Our Mortal Foe

SOME rather surprising experiences of the effects of fear on certain so-called lower animals suggest a psychology of the subject that has scarcely been considered by the philosophers. A strange analogy permeates nature. Even if we care to study nothing but man, ‘the proper study of mankind,’ we cannot afford to disregard the beast of the field. It is certain that some of the more prurient analysts of the soul or psyche of man would have fathered a more wholesome philosophy if they had widened their view and considered the lower as well as the higher animals.

The most essential influence of fear on a good many animals is that it prevents or limits breeding. It hurts the very source of life. Examples even on a large scale are not infrequent. One wide paddock on a Queensland sheep station that I visited was much littered with fallen trunks considerably overgrown. It had been wired off, but the rabbits swarmed. A few pairs had bred freely, and we all know what happens when arithmetical progression has a clean slate. The country was remarkable for the number of birds of the predatory species, especially such hawks as the whistling eagle, but it was very rare for them to find a victim in the littered paddock. The farmer could discover no way of killing off the rabbits, but as a preliminary he collected the fallen timber, burned it, and more or less cleared the paddock of the rougher cover. His direct campaign against the rabbits was for various reasons postponed. Nevertheless, as he soon began to notice, they grew fewer and fewer. The holes remained, but whenever the animals came out to feed they were subject to all sorts of fears, especially because of the watchful hawks that abounded. The actual victims were few, but the families grew rare instead of frequent. By close and particular inspection he satisfied himself that some does did not breed at all, and that others, instead of breeding five or six times a year, had no more than one litter. The litters too were smaller. He was able to corroborate his observations from other Australian experiences, and came to the conclusion that fear was at any rate the chief cause of the fewness and smallness of families. Lack of good nurseries and direct casualties were less important.

Much the same effect has been noticed in other branches of natural history in other countries. Rats in Britain breed much less freely where weasels are found, and mice where cats are found. The number of actual victims is a small thing in the reduction of population compared with the influence of fear on reproduction. In a herd of deer, as we all know, the strongest and most courageous becomes the sire — and so the fittest survive. He fights and drives off inferior males. But there is more in their defeat than their dismissal. Good reasons exist for supposing that their fears of the master buck rob them of capacity.

In his discussion of the principle of the survival of the fittest Darwin said rather too little about the results of combined courage and strength. A number of small but curious effects of the psychology continually present themselves to the field naturalist. The European — not the American — robin drives off his own adult young as well as any other competitor from his favorite breeding place and, in my experience, always wins the battle till his vitality wanes. A robin that may be described as a personal friend nested year after year in an artist’s studio near London, and each year fought furious battles, generally against the young cocks of his own family. He was entirely successful till the fourth year, when he was killed by a rival on the studio floor. Like the robin, many other small birds insist that their private nesting neighborhood shall be free from intruders; and it is almost invariable — indeed I know no exception — that the cock in possession wins the battle. His passion is more and therefore his courage more. The victory is not to the strong, but to the brave, at any rate until the difference in strength becomes wide, owing to age or accident. It is better to breed a courageous race than a powerful race; and it is not a far-fetched idea, if the multitude of little illustrations be considered, that the most plucky are the most capable of producing the best citizens.

It was not, perhaps, only to finish his Alcaic line that Horace added the last two words.

The psychology of courage and its absence, fear, among those we call the lower animals is seen positively as well as negatively. Natural selection depends principally, not on the strength, but on the courage of the male, though the two happily are often correlated; and he is not necessarily a mystic who finds reason to believe that the more courageous bear the better children. One of the commonplaces of statistics is that the average height of the French fell by some two inches after the Napoleonic wars; and the most mortal injury inflicted on society by war is that the bravest die and the least brave live. War, in spite of many Teutonic arguments to the contrary, substitutes the survival of the unfittest and of those least likely to produce better children.

The first effect of strong fears on the human being is to reduce vitality, in general and in particular. It is unnecessary to touch the purely medical side of the question. The fact is obvious to anyone who has been about the world and knows what fear is. Incidentally it may be said that one of the worst effects of a too sheltered civilization is that half the population do not know whether they themselves or their neighbors possess or do not possess the gift of courage. Some few years ago a party of tourists was caught on Helvellyn by a thick mist; two of them were separated from the rest and were forced to spend the night on the mountain. It was not very cold. There was little real danger; but by the morning one of the two was dead. He was said to have died of exposure. He did die of fear, and nothing else. Perhaps most deaths from exposure are due to the same cause. Gregarious man hates to be in danger alone; and for some reason nothing so completely frightens even courageous persons as being lost. They will upon occasion run about in vain arcs and circles, like a rabbit frightened to death by the pursuit of a stoat. The beats of the heart are lowered, less blood goes to the brain, the temperature falls.

Of course fear, like everything in nature, has its uses. The person who faints from horror at the sight of his wound automatically arrests the bleeding by reducing the powder of the heartbeat. Temporary loss of vitality is of service. Among wild animals fear sometimes saves life because the greater fear banishes the lesser. The writer has come upon examples of this among English hares pursued by greyhounds; but none so remarkable as the experience of a friend. Hunting in the northern district of Quebec, he came in sight of a hare pursued by an ermine. The pursuer gained ground and the pursued grew faint. The end seemed certain, when the hare at the last gasp caught sight of the hunter, made straight for him, and crouched between his legs. There she stopped, motionless, till the ermine, after circling round, made off. Then, recovering strength, she ambled off quietly.

Certainly fear has its uses, just as excessive vitality has its drawbacks. Who is more to be pitied than the insensate person whose nerves and intellect do not allow the approach of fear even as they fend off the touch of sympathy? Fear, nevertheless, in its perverted manifestations, is the greatest of all depressants of vitality, is perhaps the king of evils.

In nature fear often has a less numbing (though sometimes more hysteric) effect on woman than on man. The mother, throughout the animal kingdom, is very nearly above fear at certain crises. She is stimulated to the highest pitch of vitality to defend the young life. Her attitude toward life and death — and therefore her fear of death — is more elemental than in the male. The doe rabbit will have power to beat off a stoat when she is defending her brood. A swallow will mob a cat, and a partridge charge and even actually buffet a dog, if her young are in danger. That else timorous beast, the black bear, will face a dozen men in defense of her young. A hedge sparrow will peck at an adder. I quote chiefly personal experiences, but they are not exceptional. They are all a commonplace of a naturalist’s observation.

Just because woman’s courage, especially in regard to her young, is general and beneficent, therefore the malady is most mortal when the women become cowards, intellectual or other. The sequel is race suicide. Here is a little parable of which all the facts are accurate. In the town of Arras, during the war, lived a Frenchwoman who was famous for her calmness under shell-fire and her uncanny knowledge of shells. She knew by the note the exact calibre of every shell that was fired. She would tell frightened soldiers, thanks to her observation of German methods, on which side the next shell would fall. Physically her courage was supreme. But like many — perhaps the majority — of the women of her country, she was afflicted with a form of intellectual fear that must result in race suicide. She had seen many victims of the shells. She was looking on, like a spectator at a bull fight, when two horses and three men were killed near the railway bridge one summer morning of 1916. ‘No more children for us,’ she said with a sort of angry shiver. ‘We are not going to breed babies for cannon fodder.’ She spoke like a prophetess on behalf of her country and sex; and not once or twice I heard the same determination. Various forms of intellectual fear have been long leading to the same end in France, especially fear of poverty and, in the upper classes, fear of public opinion if more children are born than can be provided with a dowry.

All this is a mere incidental external result of fear, important socially but not intrinsic to the feeling. The same results might follow from mere selfishness. Yet there are social and semisocial cowardices that go to the very root of character and temperament. The psychoanalysts, in spite of their exaggerations, perversions, and stupid overemphasis of sex, unquestionably touch a primal influence in their insistence on the repression complex. If they had studied fear more and sex less they would have built a wider base for their theories, if for no other reason than because the two are closely related, as we see in the case of animals. When children are frightened, whether by the bogey stories of their nurse or the thunders of their father or the satiric cruelty of either parent or tutor, the natural processes of life are arrested and any sort of malgrowth, physical or mental or moral, may ensue, because of the close correlation of fear and vitality. Wordsworth, whose philosophy often went deep even when his poetic inspiration waned, writes of ‘the deep power of joy’; and we all know how mere pleasure adds to mental and physical capacity. If joy is the generation of power, fear and its concomitant misery are the parents of impotence. A study of innumerable ‘cases’ of the psychoanalyst reveals ninety per cent of examples of the damage wrought by fear to ten due to any other cause whatever. What is called obstinacy, in children as in animals, is nine times out of ten the expression of fright. The child starts by being inarticulate; and a frightened child is like an actor suffering from stage fright: his memory fails, he loses all ability to pull himself together, he cannot do the thing he would, however strong the wish. The inhibition of fear is upon his mind, upon his vocal cords; and the more he is overawed or threatened the deeper the obstinacy, because the deeper the incompetence of the will. When obstinacy is broken by violent treatment, it is broken because the blow releases fear into indignation. My own feeling is that Freud and other psychoanalysts were decoyed into their mania for explaining every mental malady by sex-repression because this thing fear is in its effects essentially antisexual or repressive of mind sexuality. The frightened child suffers later from sex inhibitions, but these are due, not to direct repression of primal instincts about to be developed, but rather to the loss of vitality, resulting from fear; and this loss of vitality is expressed first and most obviously in the affair of reproductive capacity. The fact is known and attested by numerous experiences of every doctor, indefinitely multiplied in the war. Under stress of terror the very form of a man underwent change.

We can all give our own examples from childhood, and many of us from experiences either in the war or in respect of those who suffered in the war. It is perhaps worth giving two for the sake of the moral. A small girl, very happy and healthy, was told a tale of a burning house and shown a picture of two girls leaning out of a top window, while the lower stories were in flames. The picture made so deep an impression on her mind that she was in perpetual fear that her own house would catch Sire. She would wake up at night and get out of bed to feel if the wall was hot. This she kept to herself, as children will, until the evening of her ninth birthday party. The entertaining, the big fires in unwonted rooms, accentuated her fear that fire was inevitable, and at the conclusion she went to bed in a misery of panic. The burden was such that she broke down when her father came to say good-night; and she told him the truth. From that moment her obsession went. She could not afterward remember what her father said; but the confession and the absolution, whatever it was, were sovereign. Her fears vanished. Life was ‘glad confident morning again.’

That same girl after the war did service in an office concerned with the medical side of soldiers’ pensions. Not one, but many, of the men whom she received dared not cross the middle of the room. They crept miserably close to the walls, victims of what the doctors call agoraphobia, — fear of the open, — bred by life in the trenches, where to show yourself was death. They reminded her of her own childish habit of feeling round the walls for the heat of incendiary flames. She could not but wonder whether they would not forget their fears and misery if they could share the feeling with some sympathetic soul. And they would.

One of the most successful dealers with shell-shock cases in France was a university professor of psychology. His whole endeavor was to persuade his patients to be articulate; and scarcely without exception those who would talk were cured. He had some mesmeric power, and in the early part of the war had considerable success with the British regular soldier. When the man was in some sort of mesmeric trance, he would issue a short, sharp order, as from a superior officer, and in most cases the man would instantly obey. Later in the war, when he was dealing with civilian soldiers, not brought up in an atmosphere of discipline, the abrupt command increased the mental obstinacy of the silence. He was compelled to a gracious, sympathetic, even wheedling, politeness. But the essence of his problem was the same: to make the invalid tell. How the silence and repressive fear were correlated with physical impotence is too medical a theme to discuss here. It is enough that the correlation often existed.

Now the power to utter at all — much more to tell an intimate secret — is itself oddly affected by nerves. One of the most daring of the big-game hunters in Africa in the earlier days told me this tale of himself. He had wounded a buffalo which pursued him round and round a little clump of trees. The natives, after their manner, had fled and he was left wholly to his own resources. The chase continued for what seemed an interminable time; but at last the beast fell dead and the natives returned. Then the hunter tried to give them their orders; but not a syllable would proceed from his mouth. The power of speech had wholly left him. He did not recover it till he had walked and rested by the side of the road for an hour or more.

It may be concluded that fear is inarticulate and mortal. Its close associates are silence and impotence. It is among the worst enemies of the race of animals. Vast numbers of people die of the progressive loss of vitality due to fear. Some die directly and quickly from fear, as in cases of exposure or the hearing of ill news suddenly. Occasionally with men and other animals fear drives them to direct suicide, when you discover this incredible contradiction: that fear of death persuades its victim to embrace death, as in Walter Scott’s Fair Maid of Perth or the behavior of horses in a fire.

Almost or quite the greatest happiness possible to the human mind follows the sudden casting-off of fear or the discovery of the possession of courage. It may literally and actually rejuvenate — change the very physical form. Not a few of the bravest acts recorded in the war were done by men who had been almost paralyzed by fear a few moments earlier. They experienced very much what the shellshocked patient experiences when he has unloaded the burden of his dread and straightened his moral backbone. Action was to the one what speech was to the other. I have told several such tales in a book (A Traveller in News), but came upon many more instances than are there recorded. Here is one.

‘The man’s a coward. Take my word for it, he’ll be missing one of these days.’ So said one officer. The other was of much the same opinion, but he added, ‘All the same, I’ve seen those nervy fellows turn up trumps.’ The man they spoke of was one of the obvious cowards, because he was a self-conscious coward, always thinking of his own cowardice. He kept saying to himself, ‘If I make the others funk I had better be away,’ and daily, against his will, schemes of escape of the wildest sort waltzed round his brain, but brought no decision. At last this rage of indecisive misery reached a pitch that became intolerable. The night was moonless but clear, and from the pit of the trench the stars seemed to look down with a pitiless scrutiny, which added to his wretchedness more than any sane and solid mind could well understand. Before he knew what he was doing the coward slipped over the parapet and began to make his tremulous way toward the German trenches in order to surrender, to desert. Further fears now seized him and he sidled off to the left, afraid to surrender, afraid to return. So for a while he wandered, an insane vagrant, through the purgatory of No Man’s Land, beneath the accusing stars.

He could not remember afterward how he came to see so suddenly the thing in front of him, but his belief, from a muddled recollection, was that he had fallen flat upon his face on seeing the explosion of a star shell. At any rate, there within a yard or so of his eyes was the muzzle of a machine-gun hidden with devilish cunning in a pit well outside the German lines.

He heard a gruff whisper and the muzzle moved. With as little reasoned thought as when he fled from his trench, he jumped past the muzzle, pulled aside a mud-covered plank over the hole, and when real sanity returned to him he found himself in a spacious enough room with two — he thought two — dead Germans lying in front of him. At any rate the machine-gunners were dead, and he had killed them.

In his excitement he was conscious, he said, of a sense of being born again. He had meant to call ‘Kamerad!’ to the first Germans who approached. He had rehearsed all sorts of forms of surrender, but somehow, instead of obeying reason, he had attacked the Germans as a ferret attacks a rabbit, and had killed them dead — stonedead. His brain and will were clear.

Quickly and silently he cut the shoulder straps from the dead Germans, then released the machine-gun, dragged it out of the hole, took it on his back, and returned to his trench, helped by the light of the now kindly stars and a faint hint of dawn.

The next day, much against his will, he was sent into hospital with a very severe strain in the back and a flesh wound in the calf, got somehow in the struggle. While he lay there he longed, as not one in a hundred longs, to go back to the trenches, that he might exercise this new possession of his, this strange thing called courage.

Illustrations of the meaning of fear to the organism are legion, and not all come within any theory; but it is clear enough that the weight of fears may be acquired like a weight of sin and exert as powerful an influence in destroying the use and happiness of life. It is scarcely questionable that confession — with which, in its ecclesiastical form, the writer himself has no sympathy — is a very real method of meeting one of the essential troubles of life. It would be a disaster to universalize the practice of confession to the members of a religious fraternity; but in the guidance of life a plan for dealing with dread is hardly less necessary to an educational system, especially in the home, than a plan for dealing with sins or crimes. There is a technique for imparting courage. How very many soldiers banished fear by cultivating a sort of intellectual fatalism. One man put it this way: ‘If I take every precaution and tease myself every minute by taking thought for my safety, I shall not increase the chances by onehalf per cent. Let me then cast off such encouragements to dread and proceed like the Happy Warrior, “as a man inspired.” ‘ quote this, not to suggest that a fatalist creed is commendable, but to indicate how a definite intellectual argument may establish courage and confidence. Any good psychologist could make out a syllabus of instruction by which parent or teacher could effectually deal with these repressive fears that are the worst evil of childhood and lead to strange and terrible perversions of the moral and even physical being in after-life.