As these illustrations suggest, the point of view of the humorous observer is not a fixed one. Sometimes the freshness, the sense of liberation from the stupidly commonplace, will come by applying a rational idea to things which are not accustomed to the treatment. At other times, when the intelligence happens to be more sprightly, the new point of {304} view is reached by a flight of fancy which loves to perch itself on some outlook far from that of a rational criticism. The humorous sort of mind delights in the play of inverting ordinary arrangements, say, of making man and beast, father and son, exchange places, or, as in Lewis Carroll’s delightful instance of an ideal experiment, of putting the sane people in asylums and allowing the lunatics to go at large.[259] It follows that humorous contemplation will have many shades of seriousness. In some instances, the proportion of the rational element leads us to speak of it as wisdom laughing,—“ridentem dicere verum”; in others, in which the predominance of a capricious fancy brings the expression near that of sportive wit, to describe it rather as laughter sobered by a word of wisdom. Yet it may be said that in every state which we describe as one of humorous enjoyment the rational element itself, affected by its alliance, puts on a half-festive attire, so that after all the whole mind may be said to join in the play.[260] The humorous state is, however, much more than a peculiar modification of the processes of intelligence. It cannot be constituted by a mere train of cold perceptions and ideas. It means that the whole consciousness is for the time modified by the taking on of a new attitude or mood. The play of young fancy about the grave elderly form of reason, which is half-coaxed to play too, comes from this new tone of the whole mind. This mental tone involves a peculiar modification of the conative processes. All laughing scrutiny of things, as a play-attitude, is a sort of relaxation of the set concentration {305} of a conative purpose. Whenever we laugh, if it be only with a child at the jocosities of a clown, we are freed from the constraining force of the practical and even of the theoretical interests which commonly hold and confine our minds when we observe closely. In such moments we abandon ourselves to the tickling play of the object on our perceptions and ideational tendencies. In humour this self-abandonment takes on a shade of seriousness, not because the relaxation of the conative effort is less complete, but because the self-abandonment is that of a mind so habitually reflective that, even when it is at play, it does not wholly lose sight of the serious import of the thoughts which minister to its entertainment; because it dimly recognises the worth of the standard ideas, by the lightest allusion to which it is able to indulge in a playful criticism of what is presented.