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Article 1
FEAR AND REASON.
"In civilized life it has at last become
possible for large numbers of people to pass from the cradle to
the grave without ever having had a pang of genuine fear. Many
of us need an attack of mental disease to teach us the meaning
of the word." William James.
We have all heard the seemingly discriminating
remarks that fear is normal and abnormal, and that normal fear
is to be regarded as a friend, while abnormal fear should be
destroyed as an enemy.
The fact is that no so called normal fear can
be named which has not been clearly absent in some people who
have had every cause therefor. If you will run over human
history in your mind, or look about yea in the present life,
you will find here and there persons who, in situations or
before objects which ought, as any fearful soul will insist, to
inspire the feeling of at least normal self-protecting fear,
are nevertheless wholly without the feeling. They possess every
feeling and thought demanded except fear. The idea of
self-preservation is as strongly present as with the most
abjectly timid or terrified, but fear they do not know. This
fearless awareness of fear suggesting conditions may be due to
several causes. It may result from constitutional make-up, or
from long continued training or habituation, or from religious
ecstasy, or from a perfectly calm sense of spiritual selfhood
which is unhurtable, or from the action of very exalted reason.
Whatever the explanation, the fact remains: the very causes
which excite fear in most of us, merely appeal, with such
people, if at all. to the instinct of self-preservation and to
reason, the thought-element of the soul which makes for
personal peace and wholeness.
Banish all
fear.
It is on such considerations that I have come
to hold that all real fear-feeling should and may be banished
from our life, and that what we call "normal fear" should be
substituted in our language by "instinct" or by "reason," the
element of fear being dropped altogether.
"Everyone can testify that the psychical state
called fear consists of mental representations of certain
painful results" (James). The mental representations may be
very faint as such, but the idea of hurt to self is surely
present. If, then, it can be profoundly believed that the real
self cannot be hurt; if the reason can be brought to consider
vividly and believingly all quieting considerations; if the
self can be held consciously in the assurance that the White
Life surrounds the true self, and is surely within that self,
and will suffer "no evil to come nigh," while all the instincts
of self preservation may be perfectly active, fear itself must
be removed "as far as the east is from the west."
These are the ways, then, in which any occasion
for fear may be divided:
As a warning and as a maker of panic. But let
us say that the warning should be understood as given to
reason, that fear need not appear at all, and that the panic is
perfectly useless pain. With these discriminations in mind, we
may now go on to a preliminary study of fear.
preliminary study of
fear.
Fear is (a) an impulse, (b) a habit, (c) a
disease.
Fear, as it exists in man, is a make-believe of
sanity, a creature of the imagination, a state of insanity.
Furthermore, fear is, now of the nerves, now of
the mind, now of the moral consciousness.
The division depends upon the point of view.
What is commonly called normal fear should give place to
reason, using the word to cover instinct as well as thought.
From the correct point of view all fear is an evil so long as
entertained.
Whatever its manifestations, wherever its
apparent location, fear is a psychic state, of course, reacting
upon the individual in several ways: as, in the nerves, in
mental moods, in a single impulse, in a chronic habit, in a
totally unbalanced condition. The reaction has always a good
intention, meaning, in each case, "Take care! Danger!" You will
see that this is so if you will look for a moment at three
comprehensive kinds of fear fear of self, fear for self, fear
for others. Fear of self is indirectly fear for self danger.
Fear for others signifies foresensed or forepictured distress
to self because of anticipated misfortune to others. I often
wonder whether, when we fear for others, it is distress to self
or hurt to them that is most emphatically in our thought.
Fear, then, is usually regarded as the soul's
danger signal. But the true signal is instinctive and
thoughtful reason.
Even instinct and reason, acting as warning,
may perform their duty abnormally, or assume abnormal
proportions. And then we have the feeling of fear. The normal
warning is induced by actual danger apprehended by mind in a
state of balance and self-control. Normal mind is always
capable of such warning. There are but two ways in which
so-called normal fear, acting in the guise of reason, may be
annihilated: by the substitution of reason for fear, and by the
assurance of the white life.
Let it be understood, now, that by normal fear
is here meant normal reason real fear being denied place and
function altogether. Then we may say that such action of reason
is a benefactor to man. It is, with pain and weariness, the
philanthropy of the nature of things within us.
One person said: "Tired? No such word in my
house!" Now this cannot be a sound and healthy attitude.
Weariness, at a certain stage of effort, is a signal to stop
work. When one becomes so absorbed in labor as to lose
consciousness of the feeling of weariness, he has issued a
"hurry call" on death. I do not deny that the soul may
cultivate a sublime sense of buoyancy and power; rather do I
urge you to seek that beautiful condition; but I hold that when
a belief or a hallucination refuses to permit you to hear the
warning of nerves and muscles, Nature will work disaster
inevitably. Let us stand for the larger liberty which is
joyously free to take advantage of everything Nature may offer
for true well-being. There is a partial liberty which tries to
realize itself by denying various realities as real; there is a
higher liberty which really realizes itself by conceding such
realities as real and by using or disusing them as occasion may
require in the interest of the self at its best. I hold this to
be true wisdom: to take advantage of everything which evidently
promises good to the self, without regard to this or that
theory, and freely to use all things, material or immaterial,
reasonable or spiritual. I embrace your science or your method;
but I beg to ignore your bondage to philosophy or to
consistency. So I say that to normal health the weary-sense is
a rational command to replenish exhausted nerves and
muscles.
It is not liberty, it is not healthful, to
declare, "There is no pain!" Pain does exist, whatever you
affirm, and your affirmation that it does not is proof that it
does exist, for why (and how) declare the non-existence of that
which actually is non-existent? But if you say, "As a matter of
fact I have pain, but I am earnestly striving to ignore it, and
to cultivate thought-health so that the cause of pain may be
removed," that is sane and beautiful. This is the commendable
attitude of the Bible character who cried: "Lord, I believe;
help thou mine unbelief." To undertake swamping pain with a
cloud of psychological fog that is to turn anarchist against
the good government of Nature. By pain Nature informs the
individual that he is somewhere out of order. This warning is
normal. The feeling becomes abnormal in the mind when
imagination twangs the nerves with reiterated irritation, and
Will, confused by the discord and the psychic chaos, cowers and
shivers with fear.
I do not say there is no such thing as fear.
Fear does exist. But it exists in your life by your permission
only, not because it is needful as a warning against
"evil."
Fear is induced by unduly magnifying actual
danger, or by conjuring up fictitious dangers through excessive
and misdirected psychical reactions. This also may be taken as
a signal of danger, but it is a falsely-intentioned witness,
for it is not needed, is hostile to the individual because it
threatens self-control and it absorbs life's forces in useless
and destructive work when they ought to be engaged in creating
values.
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