must have been able to perceive, however dimly, that
the thing which had happened might happen again. Adding the first
stirrings of imagination he must have constructed possible events in
which the danger would come from the same causes as before. With the
faculties to remember, to reason, and to imagine all at work we reach
the first stages of man.
Man was born into fear in that he was born into a world of which most of
the energies were set against him. He was a lone thing fighting his own
battle. The instinct for association which made the mammals different
from other animals didn't help him much, since association did not bring
mutual help as a matter of course, and never has done so. A man could
count on no one but himself. Not only were prodigious natural forces
always menacing him with destruction; not only was the beast his enemy
and he the enemy of the beast; but his hand was against his fellow-man
and his fellow-man's hand against him. This mutual hostility followed
men in their first groupings into communities, and only to a degree have
we lived it down in the twentieth century.
Perhaps this conviction that a man's strength lay in standing
single-handed against circumstance was the first small discovery I made
in my own fight with fear. Looking back on the developments which had
brought man into the world I saw a marvellous power of getting round
difficulties when you couldn't cut through them. Just as a river which
cannot flow over a rock can glide about its feet and turn it into a
picturesque promontory, so I recognised in myself an inborn human
faculty for "sidestepping" that which blocked my way, when I couldn't
break it down.
I left Versailles with just that much to the good--a perception that the
ages had bequeathed me a store of abilities which I was allowing to lie
latent. Moving into Paris, to more cheerful surroundings, I took up
again the writing of the book I had abandoned more than a year
previously. After long seclusion I began to see a few people, finding
them responsive and welcoming. My object in stating these unimportant
details is merely to show that in proportion as I ceased to show fear
the life-principle hastened to my aid. Little by little I came to the
belief that the world about me was a system of co-operative
friendliness, and that it was my part to use it in that way.
IX
To use it in that way was not easy. I was so accustomed to the thought
of Nature as a complex of self-seeking cruelties, the strong preying on
the weak, and the weak defenceless, that the mere idea of its containing
a ruling co-operative principle seemed at times far-fetched. To the
common opinion of the day, my own included, the conception of a
universe that would come to a man's aid the minute a man came to his own
was too much like a fairy tale. It may indeed be a fairy tale. All I
know is that in my own case it is the way in which it seems to have
worked. I think I have caught a glimpse of a constructive use for that
which I had previously thought of as only destructive and terrible.
This is what I mean. The life-principle having, through unknown millions
of years, developed the conquest-principle by meeting difficulties and
overcoming them, the difficulties had a value. To man, especially, the
menace of Nature, the ferocity of the beast, and the enmity of his
fellow-man furnished the incentive to his upward climb. Had all been
easy he would have stayed where he was. He would never have called
mental powers to his physical aid, nor appealed to spiritual faculties
when the mental fell short of his requirements. Spurred on by a
necessity which grew more urgent in proportion as the life-principle
widened its scope, the conquest-principle became an impulse which would
brook no denying. Man grew by it; but the fact remains that he would not
have grown had there been nothing for him to struggle with.
To me it seems basic to the getting rid of fear to know that our trials,
of whatever nature, are not motiveless. In our present stage of
development we could hardly do without them. So often looking like mere
ugly excrescences on life they are in reality the branches by which we
catch on and climb. They are not obstacles to happiness for the reason
that the only satisfying happiness we are equal to as yet is that of
wrestling with the difficult and overcoming it. Every call of duty has
its place in this ideal; every irksome job, every wearisome
responsibility. The fact that we are not always aware of it in no way
annuls the other fact that it is so. Boredom, monotony, drudgery,
bereavement, loneliness, all the clamour of unsatisfied ambitions and
aching sensibilities, have their share in this divine yearning of the
spirit to grasp what as yet is beyond its reach. All of that hacking of
the man to fit the job rather than the shaping of the job to fit the
man, which is, I imagine, the source of most of the discontent on earth,
has its place here, as well as the hundreds of things we shouldn't do if
we were not compelled to. Whatever summons us to conflict summons us to
life, and life, as we learn from a glance at the past, never shirks the
challenge.
It never shirks the challenge, and, what is more, it never fails to find
the expedient by which the new demand is to be satisfied. To the
conquest of fear that plank must be foundational. As far as we can learn
there never was an emergency yet which the life-principle was not
equipped to meet. When all existing methods had been used up it invented
new ones; when seemingly at the end of its new resources it was only
beginning to go on again.
X
The deduction I make is this, that a law which was operative on such a
scale before man had come into the world at all must be still more
effective now that we can help to carry it out. The life-principle is
not less ingenious than it ever was, while the conquest-principle must
have widely expanded. It is an axiom in all progress that the more we
conquer the more easily we conquer. We form a habit of conquering as
insistent as any other habit. Victory becomes, to some degree, a state
of mind. Knowing ourselves superior to the anxieties, troubles, and
worries which obsess us, we _are_ superior. It is a question of attitude
in confronting them. It is more mental than it is material. To be in
harmony with the life-principle and the conquest-principle is to be in
harmony with power; and to be in harmony with power is to be strong as a
matter of course.
The individual is thus at liberty to say: "The force which never failed
before is not likely to fail in my case. The fertility of resource which
circumvented every kind of obstacle to make me what I am--a vertebrate,
breathing, walking, thinking entity, capable of some creative
expression of my own--will probably not fall short now that I have
immediate use for it. Of what I get from the past, prehistoric and
historic, perhaps the most subtle distillation is the fact that so far
is the life-principle from balking at need, need is essential to its
activity. Where there is no need it seems to be quiescent; where there
is something to be met, contended with, and overcome, it is furiously
'on the job.' That life-principle is my principle. It is the seed from
which I spring. It is my blood, my breath, my brain. I cannot cut myself
off from it; it cannot cut itself off from me. Having formed the
mastodon to meet one set of needs and the butterfly to meet another, it
will form, something to meet mine, even if something altogether new. The
new--or what seems new to me--is apparently the medium in which it is
most at home. It repeats itself never--not in two rosebuds, not in two
snowflakes. Who am I that I should be overlooked by it, or miss being
made the expression of its infinite energies?"
XI
What this reasoning did for me from the start was to give me a new
attitude toward the multifold activity we call life. I saw it as
containing a principle that would work with me if I could work with it.
My working with it was the main point, since _it_ was working with me
always. Exactly what that principle was I could not at the time have
said; I merely recognised it as being there.
The method of working with it was simple in idea, however difficult in
practice. It was a question of my own orientation. I had to get mentally
into harmony with the people and conditions I found about me. I was not
to distrust them; still less was I to run away from them. I was to make
a parable of my childish experience with the Skye terrier, assuming that
life was organised to do me good. I remembered how many times the Bible
begins some bit of pleading or injunction with the words, "Fear not."
Other similar appeals came back to me. "Say to them that are of a
fearful heart, Be strong I fear not."[1] "Quit yourselves like men; be
strong."[2] "O man greatly beloved, fear not! Peace be unto thee! Be
strong, yea, be Strong."[3] When, at some occasional test, dismay or
self-pity took hold of me I formed a habit of saying to myself, in our
expressive American idiom: "This is your special stunt. It's up to you
to do this thing just as if you had all the facilities. Go at it boldly,
and you'll find unexpected forces closing round you and Coming to
your aid."
[1] The Book of Isaiah.
[2] First Book of Samuel.
[3] Book of Daniel.
Which is just what I did find. To an amazing degree people were
friendly, while conditions became easier. Fear diminished because I had
fewer things to be afraid of. Having fewer things to be afraid of my
mind was clearer for work. Work becoming not only more of a resource but
more remunerative as well, all life grew brighter. Fear was not
overcome; I had only made a more or less hesitating stand against it;
but even from doing that I got positive results.