The old writers call this wonderful power the _vis medicatrix naturi_, the curative power of nature. Swedenborg, for whom nature has no powers underived from spiritual sources, teaches that this vital power is the soul itself. His view that the soul itself acts unconsciously to our perceptions in the development and conservation of the body is advocated by Morell in his "Elements of Psychology," and is highly spoken of by Professor William B. Carpenter.
When we have constructed a true psychological pathology, we shall understand clearly why and how it is that fear can turn the hair gray in a single night; that a mother's milk can be poisoned by a moment of terror; that the heart may be paralyzed by a sudden joy or sorrow; that dyspepsia, paralysis, and many other diseases are produced by mental worry and fret and the brain-fag of overwork and anxiety. Yea, we will understand that away back of all physical causation, the roots of our disease originate in the spiritual conditions of the race, in our false religions, our false philosophies, our false way of thinking, our false relations to God and each other.
The most extensive of all the morbid mental conditions which reflect themselves so disastrously on the human system, is the state of fear. It has many degrees or gradations, from the state of extreme alarm, fright, or terror, down to the slightest shade of apprehension of impending evil. But all along the line it is the same thing--a paralyzing impression upon the centers of life which can produce, through the agency of the nervous system, a vast variety of morbid symptoms in every tissue of the body.
We have very seldom reflected upon the fact that fear runs like a baleful thread through the whole web of our life from beginning to end. We are born into the atmosphere of fear and dread, and the mother who bore us had lived in the same atmosphere for weeks and months before we were born. We are surrounded in infancy and childhood by clouds of fear and apprehension on the part of our parents, nurses, and friends. As we advance in life we become, instinctively or by experience, afraid of almost everything. We are afraid of our parents, afraid of our teachers, afraid of our playmates, afraid of ghosts, afraid of rules and regulations and punishments, afraid of the doctor, the dentist, the surgeon. Our adult life is a state of chronic anxiety, which is fear in a milder form. We are afraid of failure in business, afraid of disappointments and mistakes, afraid of enemies, open or concealed; afraid of poverty, afraid of public opinion, afraid of accidents, of sickness, of death, and unhappiness after death. Man is like a haunted animal from the cradle to the grave, the victim of real or imaginary fears, not only his own, but those reflected upon him from the superstitions, self-deceptions, sensory illusions, false beliefs and concrete errors of the whole human race, past and present.