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.
II.
To draw a distinction between the normal and morbid forms of fear is a task which, at first sight, might appear tolerably difficult. We have, however, a criterion to guide us. Every form of fear which, instead of being useful, becomes hurtful, which, ceasing to be a means of protection, becomes a means of destruction, is pathological. We have already (Part I., chap. iv.) indicated the marks which enable us to discriminate between the healthy and the morbid; I recall them once more.
Morbid emotion presents one or more of the following characteristics: it is apparently disproportionate to its cause; it is chronic; its physical accompaniments are of extraordinary intensity.