[326] English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii., p. 110.
[327] See my work on Pessimism, p. 428.
[328] See Dugas, op. cit., pp. 109, 110.
[329] See, for an excellent example of this retort, Dr. James Ward’s Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. i., Part I.
[330] M. Scherer may possibly mean something like this when he speaks of the humorist’s point of view as the justest from which a man’s world can be judged (Essays on English Literature, p. 148).
[331] On the moral function of comedy see Bergson, op. cit., pp. 201, 202, and Dugas, op. cit., pp. 149–159.
[332] The reference is to an article, “Ridicule and Truth” in the Cornhill Magazine, 1877, pp. 580–95. Lessing’s plea, in his Hamburg. Dramaturgie (Stücke 28 and 29), on behalf of a corrective virtue in comedy owed something, I suspect, to the reading of Shaftesbury and the other English writers.
[333] Ethics, Bk. x., 6.
[334] Sartor Resartus, loc. cit.
[335] Letters, vol. ii., p. 302.