The excellent humoristic effect of a character like that of the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, is based on economised contempt and indignation. To be sure we recognise in him the unworthy glutton and fashionably dressed swindler, but our condemnation is disarmed through a whole series of factors. We understand that he knows himself to be just as we estimate him; he impresses us through his wit; and besides that, his physical deformity produces a contact-effect in favor of a comic conception of his personality instead of a serious one; as if our demands for morality and honor must recoil from such a big stomach. His activities are altogether harmless and are almost excused by the comic lowness of those he deceives. We admit that the poor devil has a right to live and enjoy himself like any one else, and we almost pity him because in the principal situation we find him a puppet in the hands of one much his superior. It is for this reason that we cannot bear him any grudge and turn all we economize in him in indignation into comic pleasure which he otherwise provides. Sir John’s own humor really emanates from the superiority of an ego which neither his physical nor his moral defects can rob of its joviality and security. On the other hand the courageous knight Don Quixote de la Mancha is a figure who possesses no humor, and in his seriousness furnishes us a pleasure which can be called humoristic although its mechanism shows a decided deviation from that of humor. Originally Don Quixote is a purely comic figure, a big child whose fancies from his books on knighthood have gone to his head. It is known that at first the poet wanted to show only that phase of his character, and that the creation gradually outgrew the author’s original intentions. But after the poet endowed this ludicrous person with the profoundest wisdom and noblest aims and made him the symbolic representation of an idealism, a man who believed in the realization of his aims, who took duties seriously and promises literally, he ceased to be a comic personality. Like humoristic pleasure which results from a prevention of emotional feelings it originates here through the disturbance of comic pleasure. However, in these examples we already depart perceptibly from the simple cases of humor. Footnote 83: A term which is used in quite a different sense in the _Aesthetik_ of Theo. Vischer. Footnote 84: If one does not hesitate to do some violence to the conception of expectation, one may ascribe—according to the process of Lipps—a very large sphere of the comic to the comic of expectation; but probably the most original cases of the comic which result through a comparison of a strange expenditure with one’s own will fit least into this conception. Footnote 85: