102 Mr. William Samuel Lilly [March 13, 



Lotze well puts it in his ' Microcosmos,' " The mechanism of our life 

 has annexed the corporeal expression to a mood of mind produced by 

 what we see being taken up into a world of thought, and estimated 

 at the value belonging to it in the rational connection of things." 

 Of course, the corporeal expression is not necessarily connected with 

 the mood of mind. Tlie physical phenomenon which we call laughter 

 may be produced by purely physical means, for example, by titillation. 

 The laugh of the soul and the laugh of the body are distinct- We 

 may have each without the other. And only a gross and superficial 

 analysis will confound them. 



But, as I intimated just now, there is oce modern philosopher 

 who appears to me to have given us a satisfactory formula of the 

 Ludicrous. That philosopher is Schopenhauer, unquestionably one 

 of the most profound and penetrating intellects of this century, how- 

 ever we may account of his system as a whole. One of his cardinal 

 doctrines is that all abstract knowledge springs from knowledge of 

 perception, and obtains its whole value from its relation to percep- 

 tion. And upon this doctrine he hangs his theory of the Ludicrous. 

 " The source of the Ludicrous," he teaches, " is always the paradoxical, 

 and therefore unexpected, subsumption of an object under a concep- 

 tion which in other respects is diflerent from it." Or, as he elsewhere 

 in his great work, writes more at large : — 



" The cause of laughter, In every case, is simply the sudden perception of the 

 incongruity between a concept and the real objects which by means of it we 

 have thought in a certain association, and laughter itself is the expression of 

 this incongruity. Now incongruity occurs in tliis way: we have thought of 

 two or more real objects by means of one concept, and have passed on the 

 identity of the concept to the objects. It then becomes strikingly apparent, 

 from the discrepancy of the objects, in other respects, that the concept applies 

 to them only from one point of view. It occurs quite as often, however, that 

 the incoDgruity between a single real object and the concept under which from 

 one point of view, it has rightly been subsumed, is suddenly felt. Now the 

 more correct the subsumption of such objects under a concept may be from one 

 point of view, and the greater and more glaring their incongruity from another 

 point of view, the stronger is the ludicrous effect which is produced by this 

 contrast. All laughter, therefore, springs up on occasion of a paradoxical and 

 unexpected subsumption, whether this is expressed in words or actions." 



Now, I believe this account to be, in the main, correct. It is, in 

 substance, the thought of Aristotle, but it brings in the element of 

 paradox, unexpectedness, suddenness, which is lacking in that 

 philosopher's definition. And it is cast into an accurate and 

 scientific form. "The source of the Ludicrous is always the 

 paradoxical, and therefore unexpected, subsumption of an object 

 under a conception which, in other respects, is different from it." 

 Yes ; I think that this is true. Every instance of the Ludicrous, in 

 its twenty-one varieties, which I have been able to call to mind, fits 

 in with this formula. But there are two points in Schopenhauer's 

 exposition to which I must demur. In the first place, I do not think 

 Jiim well warranted in affirming — as he does — that his theory of the 



