How high-pitched speculation tends to silence laughter by withdrawing the philosopher too far from the human scene may easily be seen by a glance at the historical schools. The Stoic and the Epicurean alike, widely dissimilar as were their views of the good and their moral tempers, took into seclusion the philosophic life which Aristotle had bidden them combine with a discreet participation in the social life about them; seeking, each in his own manner, to realise its self-sufficiency and its consolations. There, no doubt, they reflected much on the follies of the unwise who remained in the crowd. Yet the Stoical temper, with its striving after a passionless imperturbability, excluded the idea of a laughing, quite as much as of a pitying, survey. On the other hand, the Epicurean, though his theory of life accentuated the value of the tranquil pleasures, did not apparently find in his Garden a corner for the quiet amusement of a laughter-bringing contemplation. In this way philosophy, by substituting a new and ideal mode of thought and life for the common mode, is apt to dismiss it as void of significance and unreal, and so to be unable to laugh at ordinary humanity just because it has ceased to be interested in it. Yet all philosophising does not thus belittle the realm of reality, as common men regard it. Philosophers have been known to regard as realities the same particular things that Plato contemned as mere shadows, and to reconstruct and to justify as rational what the plain man accepts as his world. When {398} this goes so far as to insist on the goodness of things human, and to say that the world as a whole is as perfect as it can be, and thus in a new way, as it would seem, to break away from the common view, it seriously threatens the _locus standi_ of the laugher. Nothing, indeed, in the way of a theory of life would appear to be more fatal to a mirthful temper of the mind than an out-and-out optimism. At most, laughter would take on the aspect of the serene gaiety of a happy and thoughtless girl; as it does, I suspect, in the case of Abraham Tucker, for whom Sir Leslie Stephen claims the character of a “metaphysical humorist”.[326] It is true, as I have elsewhere shown,[327] that a genial and tolerant laughter may predispose a man, should he begin to philosophise, to adopt an optimistic theory of the world. Nevertheless, I believe that a firm grasp of such a theory would tend to reduce very considerably the scope of his laughter. It is just as well, perhaps, that R. L. Stevenson—whose predominant inclination to a hopeful and cheerful view of things is clearly shown in his idea that every man carries his ideal hidden away, as the Scotch boys used to carry lanterns in a silent ecstasy—did not go farther than his letters show him to have gone, along the path of philosophic construction.