To begin with our laughter at novelties, the odd, the extravagant, what is it but the outcome of a play-impulse, a gay caprice which wills for the instant not to take objects seriously, but to disregard their real nature and significance, {151} practical, theoretical, and even æsthetic, for the joy of making them playthings for the eye? Or, if the suggestion of a rule, broken by the newcomer into our field of perception, obtrudes itself, our laughter announces that the infraction does not matter, that the violation of custom’s good law itself is passed over and turned into fun by the blithe play-spirit in us. It is the same with mischances, awkward fixes, and all sorts of moral and intellectual shortcomings. These things obviously have in them what should appeal to our seriousness: they come up for judgment as pitiable, as regrettable, often as distinctly culpable. Yet we laugh and cast aside our judicial responsibilities just because the mood of the moment disposes us to be indulgent, and because the attitude we take up in viewing the offence as a little one instantly brings up the love of play, the impulse to turn the significant into enjoyable nonsense. Once more, in our laughter at artful allusion to the obscene, it is the same swift transition from the serious attitude to that of play which seems to be at the bottom of our merriment. Here again it is the littleness—a quantity, as pointed out, varying considerably with the quality of the laugher—which disarms the serious attitude and allures it to play. In pretences, both hypocrisies and less serious kinds, which raise the laugh, we note the same swift lapse into the play-attitude. For, in order to enjoy these vain shows with perfect gaiety, we must be ready to bring a mental “blind spot” to bear on everything in them which has serious moral significance. Here, too, we take a leap into the world of the player, transmuting what has something of seriousness, something even of offending hurtfulness, into a mere plaything. {152} The more intellectual varieties of the ludicrous disclose the same deep-seated characteristic. The incongruous, the absurd, the tricks of ambiguous speech, these are things which offend us as serious mortals bent on having consistency of ideas and clearness of utterance in our social world. They evoke our laughter when they take such a form as to upset this serious attitude and to win us over to regarding them as nothing but entertaining show. In all the more intellectual laughter at things we seem to find the perfect form of the mind’s play. I say “perfect” because psychologists as well as others are wont to speak of poetic imagination as playful activity, though this, as controlled by the ends of art, is seriousness itself compared with the freer movements of ideas when the sportive temper takes us.