The Conquest of Fear

A free download from http://www.dertz.in


The Conquest of Fear

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Conquest of Fear, by Basil King
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: The Conquest of Fear
Author: Basil King
Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9944] [This file was first

posted on November 2, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: iso-8859-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
CONQUEST OF FEAR ***

E-text prepared by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

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