A PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDY OF FEAR. 777 



not real courage ; it is habit. The sailor on the tempest-driven ship ; 

 the doctor, the sister of charity, and the attendant in a pest or cholera 

 hospital ; the chemist and physiologist surrounded by infections, ex- 

 plosives, and poisons ; the aeronaut ; the roofer, and the bull-fighter, 

 do not exhibit the test of bravery. They are not afraid. The pre- 

 sentiment of an unknown danger, which is the foundation of all fear, 

 does not exist for them. Operatives who work in factories of pow- 

 der or dynamite are sometimes so imprudent and so little afraid of a 

 danger which they are perfectly well acquainted with, but to which 

 they are habituated, that it has become necessary to protect them 

 against themselves, and to take rigorous measures to keep them from 

 smoking and from using fire near the powder. Real courage, as dis- 

 tinguished from professional courage, is the fearless confronting of a 

 danger of which we recognize the importance and which we are not 

 accustomed to. 



Nothing is more variable than fear. It depends upon the individ- 

 uality, or, rather, upon the excitability of each individual. Every 

 one has his peculiar quality of excitability, which depends upon his 

 physiological and moral condition, and is not the same for the dif- 

 ferent excitations. I believe that every man is more or less sus- 

 ceptible to fright ; but that fear is caused among different persons 

 by different motives. One is afraid of poisons, another of boats ; 

 one of bridges and mountains, another of snakes ; another of dark- 

 ness or of thunder ; and each one can find among the excitations 

 that strike upon his senses the one which will be most apt to pro- 

 voke in him fear. The excitability of each person is also variable 

 according to the time of day, or to his condition in health or dis- 

 ease. The thoughts do not follow the same course in a person who 

 is hungry and in one who has just dined. A convalescent, debili- 

 tated by a protracted nervous affection, would doubtless be more 

 accessible to fear than if he were robust, well, and just rising from 

 the table. Attention and the imagination enormously augment the 

 intensity of the emotion. In fact, for all psychical reflex phenomena 

 the excitement is nothing in itself ; the reaction of the organism does 

 all. The visual or auditive image which strikes our senses is nothing, 

 so long as it is not transformed and elaborated by the intelligence in 

 such a way as to become at last a frightful image. A child walking 

 on the road at night sees a white cloth swinging in the air ; he imme- 

 diately imagines it a ghost in pursuit of him, and runs away terrified. 

 His imagination has done it all, and if it had not amplified and im- 

 measurably magnified the real image he would not have been afraid. 

 Perhaps we ought all to be more modest than we have been in the 

 habit of being respecting this matter of bravery, and to acknowledge 

 that to be bold is often simply to lack imagination. 



In some cases the imagination is blended with attention. To pay 

 attention to an image is, by the fact itself, to aggrandize it and make 



