191 1.] IN RELATION TO THE EMOTIONS. 89 



While this motor preparation is going on the entire digestive tract 

 is inhibited. It is then clear that an emotion is more harmful than 

 action. 



If the agency that inspires sufficiently the faith — whether the 

 agency be mystical, human, or divine — whatever dispels worry will 

 at once stop the body-wide stimulations and inhibitions which cause 

 lesions as truly physical as a fracture. The striking benefits of 

 good luck, success and happiness; of the change of scenes; of hunt- 

 ing or fishing; of optimistic and helpful friends, are at once ex- 

 plained by this hypothesis. One can also understand the difference 

 between the broken body and spirits of an animal in captivity and 

 its buoyant return to normal condition when freed ; but time will 

 not permit following this tempting lead which has been introduced 

 for another purpose, which I may say, is one of the principal objects 

 sought in this paper, viz., a proposed remedy. 



Worries either are or are not groundless. Of those that have a 

 basis many are exaggerated. It has occurred to me to utilize as an 

 antidote an appeal to the same great law that originally excites the 

 instinctive involuntary reaction known as fear, viz., the law of 

 self-preservation. 



I have found that if an intelligent patient suffering from fear is 

 made to see so plainly as to amount to a firm conviction that his 

 brain, his various organs, indeed his whole being could be physically 

 damaged by fear, this same instinct of self-preservation will to the 

 extent of his conviction, banish fear. It is hurling threatened active 

 militant danger, whose imperious influences are both certain and 

 known, against an uncertain, perhaps a fancied one, or in other 

 words fear itself is an injury which when recognized is instinctively 

 avoided. In precisely a similar manner anger may be softened or 

 banished by an appeal to the stronger self-preserving instinct of the 

 fear of physical damage, — such as the physical injury of brain cells. 

 This playing of one primitive instinct against another is comparable 

 to the effect upon two men quarrelling when a more powerful 

 enemy of both comes threateningly on the scene. 



The acute fears of surgical operations may be banished by the 

 use of certain drugs that depress the associational power of the 

 brain and minimize the evidence that usually inspires fear. If in 



