But the anti-revolutionists point out that Bergson does believe in the intellect as a guide to the practical affairs of life; and industry and production--the field of the syndicalist--are far more mechanical than they are vital. In man's industrial relations he has to approximate himself as much to the machine as possible, and for Bergson's anti-intellectualism to be applied to this particular realm of life is as great a calamity as could happen to the doctrine. And then these conservatives proceed, less justifiably perhaps, to train the captured gun of intuition upon the syndicalists. The racial intuitions, they say, are older than the race's newly-found intellectual conceptions. For generations the race has lived by certain instinctive rules of conduct. Religion, custom, and patriotism, these are all sacred because they are extra-intellectual, and they dare us to disturb these sacred things. It is a strange sight--this most revolutionary philosophical doctrine being used to support all the prejudices that the ages have handed down--but we cannot deny that it is a plausible use of intuitionism, and a more legitimate use than that to which Sorel and his followers have put the teachings emanating from the College of France. Perhaps the most detailed application that Bergson has yet made of his philosophy to the affairs of life is his application of its principles to the puzzling æsthetic problem of laughter and the comic. His theory is that laughter is a social corrective directed against the man who allows the dogging steps of mechanism to overtake him and imprison his spirit in a web of meaningless action. The man who is walking along the street should be going in a determinate direction with a determinate end in view, and with the ability to get there in spite of reasonable obstacles. So says society. When he becomes abstracted, walks mechanically, and in consequence falls over a brick, we laugh at him. He has permitted himself to become a machine for the nonce instead of a self-conscious spirit, and society cannot afford to have its interests jeopardized in that way. _The International Journal of Ethics_ for January, 1914, contains an article by J. W. Scott, who accuses Bergson of ethical pessimism on the grounds of his view of the comic. He points out that the psychology of comic action, as Bergson works it out, is precisely that of moral action. For in moral action, too, a man does what is habitual, what is against his own self-conscious impulse, what is mechanical in that it is a fixed course of conduct pursued without reference to the favor or disfavor of the environment. The life impulse must be, he convicts Bergson of saying, adaptable to its circumstances; it must insert itself between the determinisms of matter; it must pursue the crooked path where the straight path is too difficult. It cannot follow its moral ideal without making itself ridiculous, as indeed in real life moral people are always doing.