Test Your Self-Knowledge

(Found here)

“. . . [T]he great method of gaining any knowledge from nature is by experiment. Students of nature do not sit at home and speculate; they go out and question her. In a very true sense, the same may be said of the moral life. We are put here on earth, so to speak, to be questioned. And the answer that God listens for is not the answer of the lips but of action.

This is the true meaning of temptation. Each temptation is a question put to the soul. ‘What kind of a being are you? Do you love God or the following of your own inclinations?’ Now, as God permits temptation as a means by which we reveal ourselves to be on His side or against Him, we cannot do better than resort to somewhat the same method to gain self-knowledge.

If you would attain to any real self-knowledge, therefore, do not be content with speculation as to what you may be, or what under certain circumstances you might be. Test yourself. Find out what you are by experiment. Do as you would do if you wished to gain any fresh knowledge of nature: question yourself by action.

For instance, you have a general and indefinite belief that you are not uncharitable or sharp-tongued or disposed to gossip. In your self-examination, you do not find any sharp rebuke of conscience in such matters. But do not be content with that. Put yourself time after time through the day to the test of experiment, and watch for the answer given you by facts. Resolve, for instance, in the morning to mortify yourself in speech so many times — half a dozen or a dozen times in the day. I think the result of a few days’ efforts to keep such a resolution will be no small surprise to you of how much you fail, and how unfortified you are with your tongue.

There is nothing easier than to place ourselves in ideal states of mind; there is no ruder awakening than the facts that result from experiment. The first question put to nature in the form of experiment has exploded many a philosopher’s dream, and one day’s experiment in certain unexplored regions of the moral life has resulted in a rude but healthy awakening from mistaken dreams about himself.

. . . The answers that such experiments give bring the conviction of truth and are often like rifts in the clouds that befog us, enabling us to get a true estimate of our strength and weakness. In the light of such experiences, self-examination becomes more serious and more real; we find after a few months that its character has changed in an unaccountable way, and that the best way in which the change can be described is by saying that the sphere of self-examination seems to be transferred from the study of details to the knowledge of a person. We are, no doubt, examining the details of daily life, but they are not mere isolated or dry facts: we see them emanating from a living person, whom we appear almost to have discovered, and it is the facts seen in the light of this personal life that change their whole character.

To use a comparison that is applicable within certain limits, it is like one watching the action and movements of bodies under the power of gravity before that law was discovered. Such a person would see a multitude of different acts, isolated and disconnected, moved in a manner that seemed more or less orderly, but without meaning and without connection. Then we may imagine the great discoverer, in the moment of his discovery, looking with kindling eyes and beating heart upon the same phenomena. Wherever he looks, all things are under the same law. An apple falling from a tree is like a beam of light through a sphere everywhere cracking and rent with fissures and showing the whole interior in a blaze of light. Before, he saw effects; now he sees effects in the light of their cause.

So it is with ourselves. The surface of our life gets somehow broken through, and we see the throbbing pulsation of that mysterious source of action: the self.”
~Basil Maturin