"--William
James.
We have all heard the seemingly discriminating remarks that fear
is normal and abnormal, and that normal fear is to be regarded as
a friend, while abnormal fear should be destroyed as an enemy.
The fact is that no so--called normal fear can be named which has
not been clearly absent in some people who have had every cause
therefor. If you will run over human history in your mind, or look
about yea in the present life, you will find here and there
persons who, in situations or before objects which ought, as any
fearful soul will insist, to inspire the feeling of at least
normal self-protecting fear, are nevertheless wholly without the
feeling. They possess every feeling and thought demanded except
fear. The idea of self-preservation is as strongly present as with
the most abjectly timid or terrified, but fear they do not know.
This FEARLESS awareness of fear--suggesting conditions may be due
to several causes. It may result from constitutional make-up, or
from long--continued training or habituation, or from religious
ecstasy, or from a perfectly calm sense of spiritual selfhood
which is unhurtable, or from the action of very exalted reason.
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