inferiority; but he is only inferior in comparison with his former ego and not in comparison with us, for we know that in a similar case we could not have behaved differently. It is remarkable, however, that we find this inferiority of the person only in the case where we “feel ourselves” into some one, that is, we can only find it comical in the other, whereas we ourselves are conscious only of painful emotions when such or similar embarrassments happen to us. It is by keeping away the painful from our own person that we are probably first enabled to enjoy as pleasurable the difference which resulted from the comparison of the changing energy. _Comic of Expectation_ The other source of the comic, which we find in our own changes of investing energy, lies in our relations to the future, which we are accustomed to anticipate through our ideas of expectation. I assume that a quantitatively determined expenditure underlies our every idea of expectation, which in case of disappointment becomes diminished by a certain difference, and I again refer to the observations made before concerning “ideational mimicry.” But it seems to me easier to demonstrate the real mobilized psychic expenditure for the cases of expectation. It is well known concerning a whole series of cases that the manifestation of expectation is formed by motor preliminaries; this is first of all true of cases in which the expected events make demands on my motility, and these preparations are quantitatively determinable without anything further. If I am expecting to catch a ball thrown at me, I put my body in states of tension in order to enable me to withstand the collision with the ball, and the superfluous motions which I make if the ball turns out to be light make me look comical to the spectators. I allowed myself to be misled by the expectation to exert an immoderate expenditure of motion. A similar thing happens if, for example, I lift out a basket of fruit which I took to be heavy but which was hollow and formed out of wax in order to deceive me. By its upward jerk my arm betrays the fact that I have prepared a superfluous innervation for this purpose and hence I am laughed at. In fact there is at least one case in which the expectation expenditure can be directly demonstrated by means of physiological experimentation with animals. In Pawlof’s experiments with salivary secretions of dogs who, provided with salivary fistulæ, are shown different kinds of food, it is noticed that the amount of saliva secreted through the fistulæ depends on whether the conditions of the experiment have strengthened or disappointed the dogs’ expectation to be fed with the food shown them.