Now I take it that there is another side to these apperceptive tendencies. Not only do they secure for us, without the necessity of calling up distinct ideas, these instant recognitions of a sort of thing, they enable us as well as intelligent animals mentally to reject presentations which do not answer to “the sort of thing”. I can say that this wax figure is not a man without having any distinct image of the living man present to my consciousness. This ability {15} to recognise what we see as not of a particular kind of thing, without calling up a definite idea of this kind, extends to combinations and arrangements of parts in a whole. When, after my servant has dusted my books and rearranged them on the shelves, I instantly recognise that they are wrongly placed, I may at the moment be quite unable to say what the right arrangement was.[8] According to my view, the perceptions of the laughable which Dr. Lipps illustrates are instantaneous perceptions. As such, they may, and commonly do, arise immediately, that is, without any reversion to the idea of what is the customary or normal arrangement. But the reader may urge with force that the enjoyment of this charming bit of childish pretence involves more than a perception of the unusual and the irregular. Do we not at least apprehend the fact that the hat is not merely unfitting, and grotesquely wrong, but a usurpation of the prerogative of the superior? Is not the behaviour of the child so deliciously whimsical just because we fix the mental eye on this element of make-believe? And if so, does not this imply that we have present to the mind the proper belongings of the hat, _viz._, the father’s head and figure? I readily agree that when we make our perceptions reflective, as we may do, this idea is apt to emerge. As has been implied above, the sight of the tall hat does tend to suggest the idea of its usual wearer, and in lingering on this quaint bit of acting we may not improbably catch ourselves imagining the hat on the right {16} head, especially as we see that it is the child’s playful aim to personate the privileged owner. And the same thing might occur in laughing at the father topped with the small child’s hat; for the laugher, who would in this case more probably be a child, might naturally enough reinstate in imaginative thought the small child’s head to which the cap belongs. This combination seems at least to be much more likely to recur to the imagination than the other combination, which retaining the wearer substitutes the idea of the right hat.