The result of our inquiry is that the impressions of the laughable cannot be reduced to one or two principles. Our laughter at things is of various tones. It gathers up into itself a number of primitive tendencies; it represents the products of widely removed stages of intellectual and moral evolution. This is virtually admitted by all who recognise the Intellectual and the Moral principle; for our laughter at seeing dignity unfrocked is presumably of more ancient origin than the “laughter of the mind,” which discoursers on the ludicrous are for the most part thinking of. Our argument takes us farther, namely, to the conclusion that the effect of the laughable, even of what is given by philosophers as a sample of the ludicrous, is a highly complex feeling, containing something of the child’s joyous surprise at the new and unheard of; something too of the child’s gay responsiveness to a play-challenge; often something also of the glorious sense of expansion after compression which gives the large mobility to freshly freed limbs of young animals and children.
A consequence of this recognition of the relation of the laughable to our laughter as a whole is that we shall need to alter our method of treating the subject. Our problem {154} naturally transforms itself into the question: can we trace out the organic differentiation and integration of the several psychical tendencies which our analysis has disclosed? In other words, we find that we must resort to the genetic method, and try to explain the action of the ludicrous upon us in the modest scientific fashion by retracing the stages of its development. Such explanation may some day be crowned by a distinctly philosophical one, if a finer logical analysis succeeds in discovering the essence of the ludicrous; for the present it seems to be all that is available.
It will at once be evident that a large investigation into the origin and development of the laughing impulse will take us beyond the limits of pure psychology. We shall have to consider how the impulse grew up in the evolution of the race; and this will force us to adopt the biological point of view, and ask how this special group of movements came to be selected and fixed among the characters of our species. On the other hand, laughter is more than a physiological and psychological phenomenon. As hinted above, it has a social significance, and we shall find that the higher stages of its evolution can only be adequately dealt with in their connection with the movement of social progress.
Lastly, it will be by tracing the evolution of laughter in the human community that we shall best approach the problem of the ideal which should regulate this somewhat unruly impulse of man. Such a study would seem to promise us a disclosure of tendencies by which laughter has been lifted and refined in the past, and by the light of which it may consciously direct itself in the future.
CHAPTER VI. THE ORIGIN OF LAUGHTER.
To attempt to get back to the beginnings of human laughter may well seem to be too ambitious a proceeding. Beginnings are small things, and may easily escape detection, even when they lie well-lit not far from the eye. How, then, can we hope to get at them when they are hidden in the darkness of the remote past?
It is evident that our method here can only be the modest one of conjecture, a method which must do its best to make its conjecture look reasonable, while it never loses sight of the fact that it is dealing with the conjectural. Our aim is to get an intelligible supposition, by the help of which we may explain how laughter broke on the earthly scene, adding one more to the many strange sounds of the animal world.
This bit of conjectural inquiry will begin by trying to answer the question: By what process did the laugh, from being a general sign of pleasure, become specialised into an expression of the uprising of the mirthful, fun-loving or jocose spirit? It will then address itself to the problem: What has been the course of development of the spirit of fun and of its characteristic mode of utterance?
It would not, of course, be possible to attempt even a conjectural account of these far-off and unchronicled events, but for the new instruments of hypothetical construction {156} with which the Theory of Evolution has furnished us. In attempting so hazardous a task we have, at least, the example of one of the most modest of men to draw us on. Charles Darwin has taught us how to be at once daring and cautious in trying to penetrate the darkness of the ages behind us; and one can wish nothing better than to be able to walk worthily in his steps.