How shall we explain the apprehension of an evil which has never been experienced? Even if we admit that fear may sometimes, and from the very beginning of life onward, start from analogies, resemblances, associations of ideas, there remain many cases which can be reduced to no simple form. We have seen that Preyer, following Darwin, Spencer, and other evolutionists, admits the influence of heredity. It is a well-known fact that birds on uninhabited islands show no fear when they see man for the first time; they are taught by hard experience to distrust him, and the acquired fear is, on this theory, transmitted to their descendants. According to this hypothesis, fear would be, always and everywhere, the result of experience, whether individual or ancestral, and what we have called the second stage would be the first, and indeed the only one. This explanation is naturally rejected by those who refuse to believe in the inheritance of acquired qualities, though they have nothing satisfactory to propose in its place. Besides, this is a question of origin, on which experimental psychology may well recognise its incompetence. Not to remain on debatable ground, we must admit—since individual experience cannot be appealed to—that the bases of fear exist in the organism, form part of the constitution of animals and men, and help them to live by a defensive adaptation, which in most cases proves useful. As for the obscure mechanism of this instinctive fear, we may suppose that certain sensations produce a painful shock which excites the organic, motor, and vaso-motor relations constituting emotion, and that the conservative instinct, in order to escape _actual_ pain, reacts blindly, with or without profit. This makes it impossible to explain certain innate fears by reason. For my own part, I consider the hypothesis of a hereditary disposition to certain fears as extremely probable.[134] Footnote 134: Since the above was written the same conclusion has been reached by Professor Stanley Hall in a report founded on a statistical inquiry into the fears (some 6500 in number) of 1700 children and young persons. He concludes that “we must assume the capacity to fear or to anticipate pain, and to associate it with certain objects and experiences, as an inherited _Anlage_, often of a far higher antiquity than we are wont to appeal to in psychology.” He considers that such fears are analogous to rudimentary physical organs, though they still retain a certain use. (“A Study of Fears,” _American Journal of Psychology_, vol. viii., No. 2, 1897.)—ED.