Within our visible experience, we know how completely the emotion of fear, or any of its various expressions can upset the stomach, suspend the appetite and even cause instant death. So evident are the bad effects of fear, that it is necessary only to refer to them before suggesting a remedy; but there are some powerful illustrations that are interesting, and which will be found under the caption of "Baleful Effects of Fear."
In this connection, what we are most interested in is, how to rid ourselves of the habit of fear. Fear is not a physical thing. It is the result of fearthought, and, being fearthought, has no more substance than other thought.
In animals it is an attribute of instinct, and is a wise provision of protection. In the human young, it is not so. In the helplessness of human foetal existence and infancy, we find a perfectly clean, but wonderfully impressionable, thought-matrix, into which are to be impressed the suggestions whose sum constitutes the intelligence in men which takes the place of instinct in animals.
Fear is no constituent part of the composition of this thought-matrix. Susceptibility to fearthought, as it is susceptible to any and all suggestions, is the nearest approach to inherent infliction of fear that the unfolding soul is burdened with. If the race-habit-of-thought were indelibly pock-marked by fear, and stamped its roughness on the thought-matrix of all mankind, there would be no one free from it; but, as many are born into, and live, a life of great strength and courage, free from any taint of fearthought, this assumption is disproved, and is as absurd as would be the assumption that man must always do whatever, and only what, his ancestors did.
All of the fear-impressions received are the result of either pre-natal or post-natal suggestion. It is within the power of parents and nurses to keep the delicate susceptibility of their charges free from the curse of fearthought; or to cause or allow it to be scared and bruised by the claws of the demon.
President G. Stanley Hall, of Clarke University, Editor in Chief of the _American Journal of Psychology_, and Dr. Colin A. Scott, Professor of Psychology and Child Study at the Cook County Normal School, Chicago, Ill., U. S. A., have rendered greatest service to humanity by searching out and analyzing fears in children, exposing the absurdity of them, showing the sources from which foolish fears are derived, and thereby dragging from ambush the worst enemy of mankind, whose strength is developed by means of secret toleration, but can easily be overcome if uncovered.