According to Grant Allen, the earliest object of human admiration—i.e., of a feeling of respect mingled with fear—is the strong man, the invincible warrior, whom none can resist. This feeling shows itself even among the higher animals, with regard to each other, and still more unmistakably among children: they admire physical strength. In the course of social progress, the chief or despotic king, with power of life and death over all, becomes the incarnation of power—the sublime object—and so the feeling is specialised. After his death, it is believed that his surviving “double,” or ghost, is invested with the same, or even greater privileges. Thus the feeling hitherto enclosed within the world of experience is transferred to a supersensuous region.
The author might have shown that, at this stage of evolution, the idea of an intellectual power, proved by superior knowledge and foresight, and that of a great moral power, proved by courage and energy in effort, must have inspired the same feeling.
As, at this period, everything in nature is conceived as alive, man has necessarily assimilated natural forces to human power: as with thunderstorms, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes. Looking at mountains, he seems to see a superhuman power which has raised them. Finally, the movement of thought, continually going on, leads to the idea of a paramount or sole deity, considered as absolute and unlimited power, and the maker of all.
As for the sublimity of mass, it was probably first felt in presence of great monuments, temples, palaces, pyramids, tombs, constructed by the pride of kings, and suggesting the idea of their vast power and the enormous amount of human strength expended. As for sublimity in the immensity of time, it is not attached to the conception of empty and abstract time: it moves us because it appears to us as peopled by a myriad of past or possible events, of activities succeeding each other with unfailing prodigality.
Thus all these cases are reduced to an overwhelming force, conceived by analogy and felt by sympathy. Taking this evolution in its main lines, it has passed through two principal periods, one of predominant terror, which is not and cannot be æsthetic, and one of predominant admiration and sympathy, where the consciousness of personal safety gives the feeling a disinterested character: here emotion has become æsthetic. It is probable, says Sully, that this feeling passed from a disagreeable into an agreeable one, and became æsthetic “through the elimination of the gross element of personal fear.”[[220]]
Attempts have been made to reduce the emotion of the sublime to a contrast; it rests rather on a harmony, a synthesis of contradictories (in the Hegelian sense); it is a case of combination, as we have tried to show in another part of this work. It is neither fear nor pride (consciousness of strength) felt directly or by sympathy, but a product of their coexistence in consciousness, and their fusion in a special state which can never be completely dissociated by analysis. In short, it is far more closely related to the two primary feelings already named than to the æsthetic feeling, to which it approximates, not by nature, but by accident.[[221]]
IV.
It is also through an abuse of language that the emotional state designated by the various names of a sense of the laughable, of the ridiculous, of the comic, is considered as a department of æsthetic emotion, for no other reason, as it seems, than because the comic enters into all the arts and produces a disinterested pleasure. Its domain, however, extends far beyond this. It has been closely studied in the general and special works of Darwin, Piderit, Spencer, L. Dumont, Hecker, Kräpelin, and others; and I do not propose to dwell on it at length, having very little to offer in the way of personal opinion on the subject. Yet this manifestation of the affective life, with its peculiar mode of expression, laughter, cannot be omitted from a complete treatise on the feelings.
This subject presents two aspects, one internal, subjective, psychological, the other external, objective, physiological. The latter presents no difficulties, being susceptible of an exact description; but to connect it with an internal cause, to say why one laughs, is a very difficult problem, which has been solved in various manners. In my opinion the error lies in thinking that laughter has a cause. It has very distinct causes which, seemingly, can be reduced no further, or, at least, their unity has not hitherto been discovered. If we were to recount only a few of the numerous definitions of laughter current in books, we should find none that was not in some way open to criticism, because there is none which embraces the question in all its manifold aspects. Thus L. Dumont, in a special work on Laughter, says, “It is an assemblage of muscular movements, corresponding to a feeling of pleasure.” Is the laughter caused by tickling, by cold, or by the ingestion of certain substances, the hysteric laughter alternating with tears, the nervous laughter of soldiers in action, after the moment of danger is over—are all these to be put down to the account of pleasure? Even if we class these and analogous facts by themselves, as purely reflex actions, there still remain difficulties.
1. Considered from the purely psychological point of view, the mental state which shows itself in laughter consists, according to some, in the consciousness of incongruity, of a certain kind of contradiction; according to others, in a consciousness of superiority in relation to men and things on the part of the laugher.