Greek, English, and
German, in Plato Locke, Kant, and in the meditations of Descartes, and
many others. Self-analysis is the basis of psychological knowledge,
but the science has been chiefly used to explain the methods by which
we obtain knowledge of the outer world in relation to ourselves. When
a philosopher centres self on self, in order to know self as a result
of introspection, the results have been disastrous, and have
contributed nothing to knowledge, properly so-called. If religious
self-examination has its dangers, so also has philosophical
self-analysis for its own sake. It is a fascinating study for those
who care for thought for thought's sake--the so-called Hamlets of the
world, who are for ever revolving round the axes of their own ideas
and dreams, and who never progress towards any clear issue. Amiel's
"Vie Intime" is a study of this kind. It adds nothing to any clear
knowledge of self, absorbing and interesting as the record is. It is
suggestive to a great degree, and in that lies its value, but it is as
vague, as it is sad. It appeals deeply to those who live apart in a
world of their own, in thoughtful imaginative reverie, but its effects
on the mind were deplored even by Amiel himself in words which are
acutely pathetic. The pain which consumed him arose from the
concentration of self on self. Self was monopolised by self,
self-consciousness was produced, though without a touch of selfish
egoism.

Out of this self-conscious introspection, grew that sterility of soul
and mind, that dwindling of capacity, and individuality, which Amiel
felt was taking place within him. 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 m