fear. The idea of self-preservation is as strongly present as with
the most abjectly timid or terrified, but fear they do not know.
This FEARLESS awareness of fear--suggesting conditions may be due
to several causes. It may result from constitutional make-up, or
from long--continued training or habituation, or from religious
ecstasy, or from a perfectly calm sense of spiritual selfhood
which is unhurtable, or from the action of very exalted reason.
Whatever the explanation, the fact remains: the very causes which
excite fear in most of us, merely appeal, with such people, if at
all. to the instinct of self-preservation and to reason, the
thought-element of the soul which makes for personal peace and
wholeness.


BANISH ALL FEAR.


It is on such considerations that I have come to hold that all
real fear-FEELING should and may be banished from our life, and
that what we call "normal fear" should be substituted in our
language by "instinct" or by "reason," the element of fear being
dropped altogether.

"Everyone can testify that the psychical state called fear
consists of mental representations of certain painful results"
(James). The mental representations may be very faint as such, but
the idea of hurt to self is surely present. If, then, it can be
profoundly believed that the real self cannot be hurt; if the
reason can be brought to consider vividly and believingly all
quieting considerations; if the self can be held consciously in