nty and precision
of a somnambulist who is acting his dream. Such, then, is the origin of
his delusions, and such the particular logic which controls this
particular absurdity. Now, is this logic peculiar to Don Quixote?

We have shown that the comic character always errs through obstinacy of
mind or of disposition, through absentmindedness, in short, through
automatism. At the root of the comic there is a sort of rigidity which
compels its victims to keep strictly to one path, to follow it straight
along, to shut their ears and refuse to listen. In Moliere's plays how
many comic scenes can be reduced to this simple type: A CHARACTER
FOLLOWING UP HIS ONE IDEA, and continually recurring to it in spite of
incessant interruptions! The transition seems to take place
imperceptibly from the man who will listen to nothing to the one who
will see nothing, and from this latter to the one who sees only what he
wants to see. A stubborn spirit ends by adjusting things to its own way
of thinking, instead of accommodating its thoughts to the things. So
every comic character is on the highroad to the above-mentioned
illusion, and Don Quixote furnishes us with the general type of comic
absurdity.

Is there a name for this inversion of common sense? Doubtless it may be
found, in either an acute or a chronic form, in certain types of
insanity. In many of its aspects it resembles a fixed idea. But neither
insanity in general, nor fixed ideas in particular, are provocative of
laughter: they are diseases, and arouse our pity.

Laughter, as we have seen, is incompatible with emotion. If there
exists a madness that is laughable, it can only be one compatible with
the general health of the mind,--a sane type of madness, one might say.
Now, there is a sane state of the mind that resembles madness in every
respect, in which we find the same associations of ideas as we do in
lunacy, the same peculiar logic as in a fixed idea. This state is that
of dreams. So either our analysis is incorrect, or it must be capable
of being stated in the following theorem: Comic absurdity is of the
same nature as that of dreams.

The behaviour of the intellect in a dream is exactly what we have just
been describing. The mind, enamoured of itself, now seeks in the outer
world nothing more than a pretext for realising its imaginations. A
confused murmur of sounds still reaches the ear, colours enter the
field of vision, the senses are not completely shut in. But