Altogether different from any of the foregoing is the more recent theory of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, as presented in a special treatise on laughter, of which an excellent translation by C. Brereton and F. Rothwell has lately been published in this country. Bergson recognises, as not every investigator has done, the essentially spontaneous character of laughter, and he insists with Darwin on postulating queerness as an indispensable element in the laughable. But, as he sees it, the queerness must be of a specific sort in order to excite laughter—must consist, in fine, in an automatic inelasticity, whether of form, action, or thought, which is in sharp contrast to the wonted mobility of life. It is our immediate recognition of this automatism and rigidity that moves us to laughter. When, Bergson affirms, we laugh at a man who stumbles and falls in the street, our laughter is caused, not by his sudden change of attitude, but by the involuntary element in this change. “Perhaps there was a stone on the road. He should have altered his pace or avoided the obstacle. Instead of that, through lack of elasticity, through absent-mindedness and a kind of physical obstinacy—as a result, in fact, of rigidity or of momentum—the muscles continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances of the case called for something else. That is the reason of the man’s fall, and also of the people’s laughter.” So with our laughter at the appearance and horseplay of a clown. We laugh at his painted face because we immediately recognise in it “something mechanical encrusted upon the living,” and we laugh at his antics because of their automatic, machine-like character. In fact, “We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing. We laugh at Sancho Panza tumbled into a bed-quilt and tossed into the air like a foot-ball. We laugh at Baron Munchausen turned into a cannon-ball and travelling through space.” In laughter caused by puns, jests, and witticisms, the same principles of automatism and inelasticity obtain, though of course in much subtler form. Analyse closely all varieties of the comic and you always get back to the basic idea of “something mechanical in something living.” Or, Bergson concludes, “The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life.”