One other illustration of the _rôle_ of the playful spirit in the sphere of the laughable must not be overlooked. I have dealt with the intrusion of the trivial into solemn scenes as an expression of the child’s playfulness. But, as has been suggested above, it is more than this. Scenes of great formality, where a degree of severe self-control is enforced which is trying to mortals of only a limited gravity, are apt to throw us into a state of highly unstable equilibrium. Hence the welcome we are disposed to give to anything which touches the playful susceptibilities in us. Under such circumstances small occurrences, which at other times would pass wholly unmarked, are grasped at and become laughable things for us, just because of the great necessity of man to escape now and again into the freedom of play. As already implied, this saturation of laughter with the spirit of playfulness is characteristic only of the gayer kind, that which is purified from all tinge of seriousness. So far {153} as our jocose impulses lend themselves to serious purposes, as for example in the laughter of satire, the playful character tends to become less clearly recognisable. Not that here, too, we are unable to find a resemblance between laughter and play; for, as we know, much of what we call play or sport has its serious interest, and the player, like the laugher, may easily slip across the line which divides the playful from the serious attitude. Nevertheless, we shall need to insist on the point that laughter is a thing of different tones, some more playful than others, and that its nature and its function can only be clearly determined by distinguishing these. The result of our inquiry is that the impressions of the laughable cannot be reduced to one or two principles. Our laughter at things is of various tones. It gathers up into itself a number of primitive tendencies; it represents the products of widely removed stages of intellectual and moral evolution. This is virtually admitted by all who recognise the Intellectual and the Moral principle; for our laughter at seeing dignity unfrocked is presumably of more ancient origin than the “laughter of the mind,” which discoursers on the ludicrous are for the most part thinking of. Our argument takes us farther, namely, to the conclusion that the effect of the laughable, even of what is given by philosophers as a sample of the ludicrous, is a highly complex feeling, containing something of the child’s joyous surprise at the new and unheard of; something too of the child’s gay responsiveness to a play-challenge; often something also of the glorious sense of expansion after compression which gives the large mobility to freshly freed limbs of young animals and children.