In the foregoing account of laughter and its uses, we have sharply separated the individual from the social point of view. Fifty years ago, such a distinction would have required no justification. It seems, however, just now to be the fashion to think of the individual as merely an anatomical detail, too small to be really distinguished, of the “social organism,” and of his part on the earthly scene as consisting merely in making a small contribution, which at its best is a negligible quantity, to the efficiency of this organism. This is not the place to argue so serious a matter. At the risk of appearing unfashionable, one may venture to keep to the old notion that in counting human values we must assign a high one to individuality; that, for the sake of the community itself, a proper freedom for the full development of a man’s own mind, tastes, and character, is something which should be secured even at great cost; and that, were this not so, society’s claims on the individual have well-defined limits, beyond which every man has the right, and owes it to himself as a primal duty, to develop himself in the way which his natural inclinations enlightened by reflection may suggest to him. To insist further on this point would almost be to cast a slur on our literature, which contains some of the masterly pleadings for individual liberty. This freedom for individual self-development clearly includes a perfect right to form one’s own view of one’s world, and to derive as much amusement as one can from a humorous contemplation of it. It could only be something akin to an awe-struck flunkeyism which would make a {406} person hesitate here. To one who has cultivated the requisite observation and taste in the fellowship of one or two congenial friends, the following of the tortuous movements of the laughable in all domains of human industry and of human indolence is one of the crowning felicities of life: the fun is always old in its essence, wherefore we respond so quickly; yet it is always new in its embodiments, wherefore we go on relishing it with an unabated keenness.