h
causes panic among numbers of people. Now this is an important point
in the argument. It seems very easy to defeat it on the grounds that
animals almost invariably herd together and panic in the face of
danger, and that such action cannot be due to the element of
uncertainty and suspense, since this necessitates the employment of
calculative and reasoning faculties which animals presumably do not
possess. The justification is to be found in a closer examination of
the part played by the uncertainty in producing the panic which is
common to men and animals. In the face of danger, as in everything
else, man's first instinct is to reason and calculate, and his
calculation results in finding the danger either avoidable and
uncertain, which is almost always the case, or unavoidable and
inevitable. If the danger is found avoidable, fear is the immediate
result. Fear as we know it has come into being with reason, but at the
same time, as will be seen later, it is only reason which can triumph
over and destroy fear. This fear then brings about the destruction of
reason, and the animal standard is reached, from which time the man
behaves in the same way as the animals, to whom the danger is merely
something out of the ordinary. He then comes under the domination of
the instinct to panic. It will thus be seen that all the mental
processes which came before the reversion to the animal standard in
men, are unknown to animals, and are the outcome of the purely human
faculty of reason. However, if reason can by any means retain its
foothold and its entirety, there will neither be fear nor the
consequent breakdown of reason and the domination of panic. Now this
is the position in the other case, the case in which reason finds the
danger unavoidable. In the case of a danger which is unavoidable there
will be no panic. It is this fact which accounts for the bravery of
numbers of people going to their death on board a sinking ship; but
such a position has never--or very seldom, indeed--avoided a relapse,
to a certain extent, to panic, inasmuch as there is a possibility of
avoiding the danger, and a possibility that some may survive, while
others are doomed to perish.

In the face of universal destruction, therefore, there will be no fear
and no panic. The fact that he is facing annihilation together with
the rest of humanity would have an extraordinary influence on each
individual, which, of course, would be just the sam