Courage and Fearlessness

Courage is not fearlessness.  The courageous feel fear, but master it, unlike the cowardly who are mastered by it.  To feel no fear in any of life's situations is to fail to perceive real dangers.  The fearless are foolish.  It is therefore inept to praise the courageous as fearless: their virtue, which one presumably intends to praise, consists in the mastery of  precisely that the absence of which would render them foolish.