Saints and ascetics
without end and of many persuasions have resorted to bodily pain as a
means of deadening the imagination and exalting the will or spirit. Some
great thinkers have been invalids, but in every case their food, work
has been done when they were temporarily free from pain. Perhaps the
truth is on the side of those mystics who say that although the mind is
of a higher nature than matter, it is so closely involved with it that
neither can get away from the other, and that both together tend to shut
out the spirit and to forget its existence, which is a perpetual
reproach to them; and any ordinary intellectual effort being produced by
the joint activity of mind and the matter through which the mind acts,
the condition of the spirit at the time has little or no effect upon
them, nor upon what they are doing. And if one would carry the little
theory further, one might find that the greatest works of genius have
been produced when the effort of mind and matter has taken place under
the inspiration of the spirit, so that all three were momentarily
involved together. But such thoughts lead far, and it may be that they
profit little. The best which a man means to do is generally better than
the best he does, and it is perhaps the best he is capable of doing.
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