2. We may now pass to the second of the main types of theory which have been proposed as explanations of the working of the laughable on our feeling and the correlated muscular mechanism. Its distinctive mark is that, instead of setting behind our enjoyment of the ludicrous an emotion, or a change in our moral attitude, namely, a sense of our own superiority or of something else’s degradation, it sets a purely intellectual attitude, a modification of thought-activity. The laughter, according to this second theory, results from a peculiar effect on our intellectual mechanism, such as the nullification of a process of expectation or of an expectant tendency. It is this perfectly disinterested intellectual process which brings about the _feeling_ of the ludicrous and its expression in laughter. This may be called the Intellectual Theory, or Theory of Contrariety or Incongruity. Since we have already touched on this mode of conceiving of the effect of the ludicrous in criticising the view of Dr. Lipps, a brief examination of it may content us here. It may be noted in passing that this way of dealing with the ludicrous is characteristically German. The dominant note in the philosophy of Kant and his successors has been to regard all determinations of experience as fundamentally a rational process. Just as in the domain of ethics these thinkers conceive of what British Ethicists have been wont to call the Moral Sentiment as essentially a process of Reason, so in that branch of Æsthetics which deals with the Comic we find them disposed to regard the effect of the ludicrous, less as the excitation of a concrete and familiar emotion, such as Pride or Power, than as a special modification of the process of thought. {126} Kant may be taken as the first great representative of this theory. According to him, wit—the only variety of the ludicrous which he touches on—is a kind of play, namely, that of thought. In everything that is to excite a lively laugh there must be something absurd. It is “an affection arising from the sudden transformation of a strained (_gespannte_) expectation into nothing”. The transformation is, of course, not directly enjoyable to the understanding: it seems to induce gratification indirectly by means of a furthered _bodily_ process. This, by the way, is a noteworthy concession by a German thinker to the claims of the poor body to recognition in these high affairs of the understanding, a concession which his followers quickly struck out. He gives as an example of his theory the story of a Hindoo who, when sitting at an Englishman’s table, and seeing a bottle of beer turned into froth, expressed astonishment. Being questioned as to the reason, he remarked: “I am not at all astonished that it should flow out, but I do wonder how you ever got it in”.