him to go on living and gnawing at his food year
after year without wearing his tools away.

The problem, then, in economy of effort is: How shall we use whatever
force of sensitiveness and imagination we have, so as to get its
maximum efficiency of usefulness and its minimum pain and
inconvenience?

For many ages man has been dominated by fear. His way to freedom, now,
is to step out through his cobweb chains and go right forward with
courage and in faith. So we are told with relentless and almost
tiresome reiteration. It is the fashion, one might almost say, to have
cast off fear, and the one thing an honest "modern thinker" is afraid
of is being afraid. (To less honest ones it is the thought of _being
thought_ afraid that is a very real and present fear.)

But, if this standpoint is right, is not fear at least a vestigial
organ, a survival of a mental activity which served its purpose in
times gone by? Is it not even truer to go further still and say, as
_each particular fear_ serves its purpose it may safely be discarded,
but that, as far as our present knowledge goes, other grades of
sensitiveness, finer shades of imagination of the type we have called
fear, must take its place, to be discarded in their turn for yet other
apprehensions?

For if we lost the kind of perception that we associate with fear, if
our imagination closed itself automatically to the suggestion of all
sorts of ugly possibilities, should we not find ourselves soon in the
midst of difficulties akin to those of the hero of the German tale of
the man who felt no pain? We accept the evidence of pain as a guide
to action; when we have decided on action we proceed to get rid of the
pain as expeditiously, safely and permanently as we can.

The same thing seems true of fear. Over and over again we laugh at
ourselves for fearing something that either never happened at all or
happened in such a way as to be softened out of all likeness to the
monstrous terror we had created. On the other hand, when misfortune
falls heavily because of our lack of imagination in not foreseeing
possible consequences of particular actions or events, we lament and
complain: "If I could only have guessed! If I had only known!"

Fear pure and simple--the imagination of possible trouble--is a stage
we can hardly yet afford to do without. But when it has roused our
attention to a danger, its work is done. Let us practise turning it
into action; taking due precautions agai