But there is something to be said in opposition to this view. Great intellectual gifts mean an activity pre-eminently nervous in its character, and consequently a very high degree of susceptibility to pain in every form. Further, such gifts imply an intense temperament, larger and more vivid ideas, which, as the inseparable accompaniment 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] and-- _In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow_.[4] [Footnote 1: Antigone, 1347-8.] [Footnote 2: Ajax, 554.] [Footnote 3: Ecclesiasticus, xxii. 11.] [Footnote 4: Ecclesiastes, i. 18.]