136 SAVAGE SURVIVALS 



and fairly bathes himself in the feelings of com- 

 panionship. ' ' 



The fear of ghosts, goblins, and graves is a sur- 

 vival from the time when men supposed that 

 about all the evils of life, even storms, earth- 

 quakes, and diseases, were caused by evil spirits. 

 Primitive men believed that the spirit of the dead 

 hung around the immediate vicinity of the body 

 for some time after it left the body. We seem to 

 retain some part of this belief in our half-assent 

 to the theory of " haunted " houses and "haunted" 

 cemeteries. 



The instinct of fear is a useful instinct where- 

 ever life has dangers or enemies. And it is, of 

 course, still useful in many ways to higher peo- 

 ples. But there is much greater security among 

 higher peoples than among lower peoples, and 

 hence many occasions for fear have passed away. 



We fear the things which our machinery (na- 

 ture) is adapted to fear. And our machinery is 

 adapted to fear the things we needed to fear in 

 the savage world gone by, namely, thunder and 

 lightning and snakes and solitude and strangers 

 and darkness. None of these things now has much 

 danger to civilized peoples, but we continue to 

 fear them because of the survival of the old fear- 

 producing machinery. Microbes are probably a 

 thousand times as dangerous to human life and 

 happiness as snakes are, but our "natural" im- 

 pulse is to fear snakes much more than microbes. 

 We love fighting rather than figures, and explora- 



