Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/59

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THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS

seemed suddenly to tear away—and sweep my will before it—at least, this is a nice way of putting it, Doctor——"

Into Leyden's voice there had crept again that biting mockery which was almost jaunty in tone.

"It is so," he continued, "that one autoanalytic—a student of psychology—his own—might refer to these subjective symptoms. The brutal stranger watching this phenomenon would spell it in five letters—p-a-n-i-c—an elemental emotion which can be the source of much learned argumentation—and stamp the lives out of women and little children—and grab all of the lifeboats—and has! Yet it is an emotion quite common to certain low types of humanity, the kind who do their thinking with their spinal cord—and it is one of those lovely primitive, primordial, brutal, unregenerate and degraded emotions of which certain others of its type, such as ungoverned lust and anger and revenge, are much admired by many modern devotees, the bestial

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