I do not doubt that during this laughing contemplation of the social whole, of which at the moment he is not serious enough to regard himself as a part, the individual will feel society pulling at his heels. The detachment {410} from his community, though it fall far short of the abandonment of the recluse, will, as already hinted, be felt to be a revolt. When, glancing back at the crowd wreathing itself in a dust-cloud, he laughs with his large laugh free from rancour, he may catch a glimpse of the absurdity of his critical performances. Here, again, we meet the final contradiction between ideal conceptions and obdurate everyday facts. It is a droll encounter when the foot of pure intellect, just as it is parting from the solid earth, strikes against the sturdy frame of philistine common-sense, of “that which subdues us all,” philosophers included. The individualism of the point of view in a laughing contemplation of one’s social world is only surmounted when a large philosophic humour thus draws the laughers self into the amusing scene. We may now better define the attitude of the humorist in its relation to that of the comedian and of the satirist. The comic spirit, placing itself at the social point of view, projects as laughable show an eccentric individual, or group of individuals. Satire, when it attacks the manners of an age, may be said to project the society, turning it into an object of derision. Humour, as we have seen, sometimes does the like, though in its laughter at the social scene it is neither passionately vindictive nor concerned with the practical problem of reforming a world. To this may be now added that as a sentiment nourished by sympathy it tends, when something of philosophic width of contemplation is reached, to combine the social and the individual mode of projection by taking up the self into the spectacle of the whole. * * * * * Enough has been said, perhaps, on the developments of individual laughter. Its point of view seems on inquiry {411} to justify itself as a distinct and a legitimate one. With some idea of the ways of this, as well as of the larger laughter of societies and groups, we should be able to form an estimate of the final significance and utility of the laughing impulse. Laughter, born of play, has been seen above to possess a social character. Throughout the evolution of communities, from the first savage-like tribes upwards, we have observed it taking a considerable part in the common life, helping to smooth over difficulties of intercourse, to maintain what is valued, and to correct defects. It remains to ask under this head, what is its whole value to-day as a social force, and what indications of the future can be discovered in the tendencies which we note in its later social developments.