. .
"The modern world thinks too much as though painlessness and freedom
from danger were ultimate ends. It is fear-haunted, it is troubled
by the thoughts of pain and death, which it has never met except as
well-guarded children meet these things, in exaggerated and
untestable forms, in the menagerie or in nightmares. And so it
thinks the discovery of anaesthetics the crowning triumph of
civilization, and cosiness and innocent amusement, those ideals of
the nursery, the whole purpose of mankind. . . ."
"Mm," said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his
brows and shook his head.
10
But the bulk of Benham's discussion of fear was not concerned with
this perverse and overstrained suggestion of pleasure reached
through torture, this exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink
at anything; it was an examination of the present range and use of
fear that led gradually to something like a theory of control and
discipline. The second of his two dominating ideas was that fear is
an instinct arising only in isolation, that in a crowd there may be
a collective panic, but that there is no real individual fear.
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