ight be no means of
creating fresh ones. He also feared that should all the reforms he,
and others, worked for, be accomplished, the lives of the reformers
would become meaningless and blank, since they were working for means,
not ends in themselves. Out of this hopeless mental condition there
was only one outlet possible, and that was to leave self-analysis of
this sort alone for ever, and to throw himself into its direct
contrary, the unconscious life of the emotions. John Stuart Mill did
this, and it saved him. In Wordsworth's poetry he found sanity and
healing. Happily for him that was not the age of Browning's "Fifine at
the Fair." Had he fallen in with dialectical analysis in the garb of
poetry, it must have killed him!

And yet "Know thyself" has always been considered supremely excellent
advice, as true for our time, as for the age of Socrates. It certainly
is disregarded by most of us, as fully as it was by many of the
Greeks, whom Socrates interrogated so ruthlessly. Is there then a sort
of self-analysis, which can be carried out for its own sake, and which
can be, at the same time, of vital use? Is all self-analysis when
practised for its own sake necessarily harmful, and unprofitable? It
is time to ask these questions if we are ever to know how to analyse
ourselves with profit, if we are ever to know ourselves. And we none
of us do. As students, we are content with every other knowledge but
this. After all the self probing of the religious and philosophical,
during long centuries, what have we learned? Truly to ourselves, we
are enigmas. To know everything else except the self that knows, what
a strange position! But it is our condition. The one thing that we do
not know--that we feel as if we never could know is the Self in us.
Our characters, our powers, our natures, our being--what are they? Our
faculties--what can we do? And what can we not do? What is the reason
of this faculty, or that want of faculty? We have never reached an
understanding of ourselves, which makes us not only know, but perceive
what we are capable of knowing; which makes us aware, not only that we
can do something, but why we can do it. We are an unknown quantity to
ourselves. We can calculate on a given action in a machine, but we
cannot calculate on our own, much less on our moods. If we would but
take half the trouble to understand ourselves that we take to study a
science or art--if we could learn to depend on the sequence of our