Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory.

"Fear, you see, is the inevitable janitor, but it is not the ruler
of experience. That is what I am driving at in all this. The bark
of danger is worse than its bite. Inside the portals there may be
events and destruction, but terror stays defeated at the door. It
may be that when that old man was killed by a horse the child who
watched suffered more than he did. . . .

"I am sure that was so. . . ."



9


As White read Benham's notes and saw how his argument drove on, he
was reminded again and again of those schoolboy days and Benham's
hardihood, and his own instinctive unreasonable reluctance to follow
those gallant intellectual leads. If fear is an ancient instinctive
boundary that the modern life, the aristocratic life, is bound to
ignore and transcend, may this not also be the case with pain? We
do a little adventure into the "life beyond fear"; may we not also
think of adventuring into the life beyond pain? Is pain any saner a
warning than fear? May not pain just as much as fear keep us from
possible and splendid things? But why ask a question that is
already answered in principle in every dentist's chair? Benham's
idea, however, went much further than that, he was clearly
suggesting that in pain itself, pain endured beyond a certain pitch,