At the outset one may enter a modest protest against the quiet assumption that the two incidents here selected are laughable in an equal degree. It may be urged that, to the grown-up spectator at least, the sight of the little one crowned with the whelming headgear of his sire is immeasurably more amusing than the other. Here the author strikes one as proceeding rather hastily, as he seems to do also when he assumes that an exceptionally big and an exceptionally little nose are equally palpable examples of the laughable. This is, to say the least, disputable. One can hardly think of a comedy turning on the smallness of a person’s nose, as the _Cyrano de Bergerac_ of M. Rostand turns on its bigness. But this objection need not, perhaps, be pressed. Passing, then, to the explanation of his two examples offered by the author, we are first of all struck by the apparent arbitrariness of the supposition, that the movement of thought which he assumes should in the one case take exactly the reverse direction of that taken in the other. Seeing that both are instances of a grotesquely unsuitable head-covering should one not expect the enjoyment of them to spring out of a similar kind of mental activity? {11} The author probably means to say that we tend to fix the attention on the more dignified feature in each case, the man beneath the tiny cap, and the man’s hat above the tiny head. But that is far from being certain. And in any case there are good reasons against assuming a “contrary motion” of thought here. Dr. Lipps will no doubt allow, as a trained psychologist, that these intellectual movements are subject to well-recognised laws. One deduction from these is that the sight of a hat will suggest the idea of the human figure to which it belongs much more certainly and more powerfully than the sight of the figure will suggest the idea of its appropriate covering. I believe that everybody’s experience will confirm this. A hat seen even in a shop-window starts the impulse to think of some wearer; but who would say that seeing a human head, say across the dinner-table or in an adjoining stall at the theatre, prompts us to think of its proper covering? Special circumstances, such as the presence of an exceptional baldness appealing to pity, must be added before our thoughts flit to the out-of-door receptacle. In other words, the whole interest and significance of a hat lie in a reference to a wearer, but not _vice versâ_. We must, then, reject the idea of a double and opposed movement of thought here. If any movement takes place it must be assumed to be in each case a transition from the perception of the hat to the idea of its customary and proper wearer.