In this stimulating little book Professor Bergson propounds his theory of the comic, which is shortly to the following effect. Noting first that laughter is purely a human phenomenon, and therefore probably has a social significance, he seeks for this by trying to define what are the essential features of the comical. He reduces the various characteristic features in the main to one, namely, automatism on the part of the comical person or thing. This automatism is of a special kind; especially is it an automatism that is out of place, that occurs at the expense of spontaneity, vitality, and freshness. It may thus be defined as "something mechanical in something living," "a kind of absentmindedness on the part of life." "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." "To imitate anyone is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter. "This bald statement of Bergson's conclusion is, in the reviewer's opinion, made very convincing by the delicate analysis he proffers of numerous illustrations. Up to this point Bergson's theory of the comic fairly well coincides with that of Freud. The latter author, it is true, summarises his conclusions in different language. But the meaning is not very different. For him the feeling of comicality is an "economy of ideational expenditure," and it is evoked by the sight of another person who in a given performance displays either a lack of mental activity or an excess of physical, i.e., who is either stupid or clumsy. Compare this formulation with Bergson's. The latter says that the opposite of the comic is gracefulness, rather than beauty. "It partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly, of rigidness rather than of ugliness." The replacement of mental by physical activity is insisted on in the following passage: "Any incident is comic that calls our attention to the physical in a person, when it is the moral (i. e. mental) that is concerned." Again, he compares a comical person to "a person embarrassed by his body." His automatism is essentially a lack of mental nimbleness, a formal lack of mental elasticity, a defective capacity for rapid adjustment, in short, a mental laziness. And especially is this defect one of consciousness. The failure is on the part of the higher mental activities, which should be the most alert, and what happens is a relapse into unconscious, automatic modes of functioning, a form of absentmindness. "The comic is that element by which the person unwittingly betrays himself--the involuntary gesture or the unconscious remark. Absentmindedness is always comical. Systematic absentmindedness, like that of Don Quixote,