Wit and ingenuity are also manifestations of the faculty of judgment; in the former its activity is reflective, in the latter subsuming. In most men the faculty of judgment is only nominally present; it is a kind of irony that it is reckoned with the normal faculties of the mind, instead of being only attributed to the _monstris per excessum_. Ordinary men show even in the smallest affairs want of confidence in their own judgment, just because they know from experience that it is of no service. With them prejudice and imitation take its place; and thus they are kept in a state of continual non-age, from which scarcely one in many hundreds is delivered. Certainly this is not avowed, for even to themselves they appear to judge; but all the time they are glancing stealthily at the opinion of others, which is their secret standard. While each one would be ashamed to go about in a borrowed coat, hat, or mantle, they all have nothing but borrowed opinions, which they eagerly collect wherever they can find them, and then strut about giving them out as their own. Others borrow them again from them and do the same thing. This explains the rapid and wide spread of errors, and also the fame of what is bad; for the professional purveyors of opinion, such as journalists and the like, give as a rule only false wares, as those who hire out masquerading dresses give only false jewels. Chapter VIII.(20) On The Theory Of The Ludicrous. My theory of the ludicrous also depends upon the opposition explained in the preceding chapters between perceptible and abstract ideas, which I have brought into such marked prominence. Therefore what has still to be said in explanation of this theory finds its proper place here, although according to the order of the text it would have to come later. The problem of the origin, which is everywhere the same, and hence of the peculiar significance of laughter, was already known to Cicero, but only to be at once dismissed as insoluble (_De Orat._, ii. 58). The oldest attempt known to me at a psychological explanation of laughter is to be found in Hutcheson’s “Introduction into Moral Philosophy,” Bk. I., ch. i. § 14. A somewhat later anonymous work, “_Traité des Causes Physiques et Morals du Rire_,” 1768, is not without merit as a ventilation of the subject. Platner, in his “Anthropology,” § 894, has collected the opinions of the philosophers from Hume to Kant who have attempted an explanation of this phenomenon peculiar to human nature. Kant’s and Jean Paul’s theories of the ludicrous are well known. I regard it as unnecessary to prove their incorrectness, for whoever tries to refer given cases of the ludicrous to them will in the great majority of instances be at once convinced of their insufficiency.