leisure as the fairest of all possessions.  So, in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle concludes that a life devoted to philosophy is the happiest; or, as he says in the Politics,[2] the free exercise of any power, whatever it may be, is happiness.  This again, tallies with what Goethe says in Wilhelm Meister:  The man who is born with a talent which he is meant to use, finds his greatest happiness in using it.

[Footnote 1:  Eth.  Nichom. x. 7.]

[Footnote 2:  iv. 11.]

But to be in possession of undisturbed leisure, is far from being the common lot; nay, it is something alien to human nature, for the ordinary man’s destiny is to spend life in procuring what is necessary for the subsistence of himself and his family; he is a son of struggle and need, not a free intelligence.  So people as a rule soon get tired of undisturbed leisure, and it becomes burdensome if there are no fictitious and forced aims to occupy it, play, pastime and hobbies of every kind.  For this very reason it is full of possible danger, and difficilis in otio quies is a true saying,—­it is difficult to keep quiet if you have nothing to do.  On the other hand, a measure of intellect far surpassing the ordinary, is as unnatural as it is abnormal.  But if it exists, and the man endowed with it is to be happy, he will want precisely that undisturbed leisure which the others find burdensome or pernicious; for without it he is a Pegasus in harness, and consequently unhappy.  If these two unnatural circumstances, external, and internal, undisturbed leisure and great intellect, happen to coincide in the same person, it is a great piece of fortune; and if the fate is so far favorable, a man can lead the higher life, the life protected from the two opposite sources of human suffering, pain and boredom, from the painful struggle for existence, and the incapacity for enduring leisure (which is free existence itself)—­evils which may be escaped only by being mutually neutralized.

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:—­