I.
It has been defined as “the particular emotive reaction which takes place through a sufficiently vivid and persistent representation of possible pain or evil.”[[132]] This formula, though good in the majority of cases, does not seem applicable to the first stage of fear, as we shall see presently.
The physiology of fear has been worked out by Darwin, Mantegazza, Mosso, and Lange. I prefer the last writer’s description, as being more systematic; it is not a collection of isolated facts, but a logically arranged synopsis. We know already the importance attached by him to the physiological conditions of each emotion. The characteristic marks of fear are:—
1. As regards the innervation of the voluntary muscles: a greater weakening than in the case of sorrow, a convulsive tremor; in extreme cases, suppression of all movement, one is fixed to the spot; voice hoarse and broken, or complete dumbness; in short, a more or less accentuated paralysis of the whole voluntary motor apparatus.
2. As regards the muscles of organic life: arrest of the lacteal secretion, of menstruation, of the salivary secretion; the mouth dry, the tongue adhering to the palate; cold sweats, “goose-flesh,” bristling of the hair, arrest of respiration, oppression, constriction of the throat. Fear also, as is well known, influences the intestinal secretions.
3. As regards the vaso-motor apparatus: a spasmodic constriction of the vessels, shiverings, violent spasm of the heart; and if the impression is of excessive violence, paralysis, which may end in death; pallor, and peripheral anæmia.
These manifestations collectively express a lowering of the vital tone which in no other emotion is so complete and so clearly marked. It has been maintained with reason that fear has a teleological character, that it is adapted to an end—that of withdrawing, escaping, exposing one’s self as little as possible to attack, and remaining on the defensive in view of possible approaching evil. However, the case is not so simple as it appears. The slight or moderate forms of fear, through the feeling of weakness produced by them in the consciousness, are a protection against hurtful actions by inducing withdrawal or flight. But the grave forms, such as terror and fright, accompanied by trembling and motor annihilation, place us face to face with a great difficulty. When existence is menaced, at the most decisive moment, when attack, defence, or flight is urgently demanded, we see men and animals, paralysed with agitation, fall victims, unable to make any use of what strength they have. Darwin confines himself to remarking that the problem is very obscure (ch. xiii.). Mantegazza (op. cit., ch. vii.) alleges that trembling is extremely useful, because it tends to produce heat and warm the blood, which, under the influence of terror, would soon grow cold. Mosso has very good reasons to oppose to his compatriot’s thesis. He considers the “cataplexy” which accompanies the extreme forms of fear as a grave imperfection of the organism. “One would think that nature, in making the brain and spinal cord, was unable to devise a substance of extreme excitability which should at the same time, under the influence of exceptionally strong stimuli, be capable of never passing in its reactions beyond the limits needful for the preservation of the animal.” In short, terror and fright appear to him in the light of morbid phenomena. From the naturalistic point of view this extra-teleological position is perfectly admissible. A finalist conception of the world admits of no exceptions, and has to explain everything according to its own principle; but if we content ourselves with saying that the conditions of existence of a living being are sometimes given, sometimes absent, we have no more to do but verify the cases in which they are wanting and the occurrences logically following therefrom.
The psychology of fear includes two stages, to be studied quite distinctly. There is a primary, instinctive, unreasoning fear preceding all individual experience, and a secondary, conscious, reasoned fear posterior to experience. They are generally confounded with one another, and as the second is by far the most frequent, it serves as the typical form in descriptions.
First Stage.—Numerous observations prove the existence of an innate fear, not attributable to any individual experience. In children, Preyer[[133]] maintains the existence of “a hereditary fear manifesting itself on occasion.” Many are afraid of dogs and cats, though they have never been bitten or scratched; thunder makes them cry out—why? The fear of falling, says the same author, during first attempts at walking, is as strange as the fear shown towards animals. At fourteen months, this writer’s son could not venture to take a step without support, and was full of terror if the person holding him let go; yet he had never experienced a fall. He concludes, very justly, that “it is quite erroneous to think that the child who has not been taught to fear things does not know fear. The courage or fearfulness of the mother certainly exercises a great influence; but there are in children so many cases of motiveless fear that we must admit some hereditary influence.” The same fact has been observed in young animals: Spalding’s experiments on newly-hatched chickens and their instinctive terror of the hawk are well known. Preyer repeated this experiment, with like results. Gratiolet, as I have already said, relates that a little dog, who had never seen a wolf, on smelling a piece of the skin of that animal, was seized with indescribable terror. Adult man, though his fears are in general based on experience, sometimes manifests (at least this is the case with ignorant and primitive people) vague, unconscious fears of the unknown, of darkness, of mysterious powers, witchcraft, sorcery, magic, etc. Ignorance is a great source of terror; and Bain has said, not without reason, that knowledge is the great remedy against fear.
How shall we explain the apprehension of an evil which has never been experienced? Even if we admit that fear may sometimes, and from the very beginning of life onward, start from analogies, resemblances, associations of ideas, there remain many cases which can be reduced to no simple form. We have seen that Preyer, following Darwin, Spencer, and other evolutionists, admits the influence of heredity. It is a well-known fact that birds on uninhabited islands show no fear when they see man for the first time; they are taught by hard experience to distrust him, and the acquired fear is, on this theory, transmitted to their descendants. According to this hypothesis, fear would be, always and everywhere, the result of experience, whether individual or ancestral, and what we have called the second stage would be the first, and indeed the only one.
This explanation is naturally rejected by those who refuse to believe in the inheritance of acquired qualities, though they have nothing satisfactory to propose in its place. Besides, this is a question of origin, on which experimental psychology may well recognise its incompetence. Not to remain on debatable ground, we must admit—since individual experience cannot be appealed to—that the bases of fear exist in the organism, form part of the constitution of animals and men, and help them to live by a defensive adaptation, which in most cases proves useful. As for the obscure mechanism of this instinctive fear, we may suppose that certain sensations produce a painful shock which excites the organic, motor, and vaso-motor relations constituting emotion, and that the conservative instinct, in order to escape actual pain, reacts blindly, with or without profit. This makes it impossible to explain certain innate fears by reason.
For my own part, I consider the hypothesis of a hereditary disposition to certain fears as extremely probable.[[134]]
Second Stage.—The definition given above may be unrestrictedly applied to conscious and reasoned fear posterior to experience. It is based, not on the intellectual, but on the emotional memory. The attempts of the earlier associationists to account for fear as a mere product of association, as in James Mill’s doctrine that it is the idea of a painful sensation associated with the idea of its being future, were wholly inadequate through ignoring the essential factor, the emotional element, the organic disturbance.[[135]] If I am to be afraid of the extraction of a tooth, it is necessary that, in the memory of a former operation, its painful colouring should be revived, at any rate in a modified form; if I have only a dry recollection, with no physiological vibration, fear will not arise. There is no need to insist on a point already fully treated of in the First Part.
It results from this that we are accessible to fear in proportion as the representation of future evil is intense, i.e., emotional and not intellectual, felt and not understood. In many persons the absence of fear only amounts to the absence of imagination. This explains how it is that every lowering of vitality, whether permanent or temporary, predisposes to this emotion; the physiological conditions which engender (or accompany it) are all ready; in a weakened organism fear is always in a nascent condition.
The emotion which now occupies us exists in all degrees, from such feeble forms as suspicion and apprehension to the extreme ones of panic and terror. These gradations, fixed by language, cannot have a distinct psychological description made of each of them. Nevertheless, Bain has attempted to enumerate the different kinds of fear, and some experiments of Féré’s indicate the different physiological effects following each degree of fear.[[136]] When an owl, a serpent, or a spectre was caused to appear, by suggestion, the muscular reaction, shown in graphic tracings, was different in every case.