As soon as my reasoning-self had time to take in the situation, the probability of being burned to death seemed almost certain; but before that happened—that is, before the reasoning-self had analyzed the situation—the habit-of-thought self had asserted many times, and constantly, "You must not be afraid! you must not be afraid"; and, as a result, I was not afraid; and the calm of the moment allowed me to measure chances and arrange expedients, as if there were no danger imminent.
It was a case of much smoke and little fire, but there were those in the hotel who were made very ill by the fright of it.
If I had always been free from the emotion of fear, and had not been a sorry victim to it in some special forms, "natural temperament" could be urged as a cause of the calm I enjoyed during the incident related above; but such is not the case. I have been subjected to shocks of various kinds, incident to an adventurous life, that have been powerful impressions for evil upon my emotional self, and it is personal experience of cure and relief that I am giving in support of my theory.
The experience of Mr. George Kennan, the Siberian traveler, and brilliant writer and lecturer, relative to fear and its cure, is singularly like my own, and was related to me in an exchange of personal confidences, last year.
The Atlantic Monthly for May, 1897, contains an excellent account of Mr. Kennan's case, and I am permitted by the publishers, Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Company, to reprint it; which I have done under Appendix "B."
Fear is rarely general as related to different causes for fearthought. I have been told of a case of specific fear that is interesting because of its unreasonableness. It was the case of a filibuster who had been on several raids where death was the almost certain penalty for being caught, and where the chances of being caught were almost certain. On the frontier our subject was known as a dare-devil, not afraid of anything, and yet he was always in mortal terror of a dark room. In infancy he had been scared into obedience by tales of goblins in the dark, and he had never rid himself of their influence. Anything on earth he could see held no terror for him, but he could not see the phantoms he created in the dark, and was therefore a slave to fear of them. It is probable that the bravado of his active life was partly caused by the desire to "average up" on courage, and, if so, the baleful effects of fear in this case were very far-reaching and destructive to the peace of society.
General experience teaches that whenever you find a bully, you find a yellow streak of cowardice somewhere in his composition; and, more than probable, bravado is assumed by him, in order to "square" himself with his own self-respect.