Even if we adopt this amended form of Schopenhauer’s theory, we find that it is not sufficient for explaining his examples. Of the funny tangential angle no more need be said. Nor will his illustration of the self-befooled warders bear close inspection. To begin with, one may note a certain arbitrariness in the use of a mode of interpretation which plainly allows of an alternative. We can say equally well, either (with Schopenhauer) that the extrusion of a cheat who is also a prisoner will not fit into the general rule “cheats have to be ejected,” or that the extrusion of a prisoner who is also a cheat will not fit into the rule that prisoners have to be confined.[72] It seems to be more fitting here also to regard the incongruity—so far as the perception of this is the direct cause of our laughter—as holding between two aspects of the incident presented. The man is envisaged at once as a cheat and as a prisoner, and as such comes under two _régimes_ which directly conflict. The perception of the fun of the story surely begins with a discernment of this mutual interference of two systems of rule. Yet this is certainly not all or the chief part of the perception. The unstinting laugh comes only when we view the keepers as naïvely “giving themselves away” to their prisoner by consenting to become playmates, and so putting themselves under a rule which wholly destroys their _rôle_ as custodians. Here, too, then, the principle of incongruity shows itself to be insufficient. It only remains to add that if Schopenhauer’s theory turns out to be inadequate even when applied to an example chosen by himself, it is pretty certain to fail when applied to other groups of instances of the laughable in our list, in which incongruity does not seem to be a potent {133} ingredient, if indeed it is present at all. To suggest, for example, that our laughter at small and harmless vices, such as Aristotle speaks of, is the outcome of a suddenly conceived incongruity between a “real object” or presentation and a conception sounds sufficiently forced. Would the author of the theory have been prepared to say that in these instances we have present to our mind the concept of a perfectly virtuous man, and that our laughter comes of our failing to bring the perception under this conception? Surely the intrusion of any such exalted “concept” would be fatal to our enjoyment of the laughable aspect of vice.