Fear of humans

“ Think of what the world has suffered from fear. Think of the millions who were driven to insanity. Think of the fearful nights—nights filled with phantoms, with flying, crawling monsters, with hissing serpents that slowly uncoiled, with vague and formless horrors, with burning and malicious eyes. ”

“ Humanity, it seems to me, is toiling up a long slope leading from the brute to the god: again and again whole generations, sometimes whole races, have fallen back and disappeared in the abyss. Every slip fills the survivors with fear and horror which with ages have become instinctive, and now you appear and laugh at their fears and tell them that human flesh is excellent food, and that sterile kisses are the noblest form of passion. They shudder from you and hate and punish you, and if you persist they will kill you. ”

“ I came out of this age of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when fear does not paralyze and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself. Without further delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness where I might sleep with some security. From that refuge as a base I could face the strange world with some confidence again, a confidence I had lost now that I realized to what uncanny creatures I nightly lay exposed. ”

“ I passed by while she spake, and I saw that a fear lay upon every man, and you shivered thinking of your homeward path, fearful as rabbits of the unseen things, and forgetful how you have laughed at death facing the monsters who crush down the forests. ”

“ The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. ”

“ And spiritual fear—which is one of the noblest of all affections, as bodily fear is one of the basest—is, if properly defined, nothing less or more than the fear of doing wrong; of becoming a worse man.
But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen? The fancy which conceives the fear is physical, not spiritual. Think for yourselves. What difference is there between a savage’s fear of a demon, and a hunter’s fear of a fall? ”

“ There have been many attempts in the history of mankind to escape from the dominion of fear; the essence of fear, that which prompts it, is the consciousness of our vulnerability. What we all dread is the disease or the accident that may disable us, the loss of money or credit, the death of those whom we love and whose love makes the sunshine of our life, the anger and hostility and displeasure and scorn and ill-usage of those about us. ”

“ It was fear, rather than anger that sounded in their voices, the deadly terror of that unconquerable enemy, free-thinking, so often beaten down but always raising its head again. Men looked at each other with dread and suspicion in their eyes. ”

“ In acute stages of suffering the human face inspires fear in one contemplating it; it is not alone the profound commiseration which we feel for the anguish of a sentient being which moves us, nor the humiliation which the sight of human misery awakes in us, but also the selfish thought that this palpitating flesh might be our flesh, that our soul, shaken with pain, would also forget its tranquillity, and our tortured nerves wring from us the same cries and the same tears. ”

“ We must therefore look about us, as if we were in an enemy’s country; and consider our last hour, not as a punishment, but as the law of Nature: the fear of it is a continual palpitation of the heart, and he that overcomes that terror shall never be troubled with any other. ”

“ When anyone sees me, he flees with fear. But, for what does he fear me? I have not vexed him. So, I pursue the one that fears me. I want to ask him, 'Why do you fear me?' But, when I pursue it, it goes on fleeing more rapidly. ”

“ Each man perceives on every hand the symptoms of fear, the blanched distorted faces, the dilated pupils, the high-pitched trembling voices, and the screams of terror of his fellows; and with each such perception his own impulse and his own emotion rise to a higher pitch of intensity, and their expressions become correspondingly accentuated and more difficult to control. ”

“ It was the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk behind life. ”

“ Next, the happy believers in the supernatural owed to their simplicity delicious throbs of fear,—not craven cowardice, but that more refined and complex feeling, which is of all sensations the most enthralling, the most elusive, and the most impossible to define. Fear, like all other treacherous gifts, must be handled with discrimination: a thought too much, and we are brutalized and degraded ”

“ For years they had lived with some species of fear—of honest men or vengeance, of pursuit, of starvation, of lack of drink or gold, of blood and death, of stronger men, of luck, of chance, of fate, of mysterious nameless force. ”

“ Let a branch crackle in the forest, or a leaf rustle, and I am all atremble with fear, and my heart flutters as though it wanted to jump out, and I fly as fast as I can. Again, let a hare run by, or a bird flap its wings, or a dry twig break off, and you think that it is a beast, and you run straight up against him. Or you run away from a dog and run into the hands of a man. Frequently you get frightened and run, not knowing whither, and at full speed rush down a steep hill, and get killed. We have no rest. All the evil comes from terror. ”

“ Is to impress on men the fear of death, to teach
Trembling & fear, terror, constriction, abject selfishness.
Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on
In fearless majesty annihilating Self, laughing to scorn
Thy Laws & terrors, shaking down thy Synagogues as webs. ”

“ What is it but the consciousness of Fear? Here it is that the struggle and the triumph of humanity are to be found. Natural courage faces danger, and perhaps carries itself triumphantly through it, perhaps not. But moral courage faces fear, and in the very act of facing it puts it down: and this is the kind of courage in which we would have men put their trust ”

“ And least satisfactory of all is something that I cannot touch, somewhere—I cannot determine where—in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate, or fear. ”

“ Therefore fear not them who will torture the body but cannot torture or harass the mind. Fear not men in the sufferings you will be called upon to receive at their hands. Be faithful, be calm and steadfast. Then He tells them whom they should fear. "Fear him who is able to destroy"---here is the stronger word, meaning to destroy totally, to be lost, to perish, to be annihilated. ”

“ Yet it was the groundless fear of this nothing that poisoned all the tranquillity of life, and held men imprisoned even when existence was a torment. Whoever had surmounted that fear was armed at once against cruel tyranny and against all the gravest misfortunes. ”

“ I believe that almost every one might answer, that more than half might be charged to one single source of suffering—fear—fear of [196] opinion, reproach, shame, poverty, pain, danger, disease and death. I pause not to consider the usual dull illustrations of the wisdom and utility of assigning to us the instinct of fear, to put us on our guard and to enable us to ward off evils. It is not this instinctive shrinking and vigilance to avoid evil that I consider. ”

“ I have found that if an intelligent patient who is suffering from fear can be made to see so plainly as to become firmly convinced that his brain, his various organs, indeed his whole being, could be physically damaged by fear, that this same instinct of self-preservation will, to the extent of his conviction, banish fear. ”

“ Fear is more demonstrative, and as it is essentially destructive, its effects are more sudden and visible. In its acuter forms, as Fright and Terror, it may blanch the hair in a night, blight the mind and destroy the life of the individual. ”

“ If the stimulus of fear be repeated from day to day, whether in the case of a mother anxious on account of the illness of a child; a business man struggling against failure; a politician under contest for appointment; a broker in the daily hazard of his fortune; litigants in legal battle, or a jealous lover who fears a rival; the countless real as well as the baseless fears in daily life, in fact, all forms of fear, as it seems to me, express themselves in like terms of ancestral physical contests. On this law, fear dominates the various organs and parts of the body. ”

“ The greatest danger of all, he feels, is in "the enervation which gains on everyone, the sudden impulses of fear, of prolonged anxiety...." And then he made one more appeal to the sanity of the people. ”

“ Your hairy ears hear, not him who speaks best, but him who shouts loudest. And fear, that natural fear which was the counsellor of your ancestors and mine when they were cave-dwellers, the fear which created gods and crimes, makes you the enemy of the unfortunate and deprives you of pity. ”

“ They are afraid; unquestionably they fear. But being afraid, they remain at their posts. And they fight the flesh, compel their bodies to obedience, because that is as it should be, and because, indeed, they are men! ”

“ We go so far, and we would undoubtedly go the whole hog and kill those we hate, if something more, perhaps, than the mere fear of hanging did not hold us back. That restraining something is unquestionably the fear of the Future, and it is that fear which I am inclined to think is the origin of what we term our consciences. ”

“ But at the last they find that they fear just one thing more than they fear death and dismemberment; and that this one supremest thing is the fear that those about them may discover how terribly afraid they are. ”

“ Fear, then, is a passion of which brute animals are susceptible, though they have not, like us, rational or foreseen apprehensions. Of horror, rage, and love, they are also susceptible; but they have not our aversions, founded on reflection, our durable hatreds, or our constant friendships. ”

“ Again, the man of strong will and pure desires may quit the body spiritually, actually, and be perceptible to others at a distance; may be spoken to, hold conversations, and move material objects, when his body lies scores of leagues away.
"Are there demons?" Yes, two kinds: forms of fear, corresponding to a man's bad moral state,—projected out-creations from the wicked self. ”

“ The same holds true of the fear instinct. Every form of fear which, instead of helping or furthering vigor of life, instead of stimulating living energy, instead of being a protection, becomes a hindrance, a menace to the organism, is accompanied with suffering and distress, and ultimately leads to destruction, should be regarded as essentially morbid. ”

“ He is full of fear, and objectless fear must invent a danger, [341] which is easily done by supposing that the spirit has been actuated by wrath. Then something must have been done to enrage him: a taboo has been broken, his rites have been neglected, sin has been committed—according to the customary ideas of the tribe. There must be lustration, propitiation, expiation, perhaps with horrible cruelty. Again, then, shall we say the man has been diverted from the important inquiry into the causes of disease or drought? ”

“ Such an extravagant cast of mind engages multitudes of people not only in impertinent terrors, but in supernumerary duties of life; and arises from that fear and ignorance which are natural to the soul of man. ”

“ From top to bottom, the whole spectrum of fear is bad, from panic fear at one extremity down to that mere disinclination for enterprise, that reluctance and indolence which is its lowest phase. These are things of the beast, these are for creatures that have a settled environment, a life history, that spin in a cage of instincts. ”

“ Not all the mothers of the whole evolution of man manufactured fear or fearlessness in men. Far back beyond the first men were fear and fearlessness, love, hatred, anger, all the emotions, growing, developing, becoming the stuff that was to become men. ”

“ Fear gets possession of me under circumstances in which my suspicions are, for some reason or other, aroused to activity, all the more so if the suspicions of possible impending evil are awakened suddenly. ”

“ Except for this ghost factor, all society was founded on fundamental needs and basic biologic urges. But ghost fear introduced a new factor in civilization, a fear which reaches out and away from the elemental needs of the individual, and which rises far above even the struggles to maintain the group. ”

“ This slavish obedience is intimately bound up with one of the most fundamental of all instincts,—the fear instinct.
The individual is so effectively trained by the pressure of taboo based on self and fear, that he comes to love the yoke that weighs him down to earth. ”

“ That which they clung to and wept over yesterday, they fear to look at or touch to-day, and the idea that he would return and speak to them would inspire them with horror. But why afraid of an impossibility? Their very fears should teach them that there is a cause. ”

“ The fear and caution which must be observed in the night; the opportunity it affords for ambuscades and assassinations; depriving us of society, and cutting off many pleasing trains of ideas, which objects in the light never fail to introduce, are all circumstances of terror: and perhaps, on the whole, so much of our happiness depends upon our senses, that the deprivation of any one may be attended with a proportionate degree of horror and uneasiness. ”

“ There is no God of wrath who smites In heartless hate. Behind the things that injure man There is no purpose, thought, or plan. We waste no time in useless dread, In trembling fear; The present lives, the past is dead, And we are here, All welcome guests at life's great feast— We need no help from ghost or priest. ”