Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/180

Black things, 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 thus an inseparable association between the perceptions of darkness of caverns and woods, and fear took place, and was inherited.^[1]

 

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 entirely unreasonable, but that reason is powerless to suppress them. That this is 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 impulse is much of an individual idiosyncrasy, 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 recently been translated into French), 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 prejudices 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.

1. "Der Menschliche Wille," p. 224.