pathologic character. Fear in its origin was certainly a stimulant to action and not sedative. However, so far as fear effects an unconscious mimicry of death it often reaches thereby negatively to conservative action, and paralyzing fear is thus explained by the general law of advantage in the struggle for existence. We can then trace a double evolution of fear, on the one hand as leading to action, on the other to inaction, but the former will, I think, be found to be the primitive form. The primary and main function of fear in all life is in a duly modulated energizing in view of approaching injury, and the depressing mode is secondary and exceptional. Again, we must remark upon the sense of personal weakness, or, objectively stated, the sense of overwhelming power, as entering into fear. I cannot agree with Mr. Mercier that this is a mark of all fear. In its origin and early gradations fear, as we have noticed it in the immediately preceding paragraphs, requires no other cognition than that of pain to come. Self-measurement of power in relation to that of pain giving object is certainly too complex to be primitive, nor do the simplest forms of fear as we observe them in ourselves and judge of them in lower organisms pre-suppose any such process. Primitively every perception of painful event fills consciousness with the impetuous self-conserving fear revulsion. There is neither time nor capacity for estimating one’s own strength or weakness in relation to opposing power. By the very low intelligence only the immediately imminent is apprehended, and action is always immediate, short, and decisive. In fact, it is now probable that originally painful events are really actualized by the mind, and the fear is thus at the event as actual, rather than as ideal, as represented as to be. Certain it is that mind, in its hurry to get ahead of natural harmful agencies in their action, must in its earliest pre-apprehensions have no room or time for dynamic interpretations.