A constant, aimless, inevitable
habit of self-introspection was killing his mental life, before the
end came physically.
Another philosophical victim to the same habit was John Stuart Mill,
at one time of his life. His father analysed almost everything, except
himself, and John Stuart Mill had grown up in this logical atmosphere
of analysis, and to much profit as his works show. But when he turned
the microscope on his own states of feeling, and on the aims of his
life, the result was melancholia--almost disease of mind. His grandly
developed faculty of analysis when devoted to definite knowledge
outside himself, produced splendid results, as in his Logic, and his
Essays, but when he analysed himself, he gained no additional
knowledge, but a strange morbid horror that all possible musical
changes might be exhausted, and that there might 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.
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