The Conquest of Fear | Page 9

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,