endeavours have been directed solely towards reconstructing the ore. It
is the metal itself we are now about to study. Nothing could be easier,
for this time we have a simple element to deal with. Let us examine it
closely and see how it reacts upon everything else.

There are moods, we said, which move us as soon us as soon as we
perceive them, joys and sorrows with which we sympathise, passions and
vices which call forth painful astonishment, terror or pity, in the
beholder; in short, sentiments that are prolonged in sentimental
overtones from mind to mind. All this concerns the essentials of life.
All this is serious, at times even tragic. Comedy can only begin at the
point where our neighbour's personality ceases to affect us. It begins,
in fact, with what might be called a growing callousness to social
life. Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way
without troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of his
fellow-beings. It is the part of laughter to reprove his
absentmindedness and wake him out of his dream. If it is permissible to
compare important things with trivial ones, we would call to mind what
happens when a youth enters one of our military academies. After
getting through the dreaded ordeal of the examination, he finds the has
other ordeals to face, which his seniors have arranged with the object
of fitting him for the new life he is entering upon, or, as they say,
of "breaking him into harness." Every small society that forms within
the larger is thus impelled, by a vague kind of instinct, to devise
some method of discipline or "breaking in," so as to deal with the
rigidity of habits that have been formed elsewhere and have now to
undergo a partial modification. Society, properly so-called, proceeds
in exactly the same way. Each member must be ever attentive to his
social surroundings; he must model himself on his environment; in
short, he must avoid shutting himself up in his own peculiar character
as a philosopher in his ivory tower. Therefore society holds suspended
over each individual member, if not the threat of correction, at all
events the prospect of a snubbing, which, although it is slight, is
none the less dreaded. Such must be the function of laughter. Always
rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter
is, really and truly, a kind of social "ragging."

Hence the equivocal nature of the comic. It belongs neither altogether
to art nor a