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 the 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 animals 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 indifferentism. 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 to wrench and shatter themselves. Desire is not really extinct, but latent; though smothered it burns inward. This is that peculiar cankering, corroding quality, which is always so marked in despair. Will, not self-shattered, but forcibly pent by external circumstances, gives a sullen restlessness to the mental life now turned in upon itself. Hence the capacity for despair will be directly as the co-ordinate capacity for action and reflection in any individual, and as such co-ordination marks the highest level of conscious life, despair is certainly a phenomenon of exceptionally complex and advanced consciousness.

Again, we note that despair is intensely and oppressively a pain state, but the dull despair pain is distinct from racking fear pain. What now is the nature of despair pain, and what the reason for its peculiar quality? Here is not as in fear a feeling pain at pain, but at the idea of its inevitability and completely destructive power. The actual pain foreseen may seem bearable and excite little feeling, but it is the total loss of personal success, the complete thwarting of self-realization, that moves the mind to despair, that causes that sickening, dull, emotional pain which we term despair. Thus despair is eminently a disease of self-hood, an egoistic distemper, the strong and large individuality being peculiarly subject to it. However, the general problem of despair pain is practically the same as of the origin and nature of fear pain, which has already been discussed. Whether any mere representation induces pain, and how it does so, is certainly one of the most difficult problems of emotional psychology. We have in a previous chapter sought to indicate in a general way that purely subjective or mental pain which is not in any wise revival of sensation or objective does really exist. Also since pain per se is always simple and identical, the differentiation of pains as seemingly quite different in kind, as fear pain, despair pain, etc., is really due to sensation, will, and other elements which closely adhere to pain and give it a certain local colouring. The whole emotion is a complex of various factors which are closely knit into a single state which to common observation seems simple, but which is really constituted in its ensemble by the total specific forces of many elements. In psychics, as in physics, we know that common sense analysis of phenomena must be at fault, and that one who says “I certainly have an entirely different pain when I fear and when I despair,” is as much in the wrong as he who maintains essential diversities in material substance, or radical distinctions of species in the organic world. So we must believe that the peculiar quality of the pain in despair exists, not in the pain itself, but is really the colouring result from various coincident sensations and ideas. The lowering of the mental tone far below the zero point is greatly accentuated by refluent waves of organic sensation set up from the physical basis of the psychic disturbance.

How, we may now ask, did despair ever evolve and become a well-defined psychic form? in what way in the course of natural selection could such an apparently disadvantageous variation have arisen and been developed? The serviceability of fear is plain to every one, but of what possible value could despair be in the struggle of life? The one who gives up in despair is but very rarely doing the best thing. If we cannot look to the general principle of evolution, serviceability, how can we account for the appearance and growth of such a phase as despair, except as abnormal variation, a disease, profitable to the enemies of the individual, and so developed by and for external organisms. As there is an abnormal pathological variation of fear, which we have previously noticed, and which is forced in its development by enemies who profit by it, so despair is a psychic disease, entirely hurtful to the individual, and, so far, only advantageous for its enemies. Despair is, without doubt, one of those altruistic variations which serve, not the individual, but some antagonist in the struggle of existence. To bring one to despair is to make him entirely helpless and wholly at our mercy for our own ends. The possibility that active-reflective natures may prey upon themselves is thus stimulated into an actual phenomenon whose growth is continually fostered by those whose advantage it is to reduce the individual to a helpless condition. Despair is hardly an hypertrophy or atrophy of any normal tendency, it is rather a pathological genus by itself. The capacity for despair being inherent in the general formation of mind as subject to collapse, it arose solely in response to the needs of organisms warring upon the organism afflicted. The whole field of physical and psychical altruistic variation under the general law of natural selection, decadent and self-injurious characteristics being stimulated and maintained in a kind of artificial selection, is an interesting but unexplored field, attention so far having been turned to the individually advantageous as determining element in evolution.

Despair is a disease of advanced and mature psychic life. Children are, in general, incapable of despair. It implies a well-developed sense of self and a general experience of the world. High and strong emotional natures, but rather weak-willed and narrow of intelligence, are predisposed to it. Occasions which would lead to despair will with lower natures be unnoticed or lead merely to stolidity; while with the highest natures, there comes heroic endeavour and wide searching for means and methods.