The second principle of good habits is fearlessness. Perhaps this is not possible to acquire in a high degree without a strong religious faith. This I will not discuss. It is, at any rate, certain that fear is not only the least agreeable of human emotions, so that one should at any cost conquer it, but that it is also the most superfluous. For fear does not prevent the approach of that which is feared; it only exhausts beforehand the strength which one needs to meet the thing he fears. Most of the things which we fear to meet are not in reality so terrible as they appear to be when looked at from afar. When they meet us, they can be borne. The imagination is inclined to picture evils as more permanent and persistent than they are really to be. If, as one’s trouble approached, he should say to himself: “This is likely to last about three days,” one would in many cases be justified by the event, and, at any rate, would proceed to meet the trouble with a better courage. On the whole, the best defence against fear which philosophy can provide is the conviction that every fear is a symptom of some wrong condition in ourselves. If one search for that weakness and rid himself of it, then, for the most part, fear will vanish also. Beyond this philosophical defence from fear, however, lie certain spiritual conditions of courage. The chief of these is determining for oneself what are the best blessings of life. First of all, one must acquire as soon as possible the habit of preferring the better things to the worse. He must especially abandon the expectation of possessing at the same time different things which are contradictory of each other. Here is the secret of failure in many a career. In my opinion, a man may not only freely choose his aims in life, but he may attain all those aims which he seriously and wholly desires, provided that for the sake of this desire he is ready to surrender all other desires which are inconsistent with it. The best possessions one can have in life, and the things which, with reasonable sagacity, are the easiest to get, are these: firm moral principles, intellectual discipline, love, loyalty, the capacity for work and the enjoyment of it, spiritual and physical health, and very moderate worldly possessions. No other blessings can be compared with these, and some other possessions are inconsistent with these--for instance, great wealth, great worldly honor and power, habitual self-indulgence. These are the things which people commonly most desire, and which they very often attain, but they must always be attained through the surrender of the better things.