But, womankind, you have nowhere a more ardent admirer and defender than you will find in yours truly! CHAPTER VIII. MORBID FEARS AND FANCIES. It should be remembered that I am now a full-fledged neurasthenic, with all the rights and privileges that go with the job. Yes, Webster defines a job as being an undertaking. Neurasthenia is certainly an "undertaking," therefore it must be a job--a big one at that. It interferes with the holding of any more remunerative job and consumes most of one's time in trying to keep his health in a passable condition. I have had positions of some importance handed to me, which I discharged with eminent satisfaction to all concerned until I got ready to go off at some new tangent. If I did not imagine myself in the actual embrace of some grave physical or mental disease, I feared that something would in the near future attack me; and that brings me to the main topic of this chapter--morbid fears. These foolish, fanciful and often groundless fears are dignified by the name of "phobias." A man who is afraid of everything should not be dubbed a low-down coward--he is simply afflicted with "pantaphobia." It doesn't cost a bit more to be scientific and it carries with it more _éclat_. Another one of these fears is agoraphobia--the fear of an open space. A fellow who has it is afraid to cross an open lot or field, and if he does make the venture, he carries with him a big stick or some weapon of defense. This, like many other phobias, is explained by scientists as being of simian inheritance. Our grandparents who lived in trees a few thousand years ago had a much tougher struggle for existence than any of us have today. Tree-tops were their only places of safety. If one of them happened to fall out of a tree into an open space on the ground where there was nothing to climb into, he was likely to be attacked by a lion or a tiger. This always filled the life of our little ancestor with intense fear and so affected his brain that the impress of it has been handed down and occasionally crops out in some of us. Our dreams of falling, we are told, are a vestige of the mental condition experienced by our monkey-foreparents when they made a misleap and fell to the ground. There is also the fear of a confined area, the fear of a crowd, fear of loss of speech at an inopportune moment, fear of falling buildings, fear of being alone, fear of poison, fear of germs, fears _ad nauseam_. I have qualified in all of them and taken post-graduate courses.