Fear is often described as not knowing. When a person doesn’t know about the object of their terror, then it is often magnified becoming some terrible beast that can’t be survived. Edmund Burke describes this as one of the greatest emotions of the sublime. In the early part of the 19th century before many scientific discoveries something that was unknown was something to be feared. A common cold could be something terrible like demonic possession. Or having two different colored eyes was clearly the mark of being born of the devil. But once scientific discoveries began to explain things, they lost much of their terror. When your daughter got sick you no longer called for a priest, instead you called for a doctor, who told you not to worry, it will pass in a few days, or perhaps gave you some new antibiotics that made the sickness go away immediately. Now with the subjects of our fears analyzed and explained, many hold less terror, for they are no longer obscure.
