The Origin of Fear.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 6, 10 February 1909, Page 4

The Origin of Fear.

The average man would sooner face a 250-pound human antagonist than a, fifty-pound dog which he could choke to death in three minutes. I have seen a charging ram scatter half a dozen men, any one of whom could have mastered! the brute in a moment, and not one of whom was, in ordinary matters, a coward. There are instances on record of men who, with their bare hands, have held and baffled an ugly bull, but it was only the pressure of grim necessity that taught them their powers. Put a man against an animal, and the man looks around for weapons or support, whether he needs them or not. There was a time when he did. Eor man, to-day the most lordly of animals was once well nigh the most humble of them all. He has come up out of a state in which fear was the normal condition of existence;! fear of violence, of the dark that gave opportunity for violence; fear of falling, of animals, of being alone. And into the plastic grey cells of our brains are stamped these ancient terrors; a living record of the upward climb of man. The baby shows this record most clearly. In him the prints of heredity are not yet overlaid by the tracks of use and custom;! and therefore in him we may most easily read our past history. He is our- ancestor as truly as lie is our reincarnation, and his every shrinking gesture and frightened cry are chronicles of the younger world, tales of the age of fear. They tell of the days when man was not the master of the earth, nor even a highly considered citizen of the same, but a runaway subject of the meat-eat-ing monarch, whose sceptre was tooth and claw; a humble plebian in the presence of the horned and hoofed aristocrat of woods and fields. They speak of the nights when our hairy sires crouched in the forks of trees and whimpered softly at the dark; whimpered because the dark held so many enemies; whimpered softly lest those enemies should hear. —George L. Knapp in Lippincott’S.