More restricted is the area for amusement supplied by logical inconsistencies. The spying out of amusing inconsequences in a man’s various utterances is the work of an expert. A contradiction must be very palpable, and the contradictory statements must be very near to one another in time, in order that food for laughter may reach the many. The best example of this laughter at contradiction in popular {111} mirth is, I suppose, the “bull,” where the incompatibility stares out at you from a single statement, and sets your sides shaking; as in the argument, attributed to an Irish statesman, that, in the prosecution of a certain war, “every man ought to be ready to give his last guinea to protect the remainder”.[63] One might naturally suppose that in the appreciation of these more intellectual forms of the laughable there would be no room for the restraining action of relativity. An incongruous relation would seem to be one and the same object for all men’s intuitions, and the least affected by accidents of temperament and external circumstances. Yet this supposition is not quite correct. Such incongruities as moral and logical inconsistencies have, it must be remembered, their disagreeable and even their painful aspect. When discovered in the character or in the intellect of a person known to be of a high consistency, a contradiction would naturally offend the admiring spectator. Here, too, then, we have to add the qualification, “provided that there is nothing disagreeable and repellant in the manifestation”. Not only so, with respect to much that is popularly called paradox it is to be remembered that the standard of truth employed is far from being that of the eternal verities. As the allusion to the ridicule poured on Darwin’s theory of natural selection shows, what one generation laughs at as plainly contradictory to fundamental notions may be quietly recognised as a familiar truth by its successor. (10) A group of laughable presentations making large appeal to the more intellectual kind of laughter meets us in {112} _verbal play and amusing witticism_. A closer examination of the nature of wit will come later.