through torture, this exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink
at anything; it was an examination of the present range and use of
fear that led gradually to something like a theory of control and
discipline. The second of his two dominating ideas was that fear is
an instinct arising only in isolation, that in a crowd there may be
a collective panic, but that there is no real individual fear.
Fear, Benham held, drives the man back to the crowd, the dog to its
master, the wolf to the pack, and when it is felt that the danger is
pooled, then fear leaves us. He was quite prepared to meet the
objection that animals of a solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit
fear. Some of this apparent fear, he argued, was merely discretion,
and what is not discretion is the survival of an infantile
characteristic. The fear felt by a tiger cub is certainly a social
emotion, that drives it back to the other cubs, to its mother and
the dark hiding of the lair. The fear of a fully grown tiger sends
it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, that must be "still
reminiscent of the maternal lair." But fear has very little hold
upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme readiness to
resentment and rage.

"Like most inexperienced people," ran his notes, "I was astonished
at the reported feats of men in war; I believed they were
exaggerated, and that there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy
of silence about their real behaviour. But when on my way to visit
India for the third time I turned off to see what I could of the
fighting before Adrianople, I discovered at once that a thousand
casually selected conscripts will, every one of them, do things
together that not one of them could by any means be induced to do
alone. I saw men not merely obey orders that gave them the nearly
certain prospect of death, but I saw them exceeding orders; I saw