Possibly it may help us to some understanding of ourselves.

Not that it promises much aid to vexed metaphysical questions, but as a study in sociology it may not prove so vain.
And for a thing which is always with us, its discussion may be said to be peculiarly opportune just now.

For it lies at the bottom of the most pressing questions of the day.

Of the two great problems that stare the Western world in the face at the present moment, both turn to it for solution.

Agnosticism, the foreboding silence of those who think, socialism, communism, and nihilism, the petulant cry of those who do not, alike depend ultimately for the right to be upon the truth or the falsity of the sense of self.
For if there be no such actual thing as individuality, if the feeling we call by that name be naught but the transient illusion the Buddhists would have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as basis vanishes as does the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope,--less enduring even than the flitting phantasmagoria of a dream.