Our study has taken us through various regions of research. In looking for the germ of laughter we found ourselves in the wide and misty plains of biological speculation. In tracing its development we took a dip into the pleasant vales of child-psychology and anthropology, and then tried to climb the winding paths of social evolution. Having reached in this way the heights of modern civilisation, we made a special investigation into the social organisation of laughter, as represented in the art of comedy, and into the gradual appearance of a new type of laughter, essentially individual and independent of the social standard, to which is given the name of humour. Throughout this voyage of discovery we have kept in view the question of the function of the laughing spirit in the life of the individual and of the community. It remains to determine this function more precisely.
In order to assign its proper place and its value to a large spiritual tendency such as runs through human mirth, we must for a moment push our investigation into a yet more difficult and obscure region, that of philosophy. This is necessary for more than one reason. To begin, we can hardly hope to reach a clear view of the worth of the laughing impulse without the help of some clearly thought view of life as a whole; and such a “Weltanschauung” {393} seems only to be attainable at the level of philosophic reflection. There is, however, a second reason for entering this more remote and private domain of knowledge. Philosophy is a carrying forward to its highest point of development of that individual criticism of life, with which, as we have seen, the quieter tones of laughter associate themselves. It would thus seem to be desirable to inquire how far along the road of philosophic speculation this companionship of the mirthful spirit in her quieter mood is possible. This inquiry may conveniently be pursued at once as supplementary to our discussion of humour.
As pointed out in the chapter on the subject, reflective humour grows out of a mutual approximation of two tendencies which seem to the unexamining person to be directly antagonistic, namely, the wholly serious turn for wise reflection and the playful bent towards laughter. In philosophic humour, touched on in our survey of the laughable in literature, this antagonism seems at first sight to be particularly sharp. The plain man, to whom philosophic speculation presents itself as something remote from all human interests as he conceives of them, may well receive a shock when he hears that it holds potentialities of a smile at least, if not of a laugh—for the person who engages in the occupation, that is to say, and not merely for him who looks on. It seems to be incumbent on us, therefore, to try to make this drawing together of impulses which look so hostile a little more intelligible.
The humorist, as we have viewed him, is able through the development of his individuality to detach himself from many of the common judgments and much of the common laughter of the particular community of which he is a member. He develops his own amusing mode of contemplation, which involves a large substitution for the standards {394} of custom and “common-sense,” of the ideal standards of reason. The habit of philosophic thought may be said to complete this uplifting of the individual to ideal heights, and its concomitant process, the expansion of the view of the irrational, the essentially unfitting, the amusing. A word must suffice to indicate the way in which it does this.
Philosophy, as we know, going boldly beyond the special sciences, pushes on to a deeper knowledge of things, and of these in their totality, of what we call the universe. In this effort it has to envisage things in a way essentially different from that of everyday observation. The modern philosopher may do his best to reach his conception of the reality of things by a careful analysis of experience; yet in the end his theory seems to have transformed our familiar world beyond the possibility of recognition.
In this philosophic re-construction of the real world, man, his relation to nature, and his history have to be re-considered. It illustrates a powerful tendency to view human life and experience as a phase of a larger cosmic movement determined by an ideal end. The introduction of ideal conceptions, by lifting us above the actual, seems to throw upon the latter an aspect of littleness, of futility, of something like the dishonour of failure. The ideal requirement proves hopelessly inapplicable to much, at least, of our everyday world; so that, as long as we remain at its point of view, familiar things—say the persons we happen to be thrown with, and a good deal in ourselves, social experiments growing out of some passing trend of “popular thought,” and even long periods of history—take on the aspect of contradictions, of futile things that at least do not count, if they do not actually delay the fruition of the ideal.
So, too, when philosophy becomes distinctly practical. {395} Whether we take happiness or moral perfection or self-realisation as the ideal end of men’s conduct, a large part of the conduct which unfolds itself under our eyes, including much of our own, begins to look sadly poor and shabby, as soon as we venture seriously to apply an ideal as test. Much at least of what men praise as virtue shows itself to be of doubtful value, and at any rate to have received a laudation quite disproportionate to its true worth.
Lastly, this belittling effect of ideas on everyday realities is seen when philosophy constructs for us the ideal type of human society, and of that confederacy of civilised states of which, now and again, it has had its dream. Under the searching rays of these ideal conceptions even the “common-sense” to which “advanced” communities hold so tenaciously may begin to look something compacted rather of darkness than of light.
The situation would seem to offer room for some of those modes of transforming the aspects of things which we have found to be excitants of laughter. If philosophic contemplation effects a reduction of great things to littleness, of substances to illusory shadows, of the elevated glories of men to the level of barely passable dignities, it should, one may reason, help men to laugh. Yet the fact that a philosopher has been known to the ages as the laughing one suggests that mirth has not been a common characteristic of his kind.
In order to understand this, we must recall one or two facts. For one thing, though seriousness may combine with a taste for the laughable, it is and remains fundamentally opposed to the playfulness of mirth. Philosophers are serious persons: their constructive thought is of the most arduous of human activities, and imposes on those who {396} undertake it an exceptional amount of serious concentration. Little wonder, then, if we so rarely find in them a marked fondness for the playful. The great and ineradicable gravity of the philosopher has been sufficiently illustrated in his theoretic treatment of our subject.