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.
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