Page:Freud - Wit and its relation to the unconscious.djvu/131

 shall not deny myself the pleasure of citing. It is a comparison with which Ferd. Lassalle concluded one of his famous pleas (Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter): “A man like myself who, as I explained to you, had devoted his whole life to the motto ‘Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter’ (Science and the Workingman), would receive the same impression from a condemnation which in the course of events confronts him as would the chemist, absorbed in his scientific experiments, from the cracking of a retort. With a slight knitting of his brow at the resistance of the material, he would, as soon as the disturbance was quieted, calmly continue his labor and investigations.”

One finds a rich assortment of pertinent and witty comparisons in the writings of Lichtenberg (2 B. of the Göttingen edition, 1853). I shall take the material for our investigation from that source.

“It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.” This may seem witty, but on closer examination one notices that the witty effect does not come from the comparison itself but from a secondary attribute of the same. For the expression “the torch of truth” is no new comparison, but one which has been used for a long time and which has degenerated into a