How Fear Controls Our Minds — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne is not enough of a naturalist to name the secret springs of fear, but physicians say no other passion sooner dethrones judgment from its proper seat. He has seen many become frantic through it, and even the best settled temper falls into astonishment during the fit. He omits the vulgar sort, to whom fear shows great-grandsires in their shrouds, werewolves, and chimaeras. Among soldiers, the men over whom it ought to have least power, it has converted flocks of sheep into armed squadrons, reeds into pikes, friends into enemies, and the French white cross into the red cross of Spain. When Monsieur de Bourbon took Rome, an ensign on guard at Borgo San Pietro threw himself out at a breach with his colours on his shoulder and ran directly upon the enemy, thinking he had retreated toward the inward defences. He advanced above three hundred paces into the open field before he saw his error and fled back through the same breach. Captain Giulio's ensign, at the taking of St. Paul, threw himself colours and all out of a porthole and was cut to pieces. In the same siege a gentleman sank down stone-dead in the breach without any wound at all.

Fear adds wings or nails the feet. In an encounter of Germanicus with the Germans, two great parties ran two opposite ways, each toward the place the other had fled. The Emperor Theophilus, beaten by the Agarenes, was so stupefied he had no power to fly, until Manuel shook him and said he would kill him rather than let him lose the empire by being taken. Fear's utmost power, Montaigne says, is when it throws us upon a valiant despair after it has stripped duty and honour. In the first pitched battle the Romans lost to Hannibal under Sempronius, ten thousand foot, seeing no other escape for their cowardice, charged through the Carthaginian battalion and purchased an ignominious flight at the same price they might have gained a glorious victory. The thing in the world Montaigne is most afraid of is fear itself. Pompey's friends, watching that horrible murder from the ship, could think of nothing but calling the mariners to escape the Egyptian vessels. Only at Tyre, delivered from fear, did they have leisure to weep for their captain.

Those well rubbed in a skirmish, all wounded and bloody, may be brought on again the next day. Those who have once conceived a good sound fear of the enemy will never be made so much as to look him in the face. People in immediate fear of losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery live in perpetual anguish and lose appetite and repose, whereas those who are actually poor, slaves, or exiles often live as merrily as other folk. Many, impatient of the perpetual alarms of fear, have hanged or drowned themselves, or dashed themselves to pieces. Fear, Montaigne says, is more importunate and insupportable than death itself. The Greeks knew another kind, arriving without visible cause, by an impulse from heaven. Such a one brought desolation upon Carthage: inhabitants sallied out of their houses as to an alarm and charged, wounded, and killed one another as if enemies had come to surprise the city. All things stayed in disorder and fury until, with prayers and sacrifices, they had appeased their gods. That is what they call panic terrors.