Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/108



While Duke Karl of Würtemberg was riding horseback he met a dyer working at his trade. “Can you color my white horse blue?” “Yes, sire,” was the rejoinder, “if the animal can stand the boiling!”

In this excellent repartee, which answers a foolish question with a condition that is equally impossible, there occurs another technical factor which would have been omitted if the dyer’s reply had been: “No, sire, I am afraid that the horse could not stand being boiled.”

Another peculiarly interesting technical means at the disposal of unification is the addition of the conjunction “and.” Such correlation signifies a connection which could not be understood otherwise. When Heine (Harzreise) says of the city of Göttingen, “In general the inhabitants of Göttingen are divided into students, professors, Philistines, and cattle,” we understand this combination exactly in the sense which he furthermore emphasized by adding: “These four social groups are distinguished little less than sharply.” Again, when he speaks about the school where he had to submit “to so much Latin, drubbing, and geography,” he wants to convey by this combination, which is made very conspicuous by placing the drubbing between the two studies, that the schoolboy’s conception unmistakably described by the drubbing