"That's what God does to us," he cried triumphantly. "When we die, He takes us apart and puts us into babies, and we live again." Thereafter he would discuss death as fearlessly as he spoke of dinner, and all his fears vanished. Here was a typical rationalization of fear, one that has helped to shape religion, philosophies, ways of living. And the widespread belief in immortality is a compensation and a rationalization of the fear of death.
If some men rationalize in this fashion, others take directly opposite means. "Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die."
The popularity of Omar Khayyam rests upon the aptness of his statement of this side of the case of Man vs. Death, and many a man who never heard of him has recklessly plunged into dissipation on the theory, "a short life and a merry one." This is more truly a pessimism than is the ascetic philosophy.
"Well, then, I must die," says another. "Oh, that I might achieve before death comes!" So men, appalled by the brief tenure of life and the haphazard way death strikes, work hard, spurred on by the wish to leave a great work behind them. This work becomes a Self, left behind, and here the fear of death is compensated for by a little longer life in the form of achievement.
Many a father and mother, looking at their children, feel this as part of their compensation for parenthood. "I shall die and leave some one behind me," means, "I shall die and yet I shall, in another form, live." Part of the incentive to parenthood, in a time which knows how to prevent parenthood and which shirks it as disagreeable, is the fear of death, of personal annihilation. For there is in death a blow to one's pride, an indignity in this annihilation,--Nothingness.
There is a still larger reaction to the fear of death. I have stated that the feeling of likeness is part of the feeling of brotherhood and in death is one of the three great likenesses of man. We are born of the labor of our mothers, our days are full of strife and trouble and we die. Men's minds have lingered on these facts. "Man that is born of a woman, is of few days, and full of trouble." Job did not add to this that he dies, but elsewhere it appears as the bond for mankind. Reacting to this, the reflective minds of the race have felt that here was the unity of man, here the basis of a brotherhood. True, the Fatherhood of God was given as a logical reason, but always in every appeal there is the note, "Do we not all die? Why hate one another then?"
So to the fear of death, as with every other fear, man has reacted basely and nobly. Man is the only animal that foresees death and he is the only one to elaborate ethics and religion.
There is more than an accidental connection between these two facts.
Fear in its foreseeing character is termed worry. As a phase of character, the liability to worry is of such importance that book after book has dealt with the subject,--emphasizing the dangers, the futility and cowardice of it. It is surely idle to tell people not to worry who live continually on the brink of economic disaster, or who are facing real danger. But there are types who find in every possibility of injury a formidable threat, who are thrown into anguish when they contemplate any evil, remote or unlikely as it may be. The present and future are not faced with courage or equanimity; they present themselves as a never-ending series of threats; threat to health, to fortune, to family, reputation, everything. Horace Fletcher called this type of forethought "fear thought." Men and women, brave enough when face to face with actualities, are cowards when confronting remote possibilities. The housewife especially is one of these worriers, and her mind has an affinity for the terrible. I have described her elsewhere,[1] but she has her prototype among men.
[1] "The Nervous Housewife."
Fear of this type is an injury to the body and character both and is one of the causes and effects of the widespread neurasthenia of our day. For fear injures sleep, and this brings on fatigue and fatigue breeds more fear, --a vicious circle indeed. Fear disturbs digestion and the energy of the organism is thereby lowered. The greatest damage by worry is done in the hypochondriac, the worrier about health. Here, in addition to the effects of fear, introspection and a minute attention to every pain and ache demoralize the character, for the sufferer cannot pay attention to anything else. He becomes selfish, ego-centric and without the wholesome interest in life as an adventure. I doubt if there is enough good in too minute a popular education on disease and health preservation. Morbid attention to health often results, an evil worse than sickness.
Sometimes, instead of the indiscriminate fear of worry, there are localized fears, called phobias, which creep or spring into a man's thoughts and render him miserable. Thus there is fear of high places, of low places, of darkness, of open places, of closed places,--fear of dirt, fear of poison and of almost everything else. A bright young man was locked, at the age of fourteen, in a closed dark shanty; when released he rushed home in the greatest terror. Since then he has been afflicted with a fear of leaving home. He dares venture only about fifty feet and then is impelled to run back. If anybody hinders his return he attacks them; if the door is locked he breaks through a window.
He is in a veritable panic, and yet presents no other fears; is a reader and thinker, clever at his work (he is a painter), but his fear remains inaccessible and uncontrollable. Often one experience of this kind builds up an obsessive fear; the associations left by the experience give the fear an open pathway to consciousness, without any inhibiting power. As in this case, the whole life of the individual becomes changed.
