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The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners by William Henry Pyle
page 64 of 245 (26%)
needless fears. During the early years of a child's life, wise treatment
causes most of the fear tendencies to disappear because of disuse. On
the other hand, unwise treatment may accentuate and perpetuate them,
causing much misery and unhappiness. Neither the home nor the school
should play upon these ancestral fears. We should not try to get a child
to be good by frightening him; nor should we often use fear of pain as
an incentive to get a child to do his work.

Man has always been afraid, but he has also always been a fighter. He
has always had to fight for his life against the lower animals, and he
has also fought his fellow man. The fighting response is connected with
the emotions of anger, envy, and jealousy. A man is angered by anything
that interferes with his life, with his purposes, with whatever he calls
his own. We become angry if some one strikes our bodies, or attacks our
beliefs, or the beliefs of our dear friends, particularly of our
families. The typical responses connected with anger are such as faster
heart-beat, irregular breathing, congestion of the blood in the face and
head, tightening of the voluntary muscles, particularly a setting of the
teeth and a clinching of the fists. These responses are preparatory to
actual combat.

Anger, envy, and jealousy, and the responses growing out of them, have
always played a large part in the life of man. A great part of history
is a record of the fights of nations, tribes, and individuals. If the
records of wars and strifes, and the acts growing out of envy and
jealousy and other similar emotions should be taken out of history,
there would not be much left. Much of literature and art depict those
actions of man which grew out of these individualistic aspects of his
nature. Competition, which is an aspect of fighting, even to the present
day, continues to be one of the main factors in business and in life
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