152 MAN --AN ADAPTIVE MECHANISM 



Explanation of the Gross Phenomena of the Emotions 



In the light of this evidence many phenomena of 

 fear and of other emotions may be explained. It is 

 known, for instance, that men and animals under the 

 stimulus of strong emotion possess an extraordinary 

 amount of physical strength. This is explained by 

 the fact that fear drives certain organs and inhibits 

 others so that every particle of available energy is 

 concentrated upon the fighting mechanism. The ad- 

 vantage that this power must have given to prehis- 

 toric man in his struggles against superior foes in a 

 wild environment is apparent to any one who will 

 allow his imagination to revert to those days of supreme 

 physical contest. But that the tendency should per- 

 sist to-day, in spite of the disappearance of most of 

 the stimuli to active physical combat, so that, at the 

 slightest hint of danger, man's energies are drained, 

 exactly as in the days of physical struggle, is one of the 

 misfortunes of our insufficiently adapted state. 



So strong is the force of these ancestral acts, so 

 firmly established the action pattern of muscular re- 

 sponse to the fear stimulus, that now, whether a busi- 

 ness catastrophe or an attacking enemy threaten, fear 

 is expressed in terms of the ancestral flight to safety 

 or fight for life which took place in the remote brute 

 period of human history. In spite of the fact that by 

 harnessing the forces of nature, and by social coor- 

 dination, which reduces the number of motor reactions, 

 man has progressed vastly in his methods of acquiring 

 food and avoiding danger, his body still responds to 

 threatened moral or financial disaster, as if the old 



