Nevertheless, it must not be supposed that in such private self-correction we are always at the social point of view. Humour is the outgrowth of a pronounced individuality; its possession seems always to imply that a person forms his own ideas of the value of things, guided of course by the world’s teachers, but caring little whether his views agree with those which happen to obtain in his community at the moment. Here, again, in the high service rendered by a vigilant humour, we find the work of reflection carried out by the help of ideas or ideal conceptions, which are in part a product of the individual mind. The laughing rebuke administered to some folly, which lifts its head once more after many repressive blows, comes from the ideal self; which, though it must have nourished itself in some “communion of saints,” becomes in the end free and self-legislative. “Correction” seems too strong a word to use for this prophylactic function; for, as we have seen, humour does not readily lend itself as an instrument to serious purposes. What the habit of a quick humorous perception does for its subject here is best described, perhaps, as the fostering of a pure and wholesome atmosphere in the soul, in which disease-germs must perforce die of inanition. We may now turn to those uses of humour, into the conception of which the thought of a practical aim can hardly intrude. Humour as amusement is something agreeable and cheering. It has the refreshing properties of primitive laughter and much more; for, as a mood that feeds itself on reflective contemplation, it is consolatory and sustaining in a way in which mere gaiety, even when it persists as a temper of mind, cannot be. Apropos of Voltaire’s saying that heaven had given us two things to counterbalance the many {325} miseries of life, hope and sleep, Kant remarks: “He could have added laughter, if the means of exciting it in reasonable men were only as easily attainable, and the requisite wit or originality of humour were not so rare” (as some other endowments).[276] When the humorous bent is lively and “original,” it will stand its possessor in good stead in more than one way, amid the toilings and moilings of life. Seeing that laughter is always in a measure a throwing aside of serious pressure, we should expect it to come to our aid in the workaday hours. But it is only when the eye for the sparkling of fun in things has been instructed by humorous reflection that the alleviating service of mind-play is fully realised.