Let Us Free Ourselves from Fear

How violent man is, and how cruel! A long stretch of time has passed over him, the days and years succeeding one another across his arena, varied in form and diverse in condition, their storms and vicissitudes pulling him this way and that, until at last victory was decreed for them: they broke the violence of his egoism and the arrogance of his individuality, and managed, after arduous effort, to gather the ranks of individuals into the wide circle of the community, once men felt in their banding together and their union a real strength, mightier in force and harder in temper.

Yet he remained fearful and wary, watching for ill omen from his unknown morrow, because of the doubtful surmise and dark hope that shrouded its hiding places; and trusting the side of his old yesterday, because on its bright pages he read a clear, plain script that sent reassurance and contentment into his darkened heart.

All these active forces were leagued against him; yet there was a firebrand that lit the darkness of his soul in its blackest nights, something most like the gleam of the firefly, now flashing, now dying out. All the while the generations pressed on in their march, blotting out with their iron feet his days and his nights, which he had passed in terror and fear among the thickets and in the caves. And between his retreats and his advances, his shadow would appear to him as a sacred store laid up for a better life.

The secret of his survival on the face of this earth is ascribed to his courage, his cunning, and his patience in confronting calamities, for all these traits of the soul preserved his life, in the hope that he might attain a final resolution of happiness and peace by consolidating the foundations of his future life. And we have been stamped with the stamp of our earliest ancestors, and inherited from them fear and wariness; for our imagination has so often pointed us toward what holds the good and welfare of the world, yet we have drawn back from accomplishing that task while fear crept through our rotten breasts.

Yes, we have turned away from partaking of the laws that treat the human side in us, and have devoted ourselves instead to harnessing them to various scientific ends, and the outcome has been a scourge upon us. For we drew a wide cordon around our human feelings, and gave ourselves over entirely to treating purely scientific questions. The pages of history bear witness to this.

And humanity hopes that this blind thinking — which drove the ancient tribes to take up arms — will carry it through, in a bloody massacre more hideous than that one.

Yes, fear was an effective means of self-preservation in bygone ages; today, however, it has become the one danger that threatens to fall upon humanity and destroy it utterly. Man in our present day stands in the most urgent need of freeing himself from this moral fetter, so that he may feel in the depths of his soul that absolute love which embraces the sons of man and passes over the barriers of nationality to enter every human heart.

And mankind will never escape this grievous end unless it opens the granaries of its hearts to receive, with an open breast, every strange drop that pours into the lake of its feelings.