Understand in about 5 minutes
Basil King recounts how he worked his own way out of chronic fear by coming to trust an underlying life-principle that meets every need and carries the individual from strength to strength.
Mind Map
Core Message
King opens from his own experience: nearly everyone lives under some dread, of work, of loss, of poverty, of sickness, of death. He treats fear as the most persistent enemy of ordinary people, larger in its toll than sin or illness, and worth a deliberate fight.
Watching how life adapted from the slime upward, meeting each new danger with a new resource, King concludes that the force behind living things carries a conquest-principle within it. The same inexhaustible resourcefulness is available to the individual who stops resisting it.
King reframes fear as a signal that new energies are being called for. Difficulty is the condition of growth, and the alarm we feel is the measure of powers we have not yet used. Seen this way, fear loses much of its terror.
King's cure is to stop pigeonholing God into special days and to find God for oneself as a present, near, and trustworthy source of life. Resting quietly on that source, rather than worrying, is what frees him from the fear of poverty, illness, and death.
Summary
The Conquest of Fear is written as personal testimony rather than a thesis. King begins by admitting that for most of his conscious life he was a prey to fears, and he takes it for granted that he speaks for the majority. He looks around and sees the mother afraid for her children, the worker afraid of his competitor, the clerk afraid for his job, and concludes that fear, more than sin or sickness, is the steady drain on human happiness.
His turning point came in a dark hour at Versailles, ill, alone, and losing his sight, when a seed planted in boyhood finally germinated. A teacher had once spoken of the ingenuity of the life-principle, the force that came to the earth and adapted itself to every new condition, seeking the land when pursued in water and the air when pursued on land. King drew the conclusion that this force carries a conquest-principle with it, and that as individuals we need difficulties to overcome, with fear acting as the stimulus that calls our energies into play.
From the life-principle King moves to God. He found his inherited picture of God too small and remote to help him, a figure kept in a labelled compartment and brought out only for services. He set out to find God for himself, plainly and freely, as the near source of life rather than a distant judge. He grants that God in His being is unknowable, but argues that we may infer His goodness, love, and power from what He does, much as we know the life-principle only from its works.
King then applies this trust to the particular fears. He treats sickness and poverty as trials we largely bring on ourselves by closing the channels through which abundance would flow. Each person, he argues, is unique and of first value to God, so restriction is not God's will. The fear of death he answers with the principle of everlasting growth: life is a continual climb, and the deadly tendency in us is the closing, contracting mind that begins to die before its time.
The book ends where it began, in personal restraint. King condenses his whole experience into four words, calmly resting and quiet trust, and admits that trying is as far as he has gone. He claims no recipe and seeks no converts. The closing note is that as each generation perceives more of the underlying power, it is freed a little further from fear and feels its abundance of life more strongly.
Key Concepts
King's name for the force that has driven living things upward from the slime, meeting every danger with a new resource and never yet being defeated.
It is the foundation of his answer to fear: if that resourceful force is the individual's own animating principle, then no difficulty is final and help is always at hand.
King treats fear not only as a threat but as a signal that fresh energies are being called for, a call we could not feel unless those energies were really there.
It changes the reader's relation to fear from helpless dread to a prompt for action, draining much of fear's power by giving it a purpose.
King rejects the remote, compartmentalised God of his upbringing and seeks a near, trustworthy source of life that he must find for himself.
Worry gives way to rest only when the source of life is felt as present and dependable, so this reconception is what makes calm possible.
Mental Models
King holds that the life-principle is more abundantly present in proportion to need, so the very spasm of fear summons it to one's aid.
It lets a person read a moment of fear as evidence that help is arriving rather than that help is absent, steadying the response to crisis.
Like a river that cannot flow over a rock but glides around it, King found an inborn faculty for getting round an obstacle when he could not break through it.
It offers a practical posture toward circumstances that resist force: look for the way around before assuming defeat.
King contrasts the expanding, open mind that keeps growing with the closing mind, which he calls death-in-life and the start of dying before one's time.
It turns the fear of death into a daily practice of staying open and teachable, which keeps a person growing rather than contracting.
Selected Quotes
Everyone is living or working in fear.
My need is its call.
Each one of us is that higher type of man potentially.
Source
Source text: Project Gutenberg edition of The Conquest of Fear by Basil King.
HTML text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9944/pg9944.txt
Project Gutenberg states this ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
First published about 1921; the Project Gutenberg ebook (released 2006) prints a later introduction by Henry C. Link and does not date the original text.