What has been said of sympathy and imagination, as the allies and ministers of reason, might be extended and applied to humour, to wit, to irony. These also it may be said--and with the same qualifications--are essential to a philosopher in the highest sense. The humour, viz., which strides over the barriers set up by institution and convention between the high and the humble, and sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by a half-grim, half-jubilant _Ananke_,--which notes how human proposal is overcome, not without grace, by divine and natural disposal, how the deep inner identity in all estates breaks triumphantly through the fences of custom and deliberate intention. The wit, which upsets the hardened fixity of classes and groups, flits from one to another, shows glimpses of affinity between remote provinces of idea, and all this, without laboured and artificial search for analogies, though to the slower-following practical mind, hampered by its solid limits, these leaps from province to province seem paradoxical and whimsical. The irony, which notes the tragicomedy of life under its apparent regularity of prose,--which detects the vanity of all efforts to check the flux of vitality and make the volatile permanent; which contrasts the apparent with the real, the obviously and officiously meant with the truly desired and willed, and shows how diplomatically-close design is dissipated in a jest, or the soul bent on many years of enjoyment is plunged into torment. Thus, in a way, imagination, sympathy, wit, humour, irony and paradox are elements that go to the making of a philosopher: but in the serenity of reasoned wisdom they lose their frolicsome and fantastic mood, and fill their minor place with sober cheer. Wedded to the lord of wisdom, the Muse of poesy and wit loses her sprightly laugh and her dancing step, becoming a subdued, yet gracious matron, who, with her offspring, sheds gleams of brightness and warmth and colour in the somewhat austere household. Yet still the free maiden of poesy, in the open fields where the shadow of reflective thought has not yet fallen, has the greater charm; and a certain jealousy not unfrequently reigns between the married sister and the virgin yet untamed.