Chapter IV.
Our Worst Enemy Is Fear

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.—Shakespeare,Measure for Measure.

THOUGHTS most deadly instrument for marring human lives is fear. Fear demoralizes character, destroys ambition, induces or causes disease, paralyzes happiness in self and others, and prevents achievement. It has not one redeeming quality. It is all evil. Physiologists now well know that it impoverishes the blood by demoralizing assimilation and cutting off nutrition. It lowers mental and physical vitality, deadens every element of success. It is fatal to the happiness of youth, and is the most terrible accompaniment of old age. Buoyancy flees before its terrifying glance, and cheerfulness cannot dwell in the same house with it.

“The most extensive of all the morbid mental conditions which reflect themselves so disastrously on the human system is the state of fear,” says Dr. William H. Holcomb. “It has many degrees or gradations, from the state of extreme alarm, fright, or terror, down to the slightest shade of apprehension of impending evil. But all along the line it is the same thing—a paralyzing impression upon the centres of life which can produce, through the agency of the nervous system, a vast variety of morbid symptoms in every tissue of the body.”

“Fear is like carbonic-acid gas pumped into one’s atmosphere,” says Horace Fletcher. “It causes mental, moral, and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death—death to energy, death to tissue, and death to all growth.”

Yet from our birth we live in the presence and under the dominion of this demon, fear. The child is cautioned a thousand times a year to look out for this, and to look out for that; it may get poisoned, it may get bitten, it may get killed; something terrible may happen to it if it does not do so and so. Men and women cannot bear the sight of some harmless animal or insect because, as children, they were told it would hurt them. One of the crudest things imaginable is to impress into a child’s plastic mind the terrible image of fear, which, like the letters cut upon a sapling, grows wider and deeper with age. The baleful shadows of such blasting and blighting pictures will hang over the whole life and shut out the bright sun of joy and happiness.

An Australian writer says:

“One of the worst misfortunes which can possibly happen to a growing child is to have a mother who is perpetually tormented by nervous fears. If a mother gives way to fears—morbid, minute, and all-prevailing—she will inevitably make the environment of her children one of increasing dread and timidity. The background of fear is the habit or instinct of anticipating the worst. The mother who never makes a move, or allows her children to make a move, without conjuring up a myriad of malign possibilities, imbitters the cup of life with a slow-acting poison.

“I know that thousands of boys and girls are to-day tremulous, weak, passive, unalert on the physical side, simply because they were taught in the knickerbocker stage, or earlier, to see the potency of danger in all they did or tried to do. A mother assumes a terrible responsibility when from silly fears of possible injury she forbids a child such physical abandon as will promote courage, endurance, self-reliance, and self-control.”

“For more than twenty years I have made a study of criminal psychology and of infantile psychology,” says Dr. Lino Ferriani. “Thousands of times I have been compelled to recognize the sad fact that at least eighty-eight per cent, of morbidly timid children could have been cured and saved in time by means of common-sense principles of psychical and physiological hygiene, in which the main factor is suggestion inspired by wholesome courage.”

Not content with instilling fear of possibly real things, many mothers and most nurses invent all sorts of bugbears and bogies to frighten poor babies into obedience. They even attempt to induce sleep by telling children, “If you don’t go right to sleep, a great big bear will come and eat you up!” How much sleep would a grown man