Laughter is not nearly such a common characteristic of healthy positive life as the superficial imagine—more particularly noisy laughter. In every mixed party where much loud laughter or shrill laughter is heard, there is sure to be a good deal, not of gaiety, not of wanton spirits, but of nervous irascibility, sexual excitation, and particularly sexual abstinence, exasperation and—negativeness! He who travels the world over ascertains this curious fact: that loud, shrill laughter is essentially the social _noise_ of Puritanical countries. Positive people take too serious an attitude to life, to themselves, to each other, and particularly to members of the opposite sex, constantly to vent what they feel in an idle cackle or giggle. They laugh, but their hilarity is short, violent, and apparently effective; because it seems to relieve them for longer periods than does the laughter of negative people. _One of the chief characteristics of the positive mind, then, is the gravity, the solemn interest, with which it confronts life itself, the body that holds it, and everything vital, including sex._ Behold the healthy child, and you have an automaton guided absolutely by a positive mind! To retain this positive mind throughout one’s youth and adulthood is the greatest triumph—particularly nowadays—that anyone can achieve. He who achieves it may well laugh; he has a right to laugh; for he has mastered the most redoubtable foe a man can encounter—the powerful false values that are now seeking to prevail everywhere, and over the victims of which the vultures are muttering their thanksgiving. The only positive form of laughter is the expression of a consciousness of acquired power. This is Hobbes’ view, it was Stendhal’s view; it is the biologist’s view, who says that laughter is the expression of superior adaptation. Another characteristic of the positive mind _is its forgetfulness in regard to the things that incapacitate it for taking a lively interest in life_. This quality of the mind is simply a spiritual counterpart of the healthy body’s power of evacuating those portions of the food absorbed which cannot be assimilated without hurt: forgetting and digesting being the same function of evacuation in two different departments. The positive mind, like the healthy body it is in, knows how to get rid of a useless thing quickly—in fact knows how to forget. Things do not weigh on it, or bear it down, any more than a hearty meal lies heavily on its body’s stomach. Its body digests quickly, and has very soon done with the process. The positive mind digests quickly—particularly its supposed misdeeds. That is why it is so difficult to give a positive person a guilty conscience; because a guilty conscience is simply a costive conscience. The positive mind remembers only so much as interests it keenly, or as much as does not stand in the way of a continued positive attitude to life; just as its body only retains the nourishment out of all it absorbs.