Ecclesiastes 1:18

in much wisdom is much grief The same sad sentence was written on the study of man's nature in its greatness and its littleness, its sanity and insanity. The words have passed into a proverb, and were, perhaps, proverbial when the Debater wrote them. The mere widening of the horizon, whether of ethical or of physical knowledge, brought no satisfaction. In the former case men became more conscious of their distance from the true ideal. They ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the only result was that they knew that "they were naked" (Genesis 3:7). In the latter, the more they knew of the phenomena of nature or of human life the more they felt that the "most part of God's works were hid." Add to this the brain-weariness, the laborious days, the sleepless nights, the frustrated ambitions of the student, and we can understand the confession of the Debater. It has naturally been often echoed. So Cicero (Tusc. Disp. iii. 4) discusses the thesis, "Videtur mihi cadere in sapientem ægritudo" ("Sickness seems to me to be the lot of the wise of heart").