ndency
which he thought degrading, and which he constantly combated.

Apart from this, he was not afraid of illness in itself, except as a
prelude of mortality. Indeed I believe that he took a hypochondriac
pleasure in observing his symptoms minutely, and in dosing himself in
all sorts of ways. His mysterious preoccupations with dried orange-peel
had no doubt a medicinal end in view. But when it came to suffering
pain and even to enduring operations, he had no tremors. His one
constant fear was the fear of death. He kept it at arm's length, he
loved any social amusement that banished it, but it is obvious, in
several of his talks, when the subject was under discussion, that the
cloud descended upon him suddenly and made him miserable. It was all
summed up in this, that life was to his taste, that even when oppressed
with gloom and depression, he never desired to escape. I have heard a
great doctor say that he believed that human beings were very sharply
divided in this respect, that there were some people in whom any
extremity of prolonged anguish, bodily or mental, never produced the
smallest desire to quit life; while there were others whose attachment
to life was slight, and that a very little pressure of care or calamity
developed a suicidal impulse. This is, I suppose, a question of
vitality, not necessarily of activity of mind and body, but a deep
instinctive desire to live; the thought of deliberate suicide was
wholly unintelligible to Johnson, death was his ultimate fear, and
however much he suffered from disease or depression, his intention to
live was always inalienable.

His fear then was one which no devoutness of faith, no resolute
tenacity of hope, no array of reasons could ever touch. It was simply
the unknown that he feared. Life had not been an easy business for
Johnson; he had known all the calamities of life, and he was familiar
with the worst calamity of all, the causeless melancholy which makes
life weary and distasteful without ever removing the certainty that it
is in itself desirable.

We may see from all this that to attempt to seek a cure for fear in
reason is foredoomed to failure, because fear lies in a region that is
behind all reason. It exists in the depth of the spirit, as in the
fallen gloom of the glimmering sea-deeps, and it can be touched by no
activity of life and joy and sunlight on the surface, where the
speeding sail moves past wind-swept headlands. We must follow it into
thos