Despair is a phase of painful emotion which is certainly related to fear, yet is very distant from it. Despair has always a fear basis; we can only despair where fear is implied, and what does not excite fear will give no hold for despair. I must first fear a pain before I can despair of escaping it. The prisoner condemned to death must fear death before he will be in despair at the prospect of it. Yet while despair always implies fear, fear may often exist and that in very strong form without despair. The prisoner often displays great fear, but no despair. There is, in fact, a strong contrast between fear and despair. Fear normally stimulates effort, despair depresses it. Fear is active, despair passive. Deep dejection and lassitude mark despair, while fear is intense agitation and activity. Fear in its original and normal function is stimulant of defensive action, fear as paralytic being secondary or abnormal, but in normal despair there is absolute inertness. Fear, again, in contrast with despair, is direct and transitive. I fear the pain or injury, but my despair is only in relation to it, despair _of_, _in_ despair, etc. Fear is at the evil itself, it is a direct attitude of mind toward it, through an ideal pre-experiencing, the very representation of any pain as experienceable carrying with it a thrill of fear. But despair concerns itself, not with the pain _per se_ as experienceable, but with the inevitability of the painful. Fear rests upon idea of pain, despair, upon idea of its inevitability. “I despair of escape,” means a recoil of painful emotion at inevitability of painful experience. Sense of complete and permanent inability to attain an end, whether release from pain, or positively, a securing a pleasure, generates commonly this distressful emotion. Despair is not then simple pain at pain, but at the unavertibility of the pain. Despair is then the mind bent down and crushed by the sense of the inevitable and irremediable nature of the pain, positive or negative, it experiences or is to experience. Despair is, indeed, hopelessness, though all hopelessness is not despair. There is no hope in stolidity or in stoicism, psychic modes quite distinct from despair, but which take the place with some natures. Again, we must note that while fear has its degrees, and may be but partial, despair is always complete collapse. I may fear a little but not despair a little, I may be frightened “just the least bit,” but not despair a little bit. The hostess who is “in despair” because the ice cream has not come, speaks truly, however, for the affair is for her so important and momentous as to be the basis of real despair. That which is the occasion of despair must always be or seem of capital value.