, have had glimpses
through great windows that were worth the price they paid for them?
Haven't we allowed those checks and barriers that are so important a
restraint upon childish enterprise, to creep up into and distress and
distort adult life?...

"The modern world thinks too much as though painlessness and freedom
from danger were ultimate ends. It is fear-haunted, it is troubled
by the thoughts of pain and death, which it has never met except as
well-guarded children meet these things, in exaggerated and untestable
forms, in the menagerie or in nightmares. And so it thinks the discovery
of anaesthetics the crowning triumph of civilization, and cosiness and
innocent amusement, those ideals of the nursery, the whole purpose of
mankind...."

"Mm," said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his brows
and shook his head.

10

But the bulk of Benham's discussion of fear was not concerned with
this perverse and overstrained suggestion of pleasure reached through
torture, this exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink at
anything; it was an examination of the present range and use of fear
that led gradually to something like a theory of control and discipline.
The second of his two dominating ideas was that fear is an instinct
arising only in isolation, that in a crowd there may be a collective
panic, but that there is no real individual fear. Fear, Benham held,
drives the man back to the crowd, the dog to its master, the wolf to the
pack, and when it is felt that the danger is pooled, then fear leaves
us. He was quite prepared to meet the objection that animals of a
solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit fear. Some of this apparent fear,
he argued, was merely discretion, and what is not discretion is the
survival of an infantile characteristic. The fear felt by a tiger cub
is certainly a social emotion, that drives it back to the other cubs,
to its mother and the dark hiding of the lair. The fear of a fully grown
tiger sends it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, that must be
"still reminiscent of the maternal lair." But fear has very little hold
upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme readiness to
resentment and rage.

"Like most inexperienced people," ran his notes, "I was astonished at
the reported feats of men in war; I believed they were exaggerated,
and that there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy of silence about
their real behaviour. But when on my way to