Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/797

Rh not real courage; it is habit. The sailor on the tempest-driven ship; the doctor, the sister of charity, and the attendant in a pest or cholera hospital; the chemist and physiologist surrounded by infections, explosives, and poisons; the aëronaut; the roofer, and the bull-fighter, do not exhibit the test of bravery. They are not afraid. The presentiment of an unknown danger, which is the foundation of all fear, does not exist for them. Operatives who work in factories of powder or dynamite are sometimes so imprudent and so little afraid of a danger which they are perfectly well acquainted with, but to which they are habituated, that it has become necessary to protect them against themselves, and to take rigorous measures to keep them from smoking and from using fire near the powder. Real courage, as distinguished from professional courage, is the fearless confronting of a danger of which we recognize the importance and which we are not accustomed to.

Nothing is more variable than fear. It depends upon the individuality, or, rather, upon the excitability of each individual. Every one has his peculiar quality of excitability, which depends upon his physiological and moral condition, and is not the same for the different excitations. I believe that every man is more or less susceptible to fright; but that fear is caused among different persons by different motives. One is afraid of poisons, another of boats; one of bridges and mountains, another of snakes; another of darkness or of thunder; and each one can find among the excitations that strike upon his senses the one which will be most apt to provoke in him fear. The excitability of each person is also variable according to the time of day, or to his condition in health or disease. The thoughts do not follow the same course in a person who is hungry and in one who has just dined. A convalescent, debilitated by a protracted nervous affection, would doubtless be more accessible to fear than if he were robust, well, and just rising from the table. Attention and the imagination enormously augment the intensity of the emotion. In fact, for all psychical reflex phenomena the excitement is nothing in itself; the reaction of the organism does all. The visual or auditive image which strikes our senses is nothing, so long as it is not transformed and elaborated by the intelligence in such a way as to become at last a frightful image. A child walking on the road at night sees a white cloth swinging in the air; he immediately imagines it a ghost in pursuit of him, and runs away terrified. His imagination has done it all, and if it had not amplified and immeasurably magnified the real image he would not have been afraid. Perhaps we ought all to be more modest than we have been in the habit of being respecting this matter of bravery, and to acknowledge that to be bold is often simply to lack imagination.

In some cases the imagination is blended with attention. To pay attention to an image is, by the fact itself, to aggrandize it and make