Facts, moreover, contradict this view on every hand. It may suffice to allude to one of the world’s great purveyors of laughter, Sir John Falstaff. According to this theory, we ought to laugh most at his vices when he first reveals them, since this is the moment when we should be most likely to bring to bear on him the “concept” of a proper decent gentleman. But is it not the fact that we laugh more freely when we have quite ceased to think of him as a possible embodiment of sobriety and decency, and when we apperceive his behaviour by help of the conceptual tendency answering, not to the type of virtuous citizen, but to the general manner of behaviour or the character of John Falstaff himself? The same is true in everyday life. We are, I think, most ready to laugh at a man’s foibles, say, his vanity or his exaggerations of speech, when we know the man and can say, “Oh, it is only So-and-So!” Neither the theory of Kant nor of Schopenhauer seems, then, to be competent to do what it undertakes to do, to explain the various forms and impressions of the laughable. These two theories, in spite of their difference, agree in regarding the incongruity which excites our laughter as lying between what we perceive and what our previous {134} experience and our pre-existing ideas and apperceptive habits have prepared us to accept as natural and proper. But our examination of the instance of the ill-matched hat and head supplied by Dr. Lipps, as also our fuller discussion of the relation of incongruity in the preceding chapter, has led us to recognise an amusing contrariety between different parts of a presentation, of what may be called _internal_ incongruity in contradistinction to the external dealt with by Kant and Schopenhauer. Hence we have to inquire how these two modes of apprehending incongruity are related.