In publishing this third edition of my little book I refer the reader again to the justification given in the preface to the second edition, and shall attempt only a few additional words for the benefit of those who may have really misinterpreted what the book aims to accomplish. Since the second edition was published, an intimate friend of long acquaintance made the following very pertinent statement. The life of every individual, as it appears to others, suggests at one time his essential, archetypal self, and at another his distorted self. Now only when following out the first suggestion, that toward the archetypal self, can self-examination yield results fit for publication and communicable to others; introspection in the other direction, toward the distorted self, is soon lost too deep in those recesses of the private life which, as some sage has already said, a man had best conceal even from himself. He who passes over this latter type of introspection, as was attempted in this book, while communicating his findings in the former, obviously with the special intention of locating the points of difference between archetypal selves, is completely misinterpreted if he is censured for seeing himself only in a favorable light, and for being more ridiculous than Narcissus, in that he goes so far as to publish for the whole wide world to read the language of infatuation which he has addressed to his own likeness. Moreover, to this purpose of the book can be attributed the fact that self-examination assumes in it a purely ethical form, and that what is in a narrow sense religious should nowhere be prominent therein.1 But I did not intend this to favor the view that religious introspection must tend only in the opposite direction of contemplating man’s distorted, fallen self.2 On the contrary, it has long been my plan to refute this one-sided conception also, and to supplement this book by a similar series of religious meditations. But thus far time has not permitted me to do so.3
Berlin, December, 1821. S.
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