ABSTRACT
Man, unlike other animals, is curious as to himself. The why of his actions, the how of his thought, the what of his ego—these are the problems which have ever dangled tantalizingly before him. Know thyself, commanded the portals of Apollo’s temples, and man has ever striven earnestly to obey the behest. Nor has the endeavour been always futile—practical results have been attained even in the philosophical-metaphysical past; Socrates was subtile in analysis; Montaigne, twenty centuries later, was admirable in description; and Browning has been unsurpassed in the expression of intuitive feeling. But, there was something wrong —the problems were too ambitious. With the Ego was sought Consciousness, and, soon, Time, and Space, and the Soul. Abstracts, in general, enveloped the seeker in so dense a mental fog, and led him plunging along so miry a way, that he was able to extricate himself only after abandoning all that he had gained. The metaphysical discussion commonly came out the same road it had entered, or, if it did not so emerge, it remained a mere mental gymnastic of most limited appeal. It would seem that the seeker in metaphysical psychology set out, he the most complex and artificial of men, to study himself by a process of introspection. His effort was to get outside of himself, to study himself from without, but the fact remained that what he studied was that which he studied with. It was a lifting of one’s self by the boot-straps, and, as the gentle Philosopher of Chelsea said of it, “a hopeless struggle for the wisest as for the foolishest,” adding, by way of pertinent commentary, “an Irish saint once swam the Channel carrying his head in his teeth, but the feat has never been imitated.”
