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These two papers, 124 pages long, appear to be instalments of a monograph not yet concluded, although this is not explicitly stated. As, however, nothing further has been published since July 1914 a summary will be given of the two chapters in question, criticism of the whole being reserved for a future occasion.
The subject is introduced with the following sentences: 'Fear is the anticipation of pain. For those forms of life capable of fear this anticipation is not prevision but only a highly generalised fore-feeling, itself unpleasant, that a yet more painful state impends. The will to live, the élan vital, is more or less checked in its momentum or narrowed in its range by some kind of intimation that it may be still further held up. This protensive or futuristic attitude or orientation toward a pejoristic state is the specific quale of the psychic condition called fear. Psychogenetically it is a primitive Anlage of futurity and it is the most stimulating and vivid of all its forms of presentation. In fear the future dominates the present and gives it a new significance in addition to its own, and but for fear pain could do little of its prodigious educative work in the animal world. Fear is thus the chief paradigm of psychic prolepsis as well as the chief spur of psychic evolution. … If fear had not been felt it could not be anticipated, hence the condition precedent of fear is some kind of registration and some degree of revival of these vestiges. Thus fear involves the past as we have seen it does the future. … If Bergson's durée réelle or pure duration or time freed from spatialization which the intellect tends to give it, has any existence, it is in the pure psychic state of fear. If pleasure-pain is the result of the first day's work of creative psychic evolution, fear is that of the second. … If there be a vital principle fear must be one of its very close allies as one of the chief springs of mind. Thus if any psychic component is not a mere