Yet more interesting is the significance of surprise in relation to the comic. While the latter is more than a play with surprise, this feature becomes a factor that should by no means be overlooked in studying comic effects, especially when we reflect that previous efforts to explain this modification of aesthetic enjoyment have proved abortive, possibly through failure to give due weight to this very element. E. Hecker advances the theory, it is true, that laughter from tickling accounts for the origin of enjoyment of the comic, but in this purely physiological explanation he seems to overlook the fact that as a rule we laugh only when we are tickled, not when we tickle ourselves—that is to say, that contact with finger tips becomes tickling only when the hand is a strange one. Even in physical tickling, then, there must be some psychic factors, of which surprise may be one, even though it is inadequate alone to explain the phenomena. The fact that surprise not carried far enough to frighten is one of the first causes of laughter in children gives colour to this idea. Zeising has shown conclusively that there is a double surprise in the comic, the first being the intuitive start at something unusual, and contrasted with what is normal and typic, be it occasioned by some anomaly in the object itself or depending only on the momentary _milieu_—such, for instance, as the ridiculous appearance of a tiny cottage in a row of palatial residences.[349] This first shock is followed by a moment of suspense. “When the entirely unexpected happens,” says Goethe in Tasso, “the mind stands still for a moment,” which again is interrupted by the new surprise of finding the first one negatived or reversed.[350] Here we have the counter shock, whose pleasurable effect is strong enough to more than neutralize the first, and render their combined result agreeable.[351] As Kant, with his unrivalled penetration, has remarked, we play with the error as with a ball, tossing it back and forth and looking after it each time; in this way we are hurried through a succession of tensions and relaxations. While this illustration shows clearly how the essence of comicality is due to the peculiar character of the double shock, yet it remains true that even in this case surprise as such is pleasurable, and plays its part in the complicated effect. 4. _Fear_