Philosophy, as we know, going boldly beyond the special sciences, pushes on to a deeper knowledge of things, and of these in their totality, of what we call the universe. In this effort it has to envisage things in a way essentially different from that of everyday observation. The modern philosopher may do his best to reach his conception of the reality of things by a careful analysis of experience; yet in the end his theory seems to have transformed our familiar world beyond the possibility of recognition. In this philosophic re-construction of the real world, man, his relation to nature, and his history have to be re-considered. It illustrates a powerful tendency to view human life and experience as a phase of a larger cosmic movement determined by an ideal end. The introduction of ideal conceptions, by lifting us above the actual, seems to throw upon the latter an aspect of littleness, of futility, of something like the dishonour of failure. The ideal requirement proves hopelessly inapplicable to much, at least, of our everyday world; so that, as long as we remain at its point of view, familiar things—say the persons we happen to be thrown with, and a good deal in ourselves, social experiments growing out of some passing trend of “popular thought,” and even long periods of history—take on the aspect of contradictions, of futile things that at least do not count, if they do not actually delay the fruition of the ideal. So, too, when philosophy becomes distinctly practical. {395} Whether we take happiness or moral perfection or self-realisation as the ideal end of men’s conduct, a large part of the conduct which unfolds itself under our eyes, including much of our own, begins to look sadly poor and shabby, as soon as we venture seriously to apply an ideal as test. Much at least of what men praise as virtue shows itself to be of doubtful value, and at any rate to have received a laudation quite disproportionate to its true worth. Lastly, this belittling effect of ideas on everyday realities is seen when philosophy constructs for us the ideal type of human society, and of that confederacy of civilised states of which, now and again, it has had its dream. Under the searching rays of these ideal conceptions even the “common-sense” to which “advanced” communities hold so tenaciously may begin to look something compacted rather of darkness than of light. The situation would seem to offer room for some of those modes of transforming the aspects of things which we have found to be excitants of laughter. If philosophic contemplation effects a reduction of great things to littleness, of substances to illusory shadows, of the elevated glories of men to the level of barely passable dignities, it should, one may reason, help men to laugh. Yet the fact that a philosopher has been known to the ages as the laughing one suggests that mirth has not been a common characteristic of his kind.