Let us take as an example a child who, having reached a dim apprehension of the customary behaviour of things begins to laugh at certain odd deviations from this. Here the transition appears clearly to be a kind of transference mediated by the identity of the mental attitude with that of the laughter of an earlier stage, say at the sight of the new and entertaining baubles. Similarly when, after the consciousness of rule is developed, a child roguishly “tries it on” by pretending to disobey, we may regard the new outburst of the spirit of fun as a natural transition from an earlier variety, the laughing pretence of running away from mother or nurse. Nevertheless, we have to do here with more than a mere transference. Such extensions always involve some amount of complication and enrichment of the mirthful experience. These later forms of mental gaiety depend on the development of more complex psychoses, both on the intellectual and on the emotional side. The first amusement at the sight of the ill-matched, the inconsequent, implies the advance of an analytic reflection up to the point of a dim perception of relations. A large part of the extension of the field of the laughable depends on this intellectual advance, a finer and more precise apprehension of what is presented, in its parts and so as a whole, as also in its relations to other things. With respect to the other condition, expansion of the emotional life, it is enough to remark that certain forms of laughter which fall within the first years of life arise directly out of a deepening of the emotional consciousness as a whole, _e.g._, the awakening of the “self-feeling,” as seen {193} in the laughter of success or triumph; or, on the other hand, of tenderness and sympathy, as illustrated in the first rudiments of a kindly humour. We see, then, that, as a feature in development, differentiation into a multiplicity of forms is inseparably connected with another feature, complication. The gradual appearance of a number of laughters variously toned, such as that of slightly malicious elation at collapse of dignity, of entertainment at an intellectual inconsequence, and of a kindly amusement at a petty disaster, means that the elemental feeling of joy is getting modified by accretions or absorptions of new psychical elements. A final remark is needed to prevent misapprehension. Among the several processes of complication which underlie this differentiation of the laughing psychosis, some tend to arrest or tone down the reaction. It is thus that, when sympathy comes to be united with the laughing impulse, the gaiety of the latter is apt to become subdued into something between a smile and the gentlest of laughs. In addition to this inhibitory effect of heterogeneous emotional elements we have that of new conative attitudes. A child soon finds out that a good deal of his rollicking laughter is an offence, and the work of taming the too wild spirits begins.[125]