Now, are we aware when we laugh at either of these odd sights of carrying out this movement of thought? Keeping to the indisputable case of the child’s head under or in the man’s hat, do we, before the agreeable spasm seizes us, first mentally grasp the hat and then pass to the idea of its rightful wearer? I, at least, cannot find this to be true in {12} my own experience. But such inability may be due to the absence of a sufficiently delicate introspection. Let us then try to test the point in another way. If the smile of amusement with which we greet this spectacle comes from the dissolution of the idea of the adult male figure, we should expect the enjoyment of the ludicrous aspect to be especially conspicuous when the hat appears an instant before the child-wearer, and so thought is compelled to travel in the required direction. Let us suppose that a child in his nursery puts on his father’s hat and stands on a chair, and that you enter the room and catch a glimpse of the hat first, say above a piece of furniture, and for a brief moment expect to see an adult beneath. No doubt you will be aware of a definite movement of thought in the required direction and of the dissolution into nothing of the expectant idea. But will the element of clear anticipation and its annihilation intensify your feeling of the funniness of the spectacle, or even make the funniness more patent? You would, no doubt, in such a case, experience a little shock, the full excitement of surprise, and that might add volume to the whole feeling of the moment. You might, too, not improbably, laugh more heartily, for you would have a sense of having been taken in, and there would be a side-current of hilarity directed against yourself. But I venture to affirm that the spectacle as such would not impress you as being one whit more ludicrous when seen in this way, first the hat and then the wearer, than if your eye had lighted on the two together. What seems to happen when we are amused by this little comic scene in the nursery? Do we not at a glance perceive a grotesque whole, _viz._, a hat on the wrong head, and is not our amusement too swiftly forthcoming to allow of our singling out a part of what is seen and going through the {13} process of thought described by the ingenious author of this theory? Science seems to bear out what common observation discovers, for the newer psychology teaches that in the first moment of perceiving an object we obtain not a distinct apprehension of parts, but a vague apprehension of a whole into which detail and definiteness only come later and gradually.