A delightful exhibition of the naïve intelligence is given by a gross misapprehension of what is happening or of what is being said at the moment. The Londoner may delight his country listener with his misunderstandings of {105} what to the latter seems perfectly self-explanatory. The tickling force of such misapprehension is heightened when it involves an idea which is the very reverse of the truth. The good story of the Yorkshire juryman who remarked that “Lawyer Scarlet gets all the easy cases” turns on the delicious inversion of causal relations. When travelling once in a train I heard a mother say to her little girl, who had been complaining of the heat, “The more you think of it the worse it will be”; upon which the child remarked in a drily humorous tone, “I should say the worse it is the more I shall think of it”. The mother’s remark had probably seemed an inversion of the true relation. Other examples of what we call naïveté come, in part at least, under this head. The want of tact, the bringing in of that which has no relevance to the circumstances or the ideas of the moment, is an excitant of laughter for men of all levels of culture. The inappropriate ways in which the kindly savage or child tries to minister to his visitor’s comfort are a pretty example of such simplicity. Irrelevances in conversation and discussion, such as _mal à propos_, mistakings of the issue, unfortunate suggestions of reasons, and the like, are among the recognised tributaries of the river of laughter. These irrelevances make a large contribution to the lighter enjoyment of social intercourse. An irrelevance having a peculiarly broad effect is a response to a question which wholly misses its point, as when one reads of a man on a descending balloon who asked a yokel, “Where am I?” and received for answer only the absurdly obvious, “In a balloon”. Children’s naïveté—a mine of wealth to the discerning seeker after the laughable—illustrates this tickling property of a perfect simplicity of intelligence, and of those {106} irrelevances of behaviour and of utterance which by their mighty compass seize and occupy for the instant the field of contemplative vision. One of its most valuable manifestations is the habit of quietly substituting the child’s point of view for the adult’s. A large number of the “funny remarks” of children illustrate this. Here is an example. An improver of occasions asked a child who had seduced her grandfather into a rather alarming romp, “Isn’t grandpapa very kind to play with you, dear?” and received the sharp correction, “I’m playing with _him_”.