stimulus of fear, even excessive fear. I accept too that there comes a time, if adversity lasts long enough, when each of us has had enough. In these circumstances a man either sits down and says like Elijah in the desert, “I have had enough, I want to die”, or else more simply he turns and runs. Lord Moran in his little book The Anatomy of Courage, written as a result of his experience of the trenches in the First World War, describes how in his opinion we all have a limited reservoir of courage, and when it is used up we have no more left. At least not until the normal healing processes replenish it a little. But if it was for me a question of not quenching the smoking flax, or not breaking the bruised reed, I know where I would go, and advise others to go, for healing; and it would not be to the psychiatrist's couch. It would be to the psalms first, where the whole spectrum of human emotion is expressed; from exultation and ecstasy, through tenderness and deep compassion, to the depths of misery and self-abasement. What one wants when one is down is the sympathy and comfort of someone who has been through it all before, and not too many questions.
So the answer to that first question is that classical psychology was of no use at all; but reading about the rules of conflict and my own experience in the law courts taught me that the mind was an ordered place, not an impenetrable labyrinth.
As regards help from philosophy, it was not until the adventure had been over for a long time that I came across Spengler's massive work The Decline of the West. In it he took up Goethe's idea that every culture has a birth, maturity, senility, and death. He concluded alas that our culture was in its twilight, and was able to bring an encyclopaedic knowledge of Western mathematics, natural science, art, religion, race, money, and much else in support of his argument. Despite his astonishing grasp of all knowledge, and my comparative ignorance, I came to recognise that he was a pessimist, whereas…