Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/796

776 When the battle had begun and the bullets and shot, rattling about him, made him tremble, he remarked to himself: "You are trembling, carcass of mine; you would tremble more if you knew where I was going to take you!"

In fact, the feeling of fear can not be subdued. It is an irresistible emotion that depends upon our organization, and one which all the most logical reasonings can not change. Nothing is more true than the common saying that fear does not reason; and it is remarkable how little efficacy intelligence and its efforts have to arrest its effects. I know a highly intelligent person, with a strong and clear mind, who believes he would be lost if he had to go into a boat. Yet the sea is smooth, the course is short, and the boat stanch. Excellent reasoning, but it does not take hold of him. His emotion is stronger than all the arguments you can invent, however irreproachable they may be, and no matter how fully the poltroon may recognize their force. How many children there are who do not dare to cross in the night the garden where they have played all day, where they know there is no danger, and where they will not lose sight of the lights in the house!

An instance out of my own experience will go to show how fear does not reason. About ten years ago, when I was in Baden, near the Black Forest, I was in the habit of walking alone in the evening till late in the night. The security was absolute, and I knew very well that there was no danger; and, as long as I was in the open field or on the road, I felt nothing that resembled fear. But to go into the forest, where it was so dark that one could hardly see two steps ahead, was another thing. I entered resolutely, and went in for some twenty paces; but, in spite of myself, the deeper I plunged into the darkness the more a fear gained possession of me which was quite incomprehensible. I tried in vain to overcome the unreasonable feeling, and I may have walked on in this way for about a quarter of an hour. But there was nothing pleasant about the walk, and I could not help feeling relieved when I saw the light of the sky through a gap in the trees, and it required a strong effort of the will to keep from pressing toward it. My fear was wholly without cause. I knew it, and yet I felt it as strongly as if it had been rational. Some time after that adventure, I was traveling at night, alone with a guide in whom I had no confidence, in the mountains of Lebanon. The danger there was certainly much greater than around Baden, but I felt no fear.

The only effective means of obtaining the mastery over fear is by habit. It is with the moral emotions as with muscular exercise. To become a good walker one must be trained to it, by accustoming himself to greater and greater efforts every day till he arrives at the full extent of his powers. Habit has such an effect upon fear that nothing that is usual to us can make us afraid. Hence the frequency and ease of what is called professional courage. That kind of courage is