In considering fighting play in this connection we must notice a further point which is a corollary to those which have gone before, and is illustrated by some of the examples already given. The man standing on a ship and contemplating the force of a storm (I do not refer to his struggle with it) enjoys more than mere excitement. His soul partakes of the raging of the elements, the seething waves which break on the vessel’s prow, the furious gusts of wind, all this outward strife is inwardly imitated by him, and he is filled with jubilant delight in exercising all his fighting instincts. So also with tragedy. Not only joy in the storm of emotions, but also joy in the contest, is an important means of subduing what is unavoidably painful. While this relation, too, has been appreciated in other spheres, its application to the tragic has not hitherto been made. Indeed, this instinct is usually referred to in a narrow sense as a sort of bloodthirstiness, an idea not always far wrong. Ribot has formulated the following progression: “Pleasure in manslaughter, pleasure in judicial execution, pleasure in witnessing death (murder, gladiatorial combat, and the like), pleasure in seeing the blood of animals gush out (bull and cock fights), pleasure in witnessing violent and gory melodrama [this is only imitation, since the illusion of reality is but momentary], and finally, pleasure in reading bloody romances and following imaginary murder trials.”[499] We can hardly deny that even the cultured spectator feels something of the murderous impulse when, for instance, Hamlet springs with the agility of a tiger toward the king to fix him with a dagger. Yet as a whole this exposition of the theory of tragedy is defective even if we make the murderous impulse cover every variety of injurious conduct. The impulse to inflict injury has nothing to do with the final overthrow of the hero of our sympathies (and we do sympathize often with the very criminals in tragedy), and in the instances cited by Ribot it is usually less the bloodiness of the episode than its character as a fight which attracts us. The feeling of power in combat, not the cruelty of destructiveness, is most prominent. The reason that spectators of an animal fight are not satisfied until one of the fighters is either killed or disabled is surely not because they delight in injury as such, but because the fight can not be decisive until some injury is done.