FEAR, DlvstA OF, or PANPIIOBIA. There are many morbid manifestations of the instinct of cautiousness. Sudden fear in sleep, horrible dreams, nightmare, sleep walking, have been regarded as symptoms of a special disease. Actual terror from irregular circulation in the sensory ganglia; the sense of falling or drowning in cardiac affections; incubus from disturbance of the circulation in the larger vessels by repletion, plethora, or position, where there is the superaddition of a delusion to the feeling of apprehension—are all allied and distinguished by involuntary and excited cautiousness. It is not only, however, when the intelligence may be supposed to be dormant, and the instincts awake, that such exaggerated fears paralyze minds otherwise sane and sound. Murat, " the bravest of the brave," and James I. of England, learned if not wise, were subject to vague, uncontrollable panics, which for a time unmanned them. The condi tion is often found associated with disease of the heart, as a consequence and concomi tant rather than a cause. The presence of the habitual dread of evil, the fear of death, the sleepless and breathless anxiety during darkness, or solitude, or silence, as well as the sudden, wild, ungovernable panic, point to the existence of organic or functional diseases of the heart; and conversely, excited or irregular action of the organ, murmurs, angina, lead the astute psychologist to predicate fear as a characteristic of the mental condition. It precedes, and is believed to produce chorea, cancer, and scirrhus. Prox imately, however, it depends upon alterations in the capillary circulation, or nervous structure of the brain. Its characteristic is involuntary, irresistible, blind terror, which
arises and continues without an adequate cause, and which is not influenced by reason or religion, not even by the removal of the supposed object of alarm. The disease has appeared epidemically during commercial panics, during the horrors of cholera and plague, and in that singular affection called thnoria, which is marked by debility, tremor, and terror, and has been traced to the effects of the damp. unhealthy regions in'Sardinia and Sicily, where it exclusively occurs. Panphobia is hereditary, and has been traced through three successive generations. In reviewing the unobtrusive mem bers of an asylum family, the pallid, startled, staring, flickering countenances may be detected as those of patients laboring ruder fear. They resemble melancholics in pallid ity of skin, but in place of courting they shrink from sympathy; though horror-stricken by gloom, they hide in corners, they escape, they shriek in desperation, they climb trees, and apparently inaccessible places; and encounter real in order to elude fancied dangers; or they are motionless, paralyzed. They fear and flee from enemies, police, demons, death, punishment; indescribable agonies themselves.—Feuchtersleben, Principles of Medical Psychology, p. 281; Arnold, Observations on Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Preven tion of Insanity, etc., vol. i. p. 257.