"If the psychology of the novelist, who is the student of other people's psychology, is to be studied, where are you to stop? Why not study the peculiarities of the novelist who studies the novelist, of the reflector of life who reflects the reflector of life--nay, of the critic who reflects upon the reflection of the reflector? This modern mania for picking ourselves to pieces is only the old childish desire 'to see the wheels go wound.' People were much better in the old days when they didn't bother so much how their wheels went round. I always sympathised with the indignant old lady who came to my schoolmaster when our class began to take up physiology, and protested that she wasn't going to have her boy learn what was in his inside--it was indecent. People are not made healthier by knowing how their functions work; animals never study physiology, and plants blossom without knowing anything at all about anything. Knowledge only generates a morbid fussiness, as with Mr. Jerome's celebrated Cockney who discovered himself to be possessed of every ailment in the medical dictionary except housemaid's knee. And to learn what is in your mental inside is equally indecent and equally discomposing. 'I have never thought about thinking,' said the wise Goethe. No one can go through a treatise on insanity and come out as sane as he started. And there is an even more insidious way in which this human vivisection operates for evil. People now forgive their friends--they call their eccentricities 'pathological,' and endure instead of discouraging them. I had two letters this very morning. 'Poor A!' said B.: 'his vanity has ceased to offend me--I feel it is pathological.' 'Poor B!' said A.: 'it is impossible to resent his egotism--it is simply pathological.' "This scientific Christianity wouldn't be so bad if people didn't condone their own faults, too. They can't get up early--it's heredity. The early bird who caught the worm must have had a grandparent who stayed out late. Are they lazy? Their uncle was a country parson. They are like the man who refused to give charity because he had such expensive tastes. To acquiesce in your own weaknesses because they are hereditary, without making an effort to eradicate them, is bad science as well as bad morals. Among the items given you by heredity do not forget the potentiality of self-improvement by inward struggle. No one says, 'I can't speak French, and I sha'n't try, because my father was an illiterate Irishman.' Self-knowledge tends to weaken self-discipline, foster self-indulgence, and corrode character." "But what of the old Greek maxim 'Know thyself'?"