What the terms "God," "Appreciation," "Mother," "Love," "Altruism," "Egociation," "Forethought," "Happiness," etc., stand for, should be reverenced and glorified; while the devil, egotism, selfishness, fearthought, anger and worry, and all of their various expressions, should be ridiculed out of respectability.
There is no intent to make vulgar excuses for the method of presentation of the simple and aged truths which are the subject of the present book. For the same reason that I have asked my readers to agree with me as to the meaning of terms in connection with the discussion, I ask them to allow me to state my reasons for the method of the presentation, if it should seem unusual and, perhaps, undignified.
Professor Angelo Mosso, the eminent physiologist of Turin, Italy, who has experimented with the condition and results of fear to a greater extent than any one else that I know of, has published a volume entitled "Fear."[4]
Professor Mosso writes of much regarding fear that we can all corroborate from personal experience as to the uncomfortableness of the emotion, and also informs us of much that is instructive as to the baleful effects of the mischief it produces upon the tissues of the body. He states that, unconsciously or consciously, the effect of fear is found to be disarrangement, which allows or causes inflammation, fever and other unhealthy conditions that are favorable to the nesting of the microbes of special diseases, such as are sometimes found in the air or in the water that we take in, and which are ever waiting for a chance to nest and breed.
An eminent English physician has also communicated to a leading English magazine a belief that fear directly attacks the individual molecules of the body and causes a disarrangement, a relaxing, a letting-go condition of the molecules in their relation to adjoining molecules, and that the relaxed condition is that in which disease originates. He states that there are means of communication within the body that are as direct and distinct as are the wires that convey the electric fluid from point to point, and that they connect the brain or nervous centers with each pair of molecules. By these means the sense of fear travels, weak or strong, in response to every pulse of its activity.