Here again we may note that the “laughable” will be relative to the special experiences and standards adopted by the particular society. Contrast, for example, the fund of amusement which lies in the spectacle of drunkenness for a people addicted to, and therefore tolerant of, deep drinking, with that available for another people by whom the vice is shunned and judged severely. It is evident, indeed, that our readiness to be entertained by the look of excess or disproportion in a character will vary with the idea of the normal pattern. The old Greek way of scanning character differed, in certain respects, from that habitual, say in England to-day. In the case of what are palpable vices we have as counteractive tendencies, not merely the finer shrinking from the ugly, but the recoil of the moral sense in the distressed attitude of reprobation. Hence it may be said that the immoral trait must not be of such volume and gravity as to call forth the moral sense within us. Here, too, differences of temperament and habit, and, one may add, of the mood in which the presentation finds us, will affect the result. It is amazing to what an extent even reputable citizens are able to enjoy the presentment of moral failings, when they give {94} themselves up to the mood which seems to belong to a seat before the comic stage. (4) We may pass to a group of laughable presentations in which the feature specially fixated by the observer’s mental eye is some _breach of order and rule_. Laughable displays of vice involve this element, of course, but in the cases now to be considered the violence done to rule is the more conspicuous feature. On the other hand, laughable violations of rule are closely related to the oddities dealt with above. The donkey rolling on his back may be said, for the child’s intelligence, to break the rule of the donkey’s normal behaviour; yet here the laughableness seems to spring immediately out of the fresh stimulating character of the novelty of the spectacle. In order that an action may impress us as disorderly, we must recognise, vaguely at least, that some custom or rule is disobeyed. The sight of a donkey stepping on to the pavement of a street, or quietly browsing in a garden, would amuse as an exhibition of the disorderly. Perhaps we have the boundary-line between what is merely odd and what is disorderly illustrated by the bizarre aspect of a boy in a class who deviates considerably in height from the approximately uniform height of the rest of the class. It has been pointed out by Dr. Lipps[55] that even a house in a row may assume an amusing appearance under like circumstances. Here the general uniformity, immediately presented to the eye, seems to supply the spectator with the idea of a rule which the odd-looking individual is violating.[56] Under the present head we shall keep to examples of the laughable where the breach of rule is palpable. {95}