be poor,

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.

But the value of the intuitions is relative to the soul which has
them; they cannot be conveyed to any one else, or demonstrated; they
can never become Truths valid to all minds. And these last are the
truths we want if we would make some orderly progress towards a given
issue. And so we resort after all, to science, to see if it can solve
the intellectual riddle of our being. What can it do for us? If we
would really know ourselves, we want a depth of self-analysis; not a
pitiful search for motives, not the superficial probings of a
moralist, not the boundless, limitless, self-absorbed speculations on
the nature of self of the philosopher, not the sympathetic noting of
each emotion that crosses the horizon of the soul--the introspection
of the Poet; these will never teach us the reason why we think and
feel on certain lines, and not on others--these will never explain to
us what the mind is, that is in us--what that strange thing is, which
we have tried so vainly to understand. And without this knowledge how
worthless is the work of the moralist; of what practical use is it for
him to endeavour to alter a man's character, when he does not even
know the ingredients that constitute character, still less the cause
why character is good or bad. Mr. Robert Buchanan said in one of his
essays: "I can advance no scientific knowledge for seeing a great
genius in Robert Browning, or a fine painstaking talent in George
Eliot, for thinking George Meredith almost alone in his power of
expressing personal passion, and Walt Whitman supreme in his power of
conveying moral stimulation. I can take a skeleton to pieces