Coming now to the ordinary case of the emotional reaction, we note first of all the swift, explosive character of the outburst. If the motor discharge follow the first swell of joyous feeling, which is popularly said to excite it, it seems to do so with such electrical rapidity as to make it impossible to detect this initial swell as distinctly preceding it. Yet this fact need not baffle our inquiry. When for example we laugh at some absurd incongruity in speech or manners, can we not see that the perception which starts the laugh is an emotional perception, one which not only directs itself to something that has emotional interest and value, namely, the incongruous features as such, but is flooded from the very first with the gladness of mirth. To say that my perception of a big woman hanging upon the arm of a small man is a purely intellectual affair, like the perception of the inequality of two lines in a geometrical figure, is, one fears, to confess either to a poverty of humorous experience or to a very scanty faculty of psychological analysis. But perhaps the clearest disproof of this quaint paradox in the realm of laughter is supplied by the situation already referred to, that of forced abstention from a choral laugh through fatigue. When thus “doubled up” and impotent, we may be quite capable of seizing the funny turns of the good “story,” and of feeling all the {44} force of the bugle-call of the others’ laughter. In sooth it is just here that the misery of the situation lies, that the joyous sense of fun in the air is now robbed of its sturdy ally and so reduced to a state of limp inefficiency. The comicality still makes full appeal: we feel it, but the feeling is denied its full normal outflow. This brings us face to face with the kernel, the valuable kernel, of truth which lies in what seems at first an empty paradoxical nutshell. Though the “bodily reverberation” that is, the swiftly returning tidings of a raised or depressed nervous activity in outlying regions of the organism, is not everything in an emotion, it is a part, and an important part. The full experience of the joys of the comic, like other full emotional experiences, implies that the vents are clear, that the nervous swirl started at the centres at the moment when we greet the coming of fun with gladness can find its customary outflow along the familiar channels. Not only so, but as suggested above, this large expansion of the area of nervous commotion throughout the bodily system gives added life and a more distinctive character to the enjoyment of fun.