418 PSYCHOLOGY. 



lect rightly) about eight months okl. Then the instinct 

 suddenly seemed to develoj^, and with such intensity that 

 familiarity had no mitigating eflfect. She screamed when- 

 ever the dog entered the room, and for many months re- 

 mained afraid to touch him. It is needless to say that no 

 change in the pug's unfailingly friendly conduct had any- 

 thing to do with this change of feeling in the child. 



Preyer tells of a young child screaming with fear on 

 being carried near to the sea. The great source of terror 

 to infancy is solitude. The teleology of this is obvious, as 

 is also that of the infant's expression of dismay — the never- 

 failing cry — on waking up and finding himself alone. 



Black tilings, and especially dark places, holes, caverns, 

 etc., arouse a peculiarly gruesome fear. This fear, as well 

 as that of solitude, of being ' lost,' are explained after a 

 fashion by ancestral experience. Says Schneider : 



"It is a fact that men, especially in childhood, fear to go into a dark 

 cavern or a gloomy wood. This feeling of fear arises, to be sure, 

 partly from the fact that we easily suspect that dangerous beasts may 

 lurk in these localities — a suspicion due to stories we have heard and 

 read. But, on the other hand, it is quite sure that this fear at a certain 

 perception is also directly inherited. Children who have been carefully 

 guarded from all ghost-stories are nevertheless terrified and cry if led 

 into a dark place, especially if sounds are made there. Even an adult 

 can easily observe that an uncomfortable timidity steals over him in a 

 lonely wood at night, although he may have the fixed conviction that 

 not the slightest danger is near. 



"This feeling of fear occurs in many men even in their own house 

 after dark, although it is much stronger in a dark cavern or forest. The 

 fact of such instinctive fear is easily explicable when we consider that 

 our savage ancestors through innumerable generations were accustomed 

 to meet with dangerous beasts in caverns, especially bears, and were 

 for the most part attacked by such beasts during the night and in the 

 woods, and that tnus an inseparable association between the perceptions 

 of darkness of caverns and woods, and fear took place, and was 

 inherited."* 



High places cause fear of a peculiarly sickening sort, 

 though here, again, individuals differ enormously. The 

 utterly blind instinctive character of the motor impulses 

 here is shown by the fact that they are almost always 



* Der Menschliche Wille, p. 224. 



