Hamlet: Hamlet's Greatest Crime Was His Inherent Goodness Pain is a disease who ravaging effects are augmented by thought. It is the great irony of life that consciousness, the driving force of mankind that has delivered us from the age of stone to that of industry, delivers us also to the inescapable prison of the mind. Events that in the cycle of life are little more than trivial, can be given by the mind's eye power enough to consume us whole. The grief of the moment can become, with thought, a crashing wave that leaves behind only a semblance of sanity in its wake,