This horror is probably explicable as the result of a combination of ******r horrors.To bring the ghostly terror to its maximum, many usual elements of the dreadful must combine, such as loneliness, darkness, inexplicable sounds, especially of a dismal character, moving figures half discerned (or, if discerned, of dreadful aspect), and a vertiginous baffling of the expectation.This last element, which is intellectual , is very important.It produces a strange emotional 'curdle' in our blood to see a process with which we are familiar deliberately taking an unwonted course.
Anyone's heart would stop beating if he perceived his chair sliding unassisted across the floor.The lower animals appear to be sensitive to the mysteriously exceptional as well as ourselves.My friend Professor W.K.Brooks, of the; Johns Hopkins University, told me of his large and noble dog being frightened into a sort of epileptic fit by a bone being drawn across the floor by a thread which the dog did not see.Darwin and Romanes have given similar experiences. The idea of the supernatural involves that the usual should be set at naught.In the witch and hobgoblin supernatural, other elements still of fear are brought in -- caverns, slime and ooze, vermin, corpses, and the like. A human corpse seems normally to produce an instinctive dread, which is no doubt somewhat due to its mysteriousness, and which familiarity rapidly dispels.But, in view of the fact that cadaveric, reptilian, and underground horrors play so specific and constant a part in many nightmares and forms of delirium, it seems not altogether unwise to ask whether these forms of dreadful circumstance may not at a former period have been more normal objects of the environment than now.The ordinary cock-sure evolutionist ought to have no difficulty in explaining these terrors, and the scenery that provokes them, as relapses into the consciousness of the cave-men, a consciousness usually overlaid in us by experiences of more recent date.
There are certain other pathological fears, and certain peculiarities in the expression of ordinary fear, which might receive an explanatory light from ancestral conditions, even infra-human ones.In ordinary fear, one may either run, or remain semi-paralyzed.The latter condition reminds us of the so-called death-shamming instinct shown by many animals.
Dr.Lindsay, in his work 'Mind in Animals,' says this must require great self-command in those that practise it.But it is really no feigning of death at all, and requires no self-command.It is simply a terror-paralysis which has been so useful as to become hereditary.The beast of prey does not think the motionless bird, insect, or crustacean dead.He simply fails to notice them at all; because his senses, like ours, are much more strongly excited by a moving object than by a still one.It is the same instinct which leads a boy playing 'I spy' to hold his very breath when the seeker is near, and which makes the beast of prey himself in many cases motionlessly lie in wait for his victim or silently 'stalk' it, by rapid approaches alternated with periods of immobility.It is the opposite of the instinct which makes us jump up and down and move our arms when we wish to attract the notice of some one passing far away, and makes the shipwrecked sailor frantically wave a cloth upon the raft where he is floating when a distant sail appears.Now, may not the statue-like, crouching immobility of some melancholiacs, insane with general anxiety and fear of everything, be in some way connected with this old instinct? They can give no reason for their fear to move ; but immobility makes them feel safer and more comfortable.
Is not this the mental state of the 'feigning' animal?
Again, take the strange symptom which has been described of late years by the rather absurd name of agoraphobia.The patient is seized with palpitation and terror at the sight of any open place or broad street which he has to cross alone.He trembles, his knees bend, he may even faint at the idea.Where he has sufficient self-command he sometimes accomplishes the object by keeping safe under the lee of a vehicle going across, or joining himself to a knot of other people.But usually he slinks round the sides of the square, hugging the houses as closely as he can.This emotion has no utility in a, civilized man, but when we notice the chronic agoraphobia of our domestic cats, and see the tenacious way in which many wild animals, especially rodents, cling to cover, and only venture on a dash across the open as a desperate measure -- even then ****** for every stone or bunch of weeds which may give a momentary shelter -- when we see this we are strongly tempted to ask whether such an odd kind of fear in us be not due to the accidental resurrection, through disease, of a sort of instinct which may in some of our ancestors have had a permanent and on the whole a useful part to play?
Appropriation or Acquisitiveness.The beginnings of acquisitiveness are seen in the impulse which very young children display, to snatch at, or beg for, any object which pleases their attention.Later, when they begin to speak, among the first words they emphasize are 'me ' and 'mine.'
Their earliest quarrels with each other are about questions of ownership;
