He thereupon related how, at a certain period of his life, he had left an excellent position to take a new one which seemed more promising. It soon developed that the difficulties of this position were such as to make his success seem almost hopeless. He became obsessed with the idea that the people with whom he had to deal were "out to get him." His fears of the job and of his associates grew to the point where a nervous breakdown seemed inevitable. One day his daughter told him that she needed a book in her school work which he remembered having packed in a box that had been stored in the attic and not yet opened. When he opened the box, the first book which he picked up was THE CONQUEST OF FEAR. It was evidently one of those books which had somehow come into the possession of his family, but which he had never read. This time, however, he sat down in the attic and began to read it. During the course of the next year or so he read it carefully not once but four or five times. "It marked the turning point in my life," he told me. "It enabled me to conquer the fears which were threatening to ruin me at the time, and it gave me a philosophy which has stood me in good stead ever since." A philosophy which marked the turning point in his life and which has stood him in good stead ever since! THE CONQUEST OF FEAR offers such a philosophy not only to individuals suffering from fears peculiar to them, but to a world of individuals suffering, or about to suffer, from the collapse of world-wide materialism. In this day of chaos and uncertainty, here is the modern version of the parable of the man who built his house upon a rock instead of on the sand: "and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not for it was founded upon a rock." H. C. L. CHAPTER I FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE I When I say that during most of my conscious life I have been a prey to fears I take it for granted that I am expressing the case of the majority of people. I cannot remember the time when a dread of one kind or another was not in the air. In childhood it was the fear of going to bed, of that mysterious time when regular life was still going on downstairs, while I was buried alive under sheets and blankets. Later it was the fear of school, the first contact of the tender little soul with life's crudeness. Later still there was the experience which all of us know of waking in the morning with a feeling of dismay at what we have to do on getting up; the obvious duties in which perhaps we have grown stale; the things we have neglected; those in which we have made mistakes; those as to which we have wilfully done wrong; those which weary or bore or annoy or discourage us. Sometimes there are more serious things still: bereavements, or frightfully adverse conditions, or hardships we never expected brought on us by someone else.