With respect to its function as aiding the individual in a healthy self-correction, enough has been said. It is, in truth, no small advantage to be able to blow away some carking care with a good explosion of mirth. And if the world is much with us, we shall be likely to need laughter now and again as a protection from contact with much that is silly and much that is unwholesome. Yet, in this case, too, the chief value seems to reside in its immediate result, the gladdening and refreshing influence on the laugher, which has in it a virtue at once conciliatory and consolatory. This it is which makes it so good to step aside now and again from the throng, in which we too may have to “wink and sweat,” so as to secure the gleeful pastime of turning our tiresome world for the nonce into an entertaining spectacle; amusing ourselves, not merely as {416} Aristotle teaches,[333] in order that we may be serious, but because our chosen form of amusement has its own value and excellence. It is one thing to assign to laughter a definite ethical or logical function, another to ask whether it has its place among the worthier human qualities. We have seen how some have denounced it, indiscriminately as it would seem, as a thing irreverent if not unclean. That view does not come further into the present discussion. We have only to ask what kind of dignity it has. It is assumed here that we exclude the more malignant and the coarser sorts of laughter. A considerable capacity for the pure mirth which the child loves—and comedy may be said to provide for the man who keeps something of the child in him—supplemented by a turn for the humorous contemplation of things is, I venture to think, not merely compatible with the recognised virtues, but, in itself and in the tendencies which it implies, among the human excellences. This is certainly suggested by the saying of Carlyle: “No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad”.[334] We may not be able to rise to the point of view of R. L. Stevenson, when he wrote, “As laborare so joculari est orare;”[335] yet we may be inclined to think that it is impossible to construct the idea of a man who can be described as decently complete without endowing him with a measure of humour. Whatever our view of the “Good,” reasonable men of all schools appear to allow some value to a capacity for pleasure, especially the social pleasures, among which laughter, even when it seems to retire into solitude, always keeps a high place. On its intellectual side, again, as the {417} play of mind, the mirthful disposition has an intimate relation to such valuable qualities as quickness of insight and versatility.[336] In the light entertaining form of witty talk it takes on a social quality of no mean value.