INTRODUCTION.by Henry C. Link, Ph.D.Author of THE REDISCOVERY OF MAN, THE RETURN TO RELIGION, etc.There are many books which give some help to many people. There are books which givea set of rules, or even one master rule, by which to meet the problems of life. This is notsuch a book. It suggests no simple recipe for the conquest of fear. Instead, it presents,what all too few of us to-day possess, a philosophy of life.Moreover, in contrast to the dominant thinking of our age, which is materialistic, King'sphilosophy is spiritual and religious. Indeed, the ideas in this book are so profoundlydifferent from the commonly accepted ideas of our times that they will come as a shockto many readers. One purpose of this introduction is to prepare the reader for such ashock.I have said that the dominant thinking of our age is materialistic, and by that I mean alsophysical. Let me illustrate this broad statement with reference to the subject of fearsalone. The conquest of fear has gone on year after year chiefly through physical means.Physical pain has always been one of the great sources of fear. Now ether and otheranaesthetics have eliminated the chief pains of major operations. Older people can stillremember their fear of the dentist, when killing a nerve or pulling a tooth causedexcruciating pain. Now local anaesthetics even in minor troubles have made dentistryalmost painless. We have not conquered these fears of painrather their cause has beenremoved.Twilight sleep, the artificial sleep to alleviate the pains of childbirth, is the perfectexpression of the scientific and materialistic elimination of fear. By a chemical blackoutof the mind, a dimming of the conscious self, the person is enabled to escape thenecessity of facing and conquering fear through his own resources.I am not condemning the physical alleviation of pain or the progress of physical science. Iam only describing a trend, and that is the growing emphasis on the elimination of fearsby science rather than on their conquest by the individual.Illness has always been a great source of fear, and still is. The dread of cancer is one ofthe terrifying fears of our time and fortunes are spent in cancer research and education.THE CONQUEST OF FEAR was written as a result of the author's threatened totalblindness. He faced a fact for which there seemed no physical remedyhence his greatneed for a spiritual conquest of this great fear.And yet, year by year, physical science has been eliminating or reducing the dangers ofsickness. Vaccines for the prevention of the dread disease, small-pox, are now a matter ofcourse. Vaccines and specifics against the deadly tetanus, against typhoid fever,diphtheria, syphilis, and other fearful diseases have become commonplace. The fear ofpneumonia has been almost eliminated through the discoveries of the miraculous sulphadrugs. Science has done wonders toward the elimination of such fears. A man needhardly conquer the fear of any particular sicknessthere is left for his conquest chieflythe fear of dying.In addition to physical disease, our civilization has now developed mental ailments of allkinds. These include a large category of fears called phobiasclaustrophobia,agoraphobia, photophobia, altaphobia, phonophobia, etc.Three fields or professions, other than religion and philosophy, have sought to deal withthese fears, the psychiatric, the psychoanalytic, and the psychological. The medicalpsychiatric profession has naturally emphasized physical remedies beginning withsedatives and bromides to induce artificial relaxation and ending up with lobectomy orthe complete cutting off of the frontal lobes of the brain, the centers of man's highestthought processes. Between these two extremes are the shock treatments in which aninjection of insulin or metrazol into the blood stream causes the person to fall into a sortof epileptic fit during which he loses consciousness. Through a series of such shocktreatments some of the higher nerve centers or nerve pathways are destroyed. By thisprocess a person's fears may also be eliminated and he may be permanently ortemporarily cured. In short, the person does not conquer the fears in his mind; thepsychiatrist or neurologist, by physically destroying a part of the person's brain, destroysalso the fears.How strongly this physical approach has taken hold of people was made plain to methrough an article of mine on how to conquer fears. The emphasis in this article was onhow people could overcome their fears and worries through their own efforts. Toillustrate the opposite extreme, I mentioned the brain operations and shock treatments bywhich psychiatry now often deals with fears. Among the many people who wrote to meas a result of this article, the majority inquired where they could obtain such anoperation! To such extremes have many people gone in their desire to eliminate fear byphysical means rather than conquer it through their own spiritual powers.The psychoanalyst deals with a person's phobias through what seems like an intellectualor rational process. According to psychoanalysis, phobias or fears are due to some buriedor subconscious complex. By daily or frequent talks with a psychoanalyst for a period ofsix months or a year, a person's subconscious disturbance may be brought to light, and ifso, the fear is supposed automatically to disappear. Even if true, this process is a highlymaterialistic one, at least in the sense that only people who can spend thousands ofdollars can afford such treatments.The psychologist, as well as some psychiatrists who have studied normal psychology,regard many fears as normal experiences which the individual can cope with largelythrough his own resources and with very little help in the way of visits or treatment. Thetrouble arises in the case of those people who have no personal resources to draw on.Their lives are so lacking in spiritual power, or so full of intellectual scepticism anddistrust, that they cannot help themselves. They have no religious convictions orcertainties by which to obtain leverage in their struggles. They have no firm philosophyof life on which they or those who would help them can lay hold. They are putty in thehands of the fears and forces that beset them from without.The psychologist and the psychiatrist both find it difficult to do much to help such aperson. And yet, this is the kind of person our civilization and education tendsincreasingly to produce. By the physical elimination of the causes of fear we havegradually undermined man's inner resources for the conquest of fear.This materialistic trend has received a new impetus from the fields of political science,economics, and sociology. A dozen years ago economic disaster threatened to stampedethe nation. Millions who had lost their jobs began to fear penury and want. Millions whostill had jobs feared that they would lose them. Other millions began to fear the loss oftheir money and possessions. Rich and poor, becoming afraid that the country was goingto pieces, rushed to the banks to withdraw their savings and brought on the nation-widebank closings. Those were days when everyone knew paralyzing fears.History will record the fact that these fears were met, not by conquest, not by drawing onthe moral resources and inner fortitude of the American citizen, but by a collection ofwholesale materialistic schemes. These schemes included such devices as inflating thedollar, raising prices, expanding the government debt, paying farmers not to producecrops, government housing projects, and many others. The fears of unemployment andpoverty in old age were to be eliminated wholesale through a planned economy, a newsocial order. By an elaborate system of book-keeping called Social Security, a wholenation was to win freedom from want and freedom from fear.But while we were building our smug little house of Social Security, the whole world wascrashing around us. Instead of achieving local security we find ourselves now in themidst of world-wide insecurity. Far from having eliminated the ecoomic causes of fear,we now find these causes multiplied many times. To the fear of losing our money is nowadded the fear of losing our sons. To the fear of losing our jobs is added the fear of losingour lives. To the fear of depression and inflation is added the fear of losing the veryfreedoms for which the war is being fought.At last we see, or are on the point of seeing, that materialism breeds worse fears than itcures; that economics and sociology create more social problems than they solve; thatscience makes it possible to destroy wealth and lives much faster than it can build them.It took years of science to achieve the airplane and to eliminate people's fear of flying.Now, suddenly, the airplane has become the greatest source of destruction and of fear onthe globe. Cities which were decades in the building are blasted out of being in a night.Millions of people must regulate their lives in fear of these dread visitors.This is the background against which the conquest of fear presents its philosophy ofcourage and of hope. It is a philosophy diametrically opposed to the dominant beliefs andpractices of our materialistic age. One hesitates to use the words spiritual and moralbecause they have become catch words. Nevertheless, King's philosophy is a spiritual anda moral one, and the reader will gain from it a clearer concept of what these words reallymean