The course and affairs of our individual life, in view of their true meaning and connection, are like a piece of crude work in mosaic.  So long as one stands close in front of it, one cannot correctly see the objects presented, or perceive their importance and beauty; it is only by standing some distance away that both come into view.  And in the same way one often understands the true connection of important events in one’s own life, not while they are happening, or even immediately after they have happened, but only a long time afterwards.

Is this so, because we require the magnifying power of imagination, or because a general view can only be got by looking from a distance? or because one’s emotions would otherwise carry one away? or because it is only the school of experience that ripens our judgment?  Perhaps all these combined.  But it is certain that it is only after many years that we see the actions of others, and sometimes even our own, in their true light.  And as it is in one’s own life, so it is in history.

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Why is it, in spite of all the mirrors in existence, no man really knows what he looks like, and, therefore, cannot picture in his mind his own person as he pictures that of an acquaintance?  This is a difficulty which is thwarted at the very outset by gnothi sauton—­know thyself.

This is undoubtedly partly due to the fact that a man can only see himself in the glass by looking straight towards it and remaining quite still; whereby the play of the eye, which is so important, and the real characteristic of the face is, to a great extent, lost.  But co-operating with this physical impossibility, there appears to be an ethical impossibility analogous to it.  A man cannot regard the reflection of his own face in the glass as if it were the face of some one else—­which is the condition of his seeing himself objectively.  This objective view rests with a profound feeling on the egoist’s part, as a moral being, that what he is looking at is not himself; which is requisite for his perceiving all his defects as they really are from a purely objective point of view; and not until, then can he see his face reflected as it really and truly is.  Instead of that, when a man sees his own person in the glass the egoistic side of him always whispers, It is not somebody else, but I myself, which has the effect of a noli me tangere, and prevents his taking a purely objective view.  Without the leaven of a grain of malice, it does not seem possible to look at oneself objectively.

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No one knows what capacities he possesses for suffering and doing until an opportunity occurs to bring them into play; any more than he imagines when looking into a perfectly smooth pond with a mirror-like surface, that it can tumble and toss and rush from rock to rock, or leap as high into the air as a fountain;—­any more than in ice-cold water he suspects latent warmth.