“It is the same with the child. When in the presence of all the things around him, of which he has no idea, these sounding objects, these forms, these movements, whose cause he does not divine, he is naturally a prey to vague fears. He is just what we should be, if chance should cast us suddenly into an unexplored country before strange objects and strange beings--suspicious, always on the _qui vive_, disposed to see imaginary enemies behind every bush, fearing a new danger at every turn in the road.” Similarly, Sully says, “The timidity of childhood is seen in the readiness with which experience invests objects and places with a fear-exciting aspect, in its tendency to look at all that is unknown as terrifying, and in the difficulty of the educator in controlling these tendencies.” Sully is right in thinking that education tends greatly to reduce the early intensity of fear. “This it does by substituting knowledge for ignorance, and so undermining that vague terror before the unknown to which the child and the superstitious savage are a prey, an effect aided by the growth of will power and the attitude of self-confidence which this brings with it.” An uncultivated personality with a limited mental horizon, with a narrow range of interests, a personality trained in the fear of mysterious agencies, is a fit subject for obsessions. In certain types of functional psychosis and neurosis the patient has an inkling of the fear instinct in his dread of objects, or of states of mind, lack of confidence, blushing, expectations of some coming misfortune and some mysterious evil, but he is not aware of the fear instinct as developed in him by the events and training of early childhood. _The fears of early childhood are subconscious._ At any rate, the patient does not connect them with his present mental affection. In other types of psychopathic affections the patient is entirely unaware of the whole situation, he is engrossed by the symptoms which he regards as the sum and substance of his trouble; the fear is entirely subconscious. Frights, scares, dread of sickness, instructions associated with fear of the mysterious and unseen, injunctions with fear of punishment or failure in moral standards, enforcement of social customs with dread of failure and degradation,--all go to the cultivation of the fear instinct which in later life becomes manifested as _functional psychosis_ or _neurosis_.