The effect of noise in heightening any terror we may feel in adult years is very marked.The howling of the storm, whether on sea or land, is a principal cause of our anxiety when exposed to it.The writer has been interested in noticing in his own person, while lying in bed, and kept awake by the wind outside, how invariably each loud gust of it arrested momentarily his heart.A dog, attacking us, is much more dreadful by reason of the noises he makes.
Strange men , and strange animals , either large or small, excite fear, but especially men or animals advancing toward us in a threatening way.This is entirely instinctive and antecedent to experience.Some children will cry with terror at their very first sight of a cat or dog, and it will often be impossible for weeks to make them touch it.Others will wish to fondle it almost immediately.Certain kinds of 'vermin,' especially spiders and snakes, seem to excite a fear unusually difficult to overcome.
It is impossible to say how much of this difference is instinctive and how much the result of stories heard about these creatures.That the fear of 'vermin' ripens gradually, seemed to me to be proved in a child of my own to whom I gave a live frog once, at the age of six to eight months, and again when he was a year and a half old.The first time he seized it promptly, and holding it, in spite of its struggling, at last got its head into his mouth.He then let it crawl up his breast, and get upon his face, without showing alarm.But the second time, although he had seen no frog and heard no story about a frog between whiles, it was almost impossible to induce him to touch it.Another child, a year old, eagerly took some very large spiders into his hand.At present he is afraid, but has been exposed meanwhile to the teachings of the nursery.One of my children from her birth upwards saw daily the pet pug-dog of the house, and never betrayed the slightest fear until she was (if I recol- lect rightly) about eight months old.
Then the instinct suddenly seemed to develop, and with such intensity that familiarity had no mitigating effect.She screamed whenever the dog entered the room, and for many months remained afraid to touch him.It is needless to say that no change in the pug's unfailingly friendly conduct had anything to do with this change of feeling in the child.
Preyer tells of a young child screaming with fear on being carried near to the sea.The great source of terror to infancy is solitude.
The teleology of this is obvious, as is also that of the infant's expression of dismay -- the never-failing cry -- on waking up and finding himself alone.
Black things , and especially dark places , holes, caverns, etc., arouse a peculiarly gruesome fear.This fear, as well as that of solitude, of being 'lost,' are explained after a, fashion by ancestral experience.Says Schneider:
"It is a fact that men, especially in childhood, fear to go into a dark cavern or a gloomy wood.This feeling of fear arises, to be sure, partly from the fact that we easily suspect that dangerous beasts may lurk in these localities -- a suspicion due to stories we have heard and read.
But, on the other hand, it is quite sure that this fear at a certain perception is also directly inherited.Children who hare been carefully guarded from all ghost-stories are nevertheless terrified and cry if led into a dark place, especially if sounds are made there.Even an adult can easily observe that an uncomfortable timidity steals over him in a lonely wood at night, although he may have the fixed conviction that not the slightest danger is near." This feeling of fear occurs in many men even in their own house after dark, although it is much stronger in a dark cavern or forest.The fact of such instinctive fear is easily explicable when we consider that our savage ancestors through innumerable generations were accustomed to meet with dangerous beasts in caverns, especially bears, and were for the most part attacked by such beasts during the night and in the woods, and that thus an inseparable association between the perceptions of darkness of caverns and woods, and fear took place, and was inherited."
High places cause fear of a peculiarly sickening sort, though here, again, individuals differ enormously.The utterly blind instinctive character of the motor impulses here is shown by the fact that they are almost always entirely unreasonable, but that reason is powerless to1 suppress them.That they are a mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system, like liability to sea-sickness, or love of music, with no teleological significance, seems more than probable.The fear in question varies so much from one person to another, and its detrimental effects are so much more obvious than its uses, that it is hard to see how it could be a selected instinct.Man is anatomically one of the best fitted of animals for climbing about high places.The best psychical complement to this equipment would seem to be a 'level head' when there, not a dread of going there at all.
In fact, the teleology of fear, beyond a certain point, is very dubious.
Professor Mosso, in his interesting monograph, 'la Paura' (which has been translated into French), concludes that many of its manifestations must be considered pathological rather than useful; Pain, in several places, expresses the same opinion; and this, I think, is surely the view which any observer without a priori prejudices must take.A certain amount of timidity obviously adapts us to the world we live in, but the fear-paroxysm is surely altogether harmful to him who is its prey.
Fear of the supernatural is one variety of fear.It is difficult to assign ally normal object for this fear, unless it were a genuine ghost.
But, in spite of psychical research-societies, science has not yet adopted ghosts; so we can only say that certain ideas of supernatural agency, associated with real circumstances, produce a peculiar kind of horror.
