"The essential factor of control is cool-headedness, which permits of seeing things in their true light, and forbids us to gild them or to darken them, according to our state of mind at the time."
The Shogun adds:
"Fear, hideous fear, is a sentiment unknown to those whose soul communes with self-control and common sense.
"The first of these qualities will produce a fixt resolution tending to calmness, at the same time that it makes a powerful appeal to cool-headedness, which permits of reflection.
"Fear is always the confession of a weakness which disavows struggle and wishes to ignore the name of adversary.
"Cool-headedness is the evanescent examination of forces, either physical or intellectual, with reference to supposed danger.
"Without self-control cool-headedness can not exist; but it only develops completely under the influence of common sense which dictates to it the reasons for its existence.
"Cool-headedness, by leaving us our liberty of thought, enlightens us undoubtedly on the nature of danger, at the same time that it suggests to us the way to avoid it, if it really exists.
"There can not be a question of fear for those who possess the faculties of which we have just spoken, for it is well known that, from the moment when the cause of fear is defined it ceases to exist; it becomes stupid illusion or a real enemy.
"In the one case, as in the other, it ought not to excite anxiety any longer, but contempt or the desire to fight it.