Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team THE CONQUEST OF FEAR BASIL KING WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY HENRY C. LINK CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE II. THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD III. GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION IV. GOD'S SELF-EXPRESSION AND THE MIND OF TO-DAY V. THE MIND OF TO-DAY AND THE WORLD AS IT IS VI. THE WORLD AS IT IS AND THE FALSE GOD OF FEAR VII. THE FALSE GOD OF FEAR AND THE FEAR OF DEATH VIII. THE FEAR OF DEATH AND ABUNDANCE OF LIFE INTRODUCTION by Henry C. Link, Ph.D. _Author of_ THE REDISCOVERY OF MAN, THE RETURN TO RELIGION, etc. There are many books which give some help to many people. There are books which give a set of rules, or even one master rule, by which to meet the problems of life. This is not such a book. It suggests no simple recipe for the conquest of fear. Instead, it presents, what all too few of us to-day possess, a philosophy of life. Moreover, in contrast to the dominant thinking of our age, which is materialistic, King's philosophy is spiritual and religious. Indeed, the ideas in this book are so profoundly different from the commonly accepted ideas of our times that they will come as a shock to many readers. One purpose of this introduction is to prepare the reader for such a shock. I have said that the dominant thinking of our age is materialistic, and by that I mean also physical. Let me illustrate this broad statement with reference to the subject of fears alone. The conquest of fear has gone on year after year chiefly through physical means. Physical pain has always been one of the great sources of fear. Now ether and other anaesthetics have eliminated the chief pains of major operations. Older people can still remember their fear of the dentist, when killing a nerve or pulling a tooth caused excruciating pain. Now local anaesthetics even in minor troubles have made dentistry almost painless. We have not conquered these fears of pain--rather their cause has been removed. Twilight sleep, the artificial sleep to alleviate the pains of childbirth, is the perfect expression of the scientific and materialistic elimination of fear. By a chemical blackout of the mind, a dimming of the conscious self, the person is enabled to escape the necessity of facing and conquering fear through his own resources. I am not condemning the physical alleviation of pain or the progress of physical science. I am only describing a trend, and that is the growing emphasis on the elimination of fears by science rather than on their conquest by the individual.