Happiness as Found in Forethought Minus FearthoughtFletcher, Horace
Philosophy
Happiness as Found in Forethought Minus Fearthought
Fletcher, Horace
Fear; Happiness
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.
The method of securing information was by means of the _questionaire_,
the answers to which, although unsigned and unidentifiable, and
savoring of exaggeration or romance, furnish splendid texts in a
crusade against the toleration of the habit-of-fear in a civilized
community. One can scarcely imagine, before reading the answers to the
fear _questionaire_, the unreasonable and absurd fears that warp the
lives and ruin the health of many of the people among whom we move,
and by whom, in some measure, we and our children are unconsciously
influenced.
If it were the community-habit-of-thought that fear was an unnecessary
thing and an evil thing, and not respectable and not Christian, many
of these fears would not exist, owing to the proneness of all persons
to imitation and their acceptance of community-of-habit-thought as law
and gospel. Fear is a very insidious thing. It will enter the smallest
opening, and ferment, and increase, and permeate whatever it attacks,
if it be permitted foothold in the least degree.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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