Aristotle’s brief remarks on comedy in the _Poetics_ may be taken as illustrative of this way of envisaging the laughable. Comedy, he tells us, is “an imitation of characters of a lower type—not, however, in the full sense of the word bad”; and, again, the Ludicrous (τὸ γελοῖον) is a subdivision of the ugly (τοῦ αἰσχροῦ), and consists in “some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive”.[65] Of an adequate theory of the subject there is here, of course, hardly a pretence. It seems strange, indeed, that a great thinker with the works of his compatriot Aristophanes before him should have placed the ludicrous wholly in character, altogether overlooking the comic value of situation. Still, the reference of the laughable to the category of ugly and disgraceful things—for τὸ αἰσχρὸν on its moral side connotes the disgraceful (compare the Latin “turpe”)—may be said to imply a germ of the principle of degradation. A more careful attempt to construct a theory of the ludicrous by a reference to something low or degraded in the object is embodied in the famous doctrine of Thomas Hobbes. According to this writer, “the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the inferiority of others, or with our own formerly”. In this theory our laughter is viewed as arising, not immediately from a perception of something low or undignified, but only mediately from this perception, through a recognition of our own superiority and an accompanying emotional movement, namely, an expansion of the “self-feeling,” a sudden quickening of the sentiment of pride or power. Nevertheless, the {121} theory may be said to come under the principle of degradation, in so far as it makes the process of laughter start with a perception of some point of inferiority, that is to say of a comparative loss of dignity, in the laughable object.