and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in a lightning-flash as it were—"fear came upon
me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake." To all appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without
ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me
within the precincts of the room and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten
seconds before I felt myself a wreck; that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless
infancy. The only self-control I was capable of exerting was to keep my seat. I felt the greatest desire to run incontinently to the
foot of the stairs and shout for help to my wife,—to run to the roadside even, and appeal to the public to protect me; but by an
immense effort I controlled these frenzied impulses, and determined not to budge from my chair till I had recovered my lost self-
possession. This purpose I held to for a good long hour, as I reckoned time, beat upon meanwhile by an ever -growing tempest of
doubt, anxiety, and despair, with absolutely no relief from any truth I had ever encountered save a most pale and distant glimmer
of the divine existence, when I resolved to abandon the vain struggle, and communicate without more ado what seemed my
sudden burden of inmost, implacable unrest to my wife.
Now, to make a long story short, this ghastly condition of mind continued with me, with gradually lengthening intervals of relief,
for two years, and even longer.^1The percentage of people in the world who suffer from an acute form of mental or emotional disturbance is high.
Yet such persons constitute only a very small percentage of the total number of men and women who suffer from
pathological anxiety throughout most of their lives, but whose disorder never reaches a sufficiently alarming degree
of intensity to command the attention of a psychotherapist or to gain recognition in any statistical survey. These
individuals would, in most cases, be regarded by those around them as quite normal and would not themselves
think of questioning their psychological health merely because they are prey to fits of inexplicable, objectless
apprehension.
These are the persons who, for instance, cannot bear to be alone; who cannot live without sleeping pills; who jump
at every unexpected sound; who drink too much to calm a nervousness that