at some trouble to
explain that the importance of the subject renders us serious. But had
he recognised the fact that the ludicrous implies condemnation, he would
have seen that we could not be amused at incongruities in science,
because we have a strong conviction that they are not real but only
apparent. Some very ignorant persons, as he observes, do occasionally
laugh at philosophic truths. I knew a lady who laughed at being told of
the great distance of the planets, and a gentleman assured me that a
friend of his, a man who had such shrewdness that he rose from the
lowest ranks and acquired L100,000, would never believe that the earth
was round!

Jean Paul, taking the same admiration view, observes that "women laugh
more than men, and the haughty Turk not at all." But are not these facts
referable to comparative excitability and apathy, and also to the
multiplicity and variety of female ideas compared with the dulness of
the Moslem's apprehension. Jean Paul proceeds to say that the more
people laugh at our joke, the better we are pleased, and that this does
not seem as though the enjoyment came from a feeling of triumph. But
what is really laughed at is the humour, and not the humorist, and as a
man wishes the beauty of a poem he has written to be generally
acknowledged, so he desires to see the point of his satire appreciated
by as many as possible.

A fruitful source of error in the investigation of humour arises from
the difficulty in determining where it lies--of localizing it, if I may
be allowed the expression. We hear a very amusing observation, and at
once join heartily in the laugh, but cannot say whether we are laughing
at a circumstance or a person, at a representation or a reality.

We come now to the most important authority on this side of the
question. The systems which the German philosophers have propounded are
more serviceable to themselves than edifying to the ordinary reader.
High abstractions afford but a very vague and indefinite idea to the
mind, nor can their application be fully understood but by those who
have ascended the successive stages by which each philosopher has
himself mounted. On the present subject, their opinions seem to have
been influenced by their views on other subjects. As we have already
observed, Kant and several of the leading German idealists are in favour
of considering the ludicrous as a "resolution" or a "deliverance of the
absolute, captive by the finite," an opi