But blind fear not only causes evil to the coward himself:  it makes him a source of evil to others; for it is the cruellest of all human states.  It transforms the man into the likeness of the cat, who, when she is caught in a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an intellect to understand that you wish to release her; and, in the madness of terror, bites and tears at the hand which tries to do her good.  Yes; very cruel is blind fear.  When a man dreads he knows not what, he will do he cares not what.  When he dreads desperately, he will act desperately.  When he dreads beyond all reason, he will behave beyond all reason.  He has no law of guidance left, save the lowest selfishness.  No law of guidance:  and yet his intellect, left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead him into terrible follies.  Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest animals, he is for that very reason capable of being infinitely more foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious.  He can—­what the lower animals, happily for them, cannot—­organise his folly; erect his superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of his blind fear of the unknown.  And when he has done that—­Woe to the weak!  For when he has reduced his superstition to a science, then he will reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write books like the Malleus Maleficarum, and the rest of the witch-literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; of which Mr. Lecky has of late told the world so much, and told it most faithfully and most fairly.

But, fear of the unknown?  Is not that fear of the unseen world?  And is not that fear of the spiritual world?  Pardon me:  a great deal of that fear—­all of it, indeed, which is superstition—­is simply not fear of the spiritual, but of the material; and of nothing else.

The spiritual world—­I beg you to fix this in your minds—­is not merely an invisible world which may become visible, but an invisible world which is by its essence invisible; a moral world, a world of right and wrong.  And spiritual fear—­which is one of the noblest of all affections, as bodily fear is one of the basest—­is, if properly defined, nothing less or more than the fear of doing wrong; of becoming a worse man.

But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen?  The fancy which conceives the fear is physical, not spiritual.  Think for yourselves.  What difference is there between a savage’s fear of a demon, and a hunter’s fear of a fall?  The hunter sees a fence.  He does not know what is on the other side:  but he has seen fences like it with a great ditch on the other side, and suspects one here likewise.  He has seen horses fall at such, and men hurt thereby.  He pictures to himself his horse falling at that fence, himself rolling in the ditch, with possibly a broken limb; and he recoils from the picture he himself has made; and perhaps with very good reason.  His picture may have its counterpart in fact; and he may break his leg.  But his picture, like the previous pictures from which it was compounded, is simply a physical impression on the brain, just as much as those in dreams.