“The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear. That passion alone, in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents. Such as have been well banged in some skirmish, may yet, all wounded and bloody as they are, be brought on again the next day to the charge; but such as have once conceived a good sound fear of the enemy will never be made so much as to look the enemy in the face. Such as are in immediate fear of losing their estates, of banishment or of slavery, live in perpetual anguish, and lose all appetite and repose. And the many people who, impatient of perpetual alarms of fear, have hanged or drowned themselves, or dashed themselves to pieces, give us sufficiently to understand that fear is more importunate and insupportable than death itself.” A well known writer, who is a psychopathic sufferer, writes: “Carlyle laid his finger upon the truth, when he said that the reason why the pictures of the past were always so golden in tone, so delicate in outline, was because the quality of fear was taken from them. It is the fear of what may be and what must be that overshadows present happiness; and if fear is taken from us, we are happy. The strange thing is that we can not learn not to be afraid, even though all the darkest and saddest of our experiences have left us unscathed; and if we could but find a reason for the mingling of fear with our lives, we should have gone towards the solving of the riddle of the world.” Anxiety states of neuroses and psychoses are essentially clue to the awakening of the fear instinct, normally present in every living being. The fear instinct is a fundamental one; it is only inhibited by the whole course of civilization and by the training and education of life. Like the jinn of the “Arabian Nights,” it slumbers in the breast of every normal individual, and comes fully to life in the various neuroses and psychoses. Kraepelin and his school lay special stress on the fact that “Fear is by far the most important persistent emotion in morbid conditions.... Fear is manifested by anxious excitement and by anxious tension.” “Experience,” says Kraepelin, “shows an intimate relationship between insistent psychosis and the so-called ‘phobias,’ the _anxiety states_ which in such patients become associated with definite impressions, actions, and views.” The states are associated with the thought of some unknown danger. Violent heart action, pallor, a feeling of anxiety, tremor, cold sweat, meteorisms, diarrhœa, polyuria, weakness in the legs, fainting spells, attack the patient, who may lose control of his limbs and occasionally suffer complete collapse. “These states,” says Kraepelin, with his usual insight into abnormal mental life, “remind one of the feeling of anxiety which in the case of healthy people may, in view of a painful situation or of a serious danger, deprive one of the calmness of judgment and confidence in his movements.”