The view that in the cases just illustrated we have to do with another variety of laughter, that of the mind or intelligence, is confirmed by the reflection that much of it is excluded from the popular category. The masses can enjoy a palpable contradiction between profession and performance—witness the enjoyment afforded to the populace of the Middle Ages by the spectacle of the moral inconsistencies of the monks.[62] But when it comes to the appreciation of inherent inconsistencies within the character, such as want of stability of purpose, fickleness in the affections and so forth, the need of a certain acuteness in perceiving relations, and of quickness in mentally reinstating what is not present, may greatly restrict the area of the enjoyment. Gross and palpable inconsistencies, such as those represented in the delightful monologue _L’Indécis_, with which M. Coquelin (aîné) rejoices us, are accessible to popular laughter, but most of the self-contradictions with which a Molière, a George Eliot, or a George Meredith refreshes our spirits are “caviare to the general”. Much the same is true of the laughter which gladdens the measuring eye when it lights on the unmeasured, the excessive, the disproportionate. {110} One subdivision of this domain of the laughable is the logically incongruous or _the absurd_. Here, again, we touch on a region into a large part of which culture must give the key of admission. An example of such a laughable absurdity is found in that which conflicts with our deepest and most unalterable convictions. What is logically far-fetched or paradoxical is a familiar provocative of mirth. Since this case, like that of laughing at an extravagant costume, does not imply a direct and clear perception of relation, but only a kind of harmless shock to our firmly rooted apperceptive tendencies, we may expect to find illustrations of it low down in the scale of intelligence. As we shall see later, children will be moved to mirth by the presentation of an idea that directly conflicts with their crude standards of the possible; and savages show the same impulse to laugh at what is manifestly opposed to their fixed traditional standards of truth. So it is with suggestions and proposals which strike the more mature intelligence as paradoxical, that is to say, as a kind of assault on its deeply fixed habits of belief, and what it is pleased to call its “common-sense”. Ideas which strike it as revolutionary, whether they appear in the domain of social custom, of political activity, of morals, or of scientific explanation, are greeted by voluminous laughter. Darwin’s idea of man’s descent from an ape-like ancestor, when first introduced, probably excited almost as much hilarity as indignation.