cannot witness without laughing an excess of mad anger or
of impotent rage. In general we do not take seriously those feelings to
which we ourselves are strangers; we consider them extravagant and
amusing. "How can one be a Persian?" To laugh is to detach one's self
from others, to separate one's self and to take pleasure in this
separation, to amuse one's self by contrasting the feelings, character,
and temperament of others and one's own feelings, character, and
temperament. _Insensibility_ has been justly noted by M. Bergson as an
essential characteristic of him who laughs. But this _insensibility_,
this heartlessness, gives very much the effect of a positive and real
ill nature, and M. Bergson had thus simply repeated and expressed in a
new way, more precise and correct, the opinion of Aristotle: the cause
of laughter is malice mitigated by insensibility or the absence of
sympathy.

Thus defined, malice is after all essentially relative, and when one
says that the object of our laughter is the misfortune of someone else,
_known by us_ to be endurable and slight, it must be understood that
this misfortune may be _in itself_ very serious as well as undeserved,
and in this way laughter is often really cruel.

The coarser men are, the more destitute they are of sympathetic
imagination, and the more they laugh at one another with an offensive
and brutal laugh. There are those who are not even touched by contact
with physical suffering; such ones have the heart to laugh at the
shufflings of a bandy-legged man, at the ugliness of a hunchback, or the
repulsive hideousness of an idiot. Others there are who are moved by
physical suffering but who are not at all affected by moral suffering.
These laugh at a self-love touched to the quick, at a wounded pride, at
the tortured self-consciousness of one abashed or humiliated. These are,
in their eyes, harmless, and slight pricks which they themselves, by a
coarseness of nature, or a fine moral health, would endure perhaps with
equanimity, which at any rate they do not feel in behalf of others, with
whom they do not suffer in sympathy.

_Castigat ridendo mores._ According to M. A. Michiels, the author of a
book upon the _World of Humor and of Laughter_, this maxim must be
understood in its broadest sense. "Everything that is contrary to the
absolute ideal of human perfection," in whatever order it be, whether
physical, intellectual, moral, or social, arouses laughter. The fear o