16 



DISCOVERY 



merit from some secondary source of fear, and in cases 

 where the original shock still remains vivid in the 

 memory, the presence of some accessory factor is 

 always to be suspected. 



(b) The transference of a fear to its symbolic equiva- 

 lent may be illustrated by the case of a man who was 

 in greater danger than he supposed of yielding to a 

 passionate attachment that threatened to wreck his 

 family life ; he professed to feel master of himself and 

 quite secure, but he developed an exaggerated fear of 

 the house catching fire, and was unable to sleep from 

 anxiety lest " something might be smouldering some- 

 where." 



The fire was here accepted as a symbol or equivalent 

 of passion, a simile stereotyped by common use, and 

 though such a literal substitution may appear un- 

 reasonable, yet it is a process not altogether alien .to 

 our common mode of thought, for we see nothing 

 bizarre in, let us say, the action of the German people 

 in tearing down the Imperial monogram after the 

 revolution. 



(c) The common fears of mankind are those instinc- 

 tive fears that appear, many of them, irrational in the 

 setting of our civilisation, but which one may speculate 

 to have been serviceable to our primitive ancestors. 

 They include the fear of the dark, of open spaces 

 {agoraphobia) , of being shut in (claustrophobia) , of being 

 alone, of heights, of the unfamiliar ; fears that we 

 have all felt at some time, howsoever faintly. They 

 represent a specialised and inherited sensitiveness to 

 particular modes of sthnulation, and they are easily 

 reactivated by any free or diffused fear that is seeking 

 a means of expression. 



The nature of the particular fear is deteiTnined 

 most often by its congruity with the true object of 

 fear ; thus a boy, who has broken away from the 

 home circle and set up for himself, may regret the 

 security that he has left, and find, though too proud 

 to admit it, something a little terrif3ang in his new 

 liberty, and then perhaps he develops a strange fear 

 of empty streets and wide open spaces, that symbolise 

 for him his unprotectedness and isolation. 



It is not without interest to endeavour to trace the 

 origin of some of these common fears that seem to 

 have outlived their usefulness ; the fear of darkness 

 has still a protective value amongst those primitive 

 tribes who are liable to night raids from hostile neigh- 

 bours, and who compete on more or less equal terms 

 with the nocturnal camivora ; for the man who 

 wandered care-free in the dark was a type likely to be 

 eliminated by natural selection. 



So the old mode of reaction lingers on, and wc do 

 no great violence to the theories of heredity if we see 

 in the monsters with which a child peoples the darkness 

 an unconscious recollection of the ancestral enemies. 



The fear of open spaces is one to which few normal 

 people would admit any liability, yet many of us, in 

 crossing a wide, snow-covered field or a bare plain, 

 may have caught in ourselves a tendency to glance 

 backwards occasionally over our shoulder and felt a 

 slight feeling of relief on reaching the " shelter " of 

 the hedges and broken ground. And no one, in select- 

 ing a table in an empty or half-empty restaurant 

 hesitates to prefer one against the wall to one in the 

 centre of the room. 



If we analyse a little this uneasiness called out by 

 open spaces, it resolves itself into a feeling of being 

 improtected, especially from behind, and perhaps it 

 is not altogether fanciful to see ourselves reacting here 

 as primitive man, with his relatively inferior powers 

 of flight, would and does react when caught at a dis- 

 advantage in the open. In this situation there is 

 probably a secondary factor in operation, for man is 

 a gregarious animal and liable to an acute feeling of 

 uneasiness when separated from the protection of the 

 herd. 



In the choice of a " sheltered " position for meals 

 we have, perhaps, a faint relic of that feeling of shame 

 that many primitive tribes still attach to the act of 

 eating, a feeling probably derived from the fact that 

 the animal when preoccupied with the physiological 

 functions, such as nutrition, excretion, and reproduc- 

 tion, is relatively defenceless, and for greater safety 

 tends to carry them out in conceakneirt. 



The origin of the fear of heights as an instinctive 

 fear seems almost to elude explanation, however 

 speculative. Unlike the foregoing fears it is the 

 reaction, though an excessive one, to a real danger, and 

 it also differs from them in being almost absent in 

 childhood, seeming to become more acute towards the 

 end of life, so that the author of Ecclesiastes (xii. 5) 

 gives it place among the disabilities of old age. 



It has been referred, somewhat fancifully, to an 

 instinct inherited from some arboreal ancestor, but 

 there is no strong reason for believing that man's 

 immediate progenitors were tree-climbing animals, or, 

 if they were, for supposing them to have been liable 

 to this particular fear. An origin has also been looked 

 for in the fear of falling from the nurse's arms, a 

 relatively tremendous height to a baby, and here the 

 emotion might have a protective value if it were 

 accompanied by a tendency to cling to the mother, a 

 reaction that is rather less marked in babies than 

 might have been expected. 



The fear of height is, for the majority, e.xcited most 

 keenly on the top of a tower or the promontory of a 

 cliff, and is often more intense when looking both down 

 and outwards than when looking straight downwards. 

 It is accompanied by an urgent desire to cling hold 

 of something solid, which lends a little colour of proba- 



