necessarily unstable; and the awakening is not
always reserved for the disheartening moment at the end.
Everywhere, when we are dealing with pretension or mistake, we
come upon sudden and vivid contradictions; changes of view,
transformations of apperception which are extremely stimulating to
the imagination. We have spoken of one of these: when the sudden
dissolution of our common habits of thought lifts us into a mystical
contemplation, filled with the sense of the sublime; when the
transformation is back to common sense and reality, and away
from some fiction, we have a very different emotion. We feel
cheated, relieved, abashed, or amused, in proportion as our
sympathy attaches more to the point of view surrendered or to that
attained.

The disintegration of mental forms and their redintegration is the
life of the imagination. It is a spiritual process of birth and death,
nutrition and generation. The strongest emotions accompany these
changes, and vary infinitely with their variations. All the qualities
of discourse, wit, eloquence, cogency, absurdity, are feelings
incidental to this process, and involved in the juxtapositions,
tensions, and resolutions of our ideas. Doubtless the last
explanation of these things would be cerebral; but we are as yet
confined to verbal descriptions and classifications of them, which
are always more or less arbitrary.

The most conspicuous headings under which comic effects are
gathered are perhaps incongruity and degradation. But clearly it
cannot be the logical essence of incongruity or degradation that
constitutes the comic; for then contradiction and deterioration
would always amuse. Amusement is a much more directly physical
thing. We may be amused without any idea at all, as when we are
tickled, or laugh in sympathy with others by a contagious imitation
of their gestures. We may be amused by the mere repetition of a
thing at first not amusing. There must therefore be some nervous
excitement on which the feeling of amusement directly depends,
although this excitement may most often coincide with a sudden
transition to an incongruous or meaner image. Nor can we suppose
that particular ideational excitement to be entirely dissimilar to all
others; wit is often hardly distinguishable from brilliancy, as
humour from pathos. We must, therefore, be satisfied with saying
vaguely that the process of ideation involves various feelings of
movement and relation, -- feelings capable of i