Why?

That's the question that prompts so much of mankind's endeavors, but particularly the cerebral ones. "Why?" in the context of many sciences can enable experiments that produce tangible answers and provide an opportunity to test those results. Not so with a good deal of psychology and all philosophies. It is truly the life of the mind. Pondering why we do what we do? What drives us? What guides us? Religion is too easy an answer and besides, why did we create religion? What questions or needs were driving us to formulate this structure, within which we know (or believe we know) how our actions will be perceived, what results will be achieved from our actions and what our rewards will be. I am perennially fascinated by the "why" of these more nebulous sciences. We can postulate what makes people do things - from a psychological perspective - but we can't really prove it. You can say that a man becomes a serial killer because he was abused as a child. Then why don't all abused children become serial killers? And what's with the torturing small animals, setting fires and bedwetting triangle? The mind is too complex and, it would seem, to often unique, to truly be categorized or understood.

And philosophy? Another entire chapter in the book on mankind's life of the mind.