substitute for that social backing can be made to serve the same
purpose in neutralizing fear. He wrote with the calm of a man who
weighs the probabilities of a riddle, and with the zeal of a man
lost to every material consideration. His writing, it seemed to
White, had something of the enthusiastic whiteness of his face, the
enthusiastic brightness of his eyes. We can no more banish fear
from our being at present than we can carve out the fleshy pillars
of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain. It is deep in our
inheritance. As deep as hunger. And just as we have to satisfy
hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy
the unconquerable importunity of fear. We have to reassure our
faltering instincts. There must be something to take the place of
lair and familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we
must carry with us into the lonely places. For it is true that man
has now not only to learn to fight in open order instead of in a
phalanx, but he has to think and plan and act in open order, to live
in open order. . . .

Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, "This
brings me to God."

"The devil it does!" said White, roused to a keener attention.

"By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so
long as we feel indeed alone. An isolated man, an egoist, an
Epicurean man, will always fail himself in the solitary place.
There must be something more with us to sustain us against this vast
universe than the spark of life that began yesterday and must be
extinguished to-morrow. There can be no courage beyond social
courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd, until there is in us