* * * * * Why is it that, in spite of all the mirrors in the world, no one really knows what he looks like? A man may call to mind the face of his friend, but not his own. Here, then, is an initial difficulty in the way of applying the maxim, _Know thyself_. This is partly, no doubt, to be explained by the fact that it is physically impossible for a man to see himself in the glass except with face turned straight towards it and perfectly motionless; where the expression of the eye, which counts for so much, and really gives its whole character to the face, is to a great extent lost. But co-existing with this physical impossibility, there seems to me to be an ethical impossibility of an analogous nature, and producing the same effect. A man cannot look upon his own reflection as though the person presented there were _a stranger_ to him; and yet this is necessary if he is to take _an objective view_. In the last resort, an objective view means a deep-rooted feeling on the part of the individual, as a moral being, that that which he is contemplating is _not himself_[1]; and unless he can take this point of view, he will not see things in a really true light, which is possible only if he is alive to their actual defects, exactly as they are. Instead of that, when a man sees himself in the glass, something out of his own egotistic nature whispers to him to take care to remember that _it is no stranger, but himself, that he is looking at_; and this operates as a _noli me tang ere_, and prevents him taking an objective view. It seems, indeed, as if, without the leaven of a grain of malice, such a view were impossible. [Footnote 1: Cf. _Grundprobleme der Ethik_, p. 275.] * * * * *