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I am certainly not adequately trained to describe or enlarge on human fears, but there are certain features of the fears dispelled by scientific explanations that stand out quite clearly.

They are in general those fears that once seemed to have been amenable to prayer or ritual.

They include both individual fears and collective ones.

They arise in situations in which one believes that what happens depends not only on the external world, but also on the precise pattern of behavior of the individual or group.

Often it is recognized that all the details of the pattern may not be essential to the outcome but, because the pattern was empirically determined and not developed through theoretical understanding, one is never quite certain which behavior elements are effective, and the whole pattern becomes ritualized.

Yet often fear persists because, even with the most rigid ritual, one is never quite free from the uneasy feeling that one might make some mistake or that in every previous execution one had been unaware of the really decisive act.

To say that science had reduced many such fears merely reiterates the obvious and frequent statement that science eliminated much of magic and superstition.

But a somewhat more detailed analysis of this process may be illuminating.