are certain things that I must at all costs avoid.

But there is one thing which seems to me to have always and
invariably hampered and maimed me, whenever I have yielded to it,
and I have often yielded to it; and that is Fear. It can be called
by many names, and all of them ugly names--anxiety, timidity, moral
cowardice. I can never trace the smallest good in having given way
to it. It has been from my earliest days the Shadow; and I think it
is the shadow in the lives of many men and women. I want in this
book to track it, if I can, to its lair, to see what it is, where
its awful power lies, and what, if anything, one can do to resist
it. It seems the most unreal thing in the world, when one is on the
other side of it; and yet face to face with it, it has a strength,
a poignancy, a paralysing power, which makes it seem like a
personal and specific ill-will, issuing in a sort of dreadful
enchantment or spell, which renders it impossible to withstand.
Yet, strange to say, it has not exercised its power in the few
occasions in my life when it would seem to have been really
justified. Let me quote an instance or two which will illustrate
what I mean.

I was confronted once with the necessity of a small surgical
operation, quite unexpectedly. If I had known beforehand that it
was to be done, I should have depicted every incident with horror
and misery. But the moment arrived, and I found myself marching to
my bedroom with a surgeon and a nurse, with a sense almost of
amusement at the adventure.

I was called upon once in Switzerland to assist with two guides in
the rescue of an unfortunate woman who had fallen from a precipice,