roposition as the following: "My usual dress forms part
of my body" is absurd in the eyes of reason. Yet imagination looks upon
it as true. "A red nose is a painted nose," "A negro is a white man in
disguise," are also absurd to the reason which rationalises; but they
are gospel truths to pure imagination. So there is a logic of the
imagination which is not the logic of reason, one which at times is
even opposed to the latter,--with which, however, philosophy must
reckon, not only in the study of the comic, but in every other
investigation of the same kind. It is something like the logic of
dreams, though of dreams that have not been left to the whim of
individual fancy, being the dreams dreamt by the whole of society. In
order to reconstruct this hidden logic, a special kind of effort is
needed, by which the outer crust of carefully stratified judgments and
firmly established ideas will be lifted, and we shall behold in the
depths of our mind, like a sheet of subterranean water, the flow of an
unbroken stream of images which pass from one into another. This
interpenetration of images does not come about by chance. It obeys
laws, or rather habits, which hold the same relation to imagination
that logic does to thought.

Let us then follow this logic of the imagination in the special case in
hand. A man in disguise is comic. A man we regard as disguised is also
comic. So, by analogy, any disguise is seen to become comic, not only
that of a man, but that of society also, and even the disguise of
nature.

Let us start with nature. You laugh at a dog that is half-clipped, at a
bed of artificially coloured flowers, at a wood in which the trees are
plastered over with election addresses, etc. Look for the reason, and
you will see that you are once more thinking of a masquerade. Here,
however, the comic element is very faint; it is too far from its
source. If you wish to strengthen it, you must go back to the source
itself and contrast the derived image, that of a masquerade, with the
original one, which, be it remembered, was that of a mechanical
tampering with life. In "a nature that is mechanically tampered with"
we possess a thoroughly comic theme, on which fancy will be able to
play ever so many variations with the certainty of successfully
provoking the heartiest hilarity. You may call to mind that amusing
passage in Tartarin Sur Les Alpes, in which Bompard makes Tartarin--and
therefore also the reader to some slight ex