INSTINCT. 419 



entirely unreasonable, but that reason is powerless to 

 suppress them. That they are a mere incidental peculiarity 

 of the nervous system, like liability to sea-sickness, or love 

 of music, with no teleological significance, seems more than 

 probable. The fear in question varies so much from one per- 

 son to another, and its detrimental effects are so much more 

 obvious than its uses, that it is hard to see how it could be 

 a selected instinct. Man is anatomically one of the best 

 fitted of animals for climbing about high places. The best 

 psychical complement to this equipment would seem to be 

 a ' level head ' when there, not a dread of going there at 

 all. In fact, the teleology of fear, beyond a certain 

 point, is very dubious. Professor Mosso, in his interesting 

 monograph, ' La Paura ' (which has been translated into 

 Prench), concludes that many of its manifestations must be 

 considered pathological rather than useful ; Bain, in several 

 places, expresses the same opinion ; and this, I think, is 

 surely the view which any observer without a priori preju- 

 dices must take. A certain amount of timidity obviously 

 adapts us to the world we live in, but the fear-paroxysm is 

 surely altogether harmful to him who is its prey. 



Fear of the supernatural is one variety of fear. -It is 

 difficult to assign any normal object for this fear, unless it 

 ■were a genuine ghost. But, in spite of psychical research- 

 societies, science has not yet adopted ghosts ; so we can only 

 say that certain ideo^ of supernatural agency, associated 

 with real circumstances, produce a peculiar kind of horror. 

 This horror is probably explicable as the result of a combi- 

 nation of simpler horrors. To bring the ghostly terror to its 

 maximum, many usual elements of the dreadful must com- 

 bine, such as loneliness, darkness, inexplicable sounds, espe- 

 cially of a dismal character, moving figures half discerned 

 (or,if discerned, of dreadful aspect), and a vertiginous bafiling 

 of the expectation. This last element, which is intellectual, 

 is very important. It produces a strange emotional 

 * curdle ' in our blood to see a process with which we are 

 familiar deliberately taking an unwonted course. Any 

 one's heart would stop beating if he perceived his chair 

 sliding unassisted across the floor. The lower animals 

 appear to be sensitive to the mysteriously exceptional as 



