Such an incident makes one unpleasantly aware of the quality of one’s nature and temperament.  It shows one that though one may have a strong moral and intellectual sense of what is the right and sensible course to take, one may be sadly hampered in carrying it out, by this secret and hidden instinct of which one may be rationally ashamed, but which is characteristic of what seems to be the stronger and more vital part of one’s self.

The whole of civilisation is a combat between these two forces, a struggle between the rational and the instinctive parts of the mind.  The instinctive mind bids one follow profit, need, advantage, the pleasure of the moment; the rational part of the mind bids one abstain, resist, balance contingencies, act in accordance with a moral standard.  Many such abstentions become a mere matter of habit.  If one is hungry and thirsty, and meets a child carrying bread or milk, one has no impulse to seize the food and eat it.  One does not reflect upon the possible outcome of following the impulse of plunder; it simply does not enter one’s head so to act.  And there is of course a slow process going on in the world by which this moral restraint is becoming habitual and instinctive; but notably in the case of fear our instinct is a belated one, and results in many causeless and baseless anxieties which our reason in vain assures us are wholly false.

What then is our practical way of escape from the dominion of these shadows?  Not, I am sure, in any resolute attempt to combat them by rational weapons; the rational argument, the common-sense consolation, only touches the rational part of the mind; we have got to get behind and below that, we have got somehow to fight instinct by instinct, and quell the terror in its proper home.  By our finite nature we are compelled to attend to one thing at a time, and thus if we use rational argument, we are recognising the presence of the irrational fear; it is of little use then to array our advantages against our disadvantages, our blessings against our sufferings, as Michael Finsbury did with such small effect in The Wrong Box; our only chance is to turn tail altogether, and try to set some other dominant instinct at work; while we remember, we shall continue to suffer; our best chance lies in forgetting, and we can only do that by calling some other dominant emotion into play.

And here comes in the peculiarly paralysing effect of these baser emotions.  As Victor Hugo once said, in a fine apophthegm, “Despair yawns.”  Fear and anxiety bring with them a particular kind of physical fatigue which makes us listless and inert.  They lie on the spirit with a leaden dullness, which takes from us all possibility of energy and motion.  Who does not know the instinct, when one is crushed and tortured by depression, to escape into solitude and silence, and to let the waves and streams flow over one.  That is a universal instinct, and it is not wholly to be disregarded; it shows that to torture oneself into rational activity is of little use, or worse than useless.