he thinks himself free to act, in which game the circumscribed liberty of man is mocked (verspottet) by a reference to a higher liberty,”[11] one seems to measure the scope of the worthy writer’s sense of fun. That the irony of things in their relation to our desires and aims has its amusing aspect is certain: but who that knows anything of the diversified forms of human mirth could ever think of trying to drag all of them under so narrow a rubric? A vivid perception of the variability of the sense of the laughable in man, of the modification, in the case of individuals and of races, of the range of its play, and of the standards to which it subjects itself, by a thousand unknown influences of temperament and habits of life, may well repel not merely the philosophic recluse who can hardly be expected perhaps to have followed far the many wild {20} excursions of the laughing impulse, but others as well. Have we not, it may be asked, in the appreciation of what is funny or laughable a mode of sensibility pre-eminently erratic, knowing no law, and incapable therefore of being understood? Do not the more grotesque attempts to frame theories of the subject seem to mock the search for law where no law is? The difficulty may be admitted whilst the practical conclusion drawn is rejected. Certainly no thinker will succeed in throwing light on the dark problem who does not strenuously fight against the narrowing influences of his “subjectivity,” who does not make a serious effort to get outside the bounds of his personal preferences, and to compass in large vision the far-ranging play of the mirthful spirit, and the endless differencing of its manifestations. But if a man can only succeed in doing this without losing his head in the somewhat rollicking scene, there is nothing that need repel him from the task; for reason assures us that here too, just as in other domains of human experience where things looked capricious and lawless enough at the outset, order and law will gradually disclose themselves. A serious inquiry into the subject, such as we propose to make, must, it is evident, start from this scientific presupposition. We take the language of everyday life to imply that human laughter, notwithstanding its variability, its seeming caprices, is subject to law. We speak of an objective region of “the laughable,” that is of objects and relations of objects which are fitted and which tend to excite laughter in us all alike. It will be one of our chief problems to determine the characteristics of this field of the laughable, and to define its boundaries.