Know Thyself

1901

Ah, if we would watch for everything that might improve and instruct us! If the arrangements of our daily life were so disposed as to be a constant school for our minds! But oftenest we take no heed of them. Man is an eternal mystery to himself. His own person is a house into which he never enters and of which he studies the outside alone. Each of us need have continually before him the famous inscription which once instructed Socrates and was engraved on the walls of Delphi by an unknown hand, "Know thyself."

Knowledge of Self

1900

A Scientist's Observations of Certain Ways of Children

Dr. Sully remarks that children begin to acquire a knowledge of "self" when they are a few months old, and may be observed grasping, striking and biting their own hands or feet.

A boy, whose feet were stained with new stockings, cried to his mother, "These ain't the feet I had this morning." The trunk is first recognized as part of self; then the head is regarded as the seat of intelligence. A child will "make believe" that it is more than one self and personify its members.

When only a few months old a baby does not know its own face in a mirror until it finds out by experience. Children are often afraid of a shadow at first, but in time refer it to the sun. They attach every importance to their bodily appearance, can scarcely believe that an earlier photograph of them as babies is really meant for them and feel almost new beings when dressed for church on Sunday.

In time the conscious self which thinks, suffers and wills is dimly discerned. A girl of 3 years shut her eyes and believed her mother could see her body, but not her real self. One day she asked, "Mother, am I real, or only a pretend like my dolls?" The same child pitied the fallen leaves dying on the ground. A well known lady novelist when a child was amazed to think that she could feel and act by an internal self, and the consciousness of self came to George Sand one day as a sudden revelation.

Children want to know how their thoughts come to their tongue or limbs and imagine they travel down.

Metamorphosis of self is a common idea among children, who fancy they have been something different at one time. They also find it hard to believe they never existed at all and will ask where they were a hundred years ago. A little boy of 5 asserted that the world only began to go round when he was born. Another gravely said, when passing a street pump, "There are no pumps in heaven, where I came from." Children have a standard of time from adults, an hour seeming very long to them.

Evangeline Weed — Making Personality to Order

1922

BOSTON — A medley of public officials, business men, manufacturers, debutantes and society matrons have worn a path to the studio of a modest and demure young woman in Beacon St.

They go to her filled with worldly knowledge and material experience of years but conquered by one of the greatest of man's weaknesses — self-consciousness.

She diagnoses their cases like a physician, cures them and endows them with man's greatest boon — personality.

She is Miss Evangeline Weed, proprietor of the Personality Institute, the first project of its kind.

Miss Weed numbers among her clients three mayors, two state senators, three representatives and many business men. These men, though successful, are handicapped by self-consciousness and unable to realize their full powers because of undeveloped personality.

—The Lima News, Lima, Ohio, Aug. 26, 1922, p. 1.