When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent
warmth contained in it.
* * * * *
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.
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