Further, it seems desirable to study the utterances of the spirit of fun through the whole gamut of its expression. The _gros rire_, the cacophonous guffaw, must not be regarded as too vulgar to be admitted here. The attempts in the past to build up a theory of the ludicrous have commonly failed through a fastidious and highly artificial restriction of the laughable attribute to the field of wit and refined humour which the cultivated man is in the habit of enjoying. Nor is this all. It may possibly be found that no satisfactory explanation of our enjoyment of the laughable is obtainable without taking a glance at forms of mirth which have preceded it. Among the strange things said about laughter is surely the sentence of Bacon: “In laughing there ever precedeth a conceit of something ridiculous, and therefore it is proper to man”. That the father of the inductive philosophy should have approached the subject in this way {23} is one of the ironies that meet us in these discussions; for, allowing that he is right as to his fact that only man laughs, we must surely recognise that his reason is hopelessly weak. The conceit which Bacon here talks about is, we all know, by no means a universal accompaniment of laughter; and, what is more important, even when it occurs it is wont to grow distinct rather in the form of an afterthought than in that of an antecedent. Among all things human, surely laughter ought least of all to be afraid of recognising its humble kinsfolk. The importance of thus sweeping into our scientific net specimens of all grades of laughter will be seen when it is recognised that the one promising way of dealing with this subject is to trace its development from its earliest and crudest forms. If we begin at the top of the evolutional scheme, and take no account of the lower grades, we are very likely to fail to penetrate to the core of the laughable, as so many of our predecessors have failed. But if we will only stoop to consider its manifestations at the lowest discoverable levels, and then confine ourselves to the more modest problem: How did the first laughter, mindless as it may well seem to us, get developed and differentiated into the variety of forms which make up the humorous experience of civilised man? we may win a modest success. It will be evident that any attempt to pursue this line of inquiry will have to take note, not only of facts obtainable from the realm of primitive laughter as represented by infancy and the savage state, but of those social forces which have had so much to do with shaping the manifestations of mirth. The common directions of our laughter attest its social character and illustrate how it has insinuated itself into the many movements of social life. For a like reason we shall need to discuss to some extent {24} the place of laughter in Art, and the treatment of the sources of merriment by the comedian.