An _ensemble_, which can only be described as a whole made up of ill-fitting parts, this seems to be the object on which our attention is focussed when we laugh at the child under the needlessly capacious hat. This intuition involves, no doubt, some rapid seizing of details: but the attention to parts is not to separate objects, as the language of Dr. Lipps suggests, but to related parts, to the hat as worn in relation to the wearer. This seems to be an adequate account of what takes place so far as it is the palpable unfitness of dimensions which moves us to laughter. But it may be urged, and rightly urged, that the laughable spectacle is more than this, that what tickles us is the uncustomary and topsy-turvy arrangement of things. And here, it may be said, there certainly is implied a movement of thought, namely, to something outside the spectacle, to what is customary and in order. The supposition is a highly plausible one. Since, moreover, what we perceive is a whole, it is reasonable to assume that if such a movement occurs it must be, not, as Dr. Lipps supposes, from one part of it to another, but from the present whole as oddly and wrongly composed to some other whole as rightly composed. Do we not, it may be asked, here carry out a process fairly well described in Schopenhauer’s theory of the ludicrous, that is, conceive of “an incongruity between the real object and its idea,” and so, by implication, go back to this idea? {14} To this I would reply that, so far as I can analyse my own mental state at such a moment, I do not find the presence of any idea of another and normal whole to be a necessary element in a full enjoyment of the grotesque whole before my eyes. Such a second whole would, one supposes, have to be either the same hat on the right head, or the same head under its proper covering, and I find that I am perfectly well able to enjoy the comedy of the child crowned with the tall hat without making present to my mind either of these combinations. Here, again, I think, a better scientific theory bears out the result of one’s individual self-examination. Psychology has made it clear that in recognising an object, say a weasel crossing the road on which we are walking, we do not need to have present to our mind (in addition to the perception of the object) a pictorial idea or image of a weasel as formed from past observations. Owing to the organising of a certain perceptual disposition—a readiness to see an object as a familiar one, as of a particular “sort”—our mind instantly greets it as a weasel. In other words, we recognise things by the help not of images present to the mind at the moment, but of certain ingrained “apperceptive” tendencies or attitudes. All the higher animals seem to share with us this highly useful capability of immediate and instantaneous recognition.