diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and high blood pressure, are to be traced, eminent physicians of to-day tell us, to fear and its offspring, worry. These are only a few of the admitted instances of the influence of thought over physical processes. The body itself without the direction of the mind is a useless and helpless instrument.

Of all mental disturbances which play havoc with the human body, fear is the most deadly. It overpowers the understanding, it shuts the mind to logic and common sense, it plunges the emotions into a state of turmoil and confusion. This turbulent state of mind finds an outlet in the body; the poison generated collects itself in one part of the system or another and breaks out into one or another form of disease. And yet, as a rule, the disasters that we fear prove to be but figments of the imagination, and the suffering engendered through fear, greater than that of any actual disaster.

Man has inherited a tendency to fear, from his primitive ancestors. But so has he received other deleterious characteristics which, however, he has succeeded in destroying through a process of repression. Man possesses in his potential make-up all the proclivities of his countless progenitors, from the dweller of the cave to the citizen of the civilized world; and yet he retains only those which best fit him for the environment in which he finds himself.

The other propensities are starved out through lack of nutriment and encouragement. Fear in prehistoric ages, when men and beast met in sudden and fatal encounters, had a vital function. But to-day it has outlived its protective significance and serves only as a generator of sickness and destroyer of mankind. The persistence of fear in man is simply due to man's failure to arm himself against it and drive it from the domain of his consciousness.