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Fear: Its Nature and Diverse Uses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

The “Hyde” character of fear has been so widely, and generally so exclusively, dwelt upon, that a review of what can be truthfully said in praise of its “Jekyll” character is, I trust, not untimely. I shall proceed on the assumption that all the natural passions, with-out exception, are essential, ineradicable factors in our human make-up, each allowing of both use and abuse. This, as I shall endeavour to show, is no less true of fear than of what we quite justly call the higher emotions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1957

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References

page 4 note 1 Graham Wallas: The Great Society (1914), p. 92.

page 5 note 1 Op. cit., in the English translation of its fifth Italian edition (1896), p. 278.

page 5 note 2 (Published 1908), p. 34.

page 6 note 1 “A Synthetic Genetic Study of Fear” (American Journal of Psychology, 1914, p. 183).

page 8 note 1 In Hebrew the same word is used to cover both fear and reverence. Moffatt has therefore felt justified in substituting for the traditional translation of Psalm iii, 10—”Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”—”The first thing in knowledge is reverence for the Eternal.”

page 9 note 1 Cf. Sherrington, Man on his Nature (1940), pp. 367 ff.

page 10 note 1 Though published in 1914, with a second edition in 1920, it has, it would seem, never yet received the attention it deserves.

page 11 note 1 Cf. Dean Acheson, An American Vista (1956): “Tension is bad for people with weak nerves, but very little is ever accomplished without it.”

page 12 note 1 Sherrington, op. cit., p. 401.

page 19 note 1 As helping to make good some of the many lacunae and other short-comings in this brief review, I can refer the reader to Lord Moran's The Anatomy of Courage (1945), and to Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be (1952). As the latter indicates, there is no English word precisely corresponding to the German word Angst—a distinctive, highly complex, species of anxiety.