the dog
and the horse for instance, which have the most rapid and vivid fancy.
Does not the unlettered Highlander say all that I want to say, when he
attributes to his dog and his horse, on the strength of these very
manifestations of fear, the capacity of seeing ghosts and fairies before
he can see them himself?

But blind fear not only causes evil to the coward himself: it makes him a
source of evil to others; for it is the cruellest of all human states. It
transforms the man into the likeness of the cat, who, when she is caught
in a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an intellect to understand
that you wish to release her; and, in the madness of terror, bites and
tears at the hand which tries to do her good. Yes; very cruel is blind
fear. When a man dreads he knows not what, he will do he cares not what.
When he dreads desperately, he will act desperately. When he dreads
beyond all reason, he will behave beyond all reason. He has no law of
guidance left, save the lowest selfishness. No law of guidance: and yet
his intellect, left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead him
into terrible follies. Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest
animals, he is for that very reason capable of being infinitely more
foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious. He can--what the lower
animals, happily for them, cannot--organise his folly; erect his
superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of his
blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done that--Woe to the weak!
For when he has reduced his superstition to a science, then he will
reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write books like the
Malleus Maleficarum, and the rest of the witch-literature of the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; of which Mr. Lecky has
of late told the world so much, and told it most faithfully and most
fairly.

But, fear of the unknown? Is not that fear of the unseen world? And is
not that fear of the spiritual world? Pardon me: a great deal of that
fear--all of it, indeed, which is superstition--is simply not fear of the
spiritual, but of the material; and of nothing else.

The spiritual world--I beg you to fix this in your minds--is not merely
an invisible world which may become visible, but an invisible world which
is by its essence invisible; a moral world, a world of right and wrong.
And spiritual fear--which is one of the noblest of all affections, as
bodily fear is one of the