to do, they have not discarded
their apparatus. If mosquitoes could reason and philosophise, the
prospect of such a meal might remain as a far-off and inspiring ideal
of life and conduct, a thing which heroes in the past had achieved, and
which might be possible again if they remained true to their highest
instincts. So it is with humanity. Many of our fears do not correspond
to any real danger; they are part of a panoply which we inherit, and
have to do with the instinct of self-preservation. We are exposed to
dangers still, dangers of infection for instance, but we have developed
no instinctive fear which helps us to recognise the presence of
infection. We take rational precautions against it when we recognise
it, but the vast prevalence and mortality of consumption a generation
or two ago was due to the fact that men did not recognise consumption
as infectious; and many fine lives--Keats and Emily Bronte, to name but
two--were sacrificed to careless proximity as well as to devoted
tendance; but here nature, with all her instinct of self-preservation,
did not hang out any danger signal, or provide human beings with any
instinctive fear to protect them. Our instinctive fears, such as our
fear of darkness and solitude, and our suspicion of strangers, seem to
date from a time when such conditions were really dangerous, though
they are so no longer.

At the same time the development of the imaginative faculty has brought
with it a whole series of new terrors, through our power of
anticipating and picturing possible calamities; while our increased
sensitiveness as well as our more sentimental morality expose us to yet
another range of fears. Consider the dread which many of us feel at the
prospect of a painful interview, our avoidance of an unpleasant scene,
our terror of arousing anger. The basis of all this is the primeval
dread of personal violence. We are afraid of arousing anger, not
because we expect to be assailed by blows and wounds, but because our
far-off ancestors expected anger to end in an actual assault. We may
know that we shall emerge from an unpleasant interview unscathed in
fortune and in limb, but we anticipate it with a quite irrational
terror, because we are still haunted by fears which date from a time
when injury was the natural outcome of wrath. It may be our duty, and
we may recognise it to be our duty, to make a protest of an unpleasant
kind, or to withstand the action of an irritable person; but