The fear instinct stays with us, and watches over us day and night. It follows us closely in our active, waking life, attends us in our resting hours, and watches over us in our sleeping periods. The fear instinct is the last to fall asleep, and the first to awake. The fear instinct follows us like our shadow, with the only difference that it constantly affects our actions, hardly ever leaves us alone, and keeps steady vigilance over our life activities. The reason for this apparently strange companionship is the fact that the fear instinct is the primitive instinct of the life impulse, the impulse for self-preservation. The overwhelming intensity of the fundamental impulse of self-preservation is well described by the great writer Dostoevsky, whose insight into the psychology of human life and especially into abnormal mental life transcends that of any other writer: “Where is it I have read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he had only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live, and live! Life whatever it may be!” Just as the touch and pain nerves enmesh closely our body, warning us against hurtful stimulations, so we may say that fear, through our distant receptors of sight, hearing and smell, surrounds us, warning us against enemies, or inimical, suspicious objects, and forces. Were it not for the fear instinct, directly awakened, the animal threatened with danger would not have the time and the strong impulse to get ready for defense or for escape, by running or by hiding. The fear instinct is of the utmost importance in animal life. Looked at from this standpoint the fear instinct is as important in animal economy as the skin which covers our body, which, by pain and hurts, warns of external injurious objects, and has an important function of warding off incessant invasion of disease-bearing organisms. In nervous ills we find the same fundamental factors:--_self-preservation and the fear instinct_. CHAPTER II STAGES OF FEAR The fear instinct in its course of development passes through three stages: I. The Stimulating Stage II. The Arrestive, or Inhibitory Stage III. The Paralyzing Stage. In its milder forms when the fear instinct is but nascent, it serves as a sort of trigger to the activities of the organism. The animal may for a moment stop whatever activities and pursuits in which it happens to be engaged, and have its interest turn in the direction of the particular new stimulus, whether it be of an auditory, visual, or olfactory character. The fear instinct is just strong enough to suspend present interests, and direct its activities to the new source of the unknown stimulus.