Have you ever reached a time in your life when all that had gone before seemed cut off from the present; when you felt an imperious need to review whatever had gone to the making of the You; when the preceding years, full as they had seemed, were barren of that which made the present so vital; when, because of that barrenness, they seemed to have belonged rather to the life of one you knew than to your own? If you have, you will understand the motive that sometimes leads one to deliberate self-study and self-delineation. He who honestly undertakes such study is pledged to candour at all costs. Beginning by reviewing his ancestry and environment, he also tries to recapture some of those earliest, evanescent sense experiences and memories of childhood. He peers into that mysterious borderland between childhood and youth; surveys the formative influences, the outstanding events, the proclivities, longings, aspirations, achievements, struggles, temptations, successes, defeats--reviews them all, tries to estimate their influence, and to recognize their possible reappearance, in other guises perhaps, in his present self. The dawning of religious emotion, sex consciousness, the gradual transition from the receptiveness and naïve simplicity of childhood to the wilful caprice of adolescence (with its blind gropings, its heightened emotional life, its contradictory moods, its evolution of self-consciousness and social consciousness)--all these phases he passes in review and weighs, hoping to form a just estimate as to their effect upon his personality as he alone knows it. One cannot compass this survey until one has passed beyond the seething period of adolescence which merges so insensibly into that of maturity. Immaturity, maturity--the difference is only of degree; the child _is_ father to the man; the psychology we trace in child life is fundamentally the same that obtains when the individual achieves that self-control and balance, that steadiness of aim, that harmonious union of bodily and mental powers which characterize maturity. Until we understand this merging and blending of experiences that make up a life history, we may regard as trivial the fleeting events and memories of childhood which the psychologist knows are significant and far-reaching. In the rapid setting down of what comes crowding into the consciousness as the canvas of one’s life unrolls before him, one is not especially concerned with the orderly sequence of events; mental associations are intractable forces to deal with; a certain looseness of exterior matters is inevitable; the eye cannot look both in and out at the same time. What really matters is that one accurately read one’s own consciousness, without mistakes, without self-deception, without wilful deceit. Unless this is achieved, one cheats one’s self.