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 arebooks which give a set of rules, or even one master rule, by which tomeet the problems of life. This is not such a book. It suggests nosimple recipe for the conquest of fear. Instead, it presents, what alltoo few of us to-day possess, a philosophy of life.
Moreover, in contrast to the dominant thinking of our age, which ismaterialistic, King's philosophy is spiritual and religious. Indeed, theideas in this book are so profoundly different from the commonlyaccepted ideas of our times that they will come as a shock to manyreaders. One purpose of this introduction is to prepare the reader forsuch a shock.
I have said that the dominant thinking of our age is materialistic, andby that I mean also physical. Let me illustrate this broad statementwith reference to the subject of fears alone. The conquest of fear hasgone on year after year chiefly through physical means. Physical painhas always been one of the great sources of fear. Now ether and otheranaesthetics have eliminated the chief pains of major operations. Olderpeople can still remember their fear of the dentist, when killing anerve or pulling a tooth caused excruciating pain. Now localanaesthetics even in minor troubles have made dentistry almost painless.We have not conquered these fears of pain—rather their cause hasbeen removed.
Twilight sleep, the artificial sleep to alleviate the pains ofchildbirth, is the perfect expression of the scientific andmaterialistic elimination of fear. By a chemical blackout of the mind, adimming 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 ofphysical science. I am only describing a trend, and that is the growingemphasis on the elimination of fears by science rather than on theirconquest by the individual.
Illness has always been a great source of fear, and still is. The dreadof cancer is one of the terrifying fears of our time and fortunes arespent in cancer research and education. The Conquest of Fear was writtenas a result of the author's threatened total blindness. He faced a factfor which there seemed no physical remedy—hence his great need for aspiritual conquest of this great fear.
And yet, year by year, physical science has been eliminating orreducing the dangers of sickness. Vaccines for the prevention of thedread disease, small-pox, are now a matter of course. Vaccines andspecifics against the deadly tetanus, against typhoid fever, diphtheria,syphilis, and other fearful diseases have become commonpla