We can realize how pernicious are those schemes which physicians and many people in sanitariums lay out for the patients just to keep them busy for the time of their stay under special care. As soon as the patients leave, they are in the same predicament as before. The patients wish to have their lives conducted in the same mechanical, automatic routine. In this way they are really on the same low plane of mental life, on the plane of recurrent moment consciousness, a type which forms the pathological web and woof of the patient’s life. Unless the patient is lifted out of this low, mean, and animal form of conscious activity, he cannot be regarded as cured. Instead of having the patient’s life saturated and controlled by the recurrent automatisms of the fear instinct, he should learn to be controlled by the light of reason. “A free man is he,” says Spinoza, “who lives under the guidance of reason, who is not led by fear.” Epicurus and the ancient Epicureans laid special stress on the necessity of getting rid of fear through reason, enlightenment, and education. Thus the great poet Lucretius: “The whole of life is a struggle in the dark. For even as children are flurried and dread all things in the thick darkness, thus we in the daylight fear things not a whit more to be dreaded than those which the children shudder at in the dark and fancy future evils. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by knowledge of the aspect and law of nature.” As Carlyle tersely puts it: “The first duty of a man is still that of _subduing Fear_. We must get rid of Fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man’s acts are slavish, not true but specious (we may add psychopathic); his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he has got Fear under feet.... Now and always, the completeness of his victory over Fear will determine how much of a man he is.”