a polite man!  But I believe, from many slight indications, that Johnson was distressed by the consciousness of sensual impulses, though he held them in severe restraint.  His habit of ejaculatory prayer was, I think, directed against this tendency.  The agitation with which he once said that corruption had entered into his heart by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this.  He took a tolerant view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of the age was lax in this respect.  But I have little doubt myself that here Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendency which he thought degrading, and which he constantly combated.

Apart from this, he was not afraid of illness in itself, except as a prelude of mortality.  Indeed I believe that he took a hypochondriac pleasure in observing his symptoms minutely, and in dosing himself in all sorts of ways.  His mysterious preoccupations with dried orange-peel had no doubt a medicinal end in view.  But when it came to suffering pain and even to enduring operations, he had no tremors.  His one constant fear was the fear of death.  He kept it at arm’s length, he loved any social amusement that banished it, but it is obvious, in several of his talks, when the subject was under discussion, that the cloud descended upon him suddenly and made him miserable.  It was all summed up in this, that life was to his taste, that even when oppressed with gloom and depression, he never desired to escape.  I have heard a great doctor say that he believed that human beings were very sharply divided in this respect, that there were some people in whom any extremity of prolonged anguish, bodily or mental, never produced the smallest desire to quit life; while there were others whose attachment to life was slight, and that a very little pressure of care or calamity developed a suicidal impulse.  This is, I suppose, a question of vitality, not necessarily of activity of mind and body, but a deep instinctive desire to live; the thought of deliberate suicide was wholly unintelligible to Johnson, death was his ultimate fear, and however much he suffered from disease or depression, his intention to live was always inalienable.

His fear then was one which no devoutness of faith, no resolute tenacity of hope, no array of reasons could ever touch.  It was simply the unknown that he feared.  Life had not been an easy business for Johnson; he had known all the calamities of life, and he was familiar with the worst calamity of all, the causeless melancholy which makes life weary and distasteful without ever removing the certainty that it is in itself desirable.

We may see from all this that to attempt to seek a cure for fear in reason is foredoomed to failure, because fear lies in a region that is behind all reason.  It exists in the depth of the spirit, as in the fallen gloom of the glimmering sea-deeps, and it can be touched by no activity of life and joy and sunlight on the surface, where the speeding sail moves past wind-swept headlands.  We must follow it into those depths if we are to deal with it at all, and it must be vanquished in the region where it is born, and where it skulks unseen.