Success Quote by Havelock Ellis

Ellis is taking a quiet knife to philosophy’s favorite vanity: the idea that a neat conclusion is the point. Coming from a psychologist steeped in observation rather than metaphysical triumphs, the line demotes “attainment” to a kind of childish gold star. It’s a rebuke to systems-builders who treat thought like architecture: blueprint first, then the finished monument. Ellis suggests philosophy is closer to fieldwork. You walk, you notice, you revise your sense of what matters because the world keeps interrupting your theories.

The phrasing matters. “Goal” is singular and final, like a pinned specimen. “Things that are met” is plural, accidental, social. You don’t conquer them; you encounter them. That verb choice relocates authority from the thinker’s will to the thinker’s receptivity. It’s an ethic of attention: philosophy as training in what you’re capable of recognizing while you’re busy trying to be right.

The subtext is also a warning about intellectual self-deception. A goal can be a pretext for forcing reality to cooperate. What you meet along the way - doubts, contradictions, other people’s experiences, your own shifting motives - is harder to domesticate, which is why it’s more diagnostic. For a late-19th/early-20th-century psychologist associated with studying taboo, desire, and the messy edges of “normal,” that’s not abstract. Ellis lived in an era hungry for grand theories of mind and society, and he’s signaling allegiance to the uncomfortable data those theories usually sand down.

It works because it flatters curiosity over certainty, turning philosophy from a victory march into an honest audit of what thinking actually does to a person.