Self-knowledge is difficult because it demands intellectual honesty.  It demands that one shall not blink the facts, that one shall not hide one’s head in the sand, and that one shall not be afraid of anything that one may happen to see in looking round.  It is rare because it demands that one shall always be able to distinguish between the man one thinks one ought to be and the man one actually is.  And it is rare because it demands impartial detachment and a certain quality of fine shamelessness—­the shamelessness which confesses openly to oneself and finds a legitimate pleasure in confessing.  By way of compensation for its difficulty, the pursuit of self-knowledge happens to be one of the most entrancing of all pursuits, as those who have seriously practised it are well aware.  Its interest is inexhaustible and grows steadily.  Unhappily, the Anglo-Saxon racial temperament is inimical to it.  The Latins like it better.  To feel its charm one should listen to a highly-cultivated Frenchman analysing himself for the benefit of an intimate companion.  Still, even Anglo-Saxons may try it with advantage.

The branch of self-knowledge which is particularly required for the solution of the immediate case of the plain man now under consideration is not a very hard one.  It does not involve the recognition of crimes or even of grave faults.  It is simply the knowledge of what interests him and what bores him.

Let him enter upon the first section of it with candour.  Let him be himself.  And let him be himself without shame.  Let him ever remember that it is not a sin to be bored by what interests others, or to be interested in what bores others.  Let him in this private inquiry give his natural instincts free play, for it is precisely the gradual suppression of his natural instincts which has brought him to his present pass.  At first he will probably murmur in a fatigued voice that he cannot think of anything at all that interests him.  Then let him dig down among his buried instincts.  Let him recall his bright past of dreams, before he had become a victim imprisoned in the eternal groove.  Everybody has, or has had, a secret desire, a hidden leaning.  Let him discover what his is, or was—­gardening, philosophy, reading, travel, billiards, raising animals, training animals, killing animals, yachting, collecting pictures or postage-stamps or autographs or snuff-boxes or scalps, astronomy, kite-flying, house-furnishing, foreign languages, cards, swimming, diary-keeping, the stage, politics, carpentry, riding or driving, music, staying up late, getting up early, tree-planting, tree-felling, town-planning, amateur soldiering, statics, entomology, botany, elocution, children-fancying, cigar-fancying, wife-fancying, placid domestic evenings, conjuring, bacteriology, thought-reading, mechanics, geology, sketching, bell-ringing, theosophy, his own soul, even golf....

I mention a few of the ten million directions in which his secret desire may point or have pointed.  I have probably not mentioned the right direction.  But he can find it.  He can perhaps find several right directions without too much trouble.