Of course the whole value of sense of one’s own superior power is in fear, thereby securing the contingency of the painful event, but sense of contingency upon one’s own efforts no doubt first occurs at a considerably advanced stage, much beyond that of simple fear. Primitively mind regards events as being, or about to be, with no sense either of their certainty or uncertainty. Early mind cannot appreciate certainty, for it knows not uncertainty, it has not yet accomplished the prevision to which certainty and uncertainty may attach; it cannot say, “I fear this will happen,” or “I fear that will not happen,” but only “I fear or do not fear the thing happening, the event coming.” The world of the earliest psychical life is simply factual, and the fears are simple and wholly undifferentiated. Fear certainly antedates the perception of contingency and of one’s own agency in producing contingency. Even in the ordinary fears in human consciousness sense of personal power in relation to pain-giver is actually subsequent to the fear phenomenon and reacts upon it, but is not constitutive of it in its first impulse. Fear is first graduated by the increasing discrimination as to the amount of pain and injury to be inflicted, and later it is graduated by the sense of the painful event as more or less contingent, either in the natural course of things, or as determined by the individual’s strength in warding off impending evil. Taking chances and risks is learned, and becomes often very advantageous. Fear is also greatly diminished and modified by acquiring a sense of one’s individual power in overcoming or resisting pain given. The rabbit, often chased by a clumsy dog, evidently fears him less and less. Man, both by his increasing knowledge of natural contingencies and by his increasing power over elemental and animal pain-giving forces, fears less and less. The inevitable evil, sure to come, and sure to overcome, is that which strikes intensest fear, as we often see in criminals led to execution. The discrimination between the animate and the inanimate also differentiates fear. When this distinction is fully achieved, the attitude of mind toward each in fear is plainly distinct. The thing, perceived as having psychic powers, and capable of purposive evil and self-directive of its movements, awakens thereby a complex of feelings which rapidly develops beyond our present powers of analysis to follow them. For the present sketch of the early natural history of fear it is sufficient merely to remark this differentiation as one of prime value in the struggle for existence.