and intellectual sense of what is the right and sensible course
to take, one may be sadly hampered in carrying it out, by this secret
and hidden instinct of which one may be rationally ashamed, but which
is characteristic of what seems to be the stronger and more vital part
of one's self.

The whole of civilisation is a combat between these two forces, a
struggle between the rational and the instinctive parts of the mind.
The instinctive mind bids one follow profit, need, advantage, the
pleasure of the moment; the rational part of the mind bids one abstain,
resist, balance contingencies, act in accordance with a moral standard.
Many such abstentions become a mere matter of habit. If one is hungry
and thirsty, and meets a child carrying bread or milk, one has no
impulse to seize the food and eat it. One does not reflect upon the
possible outcome of following the impulse of plunder; it simply does
not enter one's head so to act. And there is of course a slow process
going on in the world by which this moral restraint is becoming
habitual and instinctive; but notably in the case of fear our instinct
is a belated one, and results in many causeless and baseless anxieties
which our reason in vain assures us are wholly false.

What then is our practical way of escape from the dominion of these
shadows? Not, I am sure, in any resolute attempt to combat them by
rational weapons; the rational argument, the common-sense consolation,
only touches the rational part of the mind; we have got to get behind
and below that, we have got somehow to fight instinct by instinct, and
quell the terror in its proper home. By our finite nature we are
compelled to attend to one thing at a time, and thus if we use rational
argument, we are recognising the presence of the irrational fear; it is
of little use then to array our advantages against our disadvantages,
our blessings against our sufferings, as Michael Finsbury did with such
small effect in The Wrong Box; our only chance is to turn tail
altogether, and try to set some other dominant instinct at work; while
we remember, we shall continue to suffer; our best chance lies in
forgetting, and we can only do that by calling some other dominant
emotion into play.

And here comes in the peculiarly paralysing effect of these baser
emotions. As Victor Hugo once said, in a fine apophthegm, "Despair
yawns." Fear and anxiety bring with them a particular kind of physical
fatigue which makes us listles