The Conquest of Fear | Page 7

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