The conditions of such a peaceful, harmonious confluence of dissimilar feelings are various. The effect may be furthered by the presence of points of affinity among the elements; whence the sentiments which dignify their objects, such as love and admiration, readily combine. This holds good to some extent of the constituents of humour, since amusement and something like tender regard for him who amuses us are plainly allied. Yet this {309} consideration does not seem to help us in understanding how the two polar moods of hilarity and sadness should be able to combine. We may be helped here by setting out from the fact of a simultaneous appeal to the dissimilar feelings by the same presentation. When this occurs again and again, it is probable that organic modifications may be effected by the simultaneous action of the double stimulus. Nobody begins by feeling amused and sorry at the same moment. The boy and the savage may have a moment of mild pity for an ugly piece of deformity; but this moment comes after the laughing is over. The co-presentation of the sad and the amusing had, we may be sure, to be repeated during many generations of men before the two currents could join in one smooth flow. Those who find the core of an emotion in a widely diffused organic process may reason that such repetitions of a complex emotional stimulation may modify the nervous system in some way, so as to allow of the combination of some parts at least of the bodily resonances characteristic of the emotional constituents. For one thing, the fact, already alluded to, that there is a certain community of physiological process in the case of laughter and of the expression of grief, may help us, to some extent, to understand the combination.[265] Yet mutual inhibition by the two sets of organic processes involved seems to be the principal agency in the case. The more energetic movements of laughter are without doubt restrained by an admixture of sympathy. Perhaps if we understood the physics of organic processes, we might speak here of an “interference,” or, at least, of some antagonistic action between the motor-impulses of the laugh and of the sigh. {310}