The Conquest of Fear | Page 8

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