“A filthy point of view,” Settembrini declared. A position the stupidity of which he felt himself above combating. This talk of the sanctified lot of the poor and wretched⁠—yes, and what the Engineer, in his simplicity, had said about the Christian reverence due to suffering⁠—was simply gammon, resting as it did on a misconception, on mistaken sympathy, on erroneous psychology. The pity the well person felt for the sick⁠—a pity that almost amounted to awe, because the well person could not imagine how he himself could possibly bear such suffering⁠—was very greatly exaggerated. The sick person had no real right to it. It was, in fact, the result of an error in thinking, a sort of hallucination; in that the well man attributed to the sick his own emotional equipment, and imagined that the sick man was, as it were, a well man who had to bear the agonies of a sick one⁠—than which nothing was further from the truth. For the sick man was⁠—precisely that, a sick man: with the nature and modified reactions of his state. Illness so adjusted its man that it and he could come to terms; there were sensory appeasements, short circuits, a merciful narcosis; nature came to the rescue with measures of spiritual and moral adaptation and relief, which the sound person naively failed to take into account.