Under similar conditions birds are so paralyzed by fear that they are unable to fly away from the source of danger, and fall a prey to the threatening serpent. The birds resemble very much the hypnotized subject in a state of catalepsy. Although the gibbons are the most agile of all the simians, they are easily taken by surprise, and captured without any resistance,--they are paralyzed by fear. Seals when pursued on land become so frightened that they are unable to offer any opposition to their pursuers, and let themselves easily be captured and killed. In large cities one can often witness nervous people affected suddenly by the presence of danger; they remain immobile, in the middle of the street, becoming exposed to fatal accidents. The fear instinct paralyzes their activities, they are petrified with terror. I was told by people who have experienced the effects of earthquakes, that during the time of the earthquakes they were unable to move, and the same condition was observed in animals, especially in young dogs. It is hard to move cattle and horses from a burning stable, on account of the fear of fire which obsesses the animals, so that they become paralyzed, suffocated and burnt to death. So vital is the fear instinct that the least deviation from the normal state is apt to play havoc with the safety of the individual. The fear instinct is the most primitive, the most fundamental, and the most powerful of all instincts. When the fear instinct is let loose, the animal succumbs. We should not wonder, therefore, that with the aberration of the fear instinct, the life guardian of the individual, all orientation is lost, the animal becomes demoralized, and the organism goes to destruction. No other instinct can surpass the fear instinct in its fatal effects. The more one studies the facts, the more one examines various psychopathic, functional maladies, without going into any speculations and without being blinded by foregone conclusions and pseudo-scientific hypotheses, the more one is driven to the conclusion that the fear instinct is at the bottom of all those nervous and mental aberrations, conscious and subconscious. The infinite varieties of functional psychopathic diseases are the consequences of some abnormal association with the fear instinct which alone gives rise to the infirmities characteristic of functional mental maladies. President Stanley Hall accepts my view of the subject. In a recent paper he writes: “If there be a vital principle, fear must be one of its close allies as one of the chief springs of the mind”.... In spite of his former psychoanalytic inclinations President Hall asserts now that “Freud is wrong in interpreting this most generic form of fear as rooted in sex. _Sex anxieties themselves are rooted in the larger fundamental impulse of self-preservation with its concomitant instinct of fear._” This is precisely the factor and the teaching which I have been expounding in all my works on Psychopathology.