If, on the other hand, the manner of philosophic speculation at once accepts the common facts of life as real, and yet as inherently and hopelessly bad, laughter is even more effectually excluded. There may, it is true, be room in the pessimist’s creed for a grim irony, of which, indeed, we find a trace now and again in the writings of Schopenhauer and his followers; but for laughter pure and simple, or even for laughter mellowed by the compassion which the {399} pessimist bids us cultivate, there seems to be no breathing-space. The state of things is too tragic to allow even of a smile. It remains to determine the relation of one other tendency in this high thinking to the possibilities of laughter. In philosophic scepticism, with its insistence on the relativity of our knowledge and on the impossibility of attaining to rational certainty, we seem to find a denial of all philosophy rather than a particular species of it; nevertheless, as the history of the subject shows, it is the outcome of a distinct and recurrent attitude of the philosophic mind. Now scepticism does undoubtedly seem to wear a rather malicious smile. This smile may be said to express an amusement at the spectacle of illusions pricked, which tells at least as much against the high-soaring thinker as against the man of common day who relies on the intuitions of his “common-sense”. The sceptic’s attitude leans, indeed, more towards that of common-sense, in so far that, while destroying the hope of absolute knowledge, it urges the _practical_ sufficiency of such conjectural opinion as we are able to reach.