of great intellectual power, entail on its possessor a corresponding
intensity of the emotions, making them incomparably more violent than
those to which the ordinary man is a prey. Now, there are more things
in the world productive of pain than of pleasure. Again, a large
endowment of intellect tends to estrange the man who has it from other
people and their doings; for the more a man has in himself, the less
he will be able to find in them; and the hundred things in which they
take delight, he will think shallow and insipid. Here, then, perhaps,
is another instance of that law of compensation which makes itself
felt everywhere. How often one hears it said, and said, too, with some
plausibility, that the narrow-minded man is at bottom the happiest,
even though his fortune is unenviable. I shall make no attempt to
forestall the reader's own judgment on this point; more especially as
Sophocles himself has given utterance to two diametrically opposite
opinions:--

[Greek: Pollo to phronein eudaimonias
proton uparchei.][1]

he says in one place--wisdom is the greatest part of happiness;
and again, in another passage, he declares that the life of the
thoughtless is the most pleasant of all--

[Greek: En ta phronein gar maeden aedistos bios.][2]

The philosophers of the _Old Testament_ find themselves in a like
contradiction.

_The life of a fool is worse than death_[3]