Zorzi went his way calmly and spent the day in the laboratory.  He was in a frame of mind in which such speeches as Giovanni’s could make but little impression upon him, sensitive though he naturally was.  Really great sorrows, or great joys or great emotions, make smaller ones almost impossible for the time.  Men of vast ambition, whose deeds are already moving the world and making history, are sometimes as easily annoyed by trifles as a nervous woman; but he who knows that what is dearest to him is slipping from his hold, or has just been taken, is half paralysed in his sense of outward things.  His own mind alone has power to give him a momentary relief.

Herein lies one of the strongest problems of human nature.  We say with assurance that the mind rules the body, we feel that the spirit in some way overshadows and includes the mind.  Yet if this were really true the spirit—­that is, the will—­should have power against bodily pain, but not against moral suffering except with some help from a higher source.  But it is otherwise.  If the will of ordinary human beings could hypnotise the body against material sensation, the credit due to those brave believers in all ages who have suffered cruel torments for their faith would be singularly diminished.  If the mind could dominate matter by ordinary concentration of thought, a bad toothache should have no effect upon the delicate imagination of the poet, and Napoleon would not have lost the decisive battle of his life by a fit of indigestion, as has been asserted.

On the other hand, there was never yet a man of genius, or even of great talent, who was not aware that the most acute moral anguish can be momentarily forgotten, as if it did not exist for the time, by concentrating the mind upon its accustomed and favourite kind of work.  Johnson wrote Rasselas to pay for the funeral of his yet unburied mother, and Johnson was a man of heart if ever one lived; he could not have written the book if he had had a headache.  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.