We can, therefore, realize the full significance of the principle laid down by one of the greatest thinkers of humanity, Plato, that to learn “What to fear and what not to fear” is of the utmost consequence to the individual, both in his private and social activities.
Throughout the whole domain of the animal kingdom anything strange and unfamiliar is an occasion for the awakening of the fear instinct. The strange, the unfamiliar may be detrimental to the organism, and the animal recoils from meeting it directly. There must be exploration made before the reaction of approach can be effected. We find the same tendency in children and savages who run in terror of anything unusual.
On the whole escape is probably the safest course, since the unfamiliar may prove of great danger. The well known saying “Familiarity breeds contempt” has its significance in that the familiar does not arouse the fear instinct, and can be approached without risk. Reactions to a familiar object or known situation run in well established, habitual grooves.
In man the sense of familiarity may be acquired by the use of intelligence, by observations of various forms of unfamiliar situations and strange objects. Reason, leading to the understanding of the causes of things, turns the strange and unfamiliar into the familiar and the known, and thus dispels the terrors and horrors of the fear instinct.
The function of the intellect is to conquer the world by making man at home and familiar in this “wild universe.” This is the course of human progress. “The aim of knowledge,” says Hegel, “is to divest the objective world of its strangeness, and to make us more at home in it.” In the words of the ancient poet:
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum,
Subject pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari.[2]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See Chapter “Psychopathic Reflexes” in my volume “The Causation and Treatment of Psychopathic Diseases.”