Despair is a phase of painful emotion which is certainly related to fear, yet is very distant from it. Despair has always a fear basis; we can only despair where fear is implied, and what does not excite fear will give no hold for despair. I must first fear a pain before I can despair of escaping it. The prisoner condemned to death must fear death before he will be in despair at the prospect of it. Yet while despair always implies fear, fear may often exist and that in very strong form without despair. The prisoner often displays great fear, but no despair.

There is, in fact, a strong contrast between fear and despair. Fear normally stimulates effort, despair depresses it. Fear is active, despair passive. Deep dejection and lassitude mark despair, while fear is intense agitation and activity. Fear in its original and normal function is stimulant of defensive action, fear as paralytic being secondary or abnormal, but in normal despair there is absolute inertness. Fear, again, in contrast with despair, is direct and transitive. I fear the pain or injury, but my despair is only in relation to it, despair of, in despair, etc. Fear is at the evil itself, it is a direct attitude of mind toward it, through an ideal pre-experiencing, the very representation of any pain as experienceable carrying with it a thrill of fear. But despair concerns itself, not with the pain per se as experienceable, but with the inevitability of 122the painful. Fear rests upon idea of pain, despair, upon idea of its inevitability. “I despair of escape,” means a recoil of painful emotion at inevitability of painful experience. Sense of complete and permanent inability to attain an end, whether release from pain, or positively, a securing a pleasure, generates commonly this distressful emotion. Despair is not then simple pain at pain, but at the unavertibility of the pain. Despair is then the mind bent down and crushed by the sense of the inevitable and irremediable nature of the pain, positive or negative, it experiences or is to experience. Despair is, indeed, hopelessness, though all hopelessness is not despair. There is no hope in stolidity or in stoicism, psychic modes quite distinct from despair, but which take the place with some natures.

Again, we must note that while fear has its degrees, and may be but partial, despair is always complete collapse. I may fear a little but not despair a little, I may be frightened “just the least bit,” but not despair a little bit. The hostess who is “in despair” because the ice cream has not come, speaks truly, however, for the affair is for her so important and momentous as to be the basis of real despair. That which is the occasion of despair must always be or seem of capital value.

An adjacent and often precedent state to despair is desperation, which is a feeling of the almost inevitable. In the face of heavy odds there is often awakened a painful emotion which we term desperation, and which leads to strong and furious will action, to an intense and general struggle which is often advantageous. An enemy fears to drive his adversary to desperation. In desperation we take one chance in a thousand or in a million; for example, the leader of a forlorn hope. It would be difficult to say whether despair or desperation contains more of pain, but they are obviously quite opposite in their character. To combative temperaments and with pugnacious 123animals the sense of the seeming inevitable is often stimulative of desperation rather than despair. Such are “game” to the last. A criminal of this type will run amuck rather than submit to his fate in despair. The desperado is defiant to the end. With some whose natures are balanced between reflection and action there are in the face of the inevitable or almost inevitable rapid fluctuations of despair and desperation.

Dismay is another form closely akin to despair. Dismay is the immediate result for feeling of a sudden cognition of great difficulties and pains as imminent. As the transition stage of rapid movement in feeling toward despair, as the sudden falling in temperature from hope, it is really incipient despair. Dismay is essentially temporary, and settles quickly into despair or rises into renewed hope. Though but such a passing mode, it yet has for the moment that sense of self-efficiency annihilated which is so characteristic of despair. Consternation is very intense dismay.

But what now is the real quality and inner nature of despair? what essentially is this strange drooping before inevitable loss, injury and pain? and what is its significance for life? Despair is certainly a very advanced and complex emotion, and we can do no more at present than merely remark on some of its most striking features.

A most noticeable and remarkable quality of despair is its introactive tendency. When the whole strength and vital motive, of a full-grown teleologic psychic life—the dilettante is not capable of despair—is suddenly and completely withdrawn, there results, not indifference nor ennui but a deep disturbance which is active on the minus side of mental life. The complete breaking up of great and absorbing hopes and of the free objective activity flowing from them brings will tension down, not simply to nil, but gives it a spring back into the negative region beyond the line of mere quiescence and 124indifferentism. Despair is a revulsive process by which the whole mind is broken up, just as a propeller wheel running at high speed out of water or an engine working at high pressure when disconnected from its shafting, tend t............