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.]

* * * * *

According as a man's mental energy is exerted or relaxed, will life
appear to him either so short, and petty, and fleeting, that nothing
can possibly happen over which it is worth his while to spend emotion;
that nothing really matters, whether it is pleasure or riches, or even
fame, and that in whatever way a man may have failed, he cannot